Ayn Rand?s favourite conversational gambit according to this excellent book by Anne Heller was a hectoring, ?what are your premises?? A questioning of one?s basic philosophical under pinnings, which, if it didn?t match hers would be skillfully demolished by one of the most original thinkers of the last century.
The book?s premises in that sense are made clear right at the beginning. Heller, unlike the rest of the world read Rand when in her forties, and therefore missed the whole teenage ?Howard Roark/John Galt? complex of being a misunderstood genius which most of us struggled with immediately after reading The Fountainhead. Her premises for the book therefore are very clear, the fact that Rand?s world was a creature made by her, just like her books. A seductive world, but which was predicated on philosophical syllogisms which were hardly borne out in her lifetime.
For many people, Rand represents the world of 20th Century America of big business. She was in fact a Russian Jew, completely out of sync with Soviet Russia and even earlier, by her own family?s bourgeois pretensions. Heller draws a vivid picture of her flight from Russia, helped enormously by her mother?s much reviled petite bourgeois relatives, and her own incredible self belief.
Through interviews and painstaking research, Heller reconstructs an almost sociopathic Rand?s attraction to ultra masculine characters which began through an action adventure story set in India, with a blond hero called Cyrus, a prototype for not only Galt and Roark but also bearing a physical resemblance to Rand?s husband Frank O?Connor.
The book?s core however lies in the politics of Ayn Rand?s world. Her lifelong hatred of Communism and advocacy of the free market, which made her a market fundamentalist, too blind to see that F D Roosevelt?s New Deal had in fact saved free market fundamentals in the United States.
The majority of the book also focuses on Rand?s relationship with one of her earliest disciple?s, Nathaniel Branden, the man who ?objectivised? the Objectivism philosophy and led the Self Esteem movement in American Psychology. Through their relationship and the circle of disciples that this collaboration wrought, Heller delivers the punch of the book. The circle and its fanatical enforced adherence to Objectivism, was almost Stalinist in its absolutism, a charge which Rand seemed oblivious of.
The book points the finger at the one thing, in fact, which makes most people uncomfortable with Rand?s philosophy despite the brilliance of her premises, the fact that this is an imperfect world, and not everyone is a genius. By demonstrating rather comprehensively the fact that Rand needed the help of a host of mediocre ?Ellsworth Tooheys and Paul Keatings?, to succeed and the approbation of the world quite at odds with her devil may care, solitary genius heroes, exposes the vulnerability of the philosopher. In her world, Howard Roark and John Galt may have been oblivious of bad reviews, but Rand went through much pain when her work was ?misunderstood.?
It is at these intersections of her world and the ?real world? that the portrait of Rand is best captured in this book. A must read for all those who thought ?man worship? was the way to go, if this doesnt send you back to those dog eared copies of We, the Living, nothing else will.