What’s Worth Reading, January 2023 Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead [1943], Penguin Modern Classics, 2007. Note: multiple spoilers. Rated 75 for interest, zero for moral values. Ten things you need to know about Rand are that she was born in Czarist Russia, developed an early romantic attachment to 'heroic individuals' in children's fiction, took great exception to the loss of the family business after the Bolshevik revolution, arrived in the United States in 1926 at a peak time for tycoons (or robber barons, depending on your point of view), spent much of her working life in Hollywood as an aspiring screenwriter and occasional wardrobe manager, despised 99 per cent of her fellow beings, worshipped cigarettes, shared with Marx a view of religion as self-abnegation, harboured dark sexual fantasies that were all her own, and never grew up. The Hollywood connection matters, and the sexual fantasies are at the core of The Fountainhead. Rand claimed, in a retrospective introduction written in 1968, that its protagonist, Howard Roark, is conceived as the 'ideal man' in a 'free, productive rational system which demands and rewards the best in every man and which is, obviously, laissez-faire capitalism' (ix). But this is myth-making after the event, as is so much from and around Rand. Roark is an architect, and capitalism, laissez-faire or otherwise, hardly comes into the story at all - there's a brief rant about public housing clumsily inserted late on (605), but that's about it. The source of evil in The Fountainhead is not socialism, but Christianity - seen as a doctrine that demands humility and self-sacrifice. In style, though, the novel is for the most part not a philosophical treatise so much as an old-fashioned B-Movie melodrama, to which the relationship between Roark and Dominique Francon, the daughter of a rival architect, is central: it actually became one in 1949, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. I haven't seen it, I'm sorry to say. The novel is over-extended and repetitive (running to 727 pages), and the later chapters show the marks of nicotine- and amphetamine-fuelled binge writing, and a fairly desperate reaching for cataclysmic effect. All in all, it's a big mistake to take it too seriously. As it begins, Howard Roark has just been expelled from Architectural School. He has 'never learned the process of thinking about other people' (15), he scorns socially and professionally established standards, and he believes that a building is 'alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose' (12). He prizes competence and integrity, and where his work is concerned he is uncompromising in setting himself the highest standards, and refusing to trim his practice to the current fashion - character traits that are summed up in the notion of being a 'first-hander', in contrast to the 'secondhanders' who take their convictions from others, and become literally self-less. Rand expands later on what she means by this, avoiding the idea of selfishness as commonly understood: 'We haven't even got a word for the quality I mean - for the self-sufficiency of man's spirit. It's difficult to call it selfishness or egotism, the words have been perverted, they've come to mean Peter Keating' (635-6): Keating, a rival architect, is the prime example of a second-hander in the novel - entirely self-interested, obsessed with his own status, but driven by values that he takes entirely from others. Far too much space is devoted to the doings of competitors and opponents: Keating is made to do many more despicable things than are needed to point the moral, while Ellsworth Toohey, the critic who is a supposed 'one-man holding company of altruism' (310), is presented as not only vain, cynical, hypocritical, manipulative, and fundamentally evil, but also an embodiment of egotism. Rand stacks the moral deck in her favour, and is not one for a nutcracker when a sledgehammer is to hand. This makes the whole novel a bit of a grind, as she piles on illustration with a heavy hand, and lays her moral perspective thickly over everything. It is a problem, especially in view of its length, that the cartoon characters put forward as his adversaries do not develop, but only repeat. Roark lives to make buildings, but has no interest in making money, which for most of the time is just as well. He is a jobbing architect, when he can get a job, not an entrepreneur. He has brilliant mathematical and structural skills, and has worked in all areas of the building trade. He aims to build with modern industrial materials - concrete, glass, and steel - and believes that every building should be unique, and in harmony with the landscape in which it is set. Frank Lloyd Wright was the principal model for his architecture. Competence, integrity, and principles of this kind have precious little to do with capitalism, and are fine by me. The overt plot line concerns his fortunes as an architect: it contrasts his own modernist commitment with the derivative approaches and shady tactics of his opportunistic rivals, uncreative caricatures addicted to copying classical or period styles and multiplying useless decoration, while he makes practical, functional and staggeringly beautiful buildings in harmony with their settings and instantly recognisable as his own (although in the crucial Cortlandt episode we have to believe that a building he designs in his signature style can be passed off as his own by Keating). Coherent plotting comes second to the moral perspective Rand seeks to advance, but even so the whole premise of the novel is undermined, again in the Cortlandt episode, when Roark contradicts his own principles by putting himself in the hands of another, and a parasitic second-hander at that, relying on a promise from Keating that he cannot enforce. All this, though, is by the way, as the book is really a Hollywood-style romance, albeit a slow burning one with dark undertones. We first meet Roark standing naked at the edge of a cliff, about to swim across the lake below. In appearance, he is a quintessential Hollywood leading man of the time, tall and slender, and with a face 'like a law of nature - a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; grey eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint' (4). To state the obvious, there is nothing in Objectivism that stipulates that ideal men must be gaunt, with high cheekbones, and look good naked. This is a personal fantasy on Ayn Rand's part, and it shapes the whole of her moral universe. The ideal woman, too, has a distinct Hollywood look, and looks just as good naked, the exemplar here being Roark's lover, Dominique Francon, who slips in and out (32, 43, 74), but only appears in the flesh, so to speak, on page 105: 'A young woman stood before the railing, speaking to the reception clerk. Her slender body seemed out of all scale in relation to a normal human body; its lines were so long, so fragile, so exaggerated that she looked like the stylized drawing of a woman and made the correct proportions of a normal being appear heavy and awkward beside her. She wore a plain grey suit; the contrast between its tailored severity and her appearance was deliberately exorbitant and strangely elegant. She let the fingertips of one hand rest on the railing, a narrow hand ending the straight imperious line of her arm. She had gray eyes that were not ovals, but two long, rectangular cuts edged by parallel lines of lashes; she had an air of cold serenity and an exquisitely vicious mouth. Her face, her pale gold hair, her suit seemed to have no color, but only a hint, just on the verge of the reality of color, making the full reality seem vulgar. Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty' (105). Not that she is Rand's ideal woman from the start - she has the makings, but she lacks a healthy sense of self and a capacity for happiness. So, she is the only character to develop throughout the novel, and therefore the most interesting. At the start, her creed is "To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing". And when asked, "What if you found something you wanted?", she replies, "I won't find it. I won't choose to see it. .... I'd have to share it with all the rest of you - and I wouldn't. You know, I never open again any great book I've read and loved. It hurts me to think of the other eyes that have read it and of what they were. Things like that can't be shared. Not with people like that" (141). Ayn Rand's alter ego, then, in some ways, but taller, slimmer, more elegant, and better dressed (we can all dream) - and at the outset, with a degree of self-loathing and a taste for self-destruction from which she will need to be rescued to become a worthy partner for Rand's ideal man. She develops, explicitly, through successive relationships with men. This is what the novel is about. It becomes a fantasy in which Rand lives vicariously the dream of the making of an ideal (a peculiar one, but still) that she has not herself achieved. The architecture is largely incidental, as you get the idea in the first few pages, so I'll leave it aside from this point - except to note that a fascination with New York, its skyscrapers and its skyline persists throughout, and plays its part in the highly cinematic final scene. Throughout, you need to forget Objectivism, and think Hollywood noir. Spoilers galore, then, as I develop this theme in detail. Dominique is initially pursued by the loathsome Peter Keating, concurrently with his intermittent dealings with his doomed and eventually abandoned fiancée, Catherine Halsey, the niece of Ellsworth Toohey. When he eventually declares his love for Dominique and kisses her she feels nothing and does not respond, saying, "I suppose I'm one of those freaks you hear about, an utterly frigid woman" (179), and refusing his proposal of marriage. She leaves to spend the summer alone on her father's estate in Connecticut, three miles from a granite quarry he owns, and the plot thickens as Roark, finding no work as an architect, gets a labouring job in the same quarry (I know, of all the quarries in all the world, she walks into mine – coincidentally, Casablanca came out in 1942, a year before The Fountainhead was published). Meanwhile, something is stirring in Dominique: 'Dominique had spent so many summers and winters, surrounding herself with people in order to feel alone, that the experiment of actual solitude was an enchantment to her and a betrayal into a weakness she had never allowed herself: the weakness of enjoying it. She stretched her arms and let them drop lazily, feeling a sweet, drowsy heaviness above her elbows, as after a first drink. She was conscious of her summer dress, she felt her knees, her thighs encountering the faint resistance of cloth when she moved, and it made her conscious not of the cloth, but of her knees and thighs' (206). She is coming to life, but she still needs a jolt. What follows? What do you think? Dominique happens to see Roark pounding away with a pneumatic drill in the quarry on one of her walks, of course unaware of his identity: 'She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt, hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstractions of strength made visible. She felt a convulsion of anger, of protest, of resistance - and of pleasure. He stood looking up at her; it was not a glance, but an act of ownership. She thought she must let her face give him the answer he deserved. But she was looking, instead, at the stone dust on his burned arms, the wet shirt clinging to his ribs, the lines of his long legs. She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that. She thought she had found an aim in life - a sudden, sweeping hatred for that man' (207). This may have a distant echo of the D.H. Lawrence of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1923), but is closer in style to the 1995 Diet Coke Break ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmVexzzVfDA). And in a heartbeat, back at home, 'She leaned back, closing her eyes. She thought of the many distinguished men whom she had refused. She thought of the quarry worker. She thought of being broken - not by a man she admired, but by a man she loathed. She let her head fall down on her arm; the thought left her weak with pleasure' (209). There is much more of this than is healthy, laying bare the depths of Dominique's damaged psyche. In the end, she deliberately scratches a marble slab in front of the fireplace in her bedroom so that she can ask him to come and mend it; he comes to remove the slab and measure for a replacement; when it arrives he sends someone else to fix it; she goes looking for him on horseback and strikes him across the face with a branch she is carrying; three days later, he appears, uninvited, and without a word, 'he walked to her. He held her as if his flesh had cut through hers and she felt the bones of his arms on the bones of her ribs, her legs jerked tight against his, his mouth on hers. ... She fought like an animal. But she made no sound. She did not call for help. ... It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him - and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted' (219-220). This is the much-discussed rape scene (for an overview of the debate, see Susan Love Brown, 'Ayn Rand and Rape', Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, 15, 1, 2015, pp. 3-22). It was rape, and Dominique describes it as such to herself and others (223, 703). Again, there is nothing in Objectivism that stipulates that ideal men must initially subject their prospective partners to forcible sexual relations. Rather, it comes from Rand's own disturbing erotic imaginings, and in fact she herself equivocated thereafter as to whether it did or did not constitute rape. Dominique feels intense pleasure ('rapture' is a strong term, with religious overtones), and she reflects afterwards that 'she had found pleasure in the thing which had happened, that he had known it, and more; that he had known it before he came to her and that he would not have come but for that knowledge. She had not given him the one answer that would have saved her: an answer of simple revulsion - she had found joy in her revulsion, in her terror and in his strength. That was the degradation she had wanted and she hated him for it' (222). Beyond the act of rape itself, this is thoroughly misogynistic, making Dominique self-hating, and playing too on the trope of the frigid woman whose latent sexuality must be awakened by male force. As the story develops, Dominique seeks to destroy Roark's career by steering clients towards Keating and telling Roark so, while offering herself to him unconditionally for sex whenever she does (278-80, 288-91). She poses naked for a statue for the Stoddard Temple, Roark's Temple of the Human Spirit (343-5); love begins to blossom between them; she testifies, nominally against him, when a malpractice suit is brought over the Temple, arguing that Roark 'saw man as a heroic being. And he built a temple to that,' but that 'If it were allowed to exist, nobody would dare to look at himself in the mirror,' so 'The Stoddard Temple must be destroyed. Not to save men from it, but to save it from men' (364-7). A Happy Ending is not yet quite in sight: Rand has Dominique declare that she will show just how much she can take, testing herself to the limit, and subjects her to a farcical marriage with Keating (giving rise to a rare moment of spare and felicitous writing: 'They were married in a living room that displayed armchairs of faded tapestry, blue and purple, and a lamp with a fringe of glass beads. The witnesses were the judge's wife and someone from next door named Chuck, who had been interrupted at some household task, and smelled faintly of Clorox', 383). Dominique goes from there straight to Roark, spends a night in which 'the intervals of exhausted unconsciousness [were] as intense an act of union as the convulsed meetings of their bodies', declares her love for him, and informs him in the same breath that she has married Keating (385-6). She explains herself, and he declares his love for her, at some length. It's all very highly charged, and not really what you expect from the founder of the 'rational' philosophy of Objectivism. She joins Keating on the following day, initiating sex with him with the tender words, "All right, Peter, let's get it over with". She is unmoving and unresponsive, and afterwards, 'his first whispered words were: "God damn you!"; "Peter," she replies, "if I could do this ... I can do anything now ..." (392-3). Another 50 pages pass by before the moral is pointed - Dominique is busy trying to obliterate her 'self', and Keating never had one to start with: "You're not here, Dominique. You're not alive. Where's your I?" "Where's yours Peter?", she asked quietly. In no time at all she is despatched to offer her body to the newspaper magnate, Gail Wynand, in order to win a commission for Keating (449-59). However, Wynand turns out to be a far higher calibre of person than Keating, and he will guide Dominique on the next part of her journey: "You want to sell yourself for the lowest motive to the lowest person you can find." "I didn't expect you to understand that," she said simply. "You want - men do that sometimes, not women - to express through the sexual act your utter contempt for me." "No, Mr Wynand. For myself." ... "Most people go to a very great length in order to convince themselves of their self-respect." "Yes." "Do you see the meaning of a quest for self-contempt?" "That I lack it?" "And that you'll never achieve it" (453-4). Wynand has acquired the statue of Dominique from the Temple of the Human Spirit (sent to him as a gift by Toohey), and refers to it to register the distance Dominique still has to go: "Shall I tell you the difference between you and your statue?" "No." "But I want to. It's startling to see the same elements used in two compositions with opposite themes. Everything about you in that statue is the theme of exaltation. But your own theme is suffering." "Suffering? I'm not conscious of having shown that." "You haven't. That's what I meant. No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain" (454-5). Go back to the passage where the statue is being carved, and you find that it is only at the moment when Roark appears that Dominique achieves the state of exaltation that Steve Mallory, the sculptor, immediately recognises and captures: "Is this what you want, Steve?" Dominique asked suddenly. She took her robe off and walked naked to the stand. Mallory looked from her to Roark and back again. Then he saw what he had been struggling to see all day. He saw her body standing before him, straight and tense, her head thrown back, her arms at her sides, palms out, as she had stood for many days; but now her body was alive, so still that it seemed to tremble, saying what he had wanted to hear: a proud, reverent, enraptured surrender to a vision of her own, the right moment, the moment before the figure would sway and break, the moment touched by the reflection of what she saw. Mallory's cigarette went flying across the room. "Hold it, Dominique! he cried. "Hold it! Hold it!" He was at his stand before the cigarette hit the ground. He worked, and Dominique stood without moving, and Roark stood facing her, leaning against the wall (344-5). Quintessential Rand, complete with cigarette. And there is more going on here than you might imagine. I assume Rand was familiar with Paul's epistle to the Philippians, which enjoins them: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others," and goes on: "In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death - even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2, verses 5-11). Rand's position, of course, is exactly the opposite. Dominique will be exalted (literally, in the finale) through finding her self, not losing it; and she will do so through the very earthly ministry of Roark, her secular god (as suggested earlier, p 269). At this mid-way point in her exaltation, she offers the thought that she and Wynand will get along very well together and agrees to spend two months on his yacht. He plays the role of John the Baptist here, and this first step in her rising to become worthy of Roark is quite well done, to be fair. Wynand treats her with courtesy and respect, and asks her to marry him, declaring his love for her. Sex is postponed, the cruise is cut short, and she heads for Reno to secure her divorce. An important scene follows. She stops off to find Roark, who just happens to be working in a town along the route. Still wanting to punish him, she tells him she will divorce Keating and marry Wynand: "That's worse than Peter Keating, isn't it?" she asked. "Much worse." "Do you want to stop me?" No." (481). She asks to stay the night. He refuses. She says she will stay with him and give up her fortune, if he gives up architecture: "It won't last. They won't let you. You're moving to some terrible kind of disaster. It can't end any other way. Give it up." He laughs, declines, and tells her to marry Wynand. Then: "Until - when, Roark?" "Until you stop hating all this, stop being afraid of it, learn not to notice it" (483). So, she is getting there, but she is not there yet. She throws herself wholeheartedly into the role of 'Mrs Wynand-Papers', demanding a lavish society wedding; and she finds, despite herself, that the sex is different: 'She lay in his bed and she pressed her palms to the cold, smooth sheet at her sides, not to let her arms move and touch him. But her rigid indifference did not drive him to helpless anger. He understood. He laughed. She heard him say - his voice rough, without consideration, amused "It won't do, Dominique." And she knew that this barrier would not be held between them, that she had no power to hold it. She felt the answer in her body, an answer of hunger, of acceptance, of pleasure. She thought that it was not a matter of desire, not even a matter of the sexual act, but only that man was the life force and woman could respond to nothing else; that this man had the will of life, the prime power, and this act was only its simplest statement, and she was responding not to the act nor to the man, but to that force within him' (501-2). Nietzsche (stripped, as Rand would have it, of his irrationalism) is the inspiration here, as throughout the novel. In another crucial scene, Dominique reaches a decisive turning point (510-14). From this point on, Wynand too begins to grow, guided by Roark, who undertakes to build a house for him. They become the best of friends, while Dominique longs to go to Roark, but places herself in his hands: 'She could not go. Her share of action was ended. He would come to her when he wished. She knew he would come, and that he wanted her to wait' (570). And a little later, this: ''Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closes at each end; then he bent the branch slowly into an arc. "Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That's the meaning of life." "Your strength?" "Your work." ... 'To remain controlled, as he wished, to be patient, to make of patience an active duty executed consciously each day, to stand before Roark and let her serenity tell him: "This is the hardest thing you could have demanded of me, but I'm glad, if it's what you want" - such was the discipline of Dominique's existence' (577). Deliberately juxtaposed, then, the unequal gender relations at the heart of Rand's moral universe. But there is more. Roark is saved by work, but Dominique by faith. From this point, religious imagery multiplies. So, when Dominique asks, with reference to Roark, "What is he to you, Gail? In the nature of a shrine?", he replies, "In the nature of a hair shirt." One way or another, both will do their penance, and find their way to redemption through Roark. Wynand must confess his sins and seek absolution, as he does when he walks the streets of New York after agreeing to turn The Banner against Roark (693). Dominique must show that she can now live serenely in a fallen world: "I've learned to bear anything except happiness,", she thinks, "I must learn how to carry it. How not to break under it. It's the only discipline I'll need from now on" (697). She is now able to go to Roark, and call him by his first name. She engineers a situation where it becomes public knowledge that she is living with him as his mistress - all very melodramatic: "The story, including the pyjamas, the dressing gown [all borrowed from Roark], the breakfast table and the single bed, was in all the afternoon papers of New York that day" (701). Does she find her true self and true happiness? She does. But not before the contradictory nonsense that is Roark's courtroom speech. It follows a prosecutor who implausibly accuses Roark of the crime of egotism, rather than criminal damage, as if he knew his defence and wished to respond in advance; it ignores the fact that by passing his design to Keating, on whose word he knows perfectly well that he cannot count, Roark has broken his own moral law: 'never to place his prime goal within the persons of others' (714); in its general argument, it rests on the laughable proposition that all inventions and acts of creativity are the work of a single individual; it claims, implausibly, that the inventors of fire and the wheel were destroyed by their fellows; it highlights the punishments of Prometheus and Adam, although they were punished by a god or gods, not by men; it divides humanity into two classes, creators and parasites, and bizarrely claims that parasites preach altruism - not because it has anything to do with the particular case, but because Rand has moved on, and is now thinking about the evils of 'collectivist' government, which loom large in terms more relevant to Atlas Shrugged. The argument becomes absurd: 'When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism' (715). In short, a variety of Rand's obsessions collide, and the result is an unholy mess, as should be apparent even to the majority of readers who don't bother with the rest of the novel. On balance, though, it’s just as well they don’t, considering that there must be many hundreds of thousands of copies among the 4.7 million exemplars of her work donated to 65,000 public schools and colleges over the years by the Ayn Rand Institute. Never mind. After some loose ends are quickly tied up, Roark agrees to build the Wynand Building, the tallest skyscraper ever built in New York, predicted by Wynand to be the last (724). It becomes the setting for the final scene. Dominique, who has completed her ascent from Mrs Peter Keating (385) to Mrs Wynand-Papers (466) and finally to Mrs Roark (726), as she names herself successively, now ascends physically to Roark (literally, in a hoist to the top of the building), rising until 'there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark' (727). Rapture, exaltation, creation, call it what you will. Cue final credits, The End.