For the past week, Reason Online has been putting on a wonderful examination of the life and work of Ayn Rand. The piece above is an interview with Barbara Branden, one of Rand’s earliest students and the wife of Nathaniel Branden, Rand’s one-time “intellectual heir” with whom she had an affair and, later, a falling out. As a piece of trivia, early editions of Atlas Shrugged (including the First Edition I bought my sister for Xmas a few years back) were dedicated to Mr. Branden and Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor – after their falling out, subsequent editions were dedicated only to O’Connor.

I’ve read most of Rand’s published nonfiction work, as well as all of her fiction. I re-read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged each spring, and am currently working on a reader’s guide to Atlas Shrugged (this project started here as “Blogging Atlas Shrugged,” until I decided it was too much work just to publish on the site so, yes, I’m writing it as a book). One of the primary issues I have of Rand criticism is that so many people who take potshots at the woman and her work have clearly read almost none of her writing, or certainly didn’t read it and “get” it. This isn’t merely the case of blog commenters and armchair philosophers.

The New York Times’s Adam Kirsch was rightly ridiculed in the random circles of people who admire Ayn Rand for a stunning display of ignorance regarding Objectivism and Rand. In his 10.29.09 review of Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made, Kirsch makes the following assertion (I quote this at length because people familiar with Rand will either fume or chuckle as they read what unfolds; please read the full piece if you think I’m changing context with the elipses – I’m not; also, bolded passages are mine, to condescendingly help you along):

…Rand labored for more than two years on Galt’s radio address near the end of “Atlas Shrugged” — a long paean to capitalism, individualism and selfishness that makes Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” sound like the Sermon on the Mount. “At one point, she stayed inside the apartment, working for 33 days in a row,” Heller writes. She kept going on amphetamines and willpower; the writing, she said, was a “drops-of-water-in-a-desert kind of torture.” Nor would Rand, sooner than any other desert prophet, allow her message to be trifled with. When Bennett Cerf, a head of Random House, begged her to cut Galt’s speech, Rand replied with what Heller calls “a comment that became publishing legend”: “Would you cut the Bible?” One can imagine what Cerf thought — he had already told Rand plainly, “I find your political philosophy abhorrent” — but the strange thing is that Rand’s grandiosity turned out to be perfectly justified.

In fact, any editor certainly would cut the Bible, if an agent submitted it as a new work of fiction. But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. This was, perhaps, an understandable reaction against her childhood experience of Communism …

Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.

 Without reservation I accept that there are intelligent, philosophical critiques that can be made of Rand, her life, her work, and her philosophy. This isn’t one of them.

What is infuriating about critiques such as this one is that the critic has read none of Rand’s work beyond Atlas Shrugged, and I’d argue he’s not actually read Atlas Shrugged. Although Rand wrote a play and two slender novels early in her career while struggling as a screenwriter, she burst onto the literary and cultural scene with The Fountainhead, a novel about an idealistic architect who … here it comes … gives up money in order to preserve his vision. The Fountainhead’s hero is Howard Roark (like John Galt, and most impressively, Francisco D’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged, who also take a machete to their possessed or potential material wealth), a man who, more than any character Rand created, believed that ideas matter more than lucre. Keep in mind that when Rand wrote The Fountainhead, one of her stated goals was to present “the ideal man,” which ultimately was literarily embodied in the figure of John Galt.

Kirsch’s ignorance of Rand continues, though, with the laughable notion that “Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do,” followed by the throwaway clause, “…the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker.”

As I’ve pointed out (often in high volume) to people who make such claims, James Taggart and Orren Boyle are two of the most lecherous villains in Atlas Shrugged, and both men are moneyed “executives.” Rand reserved much of her greatest rhetorical wrath for rent-seeking corporatists, and the fastest way to smoke out a critic of her writing is to hear their thoughts on how she viewed businessmen.

Furthermore, anyone who’s actually bothered to read Atlas Shrugged knows the most moving argument the novel makes is not John Galt’s 60-page speech [yes, I’ve read it multiple times – take that urban legend!], but D’Anaconia’s “The Meaning of Money” speech in Part I, a speech that directly refutes Kirsch – again, reviewing one of the most popular, influential novels ever penned in any language – himself posing as a book critic for The New York Times.

Garbage like this isn’t new. Rand and The National Review’s William F. Buckley famously feuded, presumably beginning with Rand’s opener to Buckley when they first met that he was much too intelligent to believe in God. Buckley bit back when he published Whittaker Chambers’s review of Atlas Shrugged, demonstrating that neither he nor Buckley had actually read the book (I won’t bother to link to it – you can find it online, and the reason that the book was unread by either man is obvious early on).

For people who read lots and lots and lots and lots of Serious Books, this stuff is not only insulting, it’s intellectually degrading and Serious Business. A long time ago, I posted a long diatribe about the criticism of The Modern Library naming James Joyce’s Ulysses as the greatest novel of the 20^th Century. A modern critic lambasted the move, arguing the theory that not only was it not the greatest (I don’t think it was either; I say Absalom, Absalom!, Catch-22 and Lolita forever remain in a three-way tie for that one) novel of the century, but going farther in stating he didn’t suspect anyone had actually read it, certainly not the panel that dubbed it the greatest. Like those who feel free to comment on Rand and her work, I hold in contempt any critic who chooses to mischaracterize any author’s work, to say nothing of those who insist that since they weren’t patient enough to read it, nobody could have read it. And, for the record, I read every single word of Ulysses, from Buck Mulligan’s first insults of Stephen Dedalus to Molly Bloom’s rapturous, self-induced orgasm to end the whole ordeal. Again, for the record…

Another criticism is that Rand and her followers were brainwashed, a cult of personality, etc, ultimately leading to the putdown that Rand’s work only appeals to people when they are young, that most adults can see right through it.

The importance of the interview with Branden above is her insistence that Rand was one of the most intelligent human beings she’d ever met and possessed a mind that did not end. I don’t need Rand to be the smartest woman who ever existed, but I get infuriated at the common criticism by people who are unfamiliar with the woman and her work that it is somehow “stupid.” One of the great things about Branden’s The Passion of Ayn Rand were the dozens of interviews with people in publishing who did not agree with her philosophy and politics, yet could not say enough about the vast store of knowledge possessed by Rand, or her absurd fluency in debate. It is impossible to be familiar with Rand or her work and consider it amateurish or mediocre; it is a love-hate proposition.

I say this not only as someone who is fluent in the popular work of Rand, but has a deep understanding and admiration of Objectivism, her unified philosophical system. I’m too much of a hedonist to ever consider myself an Objectivist, but I have taken a Cook’s tour through Western philosophy and literature, I will say there is much to be admired, especially for contemporary Americans pondering how we arrived at the state we are in.

In Objectivism – which Rand claimed was influenced only by Aristotle, though many see appropriate connections with Nietzsche, especially from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (although in fairness to Rand she rejected his work as being that of the thoughts of a “mystic”) – there is a code, or a theme if you will. Just as Christians point to John 3:16 as an encapsulation of their faith, so to do Objectivists point to the pledge that all must take before entering Atlas Shrugged’s Individualist Utopia, Atlantis aka Galt’s Gulch:

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

If there is a maxim that ties Rand’s work together, this is that maxim. Contemporaneously, if one wonders how we got to a state of TARP, bailouts, Porkulus, Cap-and-Trade, Obamacare et al, one can find the answer in the maxim. There is a reason that scattered through every Town Hall and Tea Party protest are signs regarding “Who is John Galt” and “Going Galt” – Atlas Shrugged is a challenging work of fiction that many Americans – and I say this with a smile, a smirk and a laugh at its critics – have actually read, understood and remembered!

Through a mishmash Marxist doctrine most Marxists haven’t bothered to read (see: Das Kapital); the insidious influence on college campuses of postmodernism spreading like a brain-eating disease through the ether, infecting most students who bother to attend college; the Orwellian though-policing of political correctness not only on college campuses but now killing off common sense even in the American military; and the misconstrued Christian notions of “love thy neighbor as thyself” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” All of these notions, when either executed truthfully or politically manipulated, remove the importance of the Individual from the national debate, and instead focus on the masses. Your brother and your neighbor are no longer really your brother or neighbor, they are countrymen spread throughout the nation who suddenly the rest of us have a (false) moral imperative to care for.    

The arguments against what I would now call Conservative Populism and the ridicule of its leading figures was long ago foretold by Ayn Rand, especially in her novels. The applications are not merely capitalistic, they span the various arenas of American culture and society. The attempt to nationalize health care – moving forward against a strong national opinion against it – through Quixiotic, Byzantine and unreadable legislation with ironic naming devices is nothing new. So long as leaders have felt the need to consolidate power, they have attempted to foist upon the public the sell of legislation that says it will do one thing yet, when enacted, does the opposite.

Ayn Rand and her remarkable mind foresaw this a half-century ago. Like so many contemporary figures ridiculed for their provinciality and simple-mindedness, Rand also saw through the elaborate charade of a bare few politicians trying to rule over the rest of us.

Happily, there is her work, which for now those content to snipe at it while never reading it can ridicule, while its sales continue to soar, to inspire, to prod and, ultimately, to demonstrate that there is room for rational thought, that there is a better way than the State way, and that when all is said and done, Liberals have moved from the same playbook for a long, long time.