Jubilee Prosperity

This is at once the failure and the making of Rand’s fiction. The
plotting and characterization in her books may be vulgar and
unbelievable, just as one would expect from the middling Holly­wood
screenwriter she once was; but her message, while not necessarily more
sophisticated, is magnified by the power of its absolute sincerity. It
is the message that turned her, from the publication of “Atlas
Shrugged” in 1957 until her death in 1982, into the leader of a kind
of sect. (This season, another Rand book, by the academic historian
Jennifer Burns, is aptly titled “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and
the American Right.”) Even today, Rand’s books sell hundreds of
thousands of copies a year. Heller reports that in a poll in the early
’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month
Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most
influenced their lives,” second only to the Bible.

Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her
so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market
elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that
they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way
distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by
the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching. The very form of her
novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as
any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader
who appreciates them is one of the elect.

Heller maintains an appropriately critical perspective on her subject
— she writes that she is “a strong admirer, albeit one with many
questions and reservations” — while allowing the reader to understand
the power of Rand’s conviction and her odd charisma. 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.

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