Barbara Branden - The Passion of Ayn Rand

In the early sixties, I was given an opportunity to learn still more about her, to examine and study her life with a depth and scope that few biographers are fortunate enough to attain.

Not long after the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Nathaniel and I decided to write a book entitled Who Is Ayn Rand? It consisted of four essays; in three of them, Nathaniel analyzed the moral theories presented in Atlas Shrugged, the view of human psychology it embodied, and Ayn's literary method; my own contribution was a short biographical sketch of Ayn. Who Is Ayn Rand? was published by Random House in 1962.

In preparation for the biographical sketch, Ayn agreed that I might interview her and tape our conversations. We met nineteen times, on each occasion for a minimum of two hours, while she spoke of her past life — her childhood and early womanhood in Russia, the nightmare of the Communist revolution and its consequences, her early years in America, her passionate professional struggle to succeed in a new world and with a new language, her meeting with Frank O'Connor and their courtship and marriage, her friends, her loves, her enemies, her disappointments, and her successes. She spoke not only of the events of her life, but also of the personal meaning of those events, how she felt and judged and what she learned and failed to learn from the days of her life. And when I had turned off the tape recorder and our formal interview was at an end, we often spent many hours in informal, less structured conversations about the material on the tapes. Had she had in mind only the sketch I wrote for Who Is Ayn Rand?, the interviews would have been much fewer in number and shorter in length. But, as Ayn made clear on one or two of the tapes, she thought that I might one day wish to write a full biography, and she spoke with a view to that possibility.

It was an intriguing and exciting experience — particularly so because Ayn rarely reminisced; she was always more interested in the future than in the past. And still more rarely, if she did speak of past events, did she speak of her emotional reaction to those events. Most especially, she did not speak of her years in Russia. In all my interviews with those who had known her, some intimately, I found not a single person with whom she had spoken at any length about the days of her childhood and young womanhood in Russia. Her memories of that period were associated in her mind with an excruciating and, to her, a humiliating pain; for Ayn Rand, pain was humiliation, it was not something to be discussed in casual conversation; the meaning of a human life was the joy one achieved, and suffering was only an irrelevant accident. There was a second, equally important cause of her silence about her early years: her commitment to the idea that human beings are in no sense inevitably the creatures of their environments; we do not have to be influenced or formed by the people and events around us, she believed; we are free to make choices, to evaluate, to come to our own conclusions. "Man," she wrote, "is a being of self-made soul." It would have seemed to her pointless to talk about her childhood with the implication that its events had something to do with the woman she became; parents, friends, the experiences of youth, all were irrelevant to the being whose spirit and values she had molded.

After 1968, when our relationship ended, I saw Ayn only once more before her death. But a number of close friends of mine remained her intimate friends, and, along with more casual acquaintances of Ayn, they were of invaluable assistance in filling in the gaps in my knowledge of those years, in giving me the sense that I was present even then, that I was continuing to observe the unfolding of her life as I had observed it for so long.

Over the years, many people have suggested that it was time for me to write Ayn Rand's biography. But I had come to believe that I would never do so, that I could not again immerse myself in those days of wonder and pain and again struggle to emerge from them whole. For some time after the ending of our relationship, I doubted that I had achieved the necessary objectivity to write about a woman and a life that had so powerfully affected and altered my own life.

But by 1981, I knew that I had made my peace with Ayn Rand and our years together. The pain had lost its keenness; the wonder had endured. And I was left with the awareness that a life and a work as remarkable as hers should be committed to paper, that whatever understanding of her I had gained should not end with me. Her story should be told; it, and the woman who lived it, were unique and important.

The writing of Ayn Rand's biography has been a matchless experience; it has been a four-year-long journey into the life and spirit of one of the most remarkable and complex individuals of our time. And because she affected me so deeply, because, for so long, my life was tied to hers, it has been, as well, a journey in self-discovery. Both journeys have enriched my life. For this, as for so many other things, I am grateful to Ayn Rand.

Those who worship Ayn Rand and those who damn her do her the same disservice: they make her unreal and they deny her humanity. I hope to show in her story that she was something infinitely more fascinating and infinitely more valuable than either goddess or sinner. She was a human being. She lived, she loved, she fought her battles, and she knew triumph and defeat. The scale was epic; the principle is inherent in human existence.

2 In the chapters that follow, quotations from Ayn Rand's works, speeches, and articles are specified as such, as are the reports from other people of statements she made to them. Where a source is not specified, the quotation is from my interview tapes, or from my own conversations with Ayn, or from her conversations with others at which I was present; I have edited such comments only for clarity.

Alice Rosenbaum was born in one of the most beautiful and cultured cities on earth — in the wake of one terrible carnage and amid the ominous warnings of a vaster and more savage carnage to come. It was a sophisticated, glittering world — that was slowly descending into hell.

On February 2, 1905, the day of Alice's birth, St. Petersburg sparkled in the rare winter sunshine. The city's broad, gracious avenues, its golden spires, onion-shaped church domes, and colored cupolas drank in the light. Elegant ladies, wrapped in sables and chattering to each other in French, returned from tea in horse-drawn troikas, and prepared to don formal gowns and their finest jewels for an evening at the Maryinsky Ballet. Along the Nevsky Prospect, in the city's restaurants, diners looked out over the wintry metallic gray of the Neva River to the Peter and Paul Fortress on the northern bank, where the bodies of former Czars lay in state; they talked of the works of Tolstoy and Maxim Gorki, of Pushkin and Turgenev and Dostoievsky, of the exhibit at the Hermitage where the paintings of Matisse, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Monet were hung, and of the city's smart new western nightclubs. Their glances slid past the troops of booted Cossacks thundering along the Nevsky on horseback, rifles on their backs and whips in their hands, seeking suspected revolutionaries. Revolution was sweeping the impoverished countryside as enraged and starving peasants, in the wake of the massacre of "Bloody Sunday," set fire to manor houses and crops.

By 1906, when Alice celebrated her first birthday, the revolution had been put down. Czar Nicholas had sold to the peasants, at low prices, more than four million acres of land, creating a new class in Russia: a class of peasant small landowners. He had transformed Russia from an autocracy to a semi-constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, the Duma; although the Duma had minimal power, the principle of constitutional monarchy was established. But the hatred engendered by the revolution continued to fester, as if awaiting it’s time to erupt in an explosion of devastating violence.