Barbara Branden - The Passion of Ayn Rand

Her second memory was of fear. Walking with her nurse one day, she happened to notice a sheet of glass in a wooden crate, propped along a wall. Curious, Alice approached and touched the edge of the glass. The frightened nurse pulled her away; she mustn't touch it, glass was sharp, it could cut her, it was dangerous. For days afterward, the child worried that invisible particles of glass somehow had gotten into her skin and would seriously hurt her. She felt a sense of danger hanging somewhere over her head. This, too, as a number of her friends would observe, was a reaction she was to carry with her all of her life, unadmitted and unrecognized but with a singular motivational effect: the feeling that the physical world held neither safety nor ease for her. As the years passed, her sense of a fundamental alienation from the material existence she would exalt in her writings was to take on a quality of obsession.

By the time Alice was five, the family had grown to include two younger sisters, Natasha and Elena, called Nora. Alice's intellectual precocity, recognized by those around her even in earliest childhood, had turned her focus to the fascinating job of asking endless questions, of struggling to understand the objects and events around her; when she felt she understood the phenomenon of "babies," her sisters had nothing more to offer her. She much preferred the company of adults. She was often included in adult activities; Anna liked to have her precocious daughter present to be admired. At parties in her home, Alice was brought from the nursery to be hugged by her doting grandmother, Anna's mother, a dour martinet except with Alice, whom she adored as the first child of her best-loved daughter, and to be praised by the other adults for her large dark eyes that gazed with grave, questioning solemnity at the world around her.

Implicit in Alice's reminiscences about her childhood is the fact that, from her parents and from the other adults she encountered, love and admiration were purchased by the qualities of her mind. When her mother paraded her before the relatives, it was because Alice's bright lucidity inspired their admiration; when her father smiled at her during his visits to the nursery at the end of the day, it was because she had told him of some activity — a game she had invented, a picture in a children's book she had built a story around — that demonstrated the quickness of her mind. Alice learned well the lesson contained in the reactions she received. As a child, and as an adult, the first question she asked about anyone she met was: Is he intelligent? It was the first question — and, in a deeply personal way, the last. Intelligence was the quality she most admired, that she responded to with the greatest pleasure and respect. Her own remarkable intelligence created that reaction in part; a mind needs the stimulation of its equals. But she placed on intelligence what can only be termed a moral value; intelligence and virtue were to become inextricably linked in her mind and her emotions; where she saw no unusual intelligence — nor the capacity for dedicated productive work that she believed to be its consequence — she saw no value that meant anything to her in personal terms. One never heard her say of anyone, as a significant compliment: "He's generous," or "He's kind," or "He's thoughtful;" none of our common coinage of admiration — particularly the admiration we pay to qualities of character involving the treatment of other people — reached the place in her where Alice Rosenbaum's deepest values lived.

On a bright summer day, Alice discovered a passion that did reach into her most private spirit. Each summer, the Rosenbaums traveled to the Crimea for two months, renting a summer house and spending long lazy hours on the white beaches, wandering through the green, lush countryside and through a sunlit park. At a bandstand in the park, beneath a line of white birch trees, a military band played through the warm afternoons. One day, Alice pulled away from her governess to stop before the bandstand. The musicians were playing the first military marches she had ever heard. Then the little Russian girl listened, astonished and transfixed, to the sounds of "Yippy Yi Yippy Yi Yay" — then "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" — then the gay lilt of American and German light classics. Her small body began to move in time to the music. Thereafter, she demanded to be taken every afternoon to the bandstand in the park. In the terms of a six-year-old child, she appeared to sense that here, for the first time, was music that contained no pain, no tragedy, none of the gloom she associated with the Russian music she had heard in her home; it was music that bore no awareness that pain ever could exist. In later years, in America, she scoured record shops until she had collected most of the music she first had heard in a park in the Crimea, and begged Americans traveling to Europe to scour the record shops there. She called it her "tiddlywink" music.

Over the years, other pieces she heard and loved were added to her list, oddly disparate pieces such as "My Irish Molly," Chopin's "Minute Waltz," "C'mon Get Happy" Prokofiev's "March" from Love for Three Oranges, selections from the operettas of Lehar and Kalman. In the happiest moments of her life, her thoughts would go to that music, she would listen to it, her body would sway to its beat. It was her music, she felt. It was untouched by the world, untouched by alien values. It was a pure, unsullied hymn to joy.

As the child worshipped joy, so did the adult she would become. Forever after, she believed that pain and frustration and suffering were meaningless aberrations, never a normal part of life, never to be accepted as the inevitable nature of human existence — and never to be considered important. This would be a theme in her writings, and despite the pain and bitterness that her life would contain, it remained a theme she struggled to keep alive in her psychology, where it was often muted, sometimes almost indiscernible, sometimes battered into silence, but always present. In Atlas Shrugged, the first words Dagny Taggart, the novel's heroine, speaks to John Galt — the man she has waited all her life to meet — are: "We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?" And Galt answers: "No, we never had to"

For a long time, Alice considered most classical music to be "sheer boredom." But when she heard the Overture and the Drinking Song from La Traviata and a few Chopin pieces, she understood that she could love — though never as much as her tiddlywink music — the works of serious composers. It was not until she lived in America that Alice first heard the music of Rachmaninoff; his Second Piano Concerto became her great love, and her standard of great music ever after.

When Alice spoke of the wonders of her tiddlywink music to her mother and other adult relatives, they were appalled that such a bright child — "Why?" and "Please explain" always on her lips — should have what they considered such uncultured tastes. It was the beginning of a series of value clashes with the people around her that was to mark the whole of her life. Years later, she remembered feeling — and still projected — an angry defiance in the face of their rejection of her musical choices. It was a defiance that was to characterize her attitude toward all of her values; "I know, but they don't. This is mine. It's not theirs."

"You're too violent, Alice," her mother constantly told the child. "Either you're tongue-tied, and won't talk to people at all, or — if they don't like something you like — you get angry and rude."

She claimed not to feel the same anger at personal rejection. One day, Anna Rosenbaum shouted at her daughters, "I never wanted children at all! I look after you because it's my duty to do so." Alice listened quietly, thinking: Why does she blame us for being born? We didn't ask for it. Even at this early age, Alice had learned not to expect appreciation except for her intellectual abilities; she had learned it so thoroughly that she appears not to have consciously experienced lack of appreciation as painful (although at a deeper level she must have suffered at a mother's rejection). Throughout Alice's life, she would expect, even demand, that her intellectual qualities be perceived and admired; she would react with pleasure, but with an authentic air of bewilderment, if any other aspect of her character or personality were understood or loved.