Barbara Branden - The Passion of Ayn Rand

It was the following summer that Alice discovered a second passion — like her tiddlywink music, it remained in her mind as a discovery of major importance in her development — about which she felt, "This is mine. This is what I like." But this time, she did not discuss her newfound love with anyone; it seems clear that she was learning, painfully, to keep her deepest emotional reactions locked up inside herself, to view them as too personal, too private to be shared or made vulnerable to the rejection of others. This, too, was a trend that was to progressively characterize her life: as an adult, she spoke easily and in strongly emotional terms of whatever elicited her disapproval, her contempt, her anger; she spoke much more rarely — and then usually in objective and impersonal terms — of that which she most profoundly loved.

In the Crimean resort where the Rosenbaums vacationed, a smart, expensive hotel had recently been built, patronized mainly by foreign visitors. Occasionally, Anna took Alice to the hotel for lunch; from the dining room, they could see the tennis court — itself an unusual phenomenon in Russia. One day, gazing out at the court, Alice's attention was caught by a slender, graceful young girl racing effortlessly after a ball and decisively smashing it across the net. She was a twelve-year-old English visitor, Alice was told, named Daisy Gerhardi. Alice stared, fascinated, at this "sophisticated, foreign" figure — doing something no Russian girl was allowed to do, and doing it with consummate grace. When she was fifty-five years old, Alice glowed as she talked of Daisy. "It amazed me," she said. "It was a creature out of a different world, my idea of what a woman should be. She was a symbol of the independent woman from abroad. I felt what today I'd feel for Dagny Taggart. I only saw her that one summer, but the symbol was magnificent — I can still see her today, a very active, tall, long-legged girl in motion; I don't remember the face, only the long-legged agility, and black stockings worn with white tennis shoes. For years, her outfit seemed the most attractive I had ever seen... I didn't long to approach her or to get acquainted, I was content to admire her from afar." 4

Daisy served for Alice as a focus, a projection, an image that she was to use in her fiction — most particularly, she later said, in the creation of the heroine of Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart, the beautiful woman who ran a great railroad. It was an image which she "held defiantly against everyone else. I didn't want others to share this value. I felt: This is my value, and anyone who shares it has to be extraordinary. I was extremely jealous — it was literal jealousy — of anyone who would pretend to like something I liked, if I didn't like that person. I had an almost anxious feeling about it, that it wasn't right. They have no right to admire it, they're unworthy of it."

The passionate concern with spiritual consistency — with a single-tracked purity of value-choices — was a significant element in alienating the small child from the people and the world around her. She felt, always, as she later said, a painful kind of anger — of contempt — for anyone who seemed to love what she loved, but also responded to what she considered boring and stupid; it was as if, through such a response, her love was desecrated. One may not light a candle before a god — and also before the figure of a clown.

The intelligence that boiled inside the child, that already had made her the center of attention in the adult world — "They all seemed to see something unusual in me," she reported — was creating its pressure to be fed. A year before she was to enter school, Alice had taught herself to read and write. By watching her parents and other adults reading, she grasped what the phenomenon consisted of; she asked them. to show her how to write her name in block letters, then to show her other words, so she could learn more letters. By that method, she quickly learned the alphabet, and soon was reading and writing with ease. She was allowed to take a special examination to determine whether she was ready for school; she won acceptance with ease.

Alice was delighted at the prospect of entering school; it would be something interesting, she felt, and she would learn new things that she wanted to know. But by the end of the first year, she was bored with all of her classes except arithmetic. Arithmetic was pure deduction, which all her life was to be a source of joy to her.

"The teacher would lecture straight from the textbook, and explain what was in it — which I already understood; she would not expand or elaborate, and I was at least three lessons ahead. I felt I could learn better and faster at home. I felt that the slow girls needed this, but I didn't." Her boredom soon became torture, and she longed to catch cold, longed for the school to close, for her teacher to be sick. She was happy when she: contracted measles and was quarantined at her grandmother's; there, she could do what she pleased, without rules, without assignments except of her own choosing.

Alice had been at school only a few days when a little girl approached her and said "Let's be girlfriends." The two children talked occasionally over the next few days, but within a week, her "friend" stopped approaching her. Alice felt regretful — she would have liked to have a friend — and "I felt I had failed her in something she wanted, I had no idea what." She never forgot her sudden awareness that she was different from the other girls, that she was too serious, too intense — and, at the same time, too shy — her realization that the other children got along with each other with an ease and understanding that she did not possess; she did not know why. Her continuing inability to form relationships with other children remained in her mind throughout childhood as a troubling question.

Anna Rosenbaum, recognizing that Alice’s lessons at school and at home — her Belgian governess was teaching her French and German — were not enough to occupy her, and that she had made no friends among her schoolmates, began subscribing to French children's magazines in the hope that they would interest the child. At first, Alice was bored with the stories, and the magazines accumulated unread. Alice later said, "My contempt for those stories was exactly the same, only more primitive, as what I would feel today about stories of the folks next door or naturalism."

Then a serial that fascinated her appeared in one of the magazines. It was about a heroic French detective in pursuit of a dangerous jewel thief. The detective overcame all obstacles in pursuit of his goal, and, in the end, was triumphant. This is interesting, Alice thought, because he's doing something important. It's more interesting than what's going on around me. His story is of a battle between good and evil. The battle between good and evil was to engage her ever after. It was to be the major element she sought in literature, it was to be the perspective from which she viewed the world. It would later draw her to such disparate literary figures as Victor Hugo and Mickey Spillane; it would cause her to see the world as a giant battlefield in which her personal god and devil were locked in endless conflict. There was good in the world, and there was evil; one had to choose sides in the battle, one had — as writer and as human being — to enlist one's energies and one's life on the side of the good. As Alice matured, the detective and the jewel thief became opposing philosophical ideas, but the principle remained the same.

The idea of writing stories began to intrigue Alice; if others could do it, she could do it. The invention of stories soon became more absorbing than anything around her. She would sit in school, barricaded behind a book, scribbling furiously at her latest adventure, wanting only to be left alone, to write, to devise dangerous exploits for her characters.