Barbara Branden - The Passion of Ayn Rand

Inventing stories and writing came to her with great ease: it was not work, it was a pure, ecstatic pleasure. She later said, in a tone of wistfulness, "The ease with which I wrote has remained to this day as a kind of Atlantis behind me, a lost Garden of Eden." Alice's style was precise and dry, she wrote with the naive directness of a child, in synopsis-like narrative. As it was to remain throughout her lifetime, her primary concern was with clarity, with expressing precisely what she wanted to say. Her greatest pleasure was inventing plots. And when the plot had been put into words, she discovered the heady feeling of living in the world of her own creation. She experienced the joy of creating a world more interesting than the world around her, of creating purposes more important than the purposes around her, of creating characters more admirable and heroic than the people around her. She was discovering, without yet the words to name it, the Aristotelian principle that the fiction writer creates the world "as it might be and ought to be."

It was during the summer of 1914 that she read a story which she recognized, then and later, as marking a crucial turning point in her life.

One quiet afternoon, Alice turned, as she often did, to her stacks of French magazines. Leafing through a boys' magazine of adventure stories, she stopped at one entitled "The Mysterious Valley," and began to read. Time stood still. Her life stood still, as if waiting for its purpose. Many years later, she talked about the story and her feeling for it.

"It was a love affair for me from the first installment. It was about English officers in India, kidnapped by an evil rajah, a monstrous old villain who is plotting to overthrow British rule. Two officers set out to avenge their friends, who they think are dead; then there follow a number of exciting adventures, until the men find the mysterious valley

where the hero and the other men are imprisoned in a cage in a temple; the rajah is going to kill them. But the hero, Cyrus — the kind of feeling I had for him, it still exists, it's in essence everything that I've ever felt for Roark, Galt, Nathan, Frank, or all my values. There's nothing that I can add in quality to any important love later on that wasn't contained in that. Except that being the first, the intensity was almost unbearable. I was a woman in love in a serious sense. The whole reality around me lost all meaning. If, before, I felt that I was imprisoned among dull people, now it was: They don't know, but I do — this is what's possible.

"One illustration that particularly impressed me was a picture of Cyrus standing with a sword. He was a perfect drawing of my present hero: tall, long-legged, with leggings but no jacket, just an open collar, his shirt torn in front, open very low, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and hair falling down over one eye. The appearance of my heroes, and what is my type of man, was completely taken from that illustration."

As Ayn Rand, in middle age, talked about Cyrus, the excitement of youth was in her voice and face, like a woman remembering her first love, never to be challenged, never again to be matched.

"Cyrus was a man of enormous audaciousness, defiant independence. All the other officers in the prison were afraid of the rajah and broken in spirit — except Cyrus. He stood holding on to the bars of the cage, hurling insults at the rajah. He was threatened with torture, with whipping, but he was completely defiant — he laughed!

"One of the rescuers climbed on the shoulders of an enormous idol in the temple, put two flashlights into the eyes of the idol and flashed their beams over the assemblage. The Indians were terror-stricken by the lights, and fled, abandoning the cages. Then began the difficulty of escaping the valley — all kinds of adventures, with secret corridors and a pool filled with crocodiles. At the last moment, they found that the rajah was holding a beautiful blond English girl prisoner; they rescued her, and escaped with her.

"In the last installment, they are climbing a steep ladder of metal rungs up the side of a cliff. Cyrus is carrying the girl on his shoulders. They had planted dynamite to go off just as the Indians were pursuing them — a dam broke, water covered the valley, and all the villains perished — and the hero married the girl."

During the years of my friendship with Ayn Rand, I was always impressed with the range and exactitude of her memory; I was never so much impressed as when, in 1982, I was able to locate "The Mysterious Valley." It was written by Maurice Champagne and published in France in 1914 after magazine serialization. I discovered that Ayn, who had recounted the story at considerable length, had recalled almost every detail, major and minor, of a work she had not read since she was nine years old.

"Cyrus was a personal inspiration," she explained, "a concrete of what one should be like, and what a man should be like. He was a man of action who was totally self-confident, and no one could stand in his way. No matter what the circumstances, he'd always find a solution. He helped me to concretize what I called 'my kind of man' — that expression, which I carried thereafter, began with that story. Intelligence, independence, courage. The heroic man."

In the child who was Alice Rosenbaum, Ayn Rand was being born. One can observe in her novels that the spirit of Cyrus became the spirit of all the fictional heroes she would create. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead was Cyrus, John Galt and Hank Rearden and Francisco d'Anconia in Atlas Shrugged were Cyrus. The name "Kira," which she chose for the heroine of We the Living, is the Russian feminine version of "Cyrus." As an adult, she would translate Cyrus's courage and daring into intellectual terms; but the basic nature of "the heroic man" was never to alter. Alice Rosenbaum, age nine, was on fire with the human possibility she had seen; Ayn Rand was to hold that fire throughout her life, as the source of a literary career that burned into the consciousness of generations of men and women. It was not the stories in her novels, it was not the literary style, it was not the events that most accounted for the fame she was to achieve; it was the portrayal of the human potential: it was Cyrus.

Talking about her childhood discovery, Alice said: "Thereafter, for the next three years, Cyrus was my exclusive love. I felt totally out of the concerns or reality of anybody. What they were interested in didn't matter at all to me, because I knew something much higher. The story made the reality around me more bearable, because it made concrete the reality of what I valued. My feeling was "This is what I want out of life."'

It made the reality around her more bearable, but it increased her estrangement from other people, both adults and children. She saw what was possible, they did not; she cared with desperate passion about her new love, they neither grasped nor cared about it; it was hers, it was not theirs. "I was shocked to hear that one girl in my class was receiving the same magazine, a girl I never particularly liked. I felt real jealousy. I felt violently: she has no right to it."

That same summer of 1914, Alice spent what she always recalled as an idyllic period. With her family, she traveled abroad, first for a week in Vienna, then for six weeks in Switzerland. She later spoke of that period in Switzerland as the springboard for the description in Atlas Shrugged of the childhood of Francisco d'Anconia and Dagny Taggart. Their childhood is spent in the country; it is a period of inventive, purposeful, adventurous activity, in a world that seems always to be lit by a brilliant sun, a joyful childhood devoted to learning the skills that will make them creative adults. Alice’s own summer in Switzerland was spent climbing through the mountains — the first physical activity she had ever enjoyed — her skirt torn and her legs scratched, scaling difficult heights and searching for wild strawberries. Her companion was a young boy whom she met at a Swiss hotel. She chose him because he was intelligent and physically daring. "When we parted, I firmly intended to meet him again when I grew up... Sometimes, to this day, I wonder what happened to him."