Ayn Rand - The Early Ayn Rand

Such painstaking, virtually scientific precision could by itself constitute an admirable literary style. But in Ayn Rand's work it is integrated with what may seem to some to be an opposite, even contradictory feature: extravagant drama, vivid imagery, passionate evaluations (by the characters and the author) — in short, a pervasive emotional quality animating the writing. The emotional quality is not a contradiction; it is an essential attribute of the style, a consequence of the element of abstractions. A writer who identifies the conceptual meaning of the facts he conveys is able to judge and communicate their value significance. The mind that stops to ask about something, "What is it?" goes on to ask, "So what?" and to let us know the answer. A style describing concretes without reference to their abstract meaning would tend to emerge as dry or repressed (for example, the style of Sinclair Lewis or John O'Hara). A style featuring abstractions without reference to concretes would, if it tried to be evaluative, emerge as bombastic or feverish (for example, the style of Thomas Wolfe). In contrast to both types, Ayn Rand offers us a rare combination: the most scrupulous, subtly analyzed factuality, giving rise to the most violent, freewheeling emotionality. The first makes the second believable and worthy of respect; the second makes the first exciting.

Serious Romantic writers in the nineteenth century (there are none left now) stressed values in their work, and often achieved color, drama, passion. But they did it, usually, by retreating to a realm of remote history or of fantasy — that is, by abandoning actual, contemporary reality. Serious Naturalists of one or two generations ago stressed facts, and often achieved an impressively accurate reproduction of contemporary reality — but, usually, at the price of abandoning broad abstractions, universal meanings, value judgments. (Today's writers generally abandon everything and achieve nothing.) By uniting the two essentials of human cognition, perception and conception, Ayn Rand's writing (like her philosophy) is able to unite facts and values.

Ayn Rand described her literary orientation as Romantic Realism (see The Romantic Manifesto). The term is applicable on every level of her writing. For her, "romanticism" does not mean escape from life; nor does "realism" mean escape from values. The universe she creates in her novels is not a realm of impossible fantasy, but the world as it might be (the principle of Realism) — and as it ought to be (the principle of Romanticism). Her characters are not knights in armor or Martians in spaceships, but architects, businessmen, scientists, politicians — men of our era dealing with real, contemporary problems (Realism) — and she presents these characters not as helpless victims of society, but as heroes (or villains) shaped by their own choices and values (Romanticism).

"Romantic Realism" applies equally to her style. The re-creation of concretes, the commitment to perceptual fact, the painstaking precision and clarity of the descriptions — this is Realism in a sense deeper than fidelity to the man on the street. It is fidelity to physical reality as such. The commitment to abstractions, to broader significance, to evaluation, drama, passion — this is the Romanticist element.

Ayn Rand's writing (like everyone else's) is made only of abstractions (words). Because of her method, however, she can make words convey at the same time the reality of a given event, its meaning, and its feeling. The reader experiences the material as a surge of power that reaches him on all levels: it reaches his senses and his mind, his mind and his emotions.

Although Ayn Rand's writing is thoroughly conscious, it is not self-conscious; it is natural, economical, flowing. It does not strike one as literary pyrotechnics (although it is that). Like all great literature, it strikes one as a simple statement of the inevitable.

The above indicates my reasons for wanting to publish these scenes. Taken by themselves as pieces of writing, "Vesta Dunning" and "Roark and Cameron" are a fitting conclusion to this survey of Ayn Rand's early work and development.

The following is what the author of "The Husband I Bought" was capable of twelve years later.

L. P.

The snow fell in a thick curtain, as if a pillow were being shaken from the top windows of the tenement, and through the flakes sticking to his eyelashes, Roark could barely see the entrance of his home. He shook the iced drops from the upturned collar of his coat, a threadbare coat that served meagerly through the February storms of New York. He found the entrance and stopped in the dark hall, where a single yellow light bulb made a mosaic of glistening snakes in the melting slush on the floor, and he shook his cap out, gathering a tiny pool of cold, biting water in the palm of his hand. He swung into the black hole of the stairway, for the climb to the sixth floor-It was long past the dinner hour, and only a faint odor of grease and onions remained in the stairshaft, floating from behind the closed, grimy doors on the landings. He had worked late. Three new commissions had come unexpectedly into the office, and Cameron had exhausted his stock of blasphemy, a bracing, joyous blasphemy ringing through the drafting room as a tonic. "Just like in the old days," Simpson had said, and in the early dusk of the office, in the unhealthy light, in the freezing drafts from the snow piled on the window ledges there had reigned for days an air of morning and spring. Roark was tired tonight, and he went up the stairs closing his eyes often, pressing his lids down to let them rest from the strain of microscopically thin black lines that had had to be drawn unerringly all day long, lines that stood now as a white cobweb on dark red whenever he closed his eyes. But he went up swiftly, his body alive in a bright, exhilarating exhaustion, a weariness demanding action, not rest, to relieve it.

He had reached the fourth floor, and he stopped. High on the dark wall facing the smeared window, the red glow of a soda-biscuit sign across the river lighted the landing, and black dots of snowflakes' shadows rolled, whirling, over the red patch. Two flights up, behind the closed door of his room, he heard a voice speaking.

He rose a few steps, and stood pressed to the wall, and listened. It was a woman's voice, young, clear, resonant, and it was raised in full force, as if addressing a huge crowd. He heard, incredibly, this:

... but do not question me. I do not answer questions.

You have a choice to make: accept me now

or go your own silent, starless way

to an unsung defeat in uncontested battle.

I stand before you here, I am unarmed;

I offer you tonight my only weapon—

the weapon of that certainty I carry,

unchangeable, untouched and unshared.

Tomorrow's battle I have won tonight

if you but follow me. We'll lift together

the siege of Orleans and win the freedom

I am alone to see and to believe...

The voice was exultant, breaking under an emotion it could not control. It seemed to fail suddenly in the wrong places, speaking the words not as they should have been spoken on a stage, but as a person would fling them out in delirium, unable to hold them, choking upon them. It was the voice of a somnambulist, unconscious of its own sounds, knowing only the violence and the ecstasy of the dream from which it came.

Then it stopped and there was no sound in the room above. Roark went up swiftly and threw the door open.

A girl stood in the middle of the room, with her back to him. She whirled about, when she heard the door knock against the wall. His eyes could not catch the speed of her movement. He had not seen her turn. But there she was suddenly, facing him, as if she had sprung up from the floor and frozen for a second. Her short brown hair stood up wildly with the wind of the motion. Her thin body stood as it had stopped, twisted in loose, incredible angles, awkward, except for her long, slim legs that could not be awkward, even when planted firmly, stubbornly wide apart, as they were now.