34 The New York Review
of capitalism. In 1941 she produced a
statement of principles, “The Individu-
alist Manifesto,” meant as an alterna-
tive to The Communist Manifesto. The
principles echoed through her work for
the rest of her life. A flavor:The right of liberty means man’s
right to individual action, indi-
vidual choice, individual initiative
and individual property. Without
the right to private property no in-
dependent action is possible.The right to the pursuit of happi-
ness means man’s right to live for
himself, to choose what constitutes
his own, private, personal happi-
ness and to work for its achieve-
ment. Each individual is the sole
and final judge in this choice. A
man’s happiness cannot be pre-
scribed to him by another man or
by any number of other men.Written under the shadow of the man-
ifesto and mostly in a one-year spurt of
creativity, The Fountainhead was pub-
lished in 1943. The book became a sen-
sation, largely through word of mouth.
Readers used words like “awakening”
and “revelation” to describe their reac-
tions. Rand became a celebrity. People
wanted to meet her. Men, in particular,
wanted to meet her. As Duggan puts
it, “Rand’s attentions often wandered
from her ‘hero’ Frank to an array of
young men who visited her.” It is un-
clear whether her relationship with any
of those men turned sexual, but there
were serious flirtations and apparently
romantic feelings. Her husband’s act-
ing career was going poorly, and he was
economically dependent on his wife; in
many ways, their marriage represented
a reversal of traditional sex roles. Rand
wasn’t living the man-worship depicted
in her novels.After World War II, Rand became
an anti-Communist cold warrior, tes-
tifying before the House Un-American
Activities Committee about the infil-
tration of the film industry, and of pop-
ular films, by communism. In 1944 she
started to write Atlas Shrugged; it took
her thirteen years to finish. In that pe-
riod, Duggan reports, Rand withdrew
from the political fray and relied on a
small social circle, created for her by
her most trusted acolyte, Nathan Blu-
menthal. Blumental was a handsome
and vibrant Canadian who had long
idolized her (and who was working as
a part-time psychologist, using Rand’s
principles). Twenty-five years younger
than Rand, Blumenthal had read and
reread The Fountainhead at the age of
fourteen, memorizing whole passages.
(Same here, as they say.) In high school
and then as a student at the Univer-
sity of California at Los Angeles, he
wrote fan letters to Rand. Initially she
ignored them, but in 1950, she invited
the nineteen-year-old undergraduate
to visit her at her home.
Sparks flew when Blumenthal and
Rand first met, at least by his own ac-
count. “I felt as if ordinary reality had
been left somewhere behind and I was
entering the dimension of my most pas-
sionate longing,” he later wrote. They
talked philosophy from 8 PM that night
until 5:30 AM the next morning, while
O’Connor sat by in silence. Blumenthal
describes himself as “intoxicated”—
“two souls shocked in mutual recogni-tion.” A few hours after the meeting,
still early in the morning, he came to
the apartment of his girlfriend, Barbara
Weidman, also a Rand enthusiast. He
was rapturous. “[She’s] fascinating,” he
told Weidman, “she’s Mrs. Logic.” A
few days later, Blumenthal returned to
Rand’s home, this time with Weidman,
who reported that she “was not a con-
ventionally attractive woman, but com-
pelling in the remarkable combination
of perceptiveness and sensuality, of in-
telligence and passionate intensity, that
she projected.”
Soon Blumenthal and Rand were
speaking almost every evening, some-
times for hours. The two couples—Ayn
and Frank, Nathan and Barbara—be-
come close, even intimate. In 1951
Blumenthal and Weidman moved to
New York, to study at NYU. Rand andO’Connor joined them a few months
later.
These were the founding members
of what Duggan calls a “weird little
group” that became “the base camp
for Rand’s philosophical movement,
Objectivism.” Things definitely did get
weird, and began to take on aspects of
a personality cult. Nathan Blumenthal,
with Rand’s endorsement, decided to
change his name to Nathaniel Branden,
exclaiming, “Why should I be stuck
with someone else’s choice of name?”
In January 1953 he married Weid-
man, with Rand as maid of honor and
O’Connor as best man. Barbara took
the new last name, too.
In September 1954 Rand and Na-
thaniel Branden declared to their
spouses that they had fallen in love with
each other, and Rand, the supposed
apostle of reason, calmly informed
Barbara and Frank that their romantic
connection was only rational. As Rand
put it, “If Nathan and I are who we are,
if we see what we see in each other, if
we mean the values we profess—how
can we not be in love?” But she prom-
ised that despite their feelings, their
relationship would not be physical.
“We have no future, except as friends,”
Rand told Barbara and Frank. Predict-
ably, their relationship did turn sexual.^2
But Ayn and Frank stayed married, as
did Barbara and Nathaniel. Through-
out the period, Rand worked intenselyon Atlas Shrugged; Frank and both
Brandens read multiple drafts.
The book is dystopian science fiction,
in which an imaginary US government
has asserted unprecedented regulatory
control over the private sector. Its first
line signals a mystery: “Who is John
Galt?” The country’s god-like creators
(inventors, scientists, thinkers, archi-
tects, and others who do and make
things), led by Galt, a Roark-like hero,
decide to go on strike. They withdraw
from society and watch the parasites
and the looters devour themselves. As
Duggan puts it, Rand depicts the cre-
ators “as sexy, gorgeous, brilliant, and
thoroughly admirable heroes, as con-
trasted with the flabby, unattractive, in-
competent, unproductive moochers and
state-backed bureaucratic looters, para-
sites, and thugs.” Ultimately the govern-ment collapses, and Galt plans to create
a new society, based on principles of in-
dividualism. The final sentence of Atlas
Shrugged captures Galt in a moment of
mastery: “He raised his hand,” Rand
writes, “and over the desolate earth he
traced in space the sign of the dollar.”
Rand dedicated her book to two peo-
ple: her husband and Nathaniel Bran-
den. Of Branden, she wrote:When I wrote The Fountainhead,
I was addressing myself to an ideal
reader—to as rational and inde-
pendent a mind as I could conceive
of. I found such a reader—through
a fan letter he wrote me about The
Fountainhead when he was nine-
teen years old. He is my intellec-
tual heir. His name is Nathaniel
Branden.Rand predicted that Atlas Shrugged
(published in 1957) would “be the most
controversial book of this century; I’m
going to be hated, vilified, lied about,
smeared in every possible way.” The
early reviews were indeed horrific. The
most severe came from the pages of
the National Review, where Whittaker
Chambers, the ex-Communist and con-
servative hero, deplored her atheism
and proclaimed:Out of a lifetime of reading, I can
recall no other book in which a
tone of overriding arrogance was
so implacably sustained.... From
almost any page of Atlas Shrugged,
a voice can be heard from painful
necessity, commanding: “To a gas
chamber—go!”Nevertheless, the book became a
national phenomenon. But Rand wasFrank O’Connor, Barbara Branden, Nathaniel Branden, and Ayn Rand
at the Brandens’ wedding, 1953(^2) Nathaniel Branden’s Judgment Day:
My Years with Ayn Rand (Houghton
Mifflin, 1989) is a riveting account,
lurid and full of insights. Excellent
biographies, offering far more detail
than Duggan does, are Anne Conover
Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She
Made (Nan A. Talese, 2009), and
Burns’s Goddess of the Market.
Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
or visit http://www.nyrb.com
“[A] self-conscious record of a
man-against-the-world’s desperate
denouement. Malaparte is a Man
Apart—a writer like no other.”
—Barry Gifford
In 1947 Curzio Malaparte returned to
Paris for the first time in fourteen years.
In between, he had been condemned
by Mussolini to five years in exile and,
on release, repeatedly imprisoned. In
his intervals of freedom, he had been
dispatched as a journalist to the East-
ern Front. Now, returning to the one
country that had always treated him
well, the one country he had always
loved, he was something of a star, al-
beit one that shines with a dusky and
disturbing light.
The journal he kept while in Paris records
a range of meetings with remarkable
people—Jean Cocteau and a dourly
unwelcoming Albert Camus among
them—and is full of Malaparte’s char-
acteristically barbed reflections on the
temper of the time. It is a perfect model
of ambiguous reserve as well as hu-
morous self-exposure.
“Malaparte is not reportage but
something else.... The aesthetic
intention is so strong, the writing so
strange, that sensitive readers know
automatically he is not a historian,
a journalist or a memoirist. But a
chimera of all three and a novelist.”
—Ben Judah, The American Interest
DIARY OF A
FOREIGNER IN PARIS
Curzio Malaparte
Introduction by Edmund White
Translated from the French and
Italian by Stephen Twilley
Paperback • $17.95 • On sale May 19th
ALSO BY CURZIO MALAPARTE
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