Ayn Rand and the World She Made

Ayn Rand was one of the most intriguing, complex, and seminal American thinkers of the Twentieth Century. For seven decades — from her 1905 birth in czarist Russia’s St. Petersburg to her 1982 interment in New York’s Kensico cemetery — she was the vortex around which she drew family, friends, acquaintances, and lovers, sometimes to their benefit, sometimes to their detriment.

As the subtext of Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made reveals, close relationships with Rand were, as Charles Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, the best of times and the worst of times.

Heller begins her biography with Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum’s 1905 birth in St. Petersburg, Russia and ends with Ayn Rand’s 1982 death in New York City. Structuring her book in chronological order, albeit interspersed with significant events, Heller enables the reader to see Rand’s development as person, woman, and writer.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

The early “Russian” chapters are particularly fascinating as they zero in on the virtues and values young Alissa developed in an alien czarist and soviet world and adhered to tenaciously throughout her life.

Far from being raised in a country that respected individual rights, free market capitalism and an objective rule of law, St. Petersburg was a boiling cauldron of the opposite, exemplified by what Heller calls “the most anti-Semitic ... nation on the European continent.”

Heller’s prodigious research — through primary sources, historical materials, and personal interviews — portrays a young girl at the mercy of a czarist regime that gave way to the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution.

And Heller succeeds admirably in integrating Alissa Rosenbaum’s personal experiences with some of the fictional events and characters Ayn Rand would create decades later in America. For example, Alissa’s mother was apparently a lightweight social climber with a cruel streak. Heller connects that characteristic with We the Living, Rand’s quasi-autobiographical first novel, where “...the heroine, Kira Argounova, views her mother as an unprincipled conformist.”

Throughout the Russian chapters Heller adduces facts about the young Alissa, some of which relate directly to Rand’s later writing — a technique that proves remarkably effective in uniting the author and her work.

Perhaps the most important of Heller’s discoveries is Alissa’s awakening to the existence and nature of heroes. Noting that this “intensely thoughtful child” disdained the social aspects of her family’s life and “had few friends and little inclination to make new ones,” Heller writes that when nine-year-old Alissa “encountered a boys’ serial adventure story called The Mysterious Valley whose protagonist was “a dashing British infantry captain named Cyrus Paltons,” it was “the sexually charged character of Cyrus who fixed the story permanently in her mind.”

According to Heller, Cyrus was “her exclusive love” from the ages of nine to twelve. “She probably spent hundreds of hours poring over the drawings and descriptions of the dashing hero who for her became the equivalent of an adolescent heartthrob.” Heller’s startling conclusion: “In homage, [Ayn Rand] would name Kira Argounova, the protagonist of We the Living, for Cyrus, ‘Kira’ being the feminine version of ‘Kirill,’ which is the Russian variant of ‘Cyrus’.”

But Heller is on less steady ground in claiming that “as a mature writer” Rand would pattern “her most explicitly erotic male characters” — The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark, Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt, on her childhood fantasy.

Despite Ayn Rand’s remark that her kind of hero was “tall, long-legged, wearing ... no jacket, just ... an open-collared shirt ... sleeves rolled at the elbows and hair falling down over one eye,” despite Heller’s comparison of Rand’s description with some original pen-and-ink drawings of the “brave, purposeful ... arrogant ... handsome” Cyrus, Heller offers no linkage between Alissa’s childhood “heartthrob” and Rand’s complex multi-dimensional heroes other than a preference on Rand’s part for a certain physical type — a characteristic common to most novelists.

The Russian chapters aside, Heller goes into great detail about Rand’s life in the United States. Apart from Heller’s infrequent but unseemly editorializing — e.g., Rand’s “fragile understanding of American due process” and “the New Deal’s economic policies ... may have helped to save capitalism” — Ayn Rand and the World She Made is a thoroughly engrossing read.

As a biographer, Heller was of course obliged to reveal not just Rand’s virtues but, as well, her considerable flaws. While Heller clearly admires Rand’s razor-like analytical ability and the power and brilliance of her novels, she pulls no punches when it comes to the pain Rand caused many loyal admirers; the callous humiliation that her affair with her then “intellectual heir,” Nathaniel Branden, heaped upon her gentle, long-suffering husband, Frank O’Connor (about which affair Heller, and the Brandens themselves, have written in too-salacious detail).

But Heller’s structure is solid, her research thorough, and considerable fairness is reflected throughout the book. In places, what emerges as her subtext — that to have been a close friend of Rand’s was to be caught up in a Dickensian world of “the best of times, the worst of times” — dominates her narrative precisely because Heller did such prodigious research into Rand’s personal relationships.

Indeed, we experienced this phenomenon firsthand in the mid-sixties when Nathaniel Branden hired Holzer & Holzer, on Rand’s behalf, as her “intellectual bodyguards” — and which immediately plunged us into the vortex that was Ayn Rand. We have written a 10,000-word review/essay about Heller’s book and our relationship with Rand entitled “The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Ruminations by Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer about Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made” (link opens PDF document). The column you are reading now is an excerpt from this much larger document.

For us the “best of times” began with our professional representation of a woman whose ideas had already profoundly influenced our lives. It flourished as our relationship gradually turned into friendship. As our evening law-related sessions at her apartment invariably segued into all-nighters, with the talk ranging from philosophy to fiction. But neither were we immune to what Heller would rightly call “the worst of times.”

Anne C. Heller’s book does not sugarcoat some unpleasant truths about the founder of Objectivism; she has written a seminal biography of a complex, conflicted woman. Her book merits the attention of people who should not forget what a debt we all owe to Ayn Rand.

Heller’s prose throughout, as she writes about Rand, is excellent and often moving. Consider this quote, for example:

[S]he fulfilled the mission she had lived for: to create her ideal man and a microcosmic ideal world in which he and all other ‘real people’ could breathe freely and love passionately — and love most passionately those whose strength and values most resembled her conception of her own. Nevertheless, the critical backlash in which [Atlas Shrugged] thrashed and almost sank darkened her outlook and shriveled her spirit, and she had no additional goal to ignite her drive and occupy her mind.

And:

If We the Living had exposed the lethal effects of totalitarian state power on the best and most spirited individuals in a closed society; if Anthem had charted an escape from the tyranny of brotherhood; and if The Fountainhead had defined the struggle of a free, active, self-reliant individual against a culture of suffocating conformity, then Atlas Shrugged extended the perspective to reveal a new ideological and social order, one in which those who are independent, purposeful, creative, and proud no longer have to fight or suffer.

Taken as a whole, Ayn Rand and the World She Made is an enjoyable read, and a valuable contribution to any Ayn Rand admirer’s library.

Henry Mark Holzer is a professor emeritus at Brooklyn Law School and a constitutional and appellate lawyer. He provided legal representation to Ayn Rand on a variety of matters in the 1960s. His latest book is Keeper of the Flame: The Supreme Court Jurisprudence of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Erika Holzer co-authored this article. Her vigilante suspense thriller Eye for an Eye was a Paramount feature film directed by John Schlesinger and starring Kiefer Sutherland and Sally Field. For more about her other books, fiction and non-fiction, and her most recent book, Ayn Rand: My Fiction-Writing Teacher, see www.ErikaHolzer.com.

Together, the Holzers were instrumental in recovering the beautiful Italian screen adaptation of We The Living, Ayn Rand's first novel.