My first encounter with the works of Ayn Rand occurred in ninth grade, after I read the author’s Introductory Note to Victor Hugo’s ‘The Man Who Laughs.’ I’ve since forgotten Rand’s views of the novel, but I recall being so moved by her writing that I immediately consulted the internet for background information on the writer. Upon discovering that her novels ‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘Atlas Shrugged’ were widely read by ‘the masses’ (ironically comprised of the very people she deprecated ‘- more on that later), I picked up a copy of the former at my local library, and the rest, as they say, is history. Published over half a century ago, ‘The Fountainhead’ has made for some of the most scintillating conversations I’ve ever had, notwithstanding its rankling diction and portraiture of characters.

‘ Howard Roark, the protagonist of ‘The Fountainhead,’ is the consummate archetype of the ideal heroic man, who is driven by Apollonian rationality and his own intransigent standards to create. In the opening scene, the Promethean figure stands ‘naked at the edge of a cliff,’ towering over an array of raw materials he is mentally deconstructing and reshaping. Roark is a visionary architect, who is most readily identified with the cold and unyielding granite with which he works. Architecture, for Rand, is the perfect backdrop for ‘The Fountainhead’ because it yokes ‘art, science in the sense of engineering, and business’ to best portray man’s creative capacity. Skyscrapers figure prominently as edifices of human greatness and American achievement.

‘ Peter Keating is introduced in a ‘hall packed with bodies and faces, so tightly that one could not distinguish at a glance which faces belonged to which bodies.’ The masses of ‘second-handers,’ of which Peter Keating and Ellsworth Toohey are cogent representatives, are held in limbo by their dichotomous need to keep up patinas and be regarded as virtuous individuals. Their sense of reality is distorted and their sense of self annulled by the fact that they attempt to measure their Lilliputian selves against outsized moral yardsticks. These parasites are sustained by expropriating the ideas of people like Roark, who think for themselves. It may appear that they lead successful lives (Keating graduates as ‘star student of Stanton, president of the student body, captain of the track team, member of the most important fraternity, the most popular man on the campus’ and Toohey is a noted critic who exercises a hegemony over the masses, by extolling the virtues of altruism and collectivism), but in point of fact, these whited sepulchers are tormented by ennui and anomie, as they are perpetually driven to prove their worthiness to everyone but themselves. Roark does nothing to disabuse them of this notion, for his concern lies not with self-less beings. He deals with independent individuals who subsist on their own terms, nothing more, nothing less.

‘ Just as Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov purchases dead ‘souls’ (or serfs) in Nikolai Gogol’s eponymous 1842 novel, the Socialist Ellsworth Toohey in ‘The Fountainhead’ collects souls as a means of social ascent. He consigns his own soul to ‘his brothers’ and derives a wrongheaded sense of power from the subservience of others, like Peter Keating. Toohey seeks to destroy the upright and talented Roark because he is the embodiment of everything Toohey can never hope to achieve: authentic greatness. Under the guise of humanitarianism, he preaches the destruction of man’s ego that leaves him as a vacuous shell, deprived of the faculty of logical reasoning. In Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22,’ Snowden’s secret is ‘the spirit gone, man is garbage.’ Keating, Roark’s antipode, lives by an altruistic ethos, suppressing his soul until he totters on the precipice of obsolescence. Roark, as a Romantic hero, upholds probity and his own code of honor in a superficial society. He does not ingratiate himself with anyone for personal aggrandizement, nor does he seek to destroy those who obscure his path towards success. He lives freely, autonomously, by his, and no other, means. ‘The Fountainhead’ implies that only those who live within their own private orbits are able to thrive in the moral sense. Those who live in and for the public arena are damned, because their facade of happiness depends on the caprices of others.

‘ The hero and heroine of Rand’s later novel ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ John Galt and Dagny Taggart, and the protaganist Equality 7-2521 of ‘Anthem’ are also guided by life-affirming principles rooted in reality. Whether it is designing buildings, inventing a revolutionary motor or disinterring the secrets of an enlightened age, all Randian heroes pursue their goals with purely personal objectives. Their motives are never conflated with those of others. Upon meeting Roark or John Galt, some characters are galvanized to fulfill their personal callings; their frozen yearning to live in the fullest sense is thawed by the warmth radiating from the fires that are Roark’s and Galt’s spirits. These men are at the vanguard of human progress ‘- they are the prime movers of the world.

‘ Rand’s most devoted readers, under the sway of the author’s logorrhea, have undoubtedly imbibed Roark’s and Galt’s scales of living (and even their egoistic credos); they might pan characters in other novels for having supple and inchoate souls or revere them for displaying the vaunted primacy of the individual, the ‘I.’ It seems to me, however, that unbridled individualism (or any temperament carried to excess) bodes pernicious consequences for the individual in possession of such a fuse. Moreover, in the real world, man cannot hope to cultivate symbiotic relationships with his fellow brothers if he barricades his ego from all that is ‘foreign’ to him. Dostoevsky insisted that ‘a voluntary, totally conscious sacrifice of oneself in the interests of all, made under no sort of compulsion, is in my opinion a sign of the highest development of the personality.’ However utopian the idea of man sacrificing himself for the edification of the community (and vice versa), it follows that the visceral passions of man guide his reasons, not the other way around, as rational egoists would have it.

‘ Rand’s tectonic novels have scant literary merit (she writes with a pen dipped in dogmatism), but if read as philosophical works, then there is much to contemplate, from a sundry of unforgettable characters, to the rejection of collectivism, to ‘the virtue of selfishness,’ to the architect’s rape of nature and Dominique Francon in ‘The Fountainhead’ (the latter being an especially polemical topic in women’s studies), to laissez-faire capitalism to the distribution of power within a leviathan bureaucracy. A quotation from Nietzsche best expresses an aphorism we should all try to validate: ‘The noble soul has reverence for itself.’