The Passion of Ayn Rand Page 2

  "I felt a friendly respect for him in childhood, not a strong affection, a dutiful 'official' affection — although probably even then I loved him more than I loved Mother. I liked him as a person, but in childhood I had very little to do with him. Children's education was totally in the hands of the mother in those days. Father never interfered, so he exercised no influence. It was when he and I began discussing ideas when I was fourteen, when we became political allies, that I felt a real love, a love that meant something."

  Alice's mother was the opposite of her father. A graceful, pretty woman with sparkling, intense eyes, Anna Rosenbaum seemed always to be rushing about the apartment, giving orders to cook, maid, nurse, and governess; organizing, the formal banquets she loved to give; arranging for a pianist to entertain; reveling in the role of intellectual hostess among the lawyers, doctors, and other professional people who attended her lively parties. When she was not entertaining, she read the French literary magazines that were scattered about the apartment, or rushed off to lectures, to the theater, to the ballet.

  All during Alice's childhood, her relationship with her mother had the quality of a pitched battle. "I disliked her quite a lot. We really didn't get along. She was my exact opposite, and I thought so in childhood, and now," said Alice years later. "She was by principle and basic style, by sense of life, extremely social. She was not really interested in ideas, she was much more interested in the social aspect. Our clashes in childhood were that I was antisocial, I was insufficiently interested in other children, I didn't play with them, I didn't have girlfriends; this was a nagging refrain always. She disapproved of me in every respect except one: she was proud of my intelligence and proud to show me off to the rest of the family."

  Her father's seeming indifference to her and her mother's disapproval had to be sources of anguish to the child. Yet as an adult she always spoke as if they were simple facts of reality, of no emotional significance to her then or later. One can only conclude that a process of self-protective emotional repression — which was so clearly to characterize her adult years — was becoming deeply rooted even in early childhood.

  In Alice's later writings, her contempt for the "social" was to be a constantly recurring theme. Lillian Rearden, the major woman villain in Atlas Shrugged, is characterized as someone whose emptiness of spirit is exemplified by her passion for social interaction, for parties, for being the center of a crowd of people. As she characterized Anna Rosenbaum in her discussions, so Ayn Rand characterized Lillian Rearden: the "intellectual hostess" fundamentally indifferent to the world of ideas. To the end of her life, for Alice to say of someone that he or she had a deep need for the company of other people was to dismiss that person as essentially without value.

  An equal source of conflict with her mother was Alice's loathing of physical activity. Anna Rosenbaum believed that it was necessary, for health reasons, that children have fresh air every day, whatever the weather. St. Petersburg's winters were freezing; darkness fell early in the afternoon and lasted until the middle of the following morning, with icy winds and whirling snowstorms and a Neva hard as steel. Alice detested the long walks she was forced to take in the snow and sleet. When expensive gymnastic equipment was purchased for her, she refused to go near it. "Make movements, Alice," was her mother's constant angry refrain. The child — and the woman she was to become — never willingly "made movements;" she was sedentary to the point of endangering her health. Even in the final years of her life, when a minimum of physical activity was recommended to her for medical reasons, she angrily refused any form of exercise-as if still defying the mother who demanded that she engage in activities that bored her.

  The Rosenbaum household was a chaotic one, alive with Anna’s comings and goings, with visiting friends, with relatives. An uncle and aunt of Alice’s lived in the same apartment building, and Alice’s first companion was little Nina, her cousin, a year and a half older than she. Alice's uncles appear to have been responsible for the family's partial protection from the anti-Semitism of Czarist Russia; one or more of them, an American cousin of Anna Rosenbaum's recalled, carried on the family tradition of being bootmaker to the army.

  In the Rosenbaum home, religion had little meaning or place. Although Anna was religious — in what Alice was to term an "emotional-traditional way, not out of conviction, more out of devotion to the religion of her own mother" — she gave her children no religious training. The family perfunctorily observed one or two holy days a year — lighting candles and serving specified foods — then gradually gave up any formal observance. Alice had not enjoyed the observances, and did not miss them. Nor did she appear to recall ever hearing the problems of anti-Semitism, raging throughout Russia, discussed in her home — although her parents must have been painfully aware of pogroms and the frighteningly ubiquitous hatred of Jews. Alice was never to deny that she was Jewish; in later years, as a committed atheist, she would say "I was born Jewish;" but it had no significance to her, she had no emotional tie or sense of identification with Jews or things Jewish. 3

  One of Alice's earliest memories was of her fascination with the great city in which she lived. Still a toddler, she sat on the windowsill of her apartment, her father beside her, looking out into the winter street at one of the first streetcars to appear in St. Petersburg. It was evening, and she gazed in wonderment at the blinking yellow and red lights of the streetcar, as her father explained their purpose. Perhaps this was the beginning of the love of technology, of what she later was to call the physical manifestations of the power of man's mind, that she would carry with her as a banner — as a proud crusade — throughout all the years of her life.

  Her second memory was of fear. Walking with her nurse one day, she happened to notice a sheet of glass in a wooden crate, propped along a wall. Curious, Alice approached and touched the edge of the glass. The frightened nurse pulled her away; she mustn't touch it, glass was sharp, it could cut her, it was dangerous. For days afterward, the child worried that invisible particles of glass somehow had gotten into her skin and would seriously hurt her. She felt a sense of danger hanging somewhere over her head. This, too, as a number of her friends would observe, was a reaction she was to carry with her all of her life, unadmitted and unrecognized but with a singular motivational effect: the feeling that the physical world held neither safety nor ease for her. As the years passed, her sense of a fundamental alienation from the material existence she would exalt in her writings was to take on a quality of obsession.

  By the time Alice was five, the family had grown to include two younger sisters, Natasha and Elena, called Nora. Alice's intellectual precocity, recognized by those around her even in earliest childhood, had turned her focus to the fascinating job of asking endless questions, of struggling to understand the objects and events around her; when she felt she understood the phenomenon of "babies," her sisters had nothing more to offer her. She much preferred the company of adults. She was often included in adult activities; Anna liked to have her precocious daughter present to be admired. At parties in her home, Alice was brought from the nursery to be hugged by her doting grandmother, Anna's mother, a dour martinet except with Alice, whom she adored as the first child of her best-loved daughter, and to be praised by the other adults for her large dark eyes that gazed with grave, questioning solemnity at the world around her.

  Implicit in Alice's reminiscences about her childhood is the fact that, from her parents and from the other adults she encountered, love and admiration were purchased by the qualities of her mind. When her mother paraded her before the relatives, it was because Alice's bright lucidity inspired their admiration; when her father smiled at her during his visits to the nursery at the end of the day, it was because she had told him of some activity — a game she had invented, a picture in a children's book she had built a story around — that demonstrated the quickness of her mind. Alice learned well the lesson contained in the reactions she received. As a child, and as an adult, the first question she asked
about anyone she met was: Is he intelligent? It was the first question — and, in a deeply personal way, the last. Intelligence was the quality she most admired, that she responded to with the greatest pleasure and respect. Her own remarkable intelligence created that reaction in part; a mind needs the stimulation of its equals. But she placed on intelligence what can only be termed a moral value; intelligence and virtue were to become inextricably linked in her mind and her emotions; where she saw no unusual intelligence — nor the capacity for dedicated productive work that she believed to be its consequence — she saw no value that meant anything to her in personal terms. One never heard her say of anyone, as a significant compliment: "He's generous," or "He's kind," or "He's thoughtful;" none of our common coinage of admiration — particularly the admiration we pay to qualities of character involving the treatment of other people — reached the place in her where Alice Rosenbaum's deepest values lived.

  On a bright summer day, Alice discovered a passion that did reach into her most private spirit. Each summer, the Rosenbaums traveled to the Crimea for two months, renting a summer house and spending long lazy hours on the white beaches, wandering through the green, lush countryside and through a sunlit park. At a bandstand in the park, beneath a line of white birch trees, a military band played through the warm afternoons. One day, Alice pulled away from her governess to stop before the bandstand. The musicians were playing the first military marches she had ever heard. Then the little Russian girl listened, astonished and transfixed, to the sounds of "Yippy Yi Yippy Yi Yay" — then "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" — then the gay lilt of American and German light classics. Her small body began to move in time to the music. Thereafter, she demanded to be taken every afternoon to the bandstand in the park. In the terms of a six-year-old child, she appeared to sense that here, for the first time, was music that contained no pain, no tragedy, none of the gloom she associated with the Russian music she had heard in her home; it was music that bore no awareness that pain ever could exist. In later years, in America, she scoured record shops until she had collected most of the music she first had heard in a park in the Crimea, and begged Americans traveling to Europe to scour the record shops there. She called it her "tiddlywink" music.

  Over the years, other pieces she heard and loved were added to her list, oddly disparate pieces such as "My Irish Molly," Chopin's "Minute Waltz," "C'mon Get Happy" Prokofiev's "March" from Love for Three Oranges, selections from the operettas of Lehar and Kalman. In the happiest moments of her life, her thoughts would go to that music, she would listen to it, her body would sway to its beat. It was her music, she felt. It was untouched by the world, untouched by alien values. It was a pure, unsullied hymn to joy.

  As the child worshipped joy, so did the adult she would become. Forever after, she believed that pain and frustration and suffering were meaningless aberrations, never a normal part of life, never to be accepted as the inevitable nature of human existence — and never to be considered important. This would be a theme in her writings, and despite the pain and bitterness that her life would contain, it remained a theme she struggled to keep alive in her psychology, where it was often muted, sometimes almost indiscernible, sometimes battered into silence, but always present. In Atlas Shrugged, the first words Dagny Taggart, the novel's heroine, speaks to John Galt — the man she has waited all her life to meet — are: "We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?" And Galt answers: "No, we never had to"

  For a long time, Alice considered most classical music to be "sheer boredom." But when she heard the Overture and the Drinking Song from La Traviata and a few Chopin pieces, she understood that she could love — though never as much as her tiddlywink music — the works of serious composers. It was not until she lived in America that Alice first heard the music of Rachmaninoff; his Second Piano Concerto became her great love, and her standard of great music ever after.

  When Alice spoke of the wonders of her tiddlywink music to her mother and other adult relatives, they were appalled that such a bright child — "Why?" and "Please explain" always on her lips — should have what they considered such uncultured tastes. It was the beginning of a series of value clashes with the people around her that was to mark the whole of her life. Years later, she remembered feeling — and still projected — an angry defiance in the face of their rejection of her musical choices. It was a defiance that was to characterize her attitude toward all of her values; "I know, but they don't. This is mine. It's not theirs."

  "You're too violent, Alice," her mother constantly told the child. "Either you're tongue-tied, and won't talk to people at all, or — if they don't like something you like — you get angry and rude."

  She claimed not to feel the same anger at personal rejection. One day, Anna Rosenbaum shouted at her daughters, "I never wanted children at all! I look after you because it's my duty to do so." Alice listened quietly, thinking: Why does she blame us for being born? We didn't ask for it. Even at this early age, Alice had learned not to expect appreciation except for her intellectual abilities; she had learned it so thoroughly that she appears not to have consciously experienced lack of appreciation as painful (although at a deeper level she must have suffered at a mother's rejection). Throughout Alice's life, she would expect, even demand, that her intellectual qualities be perceived and admired; she would react with pleasure, but with an authentic air of bewilderment, if any other aspect of her character or personality were understood or loved.

  It was the following summer that Alice discovered a second passion — like her tiddlywink music, it remained in her mind as a discovery of major importance in her development — about which she felt, "This is mine. This is what I like." But this time, she did not discuss her newfound love with anyone; it seems clear that she was learning, painfully, to keep her deepest emotional reactions locked up inside herself, to view them as too personal, too private to be shared or made vulnerable to the rejection of others. This, too, was a trend that was to progressively characterize her life: as an adult, she spoke easily and in strongly emotional terms of whatever elicited her disapproval, her contempt, her anger; she spoke much more rarely — and then usually in objective and impersonal terms — of that which she most profoundly loved.

  In the Crimean resort where the Rosenbaums vacationed, a smart, expensive hotel had recently been built, patronized mainly by foreign visitors. Occasionally, Anna took Alice to the hotel for lunch; from the dining room, they could see the tennis court — itself an unusual phenomenon in Russia. One day, gazing out at the court, Alice's attention was caught by a slender, graceful young girl racing effortlessly after a ball and decisively smashing it across the net. She was a twelve-year-old English visitor, Alice was told, named Daisy Gerhardi. Alice stared, fascinated, at this "sophisticated, foreign" figure — doing something no Russian girl was allowed to do, and doing it with consummate grace. When she was fifty-five years old, Alice glowed as she talked of Daisy. "It amazed me," she said. "It was a creature out of a different world, my idea of what a woman should be. She was a symbol of the independent woman from abroad. I felt what today I'd feel for Dagny Taggart. I only saw her that one summer, but the symbol was magnificent — I can still see her today, a very active, tall, long-legged girl in motion; I don't remember the face, only the long-legged agility, and black stockings worn with white tennis shoes. For years, her outfit seemed the most attractive I had ever seen... I didn't long to approach her or to get acquainted, I was content to admire her from afar." 4

  Daisy served for Alice as a focus, a projection, an image that she was to use in her fiction — most particularly, she later said, in the creation of the heroine of Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart, the beautiful woman who ran a great railroad. It was an image which she "held defiantly against everyone else. I didn't want others to share this value. I felt: This is my value, and anyone who shares it has to be extraordinary. I was extremely jealous — it was literal jealousy — of anyone who would pretend to like something I liked, if I didn't like that perso
n. I had an almost anxious feeling about it, that it wasn't right. They have no right to admire it, they're unworthy of it."

  The passionate concern with spiritual consistency — with a single-tracked purity of value-choices — was a significant element in alienating the small child from the people and the world around her. She felt, always, as she later said, a painful kind of anger — of contempt — for anyone who seemed to love what she loved, but also responded to what she considered boring and stupid; it was as if, through such a response, her love was desecrated. One may not light a candle before a god — and also before the figure of a clown.

  The intelligence that boiled inside the child, that already had made her the center of attention in the adult world — "They all seemed to see something unusual in me," she reported — was creating its pressure to be fed. A year before she was to enter school, Alice had taught herself to read and write. By watching her parents and other adults reading, she grasped what the phenomenon consisted of; she asked them. to show her how to write her name in block letters, then to show her other words, so she could learn more letters. By that method, she quickly learned the alphabet, and soon was reading and writing with ease. She was allowed to take a special examination to determine whether she was ready for school; she won acceptance with ease.

  Alice was delighted at the prospect of entering school; it would be something interesting, she felt, and she would learn new things that she wanted to know. But by the end of the first year, she was bored with all of her classes except arithmetic. Arithmetic was pure deduction, which all her life was to be a source of joy to her.

  "The teacher would lecture straight from the textbook, and explain what was in it — which I already understood; she would not expand or elaborate, and I was at least three lessons ahead. I felt I could learn better and faster at home. I felt that the slow girls needed this, but I didn't." Her boredom soon became torture, and she longed to catch cold, longed for the school to close, for her teacher to be sick. She was happy when she: contracted measles and was quarantined at her grandmother's; there, she could do what she pleased, without rules, without assignments except of her own choosing.