The Journals of Ayn Rand Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  EDITOR’S PREfACE

  PART 1 - EARLY PROJECTS

  Chapter 1 - THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS

  Chapter 2 - WE THE LIVING

  Chapter 3 - FIRST PHILOSOPHIC JOURNAL

  PART 2 - THE FOUNTAINHEAD

  Chapter 4 - THEME AND CHARACTERS

  Chapter 5 - RCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

  Chapter 6 - PLOT

  Chapter 7 - NOTES WHILE WRITING

  PART 3 - TRANSITION BETWEEN NOVELS

  Chapter 8 - THE MORAL BASIS OF INDIVIDUALISM

  Chapter 9 - TOP SECRET

  Chapter 10 - COMMUNISM AND HUAC

  PART 4 - ATLAS SHRUGGED

  Chapter 11 - THE MIND ON STRIKE

  Chapter 12 - FINAL PREPARATIONS

  Chapter 13 - NOTES WHILE WRITING : 1941-1952

  Chapter 14 - NOTES WHILE WRITING GALT’S SPEECH

  PART 5 - FINAL YEARS

  Chapter 15 - NOTES: 1955—1977

  Chapter 16 - TWO POSSIBLE BOOKS

  INDEX

  “Journals is a treat to read, because it is the raw evidence of Ayn Rand’s continuous growth across fifty years—her growth both as a philosopher and as an artist ...

  “We see the steps by which she [created her novels]—we are there when a dramatic event or scene first occurs to her, and we see what she finally does with it and why ... We see how Ayn Rand uses (or deliberately does not use) her knowledge of real people. This last will answer such common questions as: Was Frank Lloyd Wright a model for Roark? Or William Randolph Hearst for Wynand? It will also answer some uncommon questions, such as: What female suggested Lois Cook? What scientist Robert Stadler? And what president Mr. Thompson? ”

  -LEONARD PEIKOFF

  LEONARD PEIKOFF is universally recognized as the world’s premier Ayn Rand scholar. He worked closely with Rand for thirty years and was designated by her as heir to her estate. He has taught philosophy at Hunter College and New York University. Dr. Peikoff’s books include The Ominous Parallels and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. He is also co-editor of The Ayn Rand Reader, available in a Plume edition. For further information, you can go to his website, alshow com.

  DAVID HARRIMAN has M.S. degrees in both physics and philosophy. He has taught philosophy at California State University, San Bernardino, and is working on a book on the philosophy of physics. He has worked with Leonard Peikoff for several years.

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Previously published in a Dutton edition.

  First Plume Printing, August, 1999

  Copyright © The Estate of Ayn Rand, 1997

  Foreword copyright © Leonard Peikoff, 1997

  Preface copyright © David Harriman, 1997

  All rights reserved

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows:

  Rand, Ayn.

  Journals of Ayn Rand / edited by David Harriman ; foreword by Leonard Peikoff.

  p. cm.

  Includesindex.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-13721-5

  0-452-27887-2 (pbk.)

  1. Rand, Ayn—Diaries. 2. Women novelists, American—20th century—Diaries.

  3. Women philosophers—United States—Diaries. I. Harriman, David.

  II. Peikoff, Leonard. III. Title.

  PS3535.A547Z476 1997

  818 5203—dc21

  [B] 97-12737

  CIP

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  Information about other books by Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, may be obtained by writing to OBJECTIVISM, Box 177, Murray Hill Station, New York, New York 10157 USA.

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  FOREWORD DY LEONARD PEIKOFF

  Ayn Rand’s Journals—my name for her notes to herself through the decades—is the bulk of her still unpublished work, arranged chronologically. What remains to be published are two lecture courses on writing, presently being edited, and her old film scripts.

  The Journals contains most of AR’s notes for her three main novels—along with some early material, some notes made between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and some notes from her final decades. The early material includes, among other things, AR’s first philosophic musings on paper in English, written in her twenties. The middle section includes a fascinating transitional statement of her ethics, never finished, and also a vigorous essay on why the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 did not violate the civil rights of the Hollywood Communists. The final section includes the notes for AR’s last projected novel, To Lorne Dieterling.

  Some pieces important to this volume have been lost. I refer to eight or ten scenarios for the silent screen, written in the twenties. These stories, several pages apiece, featured strong heroes, a passionate love interest, and non-stop action, often set in exotic locales; they exemplified an extravagant romanticism bubbling over with the excitement of living. I first came upon these scenarios in the eighties, after AR’s death. Had I been able to include them here, they would have brought a sorely needed balance to some other items, such as The Little Street, a bitter novelette from the same period. Mysteriously, these scenarios have disappeared from the Estate warehouse. If they should reappear, I promise to publish them.

  Aside from occasional pieces, identified by the editor, the AR material in this book was written for herself, for her own clarity. No one, apart from her husband and a few associates, was ever shown any of this material, nor did AR intend to publish it. Obviously, therefore, nothing in the book may be taken as definitive of her ideas. On the contrary, most of these preliminary formulations were dropped, and a few were even contradicted, in her published works. In several cases, though hardly in all, the editor points out such discrepancies.

  “The art of writing,” AR wrote in a November 1944 note, “is the art of doing what you think you’re doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?” It was to answer these questions that most of the Journals was written. In other words, the notes are nothing more than AR preparing herself to write by thinking aloud on paper—in random snatches, as and when she sought to clarify a point—without outline, structure, continuous theme, or editorial polish.

  Despite its unedited character, however, the Journals is a treat to read, because it is the raw evidence of AR’s continuous growth across fifty years—her growth both as a philosopher and as an artist.

  One can s
ee her growth as a philosopher in two ways: in her interests and in her ideas, i.e., in regard both to depth and to truth.

  AR’s mind moved systematically from politics (as a youth) to ethics (in her thirties and forties) to epistemology and metaphysics (in her fifties and later). This progression is not a mere change of interest, but a true organic development: the earlier stages increasingly exhibit the maturity of what is to come, which in turn always remains faithful in principle to its youthful origins. One great pleasure in reading the book is to see hints of later discoveries mentioned at first casually, even parenthetically. For instance, if you read AR’s first philosophic musings with an eye to Atlas Shrugged, you will observe how much more you can see in her words now, thanks to her, than she herself could see at the time. Her distinctive ideas were present from her start as a thinker; they were implicit in her fundamental approach at least from the age of twelve. It was only a matter of time and logic until she was able to identify them explicitly.

  The best evidence of AR’s increasing depth is her unpublished manuscript The Moral Basis of Individualism. It is there that we see her evolution from The Fountainhead’s stress on independence to Atlas Shrugged’s recognition that the basic virtue is rationality, of which independence is but an aspect. We also see her taking the historic step from ethics to the base of philosophy. Traditionally, philosophers started their books on ethics by asking: What is the proper moral code? AR started there, too—until something occurred to her one day in mid-sentence: “Chapter 1 should begin by stating the [moral] axiom. Then define man’s nature. Then ask [these two words are deleted] Or—begin by asking whether a moral code is necessary? Prove that it is—for a rational being. What is the rational? That which is true to facts....” In regard to this passage I am tempted to paraphrase the mystics: To those who understand, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not, read Galt’s speech.

  In regard to the content of her ideas, AR also underwent an organic development as, step by step, she gained clarity about the full implications of her fundamental premises.

  AR’s first notes reveal an influence of Nietzsche, in the form of droplets of subjectivism, and of the idea that the heroes among men are innately great, as against the inherently corrupt masses, who deserve only bitterness and domination from their superiors. None of this is stated as a connected position, but such ideas do show up here and there.

  It is instructive to watch these droplets—every one of them—evaporate without residue, as AR’s own principles emerge into the sunshine of explicit statement; it is a perfect example of science (reason) functioning as a self-corrective. After she comes to define “reason,” subjectivism vanishes; after her analysis of individual rights, “domination” is gone; after she grasps the nature of volition, she says no more about “innate” stature.

  By her early thirties, AR had thought herself out of every Nietzschean element. With The Fountainhead, the only trace left is in the characters of Dominique and Wynand, whose bitterness about the world Roark proves to be a cardinal error. After The Fountainhead, Nietzsche is not even an error to be refuted; there is nothing but pure Ayn Rand.

  Although AR’s vision of the ideal man remained constant through the decades, her view of his greatest enemy changed when the Nietzschean element was dropped. As a youngster, the first enemy of Man whom she could identify was Communism, the omnipotent State. Then, as she grew beyond politics, the enemy, for a short while, was taken to be the masses of average men as such, regardless of their political organization. One of the unique features of her mature hero-worship, by contrast, is her explicit benevolence towards the honest average man (as represented by Mike in The Fountainhead and Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged). By her early thirties, AR had discovered the real enemy of the ideal (which is also the real corrupter of politics and of the masses): the intellectuals of irrationalism. Thus, although AR’s passionate values never changed, the early bitterness toward the commissars or the mob becomes in time the expose of Ellsworth Toohey, and then the damnation of Kant.

  One can see AR’s growth as an artist in regard to every facet of writing a novel, with the emphasis on plot and characterization.

  In regard to plot, we see the steps by which she learns to create it—we are there when a dramatic event or scene first occurs to her, and we see what she finally does with it and why. We see her continually restructure events so as to achieve an inexorable rise to a necessary but unpredictable climax. We see how several different lines of events (personal/emotional, economic, political, philosophical) are made to rise and climax at once, and how each of these lines helps reshape the others. And we see her carry on the plot struggles until she reaches the desired result: a seamless complexity that will enter the reader’s mind with the simplicity of the inevitable.

  In regard to characterization, we see her first concept of the cast (and her earliest names for the leads), then its simultaneous expansion and winnowing out. We see the sharpening focus on a character’s distinctive attributes, and her decisions as to what kinds of actions and relationships will convey these objectively. We learn everything about the heroes and the villains that AR herself needs to know, even though she cannot always use the information in the final book. We are there when eloquent lines of dialogue occur to her, and sometimes see her move them from one mouth to another. And we see how AR uses (or deliberately does not use) her knowledge of real people. This last will answer such common questions as: Was Frank Lloyd Wright a model for Roark? Or William Randolph Hearst for Wynand? It will also answer some uncommon questions, such as: What female suggested Lois Cook? What scientist Robert Stadler? And what President Mr. Thompson?

  In reading the Journals, we also see AR’s methodical redefinition of a novel’s theme so as to include the broader integrations she is always making and the concrete applications she is identifying. We see much of her research, from architecture to railroads to steel mills and copper mining, and how she uses it to aid her in the development of plot, character, and theme. And, sometimes—in regard both to fiction and to nonfiction—we see the first draft of a section, followed by her own ruthless critique and revision.

  If the primary value of the Journals to us is the evidence it furnishes of AR’s growth, a second value is the evidence that her growth was a product of thinking—in the art of which the Journals may serve as a textbook. The subtitle of this book really ought to be: How to Answer Your Own Questions.

  Implicit in the countless examples of fruitful thinking which make up the book are dozens of practical guides to the art of clear thinking. Among other things, one can learn a great deal about the means of properly wording a question, the need for factual data (and at what point enough have been gathered), the roles of induction and deduction, the necessity and method of integration—then, as the final mopping up, the means of formulating a definitive proof of a conclusion.

  On first reading (which is all I have done so far), three principles of clear thinking seemed, above all others, to leap out of the pages at me:1. The need for intellectual honesty. For example, AR was troubled at one point by a seeming contradiction in her views—which she hastened not to evade, but to state forcefully. “[Now I shall consider] the hypothetical case of a monopoly (say, telephone) free to refuse services to an individual or a group of men or a branch of business. In this last case, it is obvious that the inventor’s monopoly has such an absolute right. Does it mean, however, that individualism then degenerates into its opposite in practice, into collectivism? Has the size of an enterprise (made possible by the scope covered by modern inventions) anything to do with it? In other words, does invention such as the telephone give the individual who controls it a collectivist’s power by the sheer size of his business? (No, I think.)...” (Sept. 30, 1944). AR raises, as a matter of course, every objection to her views that occurs to her—and then answers them all. This is one reason why, when she finally endorses a conclusion, she is certain of it.

  2. The need for precise formulation, even
in private notes. For example: “A possible definition of a right: a ‘right’ is that which it is morally permissible to defend by force. Here I have to be very careful. This might be totally wrong. If carelessly handled, it could be used as justification for the right of a communist to murder an employer who does not give him a job. Again, ’sins of omission’ come in. This is only a hint, a possible clue to be thought out very carefully, from every possible angle and in every possible application. It is no good—unless a total proof of it can be given....” (Oct. 26, 1944).

  3. The need for fresh writing. To put this point negatively, there are no clichés in the Journals, no numbing restatements even of AR’s own ideas. On the contrary, the notes are replete with new angles, new connections, new distinctions, new analogies, new wording—even in regard to issues which AR had discussed extensively in print. Most of this new material did not survive the Journals, despite its inherent interest; to her, it was merely steps on the road to clarity, the first birth pangs of the books still to come. My point, however, is that the freshness of the writing is a corollary of the process she is engaged in: not rationalistic deduction nor recitation of the known, but pioneering thought.As a small example of the latter point, I offer the following note, never used in print, on the question of reason and emotion: “Man cannot, [some people] say, be called a rational being because his actions are not motivated by his mind; his mind is like his Sunday clothes, kept in a dark closet and donned reluctantly on rare occasions; and when donned, it makes him stiff, uncomfortable and unhappy, because it never fit him well in the first place. What man does on weekdays, they say, is to gallop about stark-naked, on all fours, because it reminds him of his mother who gave him a complex, and to whirl around catching his own tail which he hasn’t got but feels he has; that is what he does because it makes him happy. Reason? Reason, they say, is just something he uses in such negligible, incidental matters as earning a living...” (July 30, 1945).