A Long Review of a Long Book

To Thine Own Self Be True – ‘The Fountainhead’, a Review


This is a difficult book to review. The problem is that Ayn Rand has constructed it purposely as a philosophical novel, to showcase her theory about the nature of human life. The degree to which you appreciate the Fountainhead depends upon how much Rand convinces you of her vision. For those who are persuaded, it will be an enthralling and uplifting story. For those who aren’t, it may be an ugly and tedious one. I fall in between these two extremes, but I find that I have much more to say about the message of the novel than its literary qualities. To that extent, with me Rand has succeeded in her task.

The Fountainhead at times reads like a novel written by someone who would rather be delivering a lecture (or perhaps, an oration) instead. Characters often break into long speeches or trains of thought that are only the thinnest veil for a discourse on Rand’s philosophy. Because of this, it is easy to describe her views. Rand believes that the human race is divided into two types of people, the ‘prime movers’ and the ‘second-handers’. The prime movers are people who are possessed of a strong ego, who fearlessly pursue excellence and creativity regardless of the opinions of others. Prime movers create new ideas and new technologies, they blaze new trails of human experience, and they do this without regard for the convention or tradition of the society in which they live. Her archetype of a prime mover is the first man to invent the wheel, setting humanity free to move. Second-handers live through the thoughts and passions of others. They are concerned with maintaining their position in society without contributing anything new or great, and so they elevate self-sacrifice as a virtue and call upon everyone to deny themselves for the sake of others. They are not ‘persons’ in any genuine sense, as they do not exercise their ego. The archetypal second-handers are those who declare the first wheel to be a sacrilege and sacrifice its inventor to the gods. Since fear is hard to master, there will always be more second-handers than prime movers, and the prime movers will always have the status of a persecuted elite, venerated after their deaths. Given this characterisation, it is rather obvious that Rand’s sympathy is completely with the prime movers. She is essentially an extreme individualistic humanist, who is looking for noble humanity achieving its highest potential through reason and will.

This primary distinction was the cornerstone of Rand’s philosophy and ethics, and explains many of her other views. She was a strong believer in free-market capitalism, as it is the economic system that rewards people of determination and will, and has no place for interference with the ruthless judgments of the market. In ‘Atlas Shrugged’ (which I have not read) the prime movers in the USA, all the major industrialist tycoons, go on strike, and the economy begins to collapse, since all that are left are the second-handers, unable to take risks or think of creative solutions. Socialism, Communism, and other forms of collectivism were anathema to her (though this is understandable given her childhood in the Soviet Union). She believed that rational self-interest, the egoistic pursuit of personal happiness, was the only defensible basis for ethics, since people cannot genuinely work for the good of others without sacrificing their own ego and self-development. She was also a vehement atheist, arguing that religious faith was designed by second-handers to control people, and that humanity could only achieve its full potential through freedom from the idea of God.

This brief sketch should be enough to give a flavour of the philosophy that the Fountainhead is designed to expound. For certain tough-minded folks, this may be an attractive vision of the human spirit. Anyone falling to the ‘left’ of the political spectrum may feel like organising a book-burning. For others like myself, committed to a religion of love and self-sacrifice, it stands as a stark alternative vision of the good that needs to be wrestled with.

The story of the Fountainhead is essentially a morality play on prime movers and second-handers. Rand’s stated purpose was ‘to project a picture of the ideal man’. Thus she boldly stakes her project on our response to the characters that she presents.

The novel is set largely in New York in the 1920s and 30s. It follows the careers of five people, four men and one woman, who are leaders in the cultural and artistic circles of the time. Rand’s hero is Howard Roark, a modernist architect of uncompromising integrity and vision, who is constantly opposed by the insidious forcers of the second-handers in society. Ellsworth Toohey, the closest thing that the story has to a villain, is a prime mover, but a perverted one, an art critic who exploits the socialist movement to gain vast political power for himself. Peter Keating is the foil to Roark, a second-hand architect who lives only for prestige, and is eventually destroyed by his inability to choose what he knows is right. Gain Wynand is a newspaper magnate, a prime mover but driven by a painful past and vulnerable to weaknesses that do not tempt Roark. Dominique Francon is a beautiful and brilliant journalist who is looking for the perfect man and believes that she has found him in Roark. However, to satisfy her own sense of perfection and self-contempt by testing his strength, she attempts to destroy Roark’s work, and marries both Keating and Wynand throughout the book before resolving her issues. Dominique is, in my view, a fictional stand-in for Rand herself, which in light of certain aspects of the story sheds a disturbing light on her psychology.

The narrative arc of the story is not strong, in terms of a tense plot. Instead, the characters are allowed to run away with their motivations until it brings them to a crisis of conflict or decision. Since Roark, as the ideal man, is not allowed to experience doubt, his conflicts come when his buildings and ideals cause outrage and he is pitted against society. Toohey similarly proceeds smoothly through the story until something impedes his plans. The others wrestle with their weaknesses in the face of disappointment or professional challenge. In the end, everyone gets what Rand considers to be their just desserts for their level of fidelity to the ideal of rational egoism.

Rand’s prose style is extremely florid and melodramatic. The tone of the book is essentially that of a romance novel, and only Rand’s robust philosophy stops it from appearing alongside the Jackie Collins selection in your local bookstore. Characters are described in such overwrought terms as to appear cartoonish - everyone is either ruggedly handsome or exquisitely beautiful or grotesquely ugly or pathetically insipid. The book opens with a description of Roark’s physical appearance which is nearly incomprehensible due to Rand’s infatuation with her noble character. All I could figure out was that he had orange hair and was skinny. The relationships and lives of the characters are also very ‘soap opera’, with grand gestures and tearful renunciations and meaningful looks and irrevocable decisions. However, after wading through several hundred pages (the novel is 700 pages long, which I didn’t realise until too late because I bought a compact paperback) I found myself becoming reconciled to this style, and it was only when I stopped reading that I realised how overblown it was. Anyway, given that this is supposed to be an idealised projection of human life rather than a realistic novel, perhaps a little melodrama is allowable.

Rand’s taste for melodrama leads her astray in one important scene however, which many of her critics have held to destroy her credibility. Roark and Dominique’s relationship begins when, after exchanging some moments of sexual tension in which Dominique shows she is obsessed with him, Roark rapes her. Rand does not shy away from describing it as a rape, and later in the novel, when Roark and Dominique have achieved a loving and creative relationship, Dominique still tells Wynand that ‘He raped me. That is how it began.’ Rand defended this on the grounds that Dominique wanted it to happen, essentially the ‘no means yes’ argument. Given that we have direct access to Dominique’s thoughts and feelings, we can affirm that it was true in this case. However, it must surely have been possible to demonstrate a burgeoning relationship between two strong-willed people without resorting to an act of sexual violence, particularly because (and I find it hard to believe that Rand couldn’t see this) it shows with stunning clarity the dark side of rational egoism and thus undermines her argument. Rapists pursue their ego without concern for societal conventions or the desires of others. The persuasiveness of the Fountainhead relies on us accepting Rand’s evaluation of the characters, and to allow us to doubt Roark’s virtue for a moment is a fatal weakness. Thus the portrayal of the ideal man as a rapist works against Rand, as it breaks down the picture of Roark that she is trying to build up. It also illustrates another feature of the book, which is contempt for women, a bizarre theme for one of the most self-confident women of the twentieth century. There is not a single female character apart from Dominique who is portrayed sympathetically, perhaps because Rand did not see as many examples of strong, individualistic women in society and thus they could not be heroic figures in the Fountainhead. Keating’s fiancé Catharine is one of the most unfairly treated characters in fiction, and to my mind far more sympathetic than Roark.

Rand wrote the Fountainhead in 1943, and it suffers from a lack of the post-modern irony and self-consciousness that any more recent writer would use in approaching the subject. But Rand is a relentless modernist, and in fact her whole philosophy depends upon a singleness of vision that would be corrupted by irony and self-doubt, and thus she is susceptible to deconstruction. Take Roark himself. In Rand’s eyes, he is a free-spirited man of integrity, impervious to concern about petty matters but willing to go to jail over a matter of principal, a truly great and virile man who is able to satisfy the most demanding woman. But with another set of eyes, we can describe Roark as a kind of psychopath, immune to other people’s feelings, with a tendency to overwork himself and his employees, a control freak who would rather blow up a housing project than allow one line of his plans to be changed, a sexual manipulator who dominates a troubled woman. Both these Roarks are possible, and in reality instead of an ideal world it would be the second that would be more plausible. Rand makes a great fuss over the difference between ‘egoism’ and ‘egotism’, but in practice they often go together in the lives of ambitious professionals.

Other parts of Rand’s vision have also aged very badly. The most blatant example of this is her taste in architecture. She rhapsodises over modernist buildings, praising their clean lines and straightforwardness of purpose. The skyscraper is a particular favourite symbol of hers to demonstrate human potential, and though I don’t think much of Freudian analysis even for me the whole thing became a bit phallic, with skyscrapers surging upwards with potent strength, standing erect against the skyline, and being firm reminders of the strength of man. The innuendo that could be made of a title like ‘The Fountainhead’ should go unspoken. But seriously, except with a one sentence sop to the fact that shoebox buildings can be a bit boring, Rand seems entirely convinced that modernist architecture will ennoble the spirit of society. The constant refrain is that ‘second-hand’ architects needlessly embellish their buildings with ornamentation to conform to tradition, when what is needed is a single, clear idea. This may have had some currency in the 40s, particularly for someone coming from Europe and glimpsing the young and exciting world of the US, but in the early twenty-first century it seems laughable to suggest that the concrete jungle that makes up most major cities is conducive to human flourishing. Most people would welcome a bit more ornamentation and character on urban buildings. Early in the story we are told that the workers in an office building built by Henry Cameron, Roark’s mentor, are overjoyed with their modernist office because of the logical layout of the rooms. I imagine one of the office workers running home to his wife and saying ‘Honey, this place is great! The layout of the offices is so logical!’ Finally, no writer living today would say that trees are great primarily because we can chop them down to build houses, even if they might think it.

I imagine that if this story were being written in the noughties, it would not end as it does, with Roark (literally) on top of the world, vindicated in his rational egoism and ready to continue his work with his woman by his side. Roark would at some point crash down into self-doubt and failure like Peter Keating, and maybe crawl out the other side if the author was feeling particularly optimistic. It is interesting to read someone who could believe so single-mindedly in this simple vision of a triumphant humanist. Richard Dawkins tries to be this certain of his atheistic humanism, but his Darwinistic reductionism is always dragging humanity back into failure and delusion, and ultimate despair about our perfectibility is inevitable. Rand sees no intrinsic obstacle to human growth except fear and social conformity, which cannot defeat a determined prime mover (though her introductory essay written to commemorate the 25th anniversary of The Fountainhead shows that this certainty had worn a little thin).

After spending much of this review rubbishing Rand’s beliefs, it may sound strange to say that I found myself admiring The Fountainhead after a fashion. Stripped of the cruder right-wing opinions about architecture, trade unions and the environment, and misogynist sexual politics, what emerges is the heart-cry of a woman who longs to see humanity redeemed, for people to become what they were meant to be. Social conformity can be crushing and oppressive, and most people do lives their lives in fear of others. True creativity is rare, and not valued in a bureaucratic society. It is depressing to see people living trivial and pointless lives. Most of us at some point or another will long to just blow up the whole thing and start again. To the extent that she rails against an easy acceptance of the cursed world in which we live, Rand is right.

But her alternative, for me, has no power. Rational egoism is a philosophy for the exceptions, for geniuses and supermen. Even if we all had the disposition of Roark, we are all not so talented. And not everyone can be an architect – for buildings to be built there needs to be bricklayers, administration workers, accountants and cleaners. Not all these careers are romantic and glamorous creative endeavours. And, to be brutally honest, even architects die, and their buildings fall down or crumble or are demolished. Roark may make the greatest buildings ever, but in a century or two they will be gone, and nothing will be left of him.

We need a better picture of the ideal man, and the ideal life. And we do have one. It is not greatness that raises itself up above the clouds. It is a vision of greatness that consists of love, of sacrificial giving that raises others up at tremendous cost. This is the vision of a man -

‘who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.And being found in human form, 8 he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.’

It is not a shame to be second-hand to the Son of God himself, and to find freedom in the will of the one who made us. We also hope for the resurrection to eternal life, when we will be set free from our weaknesses to be the people we were meant to be. For Rand, I believe, her hope is not in the trickling fountainhead that is a man like Roark, but in the choice of Beatrice who turned away from Dante, and – Poi si torno all’ eterna Fontana – ‘then she turned back to the Eternal Fountain’.