Fountainhead Revisited

I’m still not sure what made me buy another copy of The Fountainhead last month. A tall shelf looms beside my desk full of novels and memoirs I haven’t read but should. With new writers emerging all the time, as a general rule the only book I reread is To Kill a Mockingbird—which I do every summer, and have since middle school. Ayn Rand, though, has lingered in my mind since I discovered her as a teenager. I have memories of defending laissez-faire policies in an economics class; I think at one point I described myself as an objectivist; simply to prove I could, during midterms I picked up and finished Atlas Shrugged in five days. Years later and wandering Southwest Portland, I stumbled across a used bookstore, and in it I found a 4^th edition copy of The Fountainhead. So I bought it.

The Ayn Rand I remembered wrote beautifully, bravely, and with an intelligence that could persuade any communist to buy shares of Walmart. She was rational and always made me feel as though I had been let in on a great secret, that I was unique for exploring her novels. There was something I wanted to emulate about her characters, and I wanted to emulate everything about her style and politics. She taught in her fiction that pure capitalism created utopia. Growing up in the red state of Texas it was hard not to believe her.

I’ve since heard someone say that many teenagers become followers of Ayn Rand—inferring that, at some point, they defect to someone else. Picking up The Fountainhead a second time, I remembered only bits about the story and its hero, Howard Roark. He had red hair, hated Greco-Roman architecture, spoke for a long time in a courtroom, and designed buildings almost no one appreciated. He respected very few people and set a standard for himself that no one else could reach. I would appreciate his buildings, I remember sappily thinking. What I forgot were the constant descriptions of him as monstrous, and that he’s a rapist.

I researched and learned that Rand was a sadomasochist, which explains her insistence that Roark’s victim liked it, but I suspect she had some psychological failings too. In her narrative world, friendships don’t exist, only alliances; romance is just a power struggle; nature should be utilized not observed; etc. She didn’t believe in love and left no place for it in her novel, an oversight I missed somehow at seventeen. In a way I revered Roark, didn’t seem to notice that he’s defined by a lack of empathy. Reading about him now I had a hard time noticing much else.

Like everyone must eventually, I developed new ethics and political views since following Ayn Rand. I’ve read authors with much more practical and beautiful sentences than hers; I’ve gained friends who know the realities of sexual abuse. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy The Fountainhead again. The story unravels slowly, and reading the book at night, I found myself alternately galled by the moralizing tone and amused with her pithy observations. “‘A house can have integrity, just like a person,’ said Roark, ‘and just as seldom.’” I smiled reading that a second time, and I remembered why I once appreciated his character. Roark strives for nothing short of excellence; Rand might not have achieved it but certainly had the same aspirations. I think that’s admirable. I just think it can be done while still loving other people in the world.