Never Walked In High Heels

I was twelve years old the first time my father recommended that I read Atlas Shrugged. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he offered to read it as a bedtime story before realizing the amount of sex that was involved in the story and quickly retracted the suggestion. Last Christmas, due in part to three extremely enthusiastic friends, I started reading it for myself and six months later, she is proving to be a major source while working on my university dissertation from now until the end of the year.

While I was visiting old college friends, I had the opportunity to make good use of my college’s inter-library loan services and so I ordered the nineteen boxes that held all of the surviving drafts and manuscripts from the libraries of Congress. The day they came, the librarian lined them up for my examination. My first thought was sheer excitement of getting to read her handwriting and experience the development of an epic novel from start to finish. Side by side with my copies of her journal, the completed and published Atlas Shrugged, and a plethora of her nonfiction work, I began to see the inner workings of a woman I’ve come to idolize over the past few months. I opened the first box and within five minutes I was completely frustrated by the woman’s utterly illegible and jagged handwriting —the scratched out passages, the coffee stains, the illegible notes at the bottoms a pages—Rand had a particular habit of utterly refusing to retype a page until she had completely filled up the draft of the page she was working on. So much so that it is completely illegible to a young woman working in the library fifty years later.

I looked at notes that she later disagreed with. Complete (at least to me they seemed ‘complete’) characters and chapters that never made it into the novel. When I say that they never made it, I don’t mean that it’s like seeing the director’s cut of the Watchmen and feeling sorry that they left a scene out because of time restrictions. No, what I mean is that some ideas she had were so bad (there’s no other word to describe it), that I would have been happier and more satisfied with the woman had I never seen them. In her journal, at the age of 23, Rand wrote, “From now on, no thought whatever about yourself, only about your work.You are only a writing engine. Don’t stop, until you really and honestly know that you cannot go on.” She then goes on to remark that she still has yet to accomplish anything and that the pride that she feels for herself is completely inappropriate given her blank resume. Coming from the highest advocate of selfishness, this thought was shocking to me—that at 23 even Ayn Rand had the same insecurities and frustrations that I struggle with in my own journal.

For any historian who has done primary source research, after about the first five minutes of feeling a thrill of holding a piece of history, you begin to see the human effect of that individual. There are smudges illegible points, pen marks that proved frustrating, even a small red smudge on one of the corners where I’m pretty sure she wiped off her lipstick, and even though you can’t actually see it, I can just smell the amounts of cigarettes that the woman smoked during the eleven years of drafting her Magnus Opus. Actually, doing primary source work is like looking behind the veil at the real Wizard of Oz. In real life he’s just as insecure and human as anyone else on the Yellow-Brick Road. Not that Rand wanted anyone to know that. Her philosophy is so extraordinary and at times so combative that the aura she strove to give off during her years was as someone who never wrote drafts, never edited, and for that matter was never a child. She wanted, like most people in the public eye, for everyone to believe that she came out of Zeus’s head, fully formed and ready for battle. Looking at her mistakes, her little sketches in the margins, and even the imperfect preservation of her own work however, makes her passion for life and her philosophy even more extraordinary. Here was a woman who refused to settle for good enough or any amount of dishonesty toward her own work, even when it came to her own work. As a person who fled Soviet Russia, she saw that we must not be hindered by who we are, but actively reach for who we can become. In her own words: People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don’t sit looking at it – walk.”