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INDIVIDUALISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! 51
Anthem had not, however, cured her of the squirms. Returning to
New York in the fall of 1937 Rand still found it impossible to complete
the plot and outline of her larger novel. She couldn’t begin writing
until she had the whole narrative structure down, but the pieces of the
story remained stubbornly fragmented and inchoate. She decided to
escape her daily struggle by volunteering in the offi ce of a noted New
York architect, the modernist Ely Jacques Kahn. She worked for him
without pay for six months in an arrangement that was kept secret
from the rest of the offi ce staff. Kahn was fl attered and pleased to have
attracted the interest of a budding novelist, and Rand earned his gratitude
by expertly rearranging his fi les during her tenure. He took his
new “employee” under his wing, offering her anecdotes from his own
career and gossipy tidbits about other prominent architects. Rand cast
him in the novel as Guy Francon, a once talented architect who is an
incurable social climber.
One morning Kahn suggested a resolution to her creative impasse
when he told her that the greatest problem architects face was housing.
Rand remembered, “[T]he moment he said ‘housing,’ something
clicked in my mind, because I thought, well now, there is a political
issue and an architectural issue; that fi ts my purpose.” 34 Thinking over
his words at lunch, Rand quickly visualized the rest of the story. Peter
Keating would seek a commission to build a public housing project.
He would convince Roark, who is motivated by the intellectual challenge
of the housing problem, to design it for him. Roark agrees to
help on the condition that his building be built exactly as designed.
When Roark’s plans are nonetheless altered he would destroy the building,
an action that would allow Rand to explain the supremacy of the
individual creator over the needs of society. The rest of the characters
would react accordingly. Toohey would attack Roark, Wynand would
try to defend him, Peter would retreat in shame, and Dominique would
return to him.
Rand’s excitement over the central unifying idea of housing indicated
how signifi cantly her sense of the novel had shifted. It had begun as
an abstract tale about the superior man struggling against the suffocating
mob, a thematic remnant from her obsessive reading of Nietzsche
and her earliest stabs at fi ction. The writing of Anthem, which for the
fi rst time featured a triumphant hero, marked an important move away
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