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A ROUND UNIVERSE 137
By the time he met Rand he had memorized The Fountainhead. Told a
sentence from the book, he could recite the one immediately before and
immediately after. Now he began speaking to Rand on the phone several
times a day and spent nearly every Saturday evening at her house. Rand
was like an older, feminine version of himself—although at fi rst, Nathan
did not see her as a woman. Two months after their meeting Nathan
gave her a letter to the editor he had published in the UCLA newspaper,
inscribed “To My Father—Ayn Rand—the fi rst step.” 11
The letter Nathan inscribed to Rand, which also listed Barbara as an
author, was a virulent attack on F. O. Matthiessen, a literary critic and
Harvard professor who had committed suicide while under investigation
for past Communist associations. Matthiessen’s widely publicized death
was mourned by his colleagues on the left, who considered him the fi rst
scholarly martyr of the Cold War. Nathan and Barbara would have none
of it. Instead they reinterpreted his death in Randian terms, attributing
it to the irrationality of Communism. In his letter Blumenthal asked, “if
a man places his hopes in an idea which contains an irreconcilable contradiction,
and when he sees all exponents of this idea turned corrupt
and fail in their aims—is there anything heroic about killing himself
because an idea which can’t work is not working?” Strident and tasteless,
the letter averred that people like Matthiessen “deserve no pity whatsoever;
rather do they deserve to be condemned to hell.” The letter caused
a bitter controversy at UCLA. It forever poisoned Barbara’s relationship
with a philosophy professor who had been close to Matthiessen. Before
the letter was published the professor had been attentive and welcoming
to Barbara, even joining the couple for a visit to Rand in Chatsworth,
after which he pronounced himself deeply impressed. Now he counterattacked
in the student newspaper and began criticizing Barbara openly
in class. His hostility was so intense Barbara realized she would have to
leave UCLA if she wanted to continue studying philosophy on the graduate
level. Blumenthal was unfazed by the upheaval. He was a crusader
who had found his cause. 12
His allegiance now transferred to Rand, Nathan began to break free
from his birth family. He picked a fi ght with his socialist older sister,
berating her in angry letters for her immorality and inconsistency, his
language taken straight from Rand. On a trip home he shouted so much
he claimed, “my throat’s getting hoarse.” Rand, seeing her former self
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