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THE EDUCATION OF AYN RAND, 1905–1943
Even in a town of outsize ambitions Rand was extraordinarily driven.
She lashed at herself in a writing diary, “Stop admiring yourself—you
are nothing yet.” Her steady intellectual companion in these years was
Friedrich Nietzsche, and the fi rst book she bought in English was Thus
Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche was an individualist who celebrated selfcreation,
which was after all what Rand was doing in America. She
seemed to have been deeply affected by his emphasis on the will to
power, or self-overcoming. She commanded herself, “The secret of life:
you must be nothing but will. Know what you want and do it. Know
what you are doing and why you are doing it, every minute of the day.
All will and all control. Send everything else to hell!” 28 Set on perfecting
her English, she checked out British and American literature from the
library. She experimented with a range of genres in her writing, creating
short stories, screenplays, and scenarios. She brought her best efforts
into the De Mille studio, but none were accepted.
Rand was also absorbed by the conundrums of love, sex, and men.
Shortly after arriving in Chicago she had written Seriozha to end their
relationship. Her mother applauded the move, telling her daughter it
was “only the fact that you had been surrounded by people from the
caveman days that made you devote so much time to him.” She was less
understanding when Rand began to let ties to her family lapse. “You left,
and it is though you divorced us,” Anna wrote accusingly when Rand did
not respond to letters for several months. 29 Rand was becoming increasingly
wary of dependence of any kind. The prospect of romance in particular
roused the pain of Lev’s rejection years earlier. To desire was to
need, and Rand wanted to need nobody.
Instead she created a fi ctional world where beautiful, glamorous, and
rich heroines dominated their suitors. Several short stories she wrote
in Hollywood, but never published, dwelled on the same theme. The
Husband I Bought stars an heiress who rescues her boyfriend from bankruptcy
by marrying him. Another heiress in Good Copy saves the career
of her newspaper boyfriend, again by marrying him, while in Escort a
woman inadvertently purchases the services of her husband for an evening
on the town. In several stories the woman not only has fi nancial
power over the man, but acts to sexually humiliate and emasculate him
by having a public extramarital affair. In Rand’s imagination women
were passionate yet remained fi rmly in control. 30
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