From mid-1928 until the summer of 1929—the last summer of the nation’s long, carefree era of prosperity before the Great Depression—the girl with the sign of a crown on her forehead worked as a waitress, a department-store clerk, and a door-to-door saleswoman. It was an embarrassing and probably a frightening time for her. At age twenty-two, she was without dependable employment in what was still to her a foreign country. She had half-jokingly boasted to family and friends that she would be famous within a year of reaching Hollywood, but for the moment she stood outside the golden circle of that city’s opportunities. She had to borrow small sums from her Chicago relatives, and, according to unpublished letters from her parents, depended for a time on a twenty-five-dollar monthly subsidy from them, in order to pay her Studio Club rent. Worst of all, her legal standing in the United States was in jeopardy. While she had been working for DeMille, the director presumably sponsored visa extensions for her with the immigration service, as was the custom in the movie industry. Without a permanent job or a powerful sponsor, she had reason to fear that her time in the United States was running out. At one point, things looked so bleak that Anna actually urged her to come back to Russia, or at least to return to her relatives in Chicago. Rand, of course, refused.
Pride was not a defect of character in Ayn Rand’s universe. She concealed her menial jobs from industry acquaintances by working in the suburbs, and she disguised her dire financial condition from O’Connor, who was making ends meet by working in a restaurant alongside Nick and Joe. She wanted her suitor to see her at her best—that is, to see the woman in Ayn Rand. She already believed, as she would later write, that romance should never be mixed with suffering or pity. Echoing her mother’s Victorian maxims, she also thought that a woman should avoid cooking or cleaning in the presence of her lover and steer clear of becoming her lover’s pal. O’Connor had materialized as “an answering voice, an answering hymn, an echo” of her inner world and deepest longings. Surely, her vocation as a writer would also materialize if she could learn to conquer the problem that constrained her. It was her old problem: the world did not yet understand or appreciate Ayn Rand.
She looked to herself for solutions. At night, in the mornings, and on weekends, she practiced her new language in journal entries and in letters to her parents and sisters. When she was discouraged, Anna and Zinovy tried to cheer her up. In one letter, Anna reminded her that, even as a child, she had considered bad things to be unimportant. She was a true child of her father, Anna remarked, because both he and she “put so much weight on success and so little on failure.” Zinovy wrote to say that everyone in the family “worshiped” her drive, purposefulness, and unfaltering march toward her goal, which was to write novels that would be important to the world. In an echo of a phrase Rand later used when offering high praise, he called her “my kind of person.”
Some of the stories she was writing were practice drills, imitating what she was reading: Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Babbitt, and Elmer Gantry, detective stories (“for the plots”), and short stories by her new favorite writer, O. Henry. (She even signed two unpublished stories from that period “O. O. Lyons.”) She was also absorbing the civil-libertarian iconoclasm of H. L. Mencken, Albert J. Nock, Gouverneur Morris, and, perhaps, Saturday Evening Post columnist and novelist Garet Garrett. She read and reread a charming turn-of-the-century novel of engineering prowess and conventional anti-unionism called Calumet “K,” which DeMille gave her as a present and which became her lifelong favorite novel. She was careful to make note of books she didn’t like: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (“mushy, morbid”) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (“pointless conversations about the meaning of life”). There was no use in looking for heroes there.
The topics and narrative strategies she chose in these early stories cast long shadows; she would visit them again and again. In “The Husband I Bought” (circa 1926), she dramatized something she would later call “man worship,” which involves a woman’s placing a heroic male lover above everything else in her life. Sometimes, man worship results in a female character’s having to renounce the man she loves in service of an ideal version of her love. In “The Husband I Bought,” for example, a wife leaves a “beautiful, too beautiful” husband so that he may guiltlessly marry another woman with whom he has fallen in love; the wife, now a pariah in her town, prefers to deify the “maddest, wildest” joy of her husband’s early love for her than save her reputation and her humdrum marriage. Interestingly, the story attempts to turn the tables on the old fictional formula of a wife’s self-sacrifice; this wife, far from giving up her own happiness in favor of her husband’s, claims to be preserving what she values most: her memories, her fantasies, her inner world. Written before Rand found O’Connor again, it reads like an exercise in grieving for Lev Bekkerman.
Other stories reveal surprisingly critical views of American life and character. Rand seemed to be encountering the same essential envy, conformity, and mediocrity in Americans that she had seen and loathed in Russians. In unfinished notes for a stunningly harsh and antisocial novella called The Little Street (1928), based on the actual trial of a notorious killer named William Hickman, she took a page from Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis and presented a cast of small-town jurors and spectators who were fat, stupid, and placid: “human herds … who have but one aim: to ruin all individuals and individuality.”
In spite of the novella’s hateful tone, it formulates her great theme: the exceptional individual against the mob of men. Of the protagonist in her story, a murderer, she wrote, “He doesn’t understand, because thankfully he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people. Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.” (This, by the way, is practically a diagnostic description of narcissism, and also a description of Rand herself.) As to the actual Hickman, whose highly publicized crime had been to strangle and dismember an eight-year-old Los Angeles girl, she spends pages describing his admirable qualities, including his “disdainful countenance,” “his immense, explicit egoism,” and the fact that he is, in her estimation, a “brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy,” although she does not condone his gruesome crime. In a message to herself in her notes, she observed, “A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough.”
At the time she drafted The Little Street, she had been out of Russia for just two years—too little time to form a reasonable critique of the average American citizen. Her loathing for the mob was partly literary, based on Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, and partly a memory she carried with her: of rioters and lynch mobs during the revolution and, perhaps, of generations of anti-Semitic peasants and priests who had led pogroms against undefended Russian Jews. “All the crimes in history have always been perpetrated by the mob,” she wrote to a friend in 1936. As a Russian Jew, she would have had to be wary of a single-minded crowd or even a political majority. That her remedy was not to understand “the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people” suggests a powerful defensiveness. “Psychologically, she never acknowledged that she experienced fear or self-doubt,” said a former friend, the psychiatrist Allan Blumenthal. “She hated being afraid.” Not Hickman, not even The Fountainhead’s Roark, but she herself would become strong enough to trample—intellectually, in any argument—the mob that might have wished to trample her.