“Ayn Rand and the World She Made” Is an Exploitative, Tabloid Biography

Anne Heller’s acclaimed biography of Rand is unworthy of its subject or your time.

When it was published in 2009, Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made was lavishly praised in umpteen reviews and singled out as a New York Times Notable Book. What came to my mind after reading it, however, was the spirit of a notorious tabloid in The Fountainhead. Owned by Gail Wynand, The Banner is characterized as “the most vulgar newspaper in the country.”

The public asked for crime, scandal and sentiment. . . . [Wynand] gave people what they wanted, plus a justification for indulging the tastes of which they had been ashamed. The Banner presented murder, arson, rape, corruption – with an appropriate moral against each. There were three columns of details to one stick of moral. “If you make people perform a noble duty, it bores them,” said Wynand. “If you make them indulge themselves, it shames them. But combine the two – and you’ve got them.” He ran stories about fallen girls, society divorces, foundling asylums, red-light districts, charity hospitals. “Sex first,” said Wynand. “Tears second. Make them itch and make them cry –and you’ve got them.”

. . . It overstressed the glamour of society – and presented society news with a subtle sneer. This gave the man on the street two satisfactions: that of entering illustrious drawing rooms and that of not wiping his feet on the threshold. [Emphasis added.]

. . . The Banner was permitted to strain truth, taste and credibility, but not its readers’ brain power. Its enormous headlines, glaring pictures and oversimplified text hit the senses and entered men’s consciousness without any necessity for an intermediary process of reason, like food shot through the rectum, requiring no digestion. ¹

To analyze Heller’s book at length is to give it an undeserved dignity, so I omitted it from my article on Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market, which is likewise worse than incompetent. While I find it difficult to take Heller’s book seriously, a recent experience convinced me that some comment on it is needed. Here’s why I wrote this article, and why you might want to read further.

Not long ago, I was a guest speaker in a class at a top-10 business school. The MBA students in that class were studying Ayn Rand, and I was invited to take questions and offer comments. The professor was admirably fair in leading the discussion on Rand’s life and ideas. The students had been assigned to read a brief profile of Rand. But I was dismayed to learn that this profile relied heavily on Heller’s book as a reputable source; out of 109 endnotes, it cited Heller more than 70 times.

My aim in this essay is to send out a warning flare: Heller’s book is an egregiously non-objective book, unworthy of its subject and your time. This 9-minute read is designed to save you 19-plus hours on Heller’s book.

Evaluating a Biography Objectively

In evaluating Heller’s book, I apply the same uncontroversial standards that I set out in my article on Burn’s Goddess of the Market, which I evaluated as a biography of Rand the novelist, intellectual, and public figure. These three criteria apply not only to Rand, but universally.

First, a biography needs to engage seriously with the subject’s own self-concept, assessing the evidence for it and, where disagreeing, providing counterevidence. Neither agreement with, nor admiration for, the subject is a requirement: a capitalist can write an accurate biography of Karl Marx. Second, it needs to exhibit a basic understanding of the subject’s work, if we’re to have any confidence in the biographer’s account of the themes, concerns and ideas animating her thought. And third, as with all nonfiction, the work must exhibit a commitment to objectivity in research and writing. At minimum that entails both assessing the reliability and limitations of a given source, and offsetting any biases that might be present in the sources and the biographer’s own mind.

On all three counts, Heller’s book fails. To my mind, it’s evocative of The Banner in its anti-intellectuality, prurience, and levelling spirit – offering the ugly satisfaction of entering illustrious drawing rooms and not wiping one’s feet on the threshold.

Portraying A Puppet of Fate

Fundamental to Rand’s self-concept (as I point out elsewhere) are her own choices and dedication to a life-goal of projecting a positive vision, a moral ideal. Rather than acknowledge that view and argue against it with counterevidence, Heller instead pushes a deterministic story. In this telling Rand is not as an agent choosing her values and setting the direction of her life, but shaped by outside forces. Heller writes that Rand as a child met with obstacles to attaining her desires: “Russian tradition and her family provided some of the resistance. The politics of the Russian Revolution produced the rest” (25; emphasis added). ² The Soviet expropriation of her father’s business, Heller asserts, is a pivotal moment that set Rand’s path.

Despite Rand’s atheism and stated contempt for Russian culture, Heller stresses unchosen aspects of Rand’s identity: her Jewish family background and her Russianness. Heller thus (perhaps unwittingly) exhibits a collectivized mindset that Rand had identified as resurging in the West (see “Global Balkanization”). It’s an anti-intellectual mindset that negates the individual’s sovereign mind and power of choice, while fixating on a person’s unchosen collective identity.

Through a distorting collectivized prism, Heller claims that Howard Roark’s character (who states early in The Fountainhead that “I’ve never believed in God”) somehow reveals the latent Jewishness in Rand’s thought. He is in certain ways an “exquisite portrait of a nineteenth-century Eastern European Jew” (120). Why did Rand hold the distinctive view – and invest decades of her life in trying to convince others – that philosophic ideas have a fundamental role in shaping the world? It is not because she reached that view from studying history and making first-hand observations from her own experience. No, it is because, Heller asserts, Rand was a “nineteenth-century Russian at heart” (84; see also 156).

Erasing Rand’s choices, her intellect, her mind, Heller casts her as inescapably defined by an unchosen group identity.

Anti-Intellectuality

Heller’s meager and shallow discussion of Rand’s philosophic nonfiction should embarrass any biographer. ³ Having indicated the range of issues Rand wrote about, Heller damns with faint praise, then draws ludicrously superficial takeaways:

Her often bitter rhetoric notwithstanding, many of these [essays] are worth reading decades later, if only for their clarity of language and purity of point of view. In “The Ethics of Emergencies,” for example, she warns against defining national emergencies too broadly or, worse, making them permanent, so that everyone is expected to sacrifice his liberties all the time. In “Man’s Rights,” “The Nature of Government,” “The Anatomy of Compromise,” and “The Roots of War,” she combined her old defiant dedication to radical individualism with shrewd demonstrations of how to deconstruct political speech and uproot hidden agendas – in other words, how to think one’s way through government propaganda. (322)

The points Heller mentions are not irrelevant to Rand’s discussion. But those points are so far from being the essential, or distinctive, claims in each essay, that it’s difficult to believe that Heller actually read them.

For instance, Heller’s take on “The Ethics of Emergencies” is a flagrant misreading. Rand’s point is that the prevailing moral theory – “altruism” – distorts how people view the role of moral guidance in life. Many people, she argues, see morality as irrelevant to daily life and instead the province of extraordinary, emergency or lifeboat situations. Repudiating that conception, she discusses how her moral theory of rational egoism handles such emergency cases, and she stresses her conception of morality as a needed guide for everyday life.

To say that “The Ethics of Emergencies” is a warning about unending, over-broad national emergencies is like saying that Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto is a warning about ineptly designed flyers handed out by left wing activists.

Egregious Non-Objectivity

Heller’s posture of journalistic detachment dissolves quickly. What emerges is a kind of unadmitted slant. The book is pocked with snidely condescending asides and comments that depict Rand as naive, foolish, dishonest. ⁴ Heller’s lack of objectivity is amply displayed in the account of Rand’s professional association and friendship with Nathaniel Branden. It became a romantic affair that their spouses consented to. And as I argued in my essay on the Burns book, the problem is not that a biographer is writing about this episode in Rand’s life; the problem here is rooted in a non-objective methodology.

With a paparazzi-like hunger for rumor and gossip, Heller is galvanized by Rand’s romantic relationship with Branden. Heller unloads page after relentless page of minutiae about this affair, but without sufficient explanation for why it warrants such attention (compared to, say, Rand’s writing and intellectual career). A reader wondering how to evaluate this episode – for example, how it relates to Rand’s stated moral principles – will necessarily be frustrated. To think through this episode and its implications objectively would require at least two things: first, conscientiously weighing the reliability of sources, and the limits of what can be known; and second, engaging with Rand’s distinctive moral ideas, particularly as they relate to personal relationships. Both of these are flouted in Heller’s account.

On this subject and throughout the biography, Heller relies heavily on the memoirs of Nathaniel Branden and of his then-wife Barbara. No conscientious biographer, however, could overlook the serious problems in these sources. In their respective books, published after Rand’s death, the Brandens each cast themselves as victims. They confess to having been untruthful and dishonest, for years. And the score-settling in these memoires is unsubtle. But Heller cavalierly embraces these books and their authors, whom she also interviewed (she singles them out for special thanks in the acknowledgments). The result is to launder these dubious sources as reliable.

Why such an indifference to objectivity? Presumably it serves a levelling, tabloid narrative about Rand. It is unclear to me whether Heller intends to degrade Rand, but this biography is unavoidably degrading of itself.

Cashing In

Rand was acutely sensitive to people trying to ride on her coattails. She rightly worried about anyone seeking an unearned benefit by exploiting her name and the powerful appeal of her novels. I view Heller’s book as exploitative in precisely that way. The book fails to live up to basic standards for a biography. Channeling The Banner, it manages to surpass the Burns book in its anti-intellectuality and levelling attitude.

If you’re looking for a biography that illuminates what’s essential to Rand, a book that helps you understand her basic motivation and her considered views, a book that respects your intelligence, then: avoid both Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market. Neither lives up to its subject.

Endnotes

1. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: New American Library, 2016.) Part 3, loc. lv.

2. Page numbers refer to the paperback edition: Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Anchor Books, 2010).

3. I’m skipping over the shallow discussion of Rand’s fiction, which Heller misreads and misunderstands. For example: Describing Howard Roark, Heller writes: “He would ‘walk over corpses’ to be an architect, one of the characters says about him.” (108) Heller seems to regard this as an accurate description of Roark, but it’s exactly the opposite. In the novel Peter Keating applies the “walk over corpses” phrase and a slight variant of it to describe Roark. When using this phrase early on, Keating is clearly projecting his own impulse. Later, Keating hurls that line in the company of another character, who shares his dislike for Roark. That scene is laden with irony, because the reader has already seen Keating himself act in ways that call that phrase to mind. By contrast, in countless ways, it is clear that Roark is on principle opposed to sacrificing others to accomplish his ends. This aspect of Roark is vividly dramatized, it is central to the theme, and so it’s stunning that Heller could miss it.

4. A few examples: Heller’s analysis of Rand’s emigration from Russia and entry into the U.S. (53–54); the insinuation that Rand’s personality reflected characteristics of “ideologues and narcissists” (128); the notion that Rand failed to appreciate FDR’s accomplishments (131); and the claim that Rand had a “fragile understanding of American due process” in relation to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) (246–7).