Altruism Shrugged
The unforgiving morality of Ayn Rand’s forgotten novel
BY ELIZABETH BRUENIG
Ayn Rand had a hard year in 1934. Her debut novel,
We the Living, had gone through a string of rejections from various publishers.
Night of January 16th, her first play, had not yet found a producer. Her two greatest works,
The Fountainhead (1943) and
Atlas Shrugged (1957), had yet to be written; with no literary success to her name, her savings were running out.
That year she completed, but shelved, another novel. Perhaps chastened by the indifference of the publishing world, she decided to give it some time to marinate.
She reworked it into a play,
Ideal, that went unproduced for roughly 60 years, but finally found a home at the Melrose Theatre in Los Angeles. Its delayed arrival did not precipitate a benevolent welcome. Writing about this 1989 Los Angeles run, the
Los Angeles Times’ Ray Loynd
knocked the play’s “clunky structure,” and noted that Rand never really did have a flair for dramatic literature. Roughly 20 years later, the play appeared again, this time off-Broadway, where it was similarly panned. “The show’s clumsy mix of long bursts of theory and a laborious plot would test the endurance of even Alan Greenspan,”
wrote The New York Times’ critic, Jason Zinoman. And Greenspan was a “famous Rand admirer and veteran of long, boring meetings.” Frank Scheck at the
New York Post was likewise disenchanted,
calling it “a stinker that well deserves its obscurity.”
Now, for the first time, the original novel has been released, thanks to Leonard Peikoff, heir to the Rand estate and founder of the Ayn Rand Institute, an organization aimed at evangelizing for Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. After discovering the novel among the late philosophizer’s papers, Peikoff and a cadre of Rand enthusiasts made the Promethean decision to present it to the world. “It is a common practice,” Peikoff writes in
Ideal’s introduction, “to bring out [a deceased author’s] juvenilia, his early, faltering attempts ... if he has become an immortal in his field whose every word, early or late, is avidly consumed by a large body of readers and growing number of scholars.” Rand fits this bill, and it is purely on her devotees’ account that
Ideal has been released. ...
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Sorry but that's one stereotype to which I'm not conforming, one among many.
