The Fountainhead (49 page)

It was a clear, quiet evening. The site of the Temple lay empty and silent. The red of the sunset on the limestone walls was like the first light of morning.

They stood looking at the Temple, and then stood inside, before the marble figure, saying nothing to each other. The shadows in the molded space around them seemed shaped by the same hand that had shaped the walls. The ebbing motion of light flowed in controlled discipline, like the sentences of a speech giving voice to the changing facets of the walls.

“Roark ...”

“Yes, my dearest?”

“No ... nothing ...”

They walked back to the car together, his hand clasping her wrist.

XII

T
HE OPENING OF THE STODDARD TEMPLE WAS ANNOUNCED FOR THE afternoon of November first.

The press agent had done a good job. People talked about the event, about Howard Roark, about the architectural masterpiece which the city was to expect.

On the morning of October 31 Hopton Stoddard returned from his journey around the world. Ellsworth Toohey met him at the pier.

On the morning of November 1 Hopton Stoddard issued a brief statement announcing that there would be no opening. No explanation was given.

On the morning of November 2 the New York
Banner
came out with the column “One Small Voice” by Ellsworth M. Toohey subtitled “Sacrilege.” It read as follows:

“The time has come, the walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of ships—and shoes—and Howard Roark—
And cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether Roark has wings.

“It is not our function—paraphrasing a philosopher whom we do not like—to be a fly swatter, but when a fly acquires delusions of grandeur, the best of us must stoop to do a little job of extermination.

“There has been a great deal of talk lately about somebody named Howard Roark. Since freedom of speech is our sacred heritage and includes the freedom to waste one’s time, there would have been no harm in such talk—beyond the fact that one could find so many endeavors more profitable than discussions of a man who seems to have nothing to his credit except a building that was begun and could not be completed. There would have been no harm, if the ludicrous had not become the tragic—and the fraudulent.

“Howard Roark—as most of you have not heard and are not likely to hear again—is an architect. A year ago he was entrusted with an assignment of extraordinary responsibility. He was commissioned to erect a great monument in the absence of the owner who believed in him and gave him complete freedom of action. If the terminology of our criminal law could be applied to the realm of art, we would have to say that what Mr. Roark delivered constitutes the equivalent of spiritual embezzlement.

“Mr. Hopton Stoddard, the noted philanthropist, had intended to present the City of New York with a Temple of Religion, a non-sectarian cathedral symbolizing the spirit of human faith. What Mr. Roark has built for him might be a warehouse—though it does not seem practical. It might be a brothel—which is more likely, if we consider some of its sculptural ornamentation. It is certainly not a temple.

“It seems as if a deliberate malice had reversed in this building every conception proper to a religious structure. Instead of being austerely enclosed, this alleged temple is wide open, like a western saloon. Instead of a mood of deferential sorrow, befitting a place where one contemplates eternity and realizes the insignificance of man, this building has a quality of loose, orgiastic elation. Instead of the soaring lines reaching for heaven, demanded by the very nature of a temple, as a symbol of man’s quest for something higher than his little ego, this building is flauntingly horizontal, its belly in the mud, thus declaring its allegiance to the carnal, glorifying the gross pleasures of the flesh above those of the spirit. The statue of a nude female in a place where men come to be uplifted speaks for itself and requires no further comment.

“A person entering a temple seeks release from himself. He wishes to humble his pride, to confess his unworthiness, to beg forgiveness. He finds fulfillment in a sense of abject humility. Man’s proper posture in a house of God is on his knees. Nobody in his right mind would kneel within Mr. Roark’s temple. The place forbids it. The emotions it suggests are of a different nature: arrogance, audacity, defiance, self-exaltation. It is not a house of God, but the cell of a megalomaniac. It is not a temple, but its perfect antithesis, an insolent mockery of all religion. We would call it pagan but for the fact that the pagans were notoriously good architects.

“This column is not the supporter of any particular creed, but simple decency demands that we respect the religious convictions of our fellow men. We felt we must explain to the public the nature of this deliberate attack on religion. We cannot condone an outrageous sacrilege.

“If we seem to have forgotten our function as a critic of purely architectural values, we can say only that the occasion does not call for it. It is a mistake to glorify mediocrity by an effort at serious criticism. We seem to recall something or other that this Howard Roark has built before, and it had the same ineptitude, the same pedestrian quality of an overambitious amateur. All God’s chillun may have wings, but, unfortunately, this is not true of all God’s geniuses.

“And that, my friends, is that. We are glad today’s chore is over. We really do not enjoy writing obituaries.”

On November 3 Hopton Stoddard filed suit against Howard Roark for breach of contract and malpractice, asking damages; he asked a sum sufficient to have the temple altered by another architect.

It had been easy to persuade Hopton Stoddard. He had returned from his journey, crushed by the universal spectacle of religion, most particularly by the various forms in which the promise of hell confronted him all over the earth. He had been driven to the conclusion that his life qualified him for the worst possible hereafter under any system of faith. It had shaken what remained of his mind. The ship stewards, on his return trip, had felt certain that the old gentleman was senile.

On the afternoon of his return Ellsworth Toohey took him to see the temple. Toohey said nothing. Hopton Stoddard stared, and Toohey heard Stoddard’s false teeth clicking spasmodically. The place did not resemble anything Stoddard had seen anywhere in the world; nor anything he had expected. He did not know what to think. When he turned a glance of desperate appeal upon Toohey, Stoddard’s eyes looked like Jello. He waited. In that moment, Toohey could have convinced him of anything. Toohey spoke and said what he said later in his column.

“But you told me this Roark was good!” Stoddard moaned in panic.

“I had expected him to be good,” Toohey answered coldly.

“But then—why?”

“I don’t know,” said Toohey—and his accusing glance gave Stoddard to understand that there was an ominous guilt behind it all, and that the guilt was Stoddard’s.

Toohey said nothing in the limousine, on their way back to Stoddard’s apartment, while Stoddard begged him to speak. He would not answer. The silence drove Stoddard to terror. In the apartment, Toohey led him to an armchair and stood before him, somber as a judge.

“Hopton, I know why it happened.”

“Oh, why?”

“Can you think of any reason why I should have lied to you?”

“No, of course not, you’re the greatest expert and the most honest man living, and I don’t understand, I just simply don’t understand at all!”

“I do. When I recommended Roark, I had every reason to expect—to the best of my honest judgment—that he would give you a masterpiece. But he didn’t. Hopton, do you know what power can upset all the calculations of men?”

“W-what power?”

“God has chosen this way to reject your offering. He did not consider you worthy of presenting Him with a shrine. I guess you can fool me, Hopton, and all men, but you can’t fool God. He knows that your record is blacker than anything I suspected.”

He went on speaking for a long time, calmly, severely, to a silent huddle of terror. At the end, he said:

“It seems obvious, Hopton, that you cannot buy forgiveness by starting at the top. Only the pure in heart can erect a shrine. You must go through many humbler steps of expiation before you reach that stage. You must atone to your fellow men before you can atone to God. This building was not meant to be a temple, but an institution of human charity. Such as a home for subnormal children.”

Hopton Stoddard would not commit himself to that. “Afterward, Ellsworth, afterward,” he moaned. “Give me time.” He agreed to sue Roark, as Toohey suggested, for recovery of the costs of alterations, and later to decide what these alterations would be.

“Don’t be shocked by anything I will say or write about this,” Toohey told him in parting. “I shall be forced to state a few things which are not quite true. I must protect my own reputation from a disgrace which is your fault, not mine. Just remember that you have sworn never to reveal who advised you to hire Roark.”

On the following day “Sacrilege” appeared in the
Banner
and set the fuse. The announcement of Stoddard’s suit lighted it.

Nobody would have felt an urge to crusade about a building; but religion had been attacked; the press agent had prepared the ground too well, the spring of public attention was wound, a great many people could make use of it.

The clamor of indignation that rose against Howard Roark and his temple astonished everyone, except Ellsworth Toohey. Ministers damned the building in sermons. Women’s clubs passed resolutions of protest. A Committee of Mothers made page eight of the newspapers, with a petition that shrieked something about the protection of their children. A famous actress wrote an article on the essential unity of all the arts, explained that the Stoddard Temple had no sense of structural diction, and spoke of the time when she had played Mary Magdalene in a great Biblical drama. A society woman wrote an article on the exotic shrines she had seen in her dangerous jungle travels, praised the touching faith of the savages and reproached modern man for cynicism; the Stoddard Temple, she said, was a symptom of softness and decadence; the illustration showed her in breeches, one slim foot on the neck of a dead lion. A college professor wrote a letter to the editor about his spiritual experiences and stated that he could not have experienced them in a place like the Stoddard Temple. Kiki Holcombe wrote a letter to the editor about her views on life and death.

The A.G.A. issued a dignified statement denouncing the Stoddard Temple as a spiritual and artistic fraud. Similar statements, with less dignity and more slang, were issued by the Councils of American Builders, Writers and Artists. Nobody had ever heard of them, but they were Councils and this gave weight to their voice. One man would say to another: “Do you know that the Council of American Builders has said this temple is a piece of architectural tripe?” in a tone suggesting intimacy with the best of the art world. The other wouldn’t want to reply that he had not heard of such a group, but would answer: “I expected them to say it. Didn’t you?”

Hopton Stoddard received so many letters of sympathy that he began to feel quite happy. He had never been popular before. Ellsworth, he thought, was right; his brother men were forgiving him; Ellsworth was always right.

The better newspapers dropped the story after a while. But the
Banner
kept it going. It had been a boon to the
Banner.
Gail Wynand was away, sailing his yacht through the Indian Ocean, and Alvah Scarret was stuck for a crusade. This suited him. Ellsworth Toohey needed to make no suggestions; Scarret rose to the occasion all by himself.

He wrote about the decline of civilization and deplored the loss of the simple faith. He sponsored an essay contest for high-school students on “Why I Go to Church.” He ran a series of illustrated articles on “The Churches of Our Childhood.” He ran photographs of religious sculpture through the ages—the Sphinx, gargoyles, totem poles—and gave great prominence to pictures of Dominique’s statue, with proper captions of indignation, but omitting the model’s name. He ran cartoons of Roark as a barbarian with bearskin and club. He wrote many clever things about the Tower of Babel that could not reach heaven and about Icarus who flopped on his wax wings.

Ellsworth Toohey sat back and watched. He made two minor suggestions : he found, in the Banner’s morgue, the photograph of Roark at the opening of the Enright House, the photograph of a man’s face in a moment of exaltation, and he had it printed in the
Banner,
over the caption: “Are you happy, Mr. Superman?” He made Stoddard open the Temple to the public while awaiting the trial of his suit. The Temple attracted crowds of people who left obscene drawings and inscriptions on the pedestal of Dominique’s statue.

There were a few who came, and saw, and admired the building in silence. But they were the kind who do not take part in public issues. Austen Heller wrote a furious article in defense of Roark and of the Temple. But he was not an authority on architecture or religion, and the article was drowned in the storm.

Howard Roark did nothing.

He was asked for a statement, and he received a group of reporters in his office. He spoke without anger. He said: “I can’t tell anyone anything about my building. If I prepared a hash of words to stuff into other people’s brains, it would be an insult to them and to me. But I am glad you came here. I do have something to say. I want to ask every man who is interested in this to go and see the building, to look at it and then to use the words of his own mind, if he cares to speak.”

The
Banner
printed the interview as follows: “Mr. Roark, who seems to be a publicity hound, received reporters with an air of swaggering insolence and stated that the public mind was hash. He did not choose to talk, but he seemed well aware of the advertising angles in the situation. All he cared about, he explained, was to have his building seen by as many people as possible.”