The Journals of Ayn Rand (33 page)

Outline of Roark’s architectural career.
(Highlights of his important buildings and his worst tragedies.)

Outline of Peter’s career. (Highlights of his buildings and rise. Highlights of his downfall.)

Personal life: Peter-Dominique.

Personal life: Wynand-Dominique.

The relationship: Roark-Wynand.

The career and life of Toohey.

Roark’s first women and his personal life up to Dominique—
all of first part.

Roark’s women after Dominique’s marriage to Peter.

Toohey’s trick against Roark.
(Involve Dominique, Wynand’s editor, the young millionaire, Toohey’s whole technique and his definite

advancement with the Wynand papers.)

Roark’s friends.

Roark’s temptation? Is there or is there not a situation for him? Not.

Roark-Dominique: what finally brings them together?

Roark-Wynand, Roark-Dominique, Roark-Toohey, Roark-Peter: In these [relations], the things which happen to these people affect Roark or vice versa. But he motivates them and all the major events of their lives.

On what occasions can Roark demonstrate his utter anti-socialness? Opportunities for second-handedness:

(Try to think out a type and a dramatic occasion for each.)

Roark’s situations come from his peculiar attitude and his disregard of all that would constitute tragedy to average people. As far as the plot and physical body of the novel is concerned, all the main events are motivated by the second-hand psychology (or Roark as its opposite).

The last part of the book is mainly Roark-Wynand. Consequently, the rest is preparation for it which is resolved in the main climax. This is: Dominique, Peter, Toohey. Concentrate on this for first part—building toward last.

(What if Roark is brought to Wynand, not through a house to build, but by the editor, as a rescue, as [Wynand‘s] greatest prey?)
[This sentence was crossed out.]

 

 

Wynand is at the height of his success—and sick of it. He has married Dominique. His love for her is getting to a stage of mania—the despair of holding on to one thing in which he sees salvation and self-respect. One thing which he really wants—and now he wants her with all the passion of every other “wish he might have had.” His bitterness about his kind of life is growing steadily, but vaguely, obscurely, hidden. He denies it to himself, evades it, hides from it behind Dominique. He has not missed and betrayed everything, he tells himself, he
has
Dominique. But precisely for that very reason, one serious devotion in his life leads him to feel more strongly that which he has missed; it makes him realize—subconsciously, against his will—everything that he has betrayed.

Consequently, his attitude to Dominique is a feverish mixture of exaggerated joy and involuntary, exaggerated despair. This last is rarer. But there are sudden moments, like explosions, like subterranean grumblings of the earthquake to come, when he is madly bitter, unhappy at her—without reason. These are the first signs of the man breaking up. No one notices it except the editor [Alvah Scarret], who does not like it.

His attitude toward men around him is the same strange mixture, somewhat reversed; his spurts of sadism intensified, sometimes out of all proportion, to the limits of the permissible. He has never been as bitter toward men. He is getting worse, people say. The fact is that he is getting better—and does not know it, and does not
want
to know it. He now has strange moments of relaxation in his taunting of men, moments of dead calm, a hopeless, weary calm that [suggests] his greatest danger—indifference. Even this pastime no longer interests him. He is beginning to realize—subconsciously, for he would not yet admit it to himself—that even this means nothing, that it proves nothing and
redeems nothing.
This subconscious conclusion terrifies him, drives him to excesses. But it will take Roark to make him admit the conclusion in so many words. The editor, wise in his own way and in his unerring second-hander’s instinct, sees and recognizes the danger signs. He knows the coming loss to the second-handers’ camp of a great ally who has never really belonged to it. Consequently, Wynand’s excesses worry him less than his occasional terrifying indifference. Once, when Wynand refuses to act true to form, the editor goads him to it desperately.

This is the groundwork for Roark’s entrance into Wynand’s life.

This is the definite beginning of Roark’s final [triumph]. Not much money as yet, but much fame. Notoriety, rather, of the resentful kind. Complete self-assurance. He knows he has won. His indifference to people can afford now to be tinged with the slightest pity. There is a glow about him—of a great battle won. His calm is a challenge to others. His honesty—arrogance.

He sees through him at once. He sees more than the editor, more than Wynand himself. He is amused, at first; then soon begins to pity him, with a kind pity that respects, not insults. Ends by liking him. (One occasion of
Roark’s gesture of faith in Wynand-either before or after Wynand’s attempt against him.)

Wynand is fascinated, at first. Completely and in spite of himself. Or rather, he does not fight against it, does not even analyze it. It is a complete, spontaneous emotion, so rare in him. He surrenders to it simply, naturally, and happily. He knows only that here is a man whom he really likes—which has never happened to Wynand before—a man to whom he likes to talk, simply, directly, sincerely. This after the first few taunts—and quite involuntary, unpremeditated. Then he realizes—with a little frightened start—that he actually respects the man. It is an entirely new feeling for Wynand; he enjoys it with an interested curiosity. So much for the beginning.

 

 

Then Wynand realizes the trap into which he has fallen—too late. He has one spurt of ferocious hatred against Roark, a last gesture of self-defense. Roark wins—which only makes Wynand like him more. (This may be the point where Wynand suddenly cancels the construction of his country home—for no apparent reason at all, only to take it up again shortly afterwards, knowing that nothing will make him cancel his house or lose Roark.) Perfunctorily, almost as a matter of conscientiousness, Wynand goes through a few “temptations” of Roark—such as offering him huge real estate projects if he surrenders his ideals. It does not work. Not at all. Roark does not even hesitate for a moment, makes no great show of heroism and sacrifice in refusing. He refuses simply and immediately, as a man who does not ever see two, but only one course open to him. He does not even give Wynand the satisfaction of being indignant. If anything, he is slightly amused. He sees through Wynand’s game—the first victim to do so. To the editor’s terror, Wynand—instead of being furious at his defeat—is openly delighted. Openly even to himself. Not to Roark, of course, but openly enough for the editor to see it and for Wynand himself to realize it fully, to admit it to himself. In any future, lesser attempts, Wynand is now anxious for Roark to defeat him. Roark does.

 

And the great Gail Wynand comes to a point where Roark becomes the most precious thing in his life. Above Dominique, though Wynand does not admit it. Roark becomes his revenge against society, against that mob whom Roark is defying and to whom Wynand has surrendered. Wynand, at this stage, does not yet admit this surrender to himself, but he knows it already subconsciously, hence all his vague anguish, his peculiar spiritual hysteria. The full, conscious knowledge of it will come later, when he is forced to betray Roark.

At the moment, Roark becomes an obsession to him. In the most spiritual sense only, without the slightest possibility of the merest hint of sexual perversion, Wynand is actually in love with Roark. There are no definite events, no concrete speeches in which this is displayed. It is there, nevertheless. It is an instance of Wynand’s masochism, of which he has quite a taint. The torture of loving a man whom in many other ways he hates appeals to him. He hates him for everything that Roark is and he, Wynand, isn’t. He hates him as a challenge to his whole life, as the embodiment of his conscience. He loves him for these very reasons. Unrealized, there is in Wynand’s mind a twisted feeling of atonement in his love for Roark—his worst enemy. He is punishing himself for what he has done—by bowing before what he should have done. The bowing hurts him. He enjoys it for that. By being hurt—at this late date—he thinks he is atoning for the many hurts he has avoided: he is suffering for an ideal—for the first and last time in his life. As a gesture to all the ideals he should have, but did not, suffer for.