The Journals of Ayn Rand (37 page)

“Oh, no. I’m just beginning.”

“Who’ll give you work?”

“I believe I know someone who will.”

Dean’s anger. “You are dangerous.” End of interview.

(“I haven’t the time to waste on exercises in calligraphy, copying. I’m here to learn. When I’m given a project, its only value to me is to learn to solve it as I would solve a real one. I did them the way I’ll build them.”)

Everything beautiful in architecture has been done already. We cannot improve, we can only try to repeat.

There is something good in every style. We can only choose from the great masters. Who are we to improve upon them? Of course, we must make proper adaptations to meet modern conditions.

That is
tradition.
We cannot break with tradition. It is our sacred heritage. Nothing worthwhile is invented by one man in architecture. The proper creative process is a long, slow, gradual, collective one, in which each man adds his little bit to what has gone on before. This is the splendid march of civilization. And will always be so. The modernists? A passing mode, a freak fury of exhibitionists trying to attract attention. Look at Cameron.

An architect is not an end in himself. He is only a small part of a social unit. He does not build to please himself. Cooperation is the key word to the modern world and to architecture particularly. Furthermore, the designing and artistic inspiration is only a small part of an architect’s equipment. He must also be a business man and a diplomat. Above all, he must consider the client.
The Client,
above all. It’s his cash that pays for the luxury of your artistic inspirations, isn’t it? He’s the one to live in the house. Who are you to tell him what he must live in? You’re only an employee, like his secretary, his chauffeur and his cook. You are only to execute his desire, in the best manner you are able and give it the proper artistic form.

Why do you think the Greek style beautiful? Just because your grandfather did and told you so, and his grandfather, and millions before him?

I am a man. I choose a work to do. I must do the very best possible to me. I am the sole judge of that best. If I give up that right of valuing, I might as well give up the right to all thought. If I think, I value. I alone. How do I know who is right among the others? I can only judge of what is right to me, for me.

Times have changed. New means, new materials. We put up awful imitations, we’re uncomfortable, wasteful, dirty. Why?

Architecture—the most important of the arts. Changing the face of nature, man’s background, that against which his whole life is played. In no other art are there set standards. The artist works as he alone pleases. Why not, then, in architecture?
[AR’s formulations here are open to a subjectivist interpretation; see
The Romantic Manifesto
for her defense of the objectivity of esthetic standards.
]

Form follows function. Consider the reality of what you’re doing.

The people do not know what they want. There is no such thing as the spirit of a people. [Someone must]
tell
the people what they want. There are men born to tell and men born to accept.
That
is cooperation. I do not build for a client. He only [offers] a problem for me to solve. I am glad to have a client so that I may build. Not vice versa. The client is my means, not my end. The building is the end.

7

AR
began writing
The Fountainhead
on June 26, 1938. She finished four and a half years later, on December 31, 1942. The writing went slowly at first, in part because of the difficulty of the task, and in part because financial troubles caused her to interrupt the work In 1939, she wrote two plays: an adaptation of We
the Living
(entitled
The Unconquered)
and a philosophical murder mystery,
Think Twice
(published in
The Early Ayn Rand).
In 1941, she took a job as a reader for Paramount Pictures. Her (unpaid) campaign work for Wendell Willkie in the 1940 presidential election was another major interruption. As a result, nearly two-thirds
of
the novel was still unwritten when she signed a contract with a publisher (Bobbs-Merrill) in December 1941. She had to write at a furious pace to complete the novel by the agreed-upon deadline of January 1, 1943.

The vast majority of her notes while writing are included here. Some of
the
material is undated; I have specified the year when it is known. I have omitted a revised
out
line of Part IV because it describes events as they happen in the published novel; the only other notes omitted were repetitive or cryptic.

July 18, 1938

Francon’s speech (his distinctions).

The audience. Peter in it. Peter’s thoughts about everyone noticing him, he and others. Peter’s qualifications: star student, president of student body (he has always been elected), star of track team, fraternities.

Peter receiving his degree, Paris scholarship, gold medal. Congratulations of the boys and of professors, Petechin among them (referring to his one building), mention of Peter’s graduation project. Francon’s mention of a job.

Peter at the banquet. His talk on architecture. Peter’s thoughts about Roark. Roark’s help. Party of boys planned for later that night.

Peter goes home. Wonders if people notice him or know who he is, determines that he’ll
make
them know who he is. His and Mrs. Keating’s past.

Peter comes home. Roark and Tony on the porch—Tony’s protestations to Roark—slight encounter between Peter and Tony. Tony doesn’t like Peter, Tony leaves.

Peter-Roark. Peter “wants to speak to him.” Peter’s condolences. The friendly scene. Mrs. Keating rushes down, hearing his voice. She’s been waiting for him; he’s annoyed. Peter is gloating about Francon’s offer and hesitating about the Paris trip. Mrs. Keating settles that. Peter asks what Roark will do. His horror at the mention of Cameron. Peter raises the question of living together—with Mrs. Keating keeping house for them. Roark refuses.

Vesta comes down. Vesta—appearance and status. Her brusqueness and forced nonchalance. Roark insists on knowing what’s the matter with her. She confesses. Roark’s plan for the three of them to move to New York. Peter and Vesta agree. Mrs. Keating’s horrified protests overruled.

Roark goes to pack, Vesta to dream, Peter to his party.

Peter on way to party. Complete intoxication of success. The great things he will do.

What did he graduate in? Oh yes, architecture.

 

 

Roark: feature one building in each important line, show how he knows the important activities of life—and what he thinks of them.

Friendship: Roark is the only one capable of real friendship—because he is able to look at people in themselves,
un
selfishly—because he is too selfish, because they are not a part of him in any way. He does not need them basically, does not need their opinion of him, and [therefore he] can value them for their own sake, a relationship of two equals. Roark does not want to impress himself upon others, because he does not need it.

Other people cannot be friends, because in their petty selfishness—in their concern with themselves
through
others—they can be interested in friends
only
as those friends concern them. They become tyrants, because they need the slavery of others to inflate them.

[Show] not only what second-handedness (as an abnormal, basic preoccupation with others) does to the person himself, but also to those others, to his relation with them. (Hatred of all who
don’t
belong. If one isn’t too concerned with others—why want them to “belong”?) You can have real freedom (in every sense, freedom from one another) only when you stop being too concerned with others.

 

 

For the whole—
every stage of the lives motivated by certain principles.

Every detail of how a certain conception of existence works, what it does—
and what are the results.

 

 

It’s terribly bad to be conscious of yourself as others see you, [whether they see you as] good or bad. Take yourself for granted. The consciousness that feels alone—without the weight of other eyes watching—is the only healthy consciousness.

Another aspect of second-handedness: The horror of being nothing; every person one faces is not a person, not a rational, cognizant being, but a blind, deaf agglomeration of bits from everyone else, unthinking and impotent, without the will of decision, so that nothing in that person can be reached, nothing can act or respond. It is the hopelessness of attempting to speak to an animal—there is no language, there is no possibility of a language, there is a barrier that can’t be broken. The silent, universal, omnipresent beast of “other people”—unreachable, irresponsible; vague and intangible, yet more real than the concrete beings who represent it, who are only its fragments.

[The following note was added on February 21, 1940:
]

Toohey is the one to capitalize on this. The soil is ready, begging for some seeds, because it is empty. Toohey gives them the seeds. Toohey molds public opinion. And Toohey is the one to do it, not someone better, not the Roark type, because what Toohey preaches is in accord with and in support of the one certainty of the mob: its rightness in being second-hand, its fear of the single, the strong and the definite. Toohey makes this second-handedness, this cowardice and universal “equality,” into a virtue. And he is thus armed to fight the Roark type.

 

 

For
Roark-Dominique:
She likes to think of the granite broken by his hands, [when] under his hands.

For Toohey:
His great enthusiasm for and preoccupation with books on children and animals, such books as
Ferdinand
or
Tapiola,
such movies as
Snow White
and all of Walt Disney. It would be Toohey who’d find philosophical significance in Donald Duck. Why? It’s not Donald Duck that he’s boosting. It’s philosophy that he’s destroying.

For Roark:
Watch and trace the development, the growth of his ideas on architecture and what he does with them, the changes in his work.