Second-Hand Lives

This is just a reaction to The Fountainhead. The length of this post is proportional to the length to the book :) That’s my excuse for boring you out of your skull. The title of the post was the working title of the book.

Since I started reading it over a month ago I managed to give it only about 20 minutes at the end of each day and have been able to finish it only last week. Maybe I should have read it years ago, but never mind. This book is, as most people know, enormously powerful and leaves you with a lot of thoughts, not all of which can be articulated in a manner that would do them justice. But I realize that unless I write about it I will be incapable of reading another book. Hence presently I find myself at my grandfather’s desk, nearly forcing my neurons to produce words.

I was standing in a bookstore the other day and a girl suggested this book to her friend. So the friend asked what it is about. The girl replied that you should just read it to know. Usually, that’s an answer I dislike, but in this case it is perhaps the most appropriate. The real joy of reading this book is when one part of your mind quarrels with the other because of it.

The Fountainhead is not an easy book to read. Although much easier than Catch-22, 694 pages of minuscule print is no joke. Something like Gone with the Wind (1024 pages, if I’m not wrong). But it’s worth the effort. Of course there were stretches when only my very serious crush on Howard Roark kept me going.

The book is supposed to promote the philosophy of individualism, that a man’s ego (not precisely in the sense as we use it today) is the fountainhead of all human progress (as the back covers of many editions read). However this is not exactly what remained with me. Among several other things, the novel adds, if you choose to see it the same way as I do, multiple dimensions to our understanding of integrity.

Ayn Rand chose to make her point using architecture in the city of New York as the symbol. I came to the conclusion that the same tale could have been told, albeit much less effectively, through any other profession or art form. The story has five primary characters. Each of these five characters deals with what I’m calling the question of integrity in substantially different ways.

Peter Keating is a creature you meet everyday. He does what society has deemed best. He pursues only that which will meet maximum approval. He has no ideas of his own, all his buildings are reflections of other buildings or of other architects. He lives what is referred to as a second-hand life – where your self-respect comes from the respect you see in someone else’s eyes for you – second-hand. Sure enough, he acquires name as a great architect who is charming and amicable to boot. All the admiration that comes his way is his glucose. He is, at least initially, almost unaware that he has made a choice regarding integrity; that he has never done justice to any of his buildings or to himself, because he was always told otherwise.

Ellsworth Toohey annoyed me throughout the book and after; during the book because his motives were unfathomable and later because they were simply disgusting. He is an immensely gifted man, extremely perceptive with a voice that could sway millions in any direction he wanted. The only statement from him that I agreed with was: Don’t you find it advisable not to talk too seriously in an important moment? He claims fame as a selfless social-worker of sorts and a critic of practically anything – architecture included. He has not only his own answer to the question of integrity, but knows everyone else’s answers too, even if they don’t. And he uses this. For what? Power. Over the souls of the masses. To be achieved by killing their integrity. By building up mediocrity in every profession. Incapacitating people of original thought and excellence. Destroying the ego and promoting bromide, as he later confesses.

Gail Wynand is a publishing tycoon, a towering personality, to use the cliché. He runs a newspaper called the Banner and, given the money he has accumulated, practically everything else in the city. He too in his newspaper promotes mediocrity. His early life moulded him such that he deliberately murdered his own integrity, at least superficially and sought to break the souls of the most righteous people he met. That he could buy another man’s integrity; offer him so much that he could not refuse, that he could bend the man such that he forgot his ideals and wrote trash for the Banner, was Gail Wynand’s greatest sense of achievement, of power.

Howard Roark never made a choice about integrity, neither consciously nor unconsciously. He never had to. He knew only one way of living. Only one way of working. For his own happiness. Not for anyone else’s. Not for power of any kind. He makes no compromise with the quality of his work and his actions. His buildings are no one else’s but his own. They rise from the earth, not incongruously but as though the earth had meant to have them there, and Roark was just doing what was necessary. Naturally he met with little success initially, for he refused to conform to what was perceived as good architecture. He was an aberration. His work was too unconventional for the comfort of many people. So were his looks. But for those who could appreciate him for what he was and what he represented, he was incredibly good-looking and an architect of supreme competence.

Dominique Francon is an exquisitely beautiful woman, daughter of a mediocre architect but possessing so much integrity that the shallowness of the people and the work around her disgusts her. Nevertheless she is a part of it, mostly to amuse herself. She and Roark fall passionately in love after which her actions are truly bizarre. I can understand them but at the same time not fully appreciate them. Maybe it’s an indication of my incomplete understanding of the book and/or Dominique’s character. She realizes that the world is going to conspire to destroy Roark and she decides to destroy herself first. To suffer. She marries Peter Keating and later Gail Wynand. And it is after many years and many pages that they are together again, after winning their battles with the world and with themselves, as two complete individuals.

Howard Roark had a curious effect on the people he met. It was natural for Dominique and him to fall in love; they saw man and the world in similar ways. Most people however felt extreme discomfort in Roark’s presence. Peter Keating for instance, who was always intimidated by Roark’s natural talent and assertiveness, experiences the following on one occasion: His eyes moved heavily over the room, over Roark’s body. He thought, it’s not intentional, not just to hurt me, he can’t help it, he doesn’t even know it, that look of a creature glad to be alive. And he realized that he had never actually believed that any living thing could be glad of the gift of existence. Ellsworth Toohey in the end confesses that all he wished was to destroy Roark and the likes of him, for he represented the kind of soul that cannot be conquered. I don’t want to kill him. I want him in jail. You understand? In jail. In a cell. Behind bars. Locked, stopped, strapped – and alive. He’ll get up when they tell him to. He’ll eat what they give him … He’ll take orders. He’ll take orders! One could say that Gail Wynand found his match in Roark. He respected Roark immensely; he saw in him something of what he might have wanted to be. He could not buy Roark’s integrity. They made great friends. Wynand found with Roark and Dominique (his wife then) all happiness.

The construction of the Cortlandt Homes is the acid test. Of everything – Roark’s integrity, Wynand’s power, Toohey’s brainwashing, Keating’s strength, Dominique’s endurance and the reader’s take on the entire philosophy. Keating gets the commission for the Cortlandt Homes, but knows that Roark is the only one who can do justice to its design. He doesn’t trust himself anymore. Roark accepts to design it for Keating for the pure pleasure of doing work that is exactly cut-out for him, for no money, but the condition that it will be erected precisely as he designs it. Not surprisingly, Keating does not possess the strength to go through with the entire deal; the building is erected, but with changes suggested by other architects. Roark cannot accept this, on moral grounds. He blows up the building. Wynand and Toohey pull together all their powers in response to this. The former to save Roark and the latter to jail him. Both fail. Wynand discovers that all his clout is not enough. The one time when his papers are saying what he wants them to say, there is no one to listen, no one to understand. No one to appreciate the real integrity of his soul. His empire nearly collapses. The Banner fails him. He discovers the truth of what Roark was afraid to tell him: the worst second-hander of all is the man who goes after power. Toohey fails too. Because the jury acquits Roark. In his well-worded defense Roark states that he destroyed the building because it had been mutilated by second-handers in a collective action they had no right to. He had erected the building and he had chosen to destroy it. The love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an unessential ... The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing … the integrity of a man’s creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who’re destroying the world.

I don’t agree with all of it. I don’t agree with Roark’s philosophy of no collaborations and no compromise. Because I cannot picture a world without them. A world where every man works alone and does not compromise to make space for another. It would be unreal. Maybe my life is second-hand too. But maybe second-hand lives must exist? Is there enough competence in every individual and enough opportunity in the world for each to be led by his ego, to be self-sufficient?

And then there are parts of the book where I found myself agreeing entirely with the philosophy. Like I said, one part of your mind quarrels with the other. The following to me seemed like the essence of the book. Dominique to Keating, when he blames her of not having given any part of herself to their marriage or their home: My real soul, Peter? It’s real only when it’s independent. You’ve discovered that, haven’t you? It’s real only when it chooses curtains and desserts – you’re right about that – curtains and desserts and religions Peter, and the shapes of buildings. But you’ve never wanted that. You wanted a mirror. People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they’re reflecting too. You know, the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. Usually in the more vulgar kind of hotels. Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No centre and no purpose.

Towards the end of the book my heart went out to Keating. Shockingly for me, in 694 pages I cried only this once, when a helpless Keating shows his paintings to Roark. This was his first attempt at original work, an endeavor to discover his private passion for painting which he had always ignored. Roark feels sick with pity and tells Peter that it was too late. Peter Keating, a true victim of Toohey’s murder of souls, eventually disappears from the world’s eye into a corner of his house, capable and confident of nothing.

Wynand is deeply in love with Dominique. He never tries to destroy her integrity because to him love is exception-making and I find myself agreeing. He loses a part of himself when he finds out about Dominique and Roark. He still wants Roark to design his buildings but to have nothing to do with him. His empire survives somehow, though it’s not the same. He triumphs over Toohey by shutting down the Banner just when Toohey was convinced that he finally ruled the souls of all its readers and employees.

What truly survives in the end, as the last line of the book says, is Howard Roark. His figure silhouetted against the New York skyline symbolizes the potential of the human hand.

“Look, Gail.” Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. “Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life.”

“Your strength?”

“Your work.” He tossed the branch aside. “The material the earth offers you and what you make if it…”

To Ayn Rand, Howard Roark is a man as a man should be. Is he? In all senses? He is earth’s gift to mankind and mankind’s gift to earth. But if Howard Roark cannot work in a collective, if he refuses to lead anyone, if everyone must be self-driven and self-satisfied, will the world be as the world should be? I don’t know. Does anyone?