Book review: Fountainhead
Ayn Rand loved the Great Men - as long as they are Great in her preferred way
Ayn Rand might still not be all that well-known in Finland, but she’s certainly worth taking into account when analyzing developments in the American, and thus global, society.
I recently finished reading Rand’s second-most-famous novel, Fountainhead. I’ve tried reading the book before, previously only making it probably halfway through. However, I have read her other major works of fiction - Atlas Shrugged, the short story Anthem - and some of Rand’s non-fiction works, and also a (Finnish-only, non-translated) analysis of Rand’s worldview. Thus, I have some idea of where Rand comes from.
Atlas Shrugged was, even at my younger and less-distracted years, a chore to make through, full of uninteresting events and characters that simply were too… unreal to keep my interest. Fountainhead, while having a lot of the same features, was quite a bit easier, though I still felt one could easily take 100, maybe 200, pages out without the book suffering much.
Recap
A short recap follows. The main character, Howard Roark, has been expelled from an architectural school, while his roommate Peter Keating graduates with high marks. Roark designs buildings in the modernist style (the book is written in 1930s, when modernism was having its breakthrough moment) and accepts absolutely no compromises to his vision. Keating, who does not really like architecture and only aims to please his mother and everyone else, designs in the socially-preferred classical architectural style.
While Keating gets a plum job at classical architecture designer Guy Francon’s big company, Roark only manages to get hired by similarly-uncompromising struggling alcoholic architect Henry Cameron. Guy Francon’s daughter Dominique is an architectural columnist in New York Banner, owned by high-flying businessman Gail Wynand, who runs it as the worst yellow paper in the city. Alongside Dominique, the paper hosts socialist columnist Ellsworth Toohey, who preaches altruism and collectivism.
After Cameron retires, Roark works at other companies, including Francon’s, but soon quits due to his individualist and modernist principles. He ends up working in Guy Francon’s offstate quarry, which is visited by Dominique. Howard and Dominique engage in flirting, culminating in Howard… well, the book itself calls what he does to Dominique “rape”, though the author is also intent in demonstrating that actually Dominique wanted it all along. What can I say, the book was written in the 1930s and the author clearly had a kink.
Anyway, Howard eventually returns to architecture and starts getting projects. Dominique, who is angry about how the world isn’t ready for Howard’s greatness, attacks his work in her column, while conducting a secret affair with him. Eventually, Toohey, who also wants to destroy Roark, engages in a complex plot to have him design a temple and then have the temple’s orderer sue him for breach of contract. Roark goes to trial and Dominique and Peter testify against him, expect Dominique’s testimony comes off more like praise disguised as condemnation. Roark loses, but starts getting an increasing amount of jobs.
Dominique eventually marries Peter, whom she obviously hates, out of masochism since the world is treating Roark so bad. Eventually Peter, who is flying high on his architectural career due to his brownnosing and also because Roark keeps secretly aiding him in important commissions for, well, reasons, pimps his wife to Gail Wynand, only for Dominique to end up marrying Wynand instead. Wynand ends up discovering he likes Roark’s architectural style, and the two have a bromance. Meanwhile, Toohey boasts how his socialism and altruism are only about him wanting power and how he’s trying to snatch Wynand’s paper from him.
Washed-up and suffering Peter Keating ends up asking for Howard’s help one last time for Cortlandt Building, a huge public housing project. Howard, being an individualist, hates public housing, but still agrees on the condition that Peter ensures no changes are made to his vision. Peter fails, and Howard ends up dynamiting the finished building due to alterations made by others.
The press, led by Toohey, attacks him, and eventually even his friend Wynand succumbs to the pressure and joins the rest of them. In his trial, Roark offers a grand speech on human greatness and the dangers of being a “second-hander” who relies on the others. He wins his case, marries Dominique, gets his dream job in designing one last great building for Wynand, who sells his company, and Toohey’s plans for getting more power fail.
The characters, and their oddities
Now, even from this summary, one might deduce that huge sections the book’s plot make little sense and the characters behave in very odd ways. There’s a reason for this. Like Atlas Shrugged, Fountainhead makes no bones about how it is primarily a vehicle for Rand to espouse her worldview through her fiction. The characters aren’t meant to be real people. They’re meat-puppets.
However, oftentimes they don’t even really work in this function, creating a jarring effect. For instance, Dominique Francon is supposed to be a complex character, but mainly just comes off as weird and flighty, the sort of a figure whose supposed appreciation of human spirit and disgust at the world not managing to meet her expectations are just expressions of randomness, the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Also another point: the infamous rape scene relies on author to give us a glimpse into the head of a character to let us know that something that would *look* bad from the outside is actually something that a character's motivations and thoughts make... well, less bad, at least, if we know them. But, of course, normally outside of fiction, we don't know those thoughts.
However, that's not even the biggest instance of such telepathy. in the book. One might consider how, in the world described by Rand, the culmination of the book, ie. Roark blowing up the Cortlandt building, must have seemed to literally any other person in the universe of the story.
Since nobody outside of the book's main characters either knows or could in any way have known that it was actually Roark who designed the building, it can't have appeared as anything but almost completely unmotivated case of mental illness and envy, and Wynand's decision to back Roark likewise. When Wynand's board of directors tells Wynand to stop this quixotic crusade, they are behaving completely and fully rationally and doing what needs to be done to keep the business running.
Of course, the particular point of inspiration is the main character himself, Howard Roark. Beyond his architectural chops and individualist attitude, there’s not that much to him. At the beginning of the book he actually almost comes off as being on the spectrum, though this develops a bit towards the end. This might also reflect Rand’s writer skills simply developing throughout the book.
Still, the middle part of the book is a bit of a chore, with architecture largely in the background and actually interesting characters like Wynand and Toohey largely out of the game. Instead, there’s marriages and human drama, putting the most annoying characters, Peter Keating, Dominique Francon, to the foreground.
Peter Keating is particularly insufferable. That’s obviously something that comes from his role in the book as the ultimate personal manifestation of a “second-hander” who relies on the opinions of the others to guide his life. At least in the start of the book it is indeed somewhat easy to sympathize with him, trying to make do with the fact that he has to live with his weirdo friend's strange behavior.
However, the writer pulls all the steps she can to make this everyman unsympathetic, from the words used to describe him and his actions to the extensive recounting of his pathetic motivations, to his maltreatment of his pre-Dominique girlfriend Catherine Halsey. It’s not easy to keep reading about a character by an author who conducts a vendetta against her own creation on these pages.
One reason why I found Atlas Shrugged so hard to read in general was how the villains were a bunch of Peter Keatings. Ellsworth Toohey is more interesting than them because he’s actually the one character in the book who seems to be downright enjoying himself. Even if Toohey suffers setbacks and, at a pivotal scene, gets told off by Roark, he still doesn’t really seem to be ashamed at all about what he does and even enjoys it, including his hammy stock-villain-level bragging about his evil plans. His plan to take over the Wynand papers fails, but his career continues.
Of course, a part of why Rand’s “gimme” here can work at all is Wynand himself. Wynand steals the scene at the minute he saunters on the pages, with his backstory and such actually representing a moment when Rand manages to do some actual good writing by anyone’s standards. That’s probably because he’s something rare for Rand, an actual two-dimensional character among the meat-puppets.
Rand’s Promethean visions
So, it’s not meant to be a character study and it’s not meant to be realism - it’s a vehicle for Rand’s worldview. It’s, as one might guess, a worldview I disagree with; I consider Rand somewhere between malign influence on society and a real-life thought experiment on what you’d get if you just took Marxism and turned a lot of various things on their head. A pro-capitalist Marx, so to say, one who thinks its the bosses who need to unionize instead of the workers.
Still, the pro-capitalist, most right-wing-adjacent part of Rand’s worldview largely takes a backseat in Fountainhead, apart from some disses thrown at socialism. These are blink-and-miss, especially if one is not aware of Rand's status as a pro-capitalist favorite.
Sure, there's heroic businessmen in the book, but there's also bad guy businessmen (as there are in Atlas Shrugged - for all her love of capitalism, Rand often didn’t like capitalists too much), and Roark’s a working class guy who explicitly is not in it for the money, compared to Keating, for instance. The big bad Toohey is constantly refers to altruism and the common man and the little guy etc. but secretly doesn't care at all about that stuff and just wants power and wants to manipulate people - but that is a familiar archetype to many left-wingers, both in fiction and in real life.
Fundamentally, though, Fountainhead is a book about architecture and big buildings. Moreso it’s about about the people Toohey wants to tear down – it is about individual greatness, especially in Great Men, and Promethean love of those Great Men leaving their mark on the world.
Indeed, this Promethean attitude was quintessential to the 30s; it was very much a part of the New Deal atmosphere, as well as various totalitarian projects. These days such a feeling is tapped by disparate sources, from People’s Republic of China to YIMBYs to Elon Musk to the LaRouche movement.
The 1930s were a peak time for belief that not only is unbridled progress good, it’s primarily characterized by human ability to build huge things and reach for the stars. Before that, the capacities to do so were quite limited, afterwards, the environmental movement and general progress malaise put a damper on grandiose visions.
There are still people, even environmentalists, who love big projects, but there seems to be some requirement to justify how they fit in with the idea of environmental crisis; “sure, we’re building skyscrapers, but the idea is that if we fit more people in these cities then we won’t have to cut forests to build suburbs” and so on.
It’s not difficult to connect Rand’s visions to her personal development as an immigrant fleeing the Russian Revolution to America. Her encounter with the New York skyline on the ship to America comes off as a quasi-religious experience. What strange (atheist) God can have created such magnificence? The great men she had already been fixated on since her childhood - and capitalism, the American system! And everything flows from there.
Rand and architecture
Rand’s visions of progress are not just related to big buildings but a specific style, ie. modernism. Many heavy-handed disses of architects designing in classical styles pepper the book. It’s ironic that Donald Trump has praised Fountainhead and compared himself to Roark, considering his most famous architecture-related actual act was to make all new federal construction follow classical architectural rules. It seems exactly the sort of a bill that would have sent actual Ayn Rand into a frothing rage.
Of course, there’s a reason why Trump would try to go classical. There’s a rich tradition of conservative anti-modernist criticism in saying that, in particular, architects like Le Corbusier has basically ruined our cities and the entire Western Civilization.
I’m not sure that Rand ever commented on Le Corbusier – her architectural idol was another modernist, Frank Lloyd Wright, and even the book itself contains indications she certainly didn’t like *all* modernist architecture. I actually asked the author of the Finnish Rand study linked in the first paragraph about this, and apparently Le Corbusier himself was interested in Rand, and his girlfriend even moved in the same Hollywoord circles!
However, there’s more to her possible influence than just her love of a certain style. The idea of an architect as a city-molding, world-conquering hero, building auteur whose job is to compose buildings in the way required by function and beauty no matter what (moronic) customers or tradition might require, which is straight-out Le Corbusier. This isn’t a fresh observation, either.
The spread of such ideas in architectural circles, inevitably leading to designs the public dislikes becoming lionized as an expression of the architect's auteurship and detachments from the requirements and fancies of the plebs. I’ve certainly seen architects who defend styles that the public dislikes in precisely such a fashion, including ones with ideologies directly contrary to Rand’s visions otherwise. I haven’t seen indications whether these architects have read the Fountainhead or not, though of course it doesn’t need to be to be an influence.
Apparently Fountainhead had a certain effect on architectural schools, and their students. While googling, I came across several other sources referring to Fountainhead as a book actually influencing and inspiring architects and architectural students, for better or for worse, and also some instances of architecture websites including the movie in their must-watch list for architects.
The book’s appeal - such as it is
However, it’s easy to see that such a celebration of individualist attitude and being so uncompromising about alterations to your work you would even commit acts of terrorism to prevent altered work from being presented might appeal to others. It’s also easier to see the appeal to, say, the various celebrities who have praised Rand.
You should always believe in what you do, ignore the haters and not rely on the opinions of others. Such a vision is appealing to many people in the creative field who feel that they’re under constant pressure of opinion of others - other creatives, critics, agents, public - and that their true talent as themselves doesn’t get out. That sort of thing is also grist for the modern girlboss mythmaking.
Likewise, it’s easy to see how the book might even appeal to people of a progressive, though not necessarily left-wing, type. It’s a rekindling of an old vision of material progress that still appeals to many, even in an age when the believers to such progress are in actuality getting rarer and rarer.
To Rand, though, Roark’s greatness is not just in doing what he wants, but in doing specifically what he wants the way Rand wants, not just designing buildings but designing them in Rand’s specific preferred style. And that’s probably one of the biggest crutches about the book. Rand wants everyone to be an individualist - but individualist in precisely the way she prefers. And maybe that’s one of the reason why it has been so easy for many - like conservative writer Whittaker Chambers - to see that behind her libertarian influence there’s an authoritarian strain struggling to get out.
3/5 , won’t probably read again, may attempt a reread of Atlas Shrugged at some point to see if this gives me some new insight. Then again, might not.
Image link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ayn_Rand#/media/File:Ayn_Rand_(1957_Phyllis_Cerf_portrait).jpg (according to Wikimedia, the image is in public domain)