A life of contempt: Ayn Rand's defining characteristic was hatred--for government, other people, and the very concept of human kindness.

• Author: O'Donnell, Michael
• Position: 'Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right' and 'Ayn Rand and the World She Made' - Book review

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

by Jennifer Burns

Oxford University Press, 384 pp.

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Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

Nan A.Talese, 592 pp.

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I began counting Ayn Rand's uses of the word "contempt" on page 43 of The Fountainhead, by which point it had already appeared four times, and twice on that page. The word shows up thirty-nine times more in the book, by my count, which probably missed at least a couple of deployments. Rand's villains and heroes smile contemptuously, throw back their heads and laugh contemptuously, and deem others too contemptible to be worth addressing. The most indelible image of contempt takes place when the novel's hero rapes its heroine in an act performed "in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest." If that were all, the scene would not be infamous. But the word reappears several sentences later: "the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted."

Disturbing as this man-worshipping desire to be raped is--and it is not Rand's only such scene--the most frequent use of contempt in her fiction is directed not at women but at the public, the masses. As the economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in praise of Rand's other major novel, Atlas Shrugged, "You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you."

Overuse of this angry word is not Rand's only literary tic--her villains and weaklings tend to be fat or effeminate, and she has a fondness for courtroom showdowns. Moreover, critics have so thoroughly savaged her melodramatic, high-camp prose over the years that it seems ungenerous to focus on her writing at the level of the word and the phrase rather than the grand idea. But this particular tic is revealing, for as two new biographies show, Rand herself lived a life of contempt: for people, for ideas, for government, and for the very concept of human kindness. In the most famous (and overheated) denunciation of her work, the finger pointer Whittaker Chambers wrote in National Review that "from almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber--got!" The great irony of Rand's life is that this woman who seemed to despise everyone beneath her became a...