Archive | March 7, 2014

Many of the characters in The Fountainhead are based, sort of, on real-life models. I say “sort of” because it is generally not the personality or biography but the work and social role that is grounded in a real-life model. For example, Howard Roark and Gail Wynand do not resemble Frank Lloyd Wright and William Randolph Hearst, respectively, in their personal character or the details of their career (Hearst, for example, was the son of a wealthy industrialist, while Wynand grew up on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen; and Wynand’s personality owes more to Sienkiewicz’s Petronius, with a sprinkling of Nietzsche); but Roark is the same kind of architect as Wright, and Wynand the same kind of newspaper magnate as Hearst.

The pattern continues with the book’s other characters. Austen Heller, the “star columnist” and “literary critic” with “better manners than the social elite whom he usually mocked” and “a tougher constitution than the laborers whom he usually defended,” and who devotes himself to “the destruction of all forms of compulsion, private or public,” is an obvious nod to Rand’s idol H. L. Mencken, though personally Heller is an Oxford-educated Englishman. Lois Cook’s writing style is a parody of Gertrude Stein, but Cook herself is not especially so. Rand based Ellsworth Toohey’s personality on Harold Laski, but in his work as an architectural critic Toohey is clearly modeled on Lewis Mumford, and his book Sermons in Stone on Mumford’s Sticks and Stones. Ralston Holcombe is based in his architectural project on Thomas Hastings, but Hastings did not, for example, have Holcombe’s “rich white hair … to his shoulders in the sweep of a medieval mane.”

Dominique Francon’s personality is famously based on Rand herself “in a bad mood,” but in her work as an architectural critic Dominique instead mirrors the literary criticism of Rand’s mentor Isabel Paterson. Consider this passage from one of Dominique’s columns:

You enter a magnificent lobby of golden marble and you think that this is the City Hall or the Main Post Office, but it isn’t. It has, however, everything: the mezzanine with the colonnade and the stairway with a goitre and the cartouches in the form of looped leather belts. Only it’s not leather, it’s marble. The dining room has a splendid bronze gate, placed by mistake on the ceiling, in the shape of a trellis entwined with fresh bronze grapes. There are dead ducks and rabbits hanging on the wall panels, in bouquets of carrots, petunias and string beans. I do not think these would have been very attractive if real, but since they are bad plaster imitations, it is all right. …The bedroom windows face a brick wall, not a very neat wall, but nobody needs to see the bedrooms. …The front windows are large enough and admit plenty of light, as well as the feet of the marble cupids that roost on the outside. The cupids are well fed and present a pretty picture to the street, against the severe granite of the façade; they are quite commendable, unless you just can’t stand to look at dimpled soles every time you glance out to see whether it’s raining. If you get tired of it, you can always look out of the central windows of the third floor, and into the cast-iron rump of Mercury who sits on top of the pediment over the entrance. It’s a very beautiful entrance. Tomorrow, we shall visit the home of Mr. and Mrs. Smythe-Pickering. (Fountainhead I.3.)

This arch, ironic tone is not Rand’s customary style of criticism; but it is vintage Paterson.

The character of Roark’s mentor Henry Cameron is closely based on Wright’s mentor Louis Sullivan in his career and architectural ideas, but not especially in his personality. The recent revelation that Rand was a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World has previously led me to speculate that Professor Challenger might have been the model for the personal aspect of Cameron. Here’s a pair of passages to illustrate my hypothesis:

Unlike my previous example, these parallels are not so close as to rule out the possibility of coincidence, but they are at least suggestive.

Challenger in the 1925 adaptation