- Rand, Ayn.
Ideal.
New York: New American Library, 2015.
ISBN 978-0-451-47317-2.
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In 1934, the 29 year old Ayn Rand was trying to establish
herself in Hollywood. She had worked as a junior screenwriter
and wardrobe person, but had not yet landed a major writing
assignment. She wrote Ideal on speculation,
completing the 32,000 word novella and then deciding it would
work better as a stage play. She set the novella aside and
finished the play version in 1936. The novella was never
published nor was the play produced during her lifetime. After
her death in 1982, the play was posthumously published in the
anthology
The Early Ayn Rand, but
the novella remained largely unknown until this edition,
which includes both it and the play, was published in 2015.
Ideal is the story of movie idol Kay Gonda, a
beautiful and mysterious actress said to have been modeled
on Greta Garbo. The night before the story begins, Gonda
had dinner alone with oil baron Granton Sayers, whose company,
it was rumoured, was on the brink of ruin in the depths of
the Depression. Afterwards, Sayers was found in his
mansion dead of a gunshot wound, and Gonda was nowhere to
be found. Rumours swirled through the press that Gonda was
wanted for murder, but there was a blackout of information
which drove the press and her studio near madness. Her
private secretary said that she had not seen Gonda since she
left for the dinner, but that six pieces of her fan mail were
missing from her office at the studio, so she assumed that
Gonda must have returned and taken them.
The story then describes six episodes in which the fugitive Kay
Gonda shows up, unannounced, at the homes of six of her fans,
all of whom expressed their utter devotion to her in their
letters. Five of the six—a henpecked manager of a canning
company, an ageing retiree about to lose the house in which he
raised his children, an artist who paints only canvases of Ms
Gonda who has just won first prize in an important exhibition,
an evangelist whose temple faces serious competition from the
upstart Church of the Cheery Corner, and a dissipated playboy at
the end of his financial rope—end up betraying the idol to
whom they took pen to paper to express their devotion when
confronted with the human being in the flesh and the constraints
of the real world. The sixth fan, Johnnie Dawes, who has
struggled to keep a job and roof over his head all his adult
life, sees in Kay Gonda an opportunity to touch a perfection he
had never hoped to experience in his life and devises a
desperate plan to save Gonda from her fate.
A surprise ending reveals that much the reader has assumed is
not what really happened, and that while Kay Gonda never once
explicitly lied, neither did she prevent those to whom she
spoke from jumping to the wrong conclusions.
This is very minor Ayn Rand. You can see some of the story
telling skills which would characterise her later work
beginning to develop, but the story has no plot: it is a
morality tale presented in unconnected episodes, and the
reader is left to draw the moral on his or her own. Given
that the author was a struggling screenwriter in an intensely
competitive Hollywood, the shallowness and phoniness of
the film business is much on display here, although not so
explicitly skewered as the later Ayn Rand might have done.
The message is one of “skin in the game”—people
can only be judged by what they do when confronted
by difficult situations, not by what they say when words are
cheap.
It is interesting to compare the play to the novella. The
stories are clearly related, but Rand swaps out one of the
fans, the elderly man, for a young, idealistic, impecunious,
and totally phoney Communist activist. The play was written
in 1936, the same year as
We the Living, and
perhaps the opportunity to mock pathetic Hollywood
Bolsheviks was too great to pass by.
This book will mostly be of interest to those who have read Ayn
Rand's later work and are curious to read some of the first
fiction she ever wrote. Frankly, it isn't very good, and an
indication of this is that Ayn Rand, whose reputation later in
life would have made it easy to arrange publication for this
work, chose to leave it in the trunk all her life. But she did
not destroy the manuscript, so there must have been some affection
for it.
August 2018 