Anthem - Ayn Rand
Epigraph
They existed only to serve the state. They were conceived in controlled Palaces of Mating. They died in the Home of the Useless. From cradle to grave, the crowd was one—the great WE.
In all that was left of humanity there was only one man who dared to think, seek, and love. He, Equality 7-2521, came close to losing his life because his knowledge was regarded as a treacherous blasphemy ... he had rediscovered the lost and holy word—I.
“I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.”
—Ayn Rand
INTRODUCTION
Ayn Rand’s working title for this short novel was Ego. “I used the word in its exact, literal meaning,” she wrote to one correspondent. “I did not mean a symbol of the self—but specifically and actually Man’s Self.”1
Man’s self, Ayn Rand held, is his mind or conceptual faculty, the faculty of reason. All man’s spiritually distinctive attributes derive from this faculty. For instance, it is reason (man’s value judgments) that leads to man’s emotions. And it is reason which possesses volition, the ability to make choices.
But reason is a property of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain.
The term ego combines the above points into a single concept: it designates the mind (and its attributes) considered as an individual possession. The ego, therefore, is that which constitutes the essential identity of a human being. As one dictionary puts it, the ego is “the ‘I’ or self of any person; [it is] a person as thinking, feeling, and willing, and distinguishing itself from the selves of others and from the objects of its thought.”2
It is obvious why Ayn Rand exalts man’s ego. In doing so, she is (implicitly) upholding the central principles of her philosophy and of her heroes: reason, values, volition, individualism. Her villains, by contrast, do not think, judge, and will; they are second-handers, who allow themselves to be run by others. Having renounced their minds, they are, in a literal sense, selfless.
How does this novella about man’s ego, first published in England in 1938, relate to The Fountainhead (1943)? Anthem, Miss Rand wrote in 1946, is like “the preliminary sketches which artists draw for their future big canvases. I wrote [Anthem] while working on The Fountainhead—it has the same theme, spirit and intention, although in quite a different form.”3
One correspondent at the time warned Miss Rand that there are people for whom the word ego is “too strong—even, immoral.” She replied: “Why, of course there are. Against whom do you suppose the book was written?”4
Although the word ego remains essential to the text, the title was changed to Anthem for publication. This was not an attempt to soften the book; it was a step that Ayn Rand took on every novel. Her working titles were invariably blunt and unemotional, naming explicitly, for her own clarity, the central issue of the book; such titles tend to give away to the reader too much too soon and too dryly. Her final titles still pertain to the central issue, but in an indirect and evocative way; they intrigue and even touch the reader while leaving him to discover for himself the book’s meaning. (As another example, The Strike became in due course Atlas Shrugged.)
The present novel, in Miss Rand’s mind, was from the outset an ode to man’s ego. It was not difficult, therefore, to change the working title: to move from “ego” to “ode” or “anthem,” leaving the object celebrated by the ode to be discovered by the reader. “The last two chapters,” Miss Rand writes in a letter, “are the actual anthem.”5 The rest is the build-up to it.
There is another reason, I think, for the choice of anthem (as against “ode,” say, or “celebration”). Anthem is a religiously toned word; its second definition is “a piece of sacred vocal music, usually with words taken from the Scriptures.”6 This does not mean that Ayn Rand conceived her book as religious. The opposite is true.
Ayn Rand explains the point in her Introduction to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition of The Fountainhead. Protesting religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics, she writes, in part:
Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. “Reverence” means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. “Sacred” means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.
But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal....
It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.
It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man-worship.7
For the same reason, Ayn Rand chose the esthetic-moral concept “anthem” for her present title. In doing so, she was not surrendering to mysticism, but waging war against it. She was claiming for man and his ego the sacred respect that is actually due not to Heaven, but to life on earth. An “anthem to the ego” is blasphemy to the pious, because it implies that reverence pertains not to God, but to man and, above all, to that fundamental and inherently selfish thing within him that enables him to deal with reality and survive.
There have been plenty of egoists in human history, and there have been plenty of worshipers, too. The egoists were generally cynical “realists” (à la Hobbes), who despised morality; the worshipers, by their own statement, were out of this world. Their clash was an instance of the fact-value dichotomy, which has plagued Western philosophy for many centuries, making facts seem meaningless and values baseless. Ayn Rand’s concept of an “anthem to the ego” throws out this vicious dichotomy. Her Objectivist philosophy integrates facts with values—in this instance, the actual nature of man with an exalted and secular admiration for it.
The genre of Anthem is determined by its theme. As an anthem, or hymn of praise, the novel is not typical of Ayn Rand in form or in style (although it is typical in content). As Miss Rand has said, Anthem has a story, but not a plot, i.e., not a progression of events leading inexorably to an action-climax and a resolution. The closest thing to a climax in Anthem, the hero’s discovery of the word I, is not an existential action, but an internal event, a process of cognition—which is, besides, partly accidental (it is not fully necessitated by the earlier events of the story).8
Similarly, Anthem does not exemplify Ayn Rand’s usual artistic approach, which she called “Romantic Realism.” In contrast to her other novels, there is no realistic, contemporary background and relatively little attempt to re-create perceptual, conversational, or psychological detail; the story is set in a remote, primitive future and told in the simple, quasi-biblical terms that befit such a time and world. To Cecil B. De Mille, Ayn Rand described the book as a “dramatic fantasy.”9 To Rose Wilder Lane, in answer to a question, she classified it officially as a “poem.”10
She held the same view of the book in regard to its adaptation to other media. To Walt Disney, she wrote in 1946 that if a screen version were possible, “I would like to see it done in stylized drawings, rather than with living actors.”11
Then—in the mid-1960s, as I recall—she received a request from Rudolf Nureyev, who wanted to create a ballet based on Anthem. Ordinarily, Miss Rand turned down requests of this kind. But because of the special nature of Anthem (and because of her admiration for Nureyev’s dancing), she was enthusiastically in favor of his idea. (Unfortunately, neither a movie nor a ballet ever materialized.)
The point is that animation or ballet can capture a fantasy—but not Soviet Russia or the struggles of Roark or the strike of the men of the mind.
Anthem was initially conceived in the early 1920s (or perhaps a bit earlier) as a play. At the time, Ayn Rand was a teenager in Soviet Russia. Some forty years later, she discussed the work’s development with an interviewer.
It was to be a play about a collectivist society of the future in which they lost the word “I.” They were all calling each other “we” and it was worked out as much more of a story. There were many characters. It was to be four acts, I think. One of the things I remember about it is that the characters couldn’t stand the society. Once in a while, someone would scream and go insane in the middle of one of their collective meetings. The only touch of this left is the people who scream at night.12
The play was not specifically anti-Russian:
I wasn’t taking my revenge on my background. Because if it were that I would have been writing stories laid in Russia or projecting them. It was my intention to wipe out that kind of world totally; I mean I wouldn’t want to include Russia or have anything to do with it. My feeling toward Russia at that time was simply an intensified feeling that I’ve had from childhood and from before the revolutions. I felt that this was so mystical, depraved, rotten a country that I wasn’t surprised that they got a Communist ideology—and I felt that one has to get out and find the civilized world.13
Ayn Rand got out to the United States in 1926, at the age of twenty-one. But she didn’t think of writing Anthem here—until she read in the Saturday Evening Post a story laid in the future:
It didn’t have any particular theme, only the fact that some kind of war had destroyed civilization, and that there is a last survivor in the ruins of New York who rebuilds something. No particular plot. It was just an adventure story, but what interested me was the fact that it was the first time I saw a fantastic story in print—rather than the folks-next-door sort of serials. What impressed me was the fact that they would publish such a story. And so I thought that if they didn’t mind fantasy, I would like to try Anthem.
I was working on the plot of The Fountainhead at that time, which was the worst part of any of my struggles. There was nothing I could do except sit and think—which was miserable. I was doing architectural research, but there was no writing I could do yet, and I had to take time off once in a while to write something. So I wrote Anthem that summer of 1937.14
What followed was a long struggle to get it published—not a struggle in England, where it was published at once, but in America, where intellectuals, intoxicated by Communism, were at the height (or nadir) of the Red Decade:
I intended Anthem at first as a magazine story or serial ... but I think my agent said it would not be for the magazines, and she was probably right. Or if she tried them, she didn’t succeed. She told me that it should be published as a book, which I hadn’t thought of. She submitted it simultaneously to Macmillan in America, who had published We The Living and whom I had not left yet, and to the English publisher Cassell. Cassell accepted it immediately; the owner said he was not sure whether it would sell but it was beautiful, and he appreciated it literarily, and he wanted to publish it. Macmillan turned it down; their comment was: the author does not understand socialism.15
For the next eight years, nothing was done about Anthem in the United States. Then, in 1945, Leonard Read of Pamphleteers, a small conservative outfit in Los Angeles that published nonfiction essays, decided that Anthem had to have an American audience; Read brought it out as a pamphlet in 1946. Another conservative house with a meager audience, Caxton, took the book over as a hardcover in 1953. At last, in 1961, about a quarter of a century after it had been written, New American Library issued it as a mass-market paperback.
By such agonizingly drawn-out steps, the country of individualism was finally allowed to discover Ayn Rand’s novel of individualism. Anthem has now sold nearly 2.5 million copies.
For the first American edition, Ayn Rand rewrote the book. “I have edited [the story] for this publication,” she said in her 1946 Foreword, “but have confined the editing to its style.... No idea or incident was added or omitted.... The story remains as it was. I have lifted its face, but not its spine or spirit; these did not need lifting.”16
Until her late thirties, when she had mastered English and finished writing The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand was not completely satisfied with her command of style. One problem was a degree of overwriting in her earlier work; she was still uncertain at times, she told me once, as to when a point (or an emotion) had been communicated fully and objectively. After 1943, when she was an assured professional both in art and in English, she went back to Anthem and (later) to We The Living, and revised them in accordance with her mature knowledge.
In editing Anthem, she said years later, her main concerns were:
Precision, clarity, brevity, and eliminating any editorial or slightly purple adjectives. You see, the attempt to have that semi-archaic style was very difficult. Some of the passages were exaggerated. In effect, I was sacrificing content for style—in some places, simply because I didn’t know how to say it. By the time I rewrote it after The Fountainhead, I was in full control of my style and I knew how to achieve the same effect, but by simple and direct means, without getting too biblical.17
For those who want some idea of how in their own work to achieve “precision, clarity, brevity”—and, I might add, beauty, the beauty of a perfect marriage between sound and meaning—I am including as an Appendix to this edition a facsimile of the original British edition of Anthem, with Ayn Rand’s editorial changes for the American edition written on each page in her own hand. If (ignoring the concrete issue of biblical style) you study her changes and ask “Why?” as you proceed, there is virtually no limit to what you can learn about writing—Ayn Rand’s or your own.
Ayn Rand learned a great deal about her art (and about much else, including the applications of her philosophy) during the years of her hard-thinking life. But in essence and as a person, she was immutable. The child who imagined Anthem in Russia had the same soul as the woman who edited it nearly thirty years later—and who was still proud of it thirty-five years after that.
A small example of Ayn Rand’s constancy can be found in a publicity form she had to fill out for We The Living in 1936, a year before she wrote Anthem. The form asked authors to state their own philosophy. Her answer, at the age of thirty-one, begins: “To make my life a reason unto itself. I know what I want up to the age of two hundred. Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities....”18
When I come across such characteristic Ayn Rand entries dating as early as 1936 (and even earlier), I think irresistibly of a comment made about Roark by his friend Austen Heller:
I often think that he’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean he won’t die someday. But he’s living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes.... They change, they deny, they contradict—and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out of an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard—one can imagine him existing forever.19
One can imagine it of Ayn Rand, too. She herself was immortal in the above sense—and she achieved fame, besides. I expect her works, therefore, to live as long as civilization does. Perhaps, like Aristotle’s Logic, they will even survive another Dark Ages, if and when it comes.
Anthem, in any event, has lived—and I am happy to have had the opportunity to introduce its fiftieth anniversary edition in America.
Some of you reading my words will be here to celebrate its hundredth anniversary. As an atheist, I cannot ask you to “keep the faith” in years to come. What I ask instead is: Hold on to reason.
Or, in the style of Anthem: Love thine Ego as thyself. Because that’s what it is.
—Leonard Peikoff
Irvine, California
October 1994
NOTES
1 Letter to Richard de Mille, November, 1946.
2 Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition, 1968.
3 Letter to Lorine Pruette, September, 1946.
4 Letter to Richard de Mille, November, 1946.
5 Letter to Lorine Pruette, October, 1946.
6 Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition, 1968.
7 Miss Rand’s Introduction to 25th Anniversary Edition of The Fountainhead, p. ix, paperback.
8 Personal communication.
9 Letter to Cecil B. De Mille, September, 1946.
10 Letter to Rose Wilder Lane, July, 1946.
11 Letter to Walt Disney, September, 1946.
12 Recorded biographical interviews, 1960-61.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Foreword, 1946 edition of Anthem, p. v.
17 Recorded biographical interviews, 1960-61.
18 A Candid Camera of Ayn Rand, June, 1936.
19 The Fountainhead, p. 453 paperback.