We the Living (81 page)

The third choice is that of Kira—to flee abroad. In real life the attempt to flee might well be successful, as it was in AR’s own case. In the context of the novel, however, Kira had to die in the attempt. If the book’s theme is the fate of the living under the rule of killers, there is no place for the accident of escape. The essence of such a political system is destruction, whether the individual is within the borders or trying to run across them.

In her journal AR summarized, in characterological terms, the three forms of destruction depicted in the novel: “The higher and stronger individual is broken, but not conquered; she falls on the battlefield, still the same individual, untouched:
Kira.
The one with less resistance is broken and conquered; he disintegrates under an unbearable strain:
Leo.
And the best of those who believed in the ideal is broken by the realization of what that ideal really means:
Andrei.
”

AR finished
We the Living
in 1933. The principal reaction of the manuscript’s early readers, she wrote in a 1934 letter, “is one of complete amazement at the revelation of Soviet life as it is actually lived.”
⁴
Almost sixty years later, I cannot resist adding, the grandchildren of such readers were still being amazed by Soviet life, this time as they watched it lead to the collapse of the entire Soviet structure.

AR knew that the American public did not understand the nature of communism, but she did not know that she was trying to publish the truth at the start of the Red Decade, as it was later called. An anti-communist librarian had told her, when she was still working on the novel, that “the communists have a tremendous influence” on American intellectuals, “and you will find a lot of people opposing you.” “I was indignant,” AR recalled years later. “I didn’t believe her. I thought that she is a typical Russian and is, in effect, panic mongering.”
⁵

For nearly three years,
We the Living
was rejected by New York publishers. It was rejected by more than a dozen houses. A typical rejection said that the author did not understand socialism. Gradually, AR came to see how accurate the librarian had been. By 1936, she herself was writing to a friend that “New York is full of people sold bodies and souls to the Soviets.”
⁶

At last the book came to Macmillan, whose editorial board was divided about it. One of the associate editors, who fought against the book “violently” (AR’s word), was Granville Hicks. Several years later, Hicks admitted publicly that he had been a member of the Communist Party. After a bitter struggle Hicks was overruled by the owner of the company, an elderly gentleman who said that he did not know whether the book would make any money, but that it was important and ought to be published. (It is instructive to note that in 1957, the
New York Times
chose the same man, Granville Hicks, to review
Atlas Shrugged
for the Sunday
Book Review
.)

We the Living
did poorly at first. A year after publication, however, in 1937, thanks to word of mouth, the novel started to take off. But it was too late: Macmillan had set the book from type, not plates, and had destroyed the type in the first months. As a result, while the book was achieving great success in England, Denmark, and Italy, it went out of print in America, and had to wait a quarter of a century to reach its audience. In 1958, after the triumph of
Atlas Shrugged
, a new American edition was finally brought out by Random House; a year later, a mass-market paperback was published by New American Library.

By now
We the Living
has sold over three million copies in the United States. To bring the book to a wider audience, AR in 1939 turned it into a play, which opened on Broadway under the title of
The Unconquered
. She did not think the book was “proper stage material,” she said later, but she tried her best to adapt it—under impossible circumstances, with a producer (George Abbott) who fought her every step of the way, and a country full of acting talents afraid to come near anything so controversial. One famous actress, Bette Davis, read the script and declared that she loved it and would be honored to play the part of Kira. Her agent forbade her to do it, on the grounds that such an anti-communist role would destroy her career. This is a small indication of the country’s intellectual state at the time—and of what AR was up against. The play closed after five performances.

As to the pirated Italian movie of it, AR finally got hold of it some twenty years after its original release. Apart from a few scenes, she was very favorably impressed; she regarded Alida Valli in particular as ideal casting. Under her supervision, the two parts were condensed into a single, tightly focused three-hour film. In 1986 (four years after her death) the new version, in black-and-white with English subtitles, was finally completed and began a successful run in the U.S. In my own opinion, the movie is superior to the much more famous Hollywood movie of
The Fountainhead
.
^a

In 1934, two years before the book was published, AR showed the manuscript to H. L. Mencken, the well-known individualist, who liked it. Thanking him for his interest, AR wrote back on July 28:

Do we know it yet, even this late? Do we know the nature of a dictatorship as it grows ever more visible in the land of the free? If we do at all, it is thanks in large part to the works of Ayn Rand.

 

—Leonard Peikoff
Irvine, California
December, 2008

 

NOTES

1
Letter to Jean Wick, March 1934.

2
Recorded biographical interviews, 1960
-
61.

3
Screen treatment for
We the Living
, 1947.

4
Letter to Jean Wick, October 1934.

5
Recorded biographical interviews, 1960
-
61.

6
Letter to Gouverneur Morris, April 1936.