The childhood of Ayn Rand: some very familiar features

We may not be as unique, unusual or individual as we thnk we are.

I have seen many examples online of people saying such things as, “I could have written that myself” and, “Are you me?” and, “That is a perfect description of MY mother.” They seem surprised to find that there are others out there who are just like them or who have had exactly the same experiences.

I have been reading about the early life of Ayn Rand. Her generation, nationality and family situation are very different from mine, yet much of her early life seems like a description of my early life. Many of her characteristics, views and experiences are very familiar; some of it reminds me of what I have read about the early lives of some writers of interest.

Some basic elements of her personality

In her biography The Passion of Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden tells us that Ayn Rand was not very interested in other children and didn’t fit in with or get on well with them; I was much the same: on the whole, they seemed alien, boring, incomprehensible and sometimes dangerous.

She was very serious and intense, too much so for the liking of her fellow schoolgirls. I was too. She felt that she failed them by not reacting, responding or behaving according to their expectations. Some of us are wired very differently on the inside from the majority of our contemporaries and just cannot fit in with them.

Ayn Rand obtained positive attention from the people around her only because of the qualities of her mind. The only time I got positive attention was when I repeated the ridiculous political ideas that I was force-fed and brainwashed with.

Ayn Rand’s intelligence ‘created a pressure to be fed’. My mind too demanded huge amounts of food and fuel in the form of books and information. I was always hungry for more.

She felt a driving ambition from an early age; I did too.

She was future-oriented from earliest childhood; I was too.

She loathed physical activity; I hated some of it too, although in my case it was not only because organised exercises and games in school seemed pointless but also because I was weakened by being eaten alive by energy vampires. Stella Gibbons too hated being forced to play team games at school; she had no interest in them and didn’t care who won.

Mind, imagination and escape

Ayn Rand invented stories from an early age. She didn’t just create them in her imagination: she also wrote them down and shared them with her spellbound younger sisters.

Barbara Branden tells us that Ayn - 

“experienced the joy of creating a world more interesting than the world around her, of creating purposes more important than the purposes around her, of creating characters more admirable and heroic than the people around her…the fiction writer creates the world as it might be and ought to be.” 

This is a spot-on summary of the way some children see the world and people around them.  It describes the childhood outlook of many fiction writers. Nothing that they encounter in real life coincides with or lives up to their visions and expectations and what they get from books. The excitement and adventure, the colour and glamour that they crave are lacking in their lives so they create some for themselves.

The Brontës and their Juvenilia come immediately to mind.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel, who became a romance writer from the age of 16, escaped from a dreary childhood world and a life that she found unbearable by using her imagination to create a much better life for herself; she wasn’t interested in reading and didn’t use her mind much though.

Another reason for living in an inner world is to escape neglect and ill-treatment, persecution even.

Lucy M. Boston, author of the Green Knowe series and one of six children, says that her mother once told her that she wished she had never had any of them. Ayn Rand’s mother said the same thing to Ayn about her and her two younger sisters. Diana Wynne Jones’s appalling mother had better things to do than care for her three little daughters, who endured severe neglect and emotional abuse.

Diana Wynne Jones and Stella Gibbons invented stories to help their younger siblings forget their unhappy situation. I read to my younger sisters to help make their lives more bearable.

Ayn Rand felt rejected as a person by everyone around her; the life of the mind and imagination provided a means of escape.

I escaped from a bad family situation by using both my mind – for reading, research and learning - and my imagination for creating alternative worlds that were based on the escapist fiction I devoured. If I couldn’t have something in real life, I could have it in my imagination; if I didn’t know any glamorous, heroic people in this world, I could meet them in a fantasy world. I turned to books for the nourishment I needed but wasn’t getting.

Addiction to ideals

Ayn Rand read an adventure story in a boys’ magazine that influenced her for the rest of her life. It was a major turning point. She could remember the details decades later.

She had what she thought of as a love affair with the story; at the age of only nine, she had unbearably intense feelings for Cyrus, the young hero. The whole reality around her lost all meaning. Cyrus was more real to her than the dull people she was imprisoned among. She said:

“For the next three years, Cyrus was my exclusive love. I felt totally out of the concerns or reality of anybody. What they were interested in didn’t matter at all to me, because I knew something much higher…” 

These things can be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, this use of her mind and imagination made her life more bearable; on the other hand, it increased her estrangement from those around her:

“She saw what was possible, they did not; she cared with desperate passion about her new love, they did not…”

People who don’t share our views can seem like a different species, like people from another planet. Actually, we are the ones who perhaps come from another world.

The Cyrus affair is an example of an occupational hazard for very imaginative young girls, some of whom go on to become fiction writers. Something sinister, even something demonic or Luciferian, may be at work here.

Lucy M. Montgomery, author of the Anne of Green Gables series and someone who also felt set apart from other children by her intelligence and greater powers of imagination, was obsessed with and lived inside Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s mystical novel Zanoni: a Rosicrucian Tale. She later said something to the effect that after reading about and becoming in her imagination a companion to the handsome and mysterious wanderer and occultist Zanoni, ordinary men in real life didn’t seem very interesting or exciting.

The young Charlotte Brontë felt the same way about her own creation, the glamorous and dangerous Duke of Zamorna.

For elite eyes only

Ayn Rand felt that whatever reading material she liked belonged to her alone and should only be made available to special, superior people, others of her own kind; she did not like to see people whom she disliked or considered unworthy enjoying something of ‘hers’. They had no right to admire it. She felt very jealous when she learned that a classmate she never particularly liked was receiving the same magazine.

Some people do believe that such masterpieces should be made available only to true worshippers; sacred mysteries should be unveiled only by an initiated and worthy elite. How dare the peasants, the profane masses, approach the holy flame!

I too found it very jarring when someone I didn’t think much of referred casually to a book or poem that I thought was a great work of art.

Stella Gibbons too felt much the same way. There is a scene in Cold Comfort Farm where a man whom Flora Poste dislikes refers to a poem she likes. Flora thinks to herself:

“One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one’s favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one’s dressing gown.”

Good and evil and heroes

The young Ayn Rand became fascinated with the concept of the battle between good and evil. So did I. She came to see everything in those terms for the whole of her life. Evaluating everything and everyone on that basis makes what happens in the world more comprehensible and easier to deal with. The battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness is the only game in town.

The qualities that she admired the most are those more commonly found in men, thus she thought that men were superior in value to women. She thought that the attributes of strength and purposefulness were of supreme importance. She decided that she could never be in love with anyone but a hero; she felt contempt for those of her classmates who went out with ordinary boys.

I too wanted to read about action, adventure and examples of heroism; I did not like books that were primarily about relationships very much. 

How she saw her childhood

Ayn Rand did not enjoy being a child. She saw childhood as a preparation for the future, with no significance in itself. There was nothing for her in the immediate reality.

She believed that her kind of people, romantic and heroic, didn’t exist around her, but they existed somewhere and one day she would find them. I spent many years just filling in time, waiting for my people to come and take me away.

It is a pity that she and others like her missed the essence of life in those early years. What they didn’t know was that their minds and and/or imagination were so highly developed that there was little room for feelings and instincts in their lives. The children who enjoyed their lives and were attached to the people around them were the converse; neither group could envisage or comprehend what the world looked like to the other side.

How does this happen? Are all these patterns and similarities just chance? Are people issued with basic personality types and life programmes at birth? Do some mediumistic children break or are forced though into another world where they are captured and enslaved by something evil that affects the way that people around them treat them and creates scripted scenarios that they are forced to live out?

More to come

Barbara Branden’s brilliant insights and the information she has provided about the later life of Ayn Rand in her biography will be the source material for another article.

In the meantime, I will just say that I was very interested and delighted to learn that Ayn’s favourite colour was blue-green: mine is too, and always has been.