To write a long, perceptive and definitive biography of your ex-husband`s ex-lover, the woman who drove an ax into your marriage, is a challenging assignment but it`s the one Barbara Branden purports to have accepted.
``The Passion of Ayn Rand`` is a fascinating book that does not in any sense resemble a People magazine article on the numbing shock of a love betrayed. Branden has given us a detailed, sensitive portrait of Ayn Rand, author of ``The Fountainhead`` and ``Atlas Shrugged.``
Rand possessed a brilliant, philosophic mind, a virtually indomitable will, and enough charisma to outfit a whole political party. Few--if any
--could stand against her in open debate, and the story of how Rand announced her decision to take Barbara Branden`s husband as her secret lover is chillingly told. So is the cataclysmic rupture of the relationship, and Rand`s embittered incomprehension.
Most of the book, however, deals with the other triumphs and tragedies in Rand`s life. As a philosopher, she recognized man ``as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.`` Rand`s followers once were described in a Life magazine article as ``so ragingly individualistic as to be a menace getting on and off elevators.``
Rand attracted an influential coterie, starting with Barbara Branden and Barbara`s husband-to-be, psychologist Nathaniel Branden. Rand was to be the guiding spirit of this ``collective`` throughout her years of fame.
``The Passion of Ayn Rand`` has its beginnings in pre-Soviet Russia, where Rand was born Alice Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg in 1905, in comfortable circumstances. Branden recounts Alice`s childhood dreams, ambitions, romances, and fantasies, gathered from long hours of close association.
Alice and her family barely managed to survive the revolution, and when Alice was 21, relatives in Chicago enabled her to leave the poverty, hunger, degradation and terror that was her lot as a daughter of the bourgeoisie. She was allowed to visit America--and never planned to return to her homeland.
During a brief stay in Chicago in the 1920s she adopted a new name: Ayn
(from a Finnish author she had never read) and Rand (from her typewriter), partly to avoid reprisals against her family.
Armed with genius, persistence and a profoundly crafted philosophy, she was to endure crushing poverty to make publishing history with her epic novels. They were successful because her voice was needed; they have sold millions and helped shape conservative thought, although she despised religion, censorship and the anti-intellectualis m with which the Right so often is associated.
``The Passion of Ayn Rand`` is aptly titled. Critics who regard her as something of an intellectual cold fish may be surprised at the depths of feeling that stirred her analytic but romantic soul.
``The life of Ayn Rand was the material of fiction,`` Branden writes.
``But if one attempted to write it as a novel, the result would be preposterously unbelievable.`` Written as biography, it becomes compellingly believable and, paradoxically, completely human.