Black Milk

semiautobiographical novel, We the Living, had attracted considerable attention, her real breakthrough came in 1943 with her best-selling novel The Fountainhead, which took her seven years to write. Her magnum opus was Atlas Shrugged, a science-fiction romance and a novel of ideas. It was here that she introduced what she saw as a new moral philosophy-the morality of rational self-interest.

Not a great fan of Kant, she called him “the most evil man in mankind’s history.” Her response to those who accused her of caricaturizing the fountainhead of Western philosophy was even harsher: “I didn’t caricature Kant. Nobody can do that. He did it himself.”

In time her name became synonymous with individualism, capitalism and rationalism. Firmly believing that a person had to choose his values by using his reason, she defended the individual’s rights against the community and the state, and opposed all sorts of governmental interference (hence her popularity today among those who oppose bank bailouts).

“No man can use his brain to think for another,” Ayn Rand was fond of saying. “All functions of the body and spirit are private. Therefore they cannot be shared or transferred.” Strikingly, she regarded “reason” not only as the basis for our individual choices but also as the foundation of love between opposite sexes. Even physical attraction, for her, was the working of the brain. Love, sex and desire might seem to be selfish if left untamed by society, but despite that, or perhaps precisely because of it, they rendered the human individual an object worthy of attraction and appreciation. As it was maintained in The Fountainhead, “To say ‘I love you,’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’”

Her views on female sexuality could be regarded as problematic, to say the least. On the one hand, she was one of the few female novelists who could write about carnal desires and sexual fetishism without self-censure. On the other hand, her tone was visibly discriminatory at times, and the “beautiful woman” in her works was often “blond, fairskinned and long-legged”-the type of woman she was not and could never be. In almost all the sex scenes throughout her novels, there is a recurrent pattern: The woman first resists, the man insists, sometimes to the point of using physical force, and finally the woman surrenders.

Never a compliant personality, Ayn Rand loved to scandalize feminists with her views on women, especially her comments on how a female should admire her male. Ironically, such was not the pattern in her own marriage.

Increasingly over the years, Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor, was overshadowed by his wife’s fame. Not an exceptionally talented actor or one who was popular with producers, he was often unemployed. From the moment they got married, the fact that she was the more famous and successful of the two was a burden on him. As if making fun of his predicament, he would often introduce himself as “Mr. Ayn Rand.”

In 1951, the year after they moved to New York, Ayn Rand met a nineteen-year-old psychology student named Nathaniel Branden. He appreciated, admired and, perhaps, feared her. Such was his adoration that he founded an institution to spread her ideas far and wide. What started as an intellectual attraction soon turned physical. It was a kind of magnetic pull that intensified between a middle-aged, celebrated and intelligent woman and a young, ambitious and emotional man. Without hiding the situation from her husband, Rand gradually built a love triangle, situating herself right at the center. Atlas Shrugged was dedicated to both Branden and O’Connor.

Though it was a complicated scheme that made no one happy, it lasted fourteen years. When Ayn Rand turned sixty-one, Nathaniel left her for a young model. The famous writer who perceived even a sexual relationship fundamentally as an “intellectual exchange,” could not possibly come to grips with her long-term lover’s choice of “body” over “mind.”

She never forgave him. Perhaps his renouncement of her philosophy hurt her more than the physical abandonment. In a bitter article in The Objectivist, she announced to everyone that they were on separate paths. They never saw each other again.

Ayn Rand was one of those female writers who chose, from the very start, not to have children. Just as children did not play a part in her life, they did not factor into her novels either. [11] She was criticized for not writing about children and not even trying to understand them, but there is nothing in her notes to make us think that she paid this any heed. The only children she ever wanted to have were her books.

She was a writer with scintillating ideas and a woman of spectacular contradictions-as is her legacy. It is no coincidence that even after her death, both those who admired her and those who disliked her have dug in their heels. Though she defended capitalism ardently, in her personal life she preferred to have relationships that bordered on totalitarianism. In theory she was on the side of individual freedom and critical thinking. But in reality, she absolutely hated being criticized; she cast out and held in contempt anyone who did not agree with her. She expected obedience and loyalty from her inner circle. Despite the fact that she was a headstrong woman, and that her novels were full of independent female characters, she argued that a woman had to surrender herself to her man. The fact that she did no such thing in her private life was a different matter.

Always a fighter, when she got cancer she didn’t want anyone to know about it. She saw even her illness as a mistake that needed to be corrected. And she did “correct it,” managing to beat the cancer. For her it was another victory of the brain over the body. A confirmation of her viewpoint.

But in 1982, she suddenly and unexpectedly died of a heart attack.

Today, literature enthusiasts from all around the world post their views on the Internet by asking questions such as “What kind of a psycho would I turn out to be if Ayn Rand had been my mother?” or “What would my life be like if I were married to Ayn Rand?”

Maybe they are right. Ayn Rand hadn’t been born to be a mother or a wife. If she had been a mother she would very likely have been a dominant one, seeing each of her children as a different scientific experiment. But perhaps we are all badly mistaken. She may have found motherhood to be a “wonderfully intense intellectual excitement”- the way she described school and classes as a young girl in her diary. I am curious to know what she would have done when her child turned into a rebellious teenager.

It is equally plausible that early on she realized that in the motherchild relationship, the child always wins. Perhaps that was the real reason why she didn’t want children. Ayn Rand liked to win.

Giving birth to books was enough for her.

When the Grand Bazaar Smiles

Exactly a year later we are sitting in a cafe at the Grand Bazaar, Eyup and I.

The finger-women are nowhere to be seen and I suspect each is shopping in a separate store. After Mount Holyoke I was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I taught courses in women’s studies, and slowly I started writing my new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul.

Now it is summer again. I am back in the city. We are sitting here, my love and I, between silver bracelets, smoke pipes, carpets and brass lamps that remind me of Aladdin’s. A rumpus is going on around us. Young men pushing carts loaded with merchandise, old men playing backgammon, merchants haggling in every language known to humankind, tourists struggling to keep pushy sellers at bay, apprentices carrying tea glasses on silver trays, cats meowing in front of restaurants, children feeding the cats when their parents are not looking-everyone is in their own world.

Suddenly, Eyup holds my hand and asks, his voice raised over the din in the background, “Honey, I was just wondering. Are you still against marriage?”

“I certainly am,” I say with conviction, but then add, “theoretically.”

“And what exactly does theoretically mean?” he asks sweetly.

“It means, generally speaking. As an abstract idea. As a philosophical model-” I try to explain.

“In plain language, please?” he says, swirling the spoon in his tea glass.

“I mean, I am against human beings getting married, at least most of them, because they really shouldn’t, but that said-”

“That said?” he repeats.

“I am not against me marrying you, for instance.”

Eyup laughs-his laughter like a sword being pulled out of a silken sheath before the final thrust.