Brad's Reviews > The Fountainhead

So there was this girl I loved, deeply loved, and our love was key to the end of my first marriage. We didn't cheat physically, although there was no avoiding or denying the intellectual and emotional cheating that just being in each others' presence elicited, but my partner/wife felt that something was wrong with our "friendship," and she was right.

C--- and I had been in love for a couple of months, and it was the night before I was leaving for my anniversary trip. I was meeting my partner/wife for a weekend of Shakespeare plays, good food and theoretical love making (which never happened), and I was having a final cast party at our home after the summer production of one of my plays. My partner/wife was already near Stratford, Ontario -- home of Canada’s Shakespeare Festival. She was at her family reunion, and at the time I had no idea she was with her lover (I later discovered that their affair had spanned countries and years); I felt paradoxical Catholic guilt for my pseudo-adultery and the liberation of being freshly in love as I sat at my backyard pool and let my feet brush C---'s in the cool water under the moonlight.

That night she told me of her love for Ayn Rand's Fountainhead, a book I'd long ignored, supposing it and its politics were not for me. She opined about Objectivism and selfishness, and I was intrigued as only one in love and full of their own selfishness could be. So when I reached my first airport bookstore in DC the next day, I sought a copy of Fountainhead and bought it during my layover. It became a constant companion during the rest of my trip.

The next day I began racking up the largest cell phone bill I've ever produced, talking to C--- at all hours of the day and wherever I happened to be: once I was on the edge of a field full of dairy cows, often I was at the local pub imbibing Black & Tans, and the rest of the time I was in my cousin's empty house (he was on a camping weekend, and I was staying there until I hooked up with my partner/wife) amidst his kitschy Elvis memorabilia. When I wasn't talking to C---, I wrote, I watched bad T.V., and I alternated between Rendezvous with Rama and Fountainhead. Somewhere in those three days I rented Boondock Saints (another favourite of C---'s), and then, as if fate were taking a hand, I turned on the CBC and caught the documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life. Coincidence, but a fascinating one that made me enjoy and love the book more than it deserved.

And I did love the book. I’ve never read it again -- and I really disdain Objectivism -- but there was a clarity in Rand’s prose that was captivating. She goes on and on, but she does it beautifully, which makes me understand why her ideas are so beloved by those on the other side of the political membrane. She propagandizes like Goebbels. She makes you want to believe. Hell, she even makes rape seem acceptable (ish). And as long as you don’t pay too much attention to what she said and focus, instead, on how she said it, the Fountainhead is a masterpiece.

If it weren’t for C--- I don’t know that I’d have given this book another thought, but there was a C---, and this book means something more to me than it should. How bizarre is man?