The Fountainhead - less crossly but still a little cross. And longer.

It’s difficult to look at this book objectively, since it’s a rare book I am physically violent against (it joins Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole in that dubious honour). These books are alike, in that I really, really liked parts of them and despised other parts with an almost irrational passion, mostly because they were so forced and tedious compared to the good parts. 

On an aesthetic level, much of this book is appealing. I found a lot of Rand’s figurative language, like the plot, forced and tedious, but purely for style this is a world I’d happily move into, for a little while at least. The spaces sound so elegant. Simple details, like Dominique's white chair or European god statue, give an impression of restrained opulence. The image of one of Roark's buildings, rising out of the black rock as if thrown up by the earth itself, gives chills. These are buildings, as the characters themselves say, that you would have to live up to. It's an appealing idea, to have yourself displayed to your absolute best in the form of your home, as somehow truthful and honest, not deceitful or fake.

It aims at an aesthetic ideal recognisable in other studies of interior decoration from the Victorian period onward. Two in particular: novelist Edith Wharton and architect Ogden Codman’s book The Decoration of Houses, published in 1898, and an essay by the writer Willa Cather called “The Novel Dèmeublè”, written in 1922 and published in The New Republic. The former addresses interior design, outlining the ideal way of decorating the home, and derides the ornate Victorian style of the time (like Peter Keating’s apartment), favouring a simple, elegant style which prioritises utility and function. The latter addresses furnishings in literature, decrying the Realist trend of accumulating detailed description of furnishings. Put these two together and you can see, as has been observed, that this trend against the overblown Victorian style had already been established by the time Rand was writing. Which isn’t to say Rand shouldn’t bother with her own argument, on the contrary I think it’s an admirable aesthetic philosophy, but there's a reason that kitsch and overblown decoration persisted (and you could say persists, even today). Like romance literature and melodrama, ornate furnishings fill a need. In The Architecture of Happiness Alain de Botton describes a housing estate designed by Le Corbusier. Despising the unnecessarily ornate styles of the past, Le Corbusier built simple, pared back structures with flat roofs, plain windows, and no ornamentation. But the factory workers who lived in the houses weren't tired of ornamentation. In fact, they needed it to escape from their daily work in the factories. So they added shutters to the windows, built picket fences, and even added pitched roofs to their boxy houses. Fortunately, Le Corbusier wasn't Howard Roark, and didn't blow them all up for their intransigence.

Perhaps what's so deeply offensive to many, and it is to me, about The Fountainhead is that this is an individual showing us how we ought to live, and what beauty really is. Rand's minimal aesthetic might be appealing for people who have always been surrounded by opulence. It might seem refreshingly simple to someone like Edith Wharton, who built this, to strip away the brocade and the flocked wallpaper and the gilt and live without clutter. Doing so may make them feel more natural, less buffered from the rest of the world, as though they are living more wholesome, simple lives. But to people who aren't inured to ornamentation, and whose lives are plenty simple enough, stripping away the upholstered surfaces and decorative touches - unnecessary though they may be - might only serve to remind them how little stands between themselves and destitution. This is how de Botton reads the tendency towards ornamentation, anyway, and in relation to The Fountainhead it seems to show why, after the new minimalist, almost utilitarian, style had apparently been adopted, Rand would still be railing against the foolish masses who don't know what beauty and greatness really are. It also partly explains, to me anyway, why this book ended up hurled across the room. Like the music in Man With a Movie Camera, this book is so BOSSY. Sure, the spaces sound appealing and the furnishings are amazing, but we don't want to be shown how to live. This book poses a phenomenological reading of aesthetics, in which everyone perceives the same things to be good or beautiful, you just have to get them to admit it. It's deeply reductive and really, sort of offensive.