FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, Anti-Life

Jim Taggart hands a hundred dollar bill to a bum on the street, and the bum contemptuously takes no notice of the denomination.

Under the Railroad Unification Plan, the machine has run down further. There are ripples.

Jim has been busy. His day began with a meeting with the Argentine ambassador where he discovered that Argentina was to be declared a people’s state in two weeks. It was followed by a cocktail party at Orren Boyle’s where it was decided to loan $4 billion to Argentina and Chile. That was followed by a party given by Jim at the bar on the 60th floor of a skyscraper that looked like a cellar in which was formed the Interneighborly Amity and Development Corporation, an outfit presided over by Orren Boyle that would possess exclusive rights to run the industrial concerns of the various people’s states of South America. The final event had been held at the home of the Chilean ambassador, who appeared to be nothing more than a gangster. Here Jim had learned that on September 2, all d’Anconia Cooper properties would be nationalized. Jim had made a mental note: sell d’Anconia, buy Interneighborly. He feels no pleasure in this because he is not thinking about money any longer, and that bothers him. In his mind is a fogbound alley that holds things he prefers not to think about.

Arriving home, Jim senses in Cherryl that things are no better here. He brags that he has closed a big deal today, and she seems neutral in her reaction. He asks for champagne while he brags that he and a group of men will control the nationalized properties of South America to help the underprivileged. He complains that slum dwellers like Cherryl have no humanitarian spirit of altruism, something that can be felt only by those born to wealth. Cherryl has no sympathy for the welfare philosophy; having come from the slums, she knows that most of the poor want something for nothing. She tells Jim straightforwardly that he doesn’t care about the humanitarian spirit either. He brags that he will end up one of the richest men in the world, and she indicates that even if he does, she wants nothing from him. She tells Jim that she respects Hank Rearden as Jim brags about having beaten him.

Cherryl is proud of what Dagny did on the radio and has noticed that the government never answered her charges. Jim explains that Bertram Scudder took the fall for that disaster. It was better for the nation – and Jim – that Scudder become the scapegoat. Scudder’s fatal mistake was his membership in the Tinky Holloway faction. The Chick Morrison faction won, and Holloway traded Scudder for some favors. Cherryl is horrified that this is the kind of victory her husband is winning. Jim complains that he did not create this world, he only lives in it. In Jim’s words Cherryl hears the echo of her drunken father.

Cherryl had worked hard to be Mrs. James Taggart, approaching the task as would a military cadet, but Jim was never satisfied. She could not understand the intellectual scum that formed Jim’s orbit. She perceived that men like Simon Pritchett and Balph Eubank were phonies. In her mind was an oncoming headlight that held things she preferred not to think about. And her worst discovery was that her husband was also a phony. The only true thing Jim had said was that he was surrounded by enemies. Conversations with people within the railroad revealed to Cherryl that his enemies did in fact work there – and he had earned their hatred. It was from Eddie Willers that she had finally learned the truth about Jim and Dagny.

When she confronts Jim about it, he turns ugly and accuses her of ingratitude. He can’t put into words what he wants; it can only be felt. Cherryl can’t accept this and says that what she loved about him wasn’t real. Cherryl now feels something – and it’s fear. Jim accuses her of being a gold-digger who trades love, but can’t just give it. Loving a man for his virtues is cold justice; it’s unearned love that matters. Cherryl explodes. Jim is a charlatan like the welfare pimps, wanting unearned love and unearned admiration. He wants to be like Hank Rearden without working for it.

The champagne arrives, and Jim mockingly proposes a toast to Francisco, which Cherryl refuses. Jim comes unglued and leaves the room.

At her apartment, Dagny yearns to be back in Galt’s Gulch and hopes to spot John on the street in New York. The doorbell rings and in comes Cherryl. She is there to pay a debt; she apologizes for everything she had said at the wedding. She admits that she now knows the truth about who really runs the railroad. She knows that her husband is a worthless moocher; the girls now have a bond. Dagny admits that when people say she is hard and unfeeling, it is true – because she is being just. Dagny has held herself above the terrible world Jim inhabits by one rule: To place nothing above the verdict of her own mind. This connects with something Cherryl had felt in her poor youth in Buffalo, something people around her had wanted to destroy. A premonition tells Dagny to suggest that Cherryl stay with her tonight, but Cherryl decides to go home. She looks broken.

Moments after Cherryl has left Jim, Lillian Rearden shows up. Lillian is unhappy about the quality of the new class of looters, who are not “our crowd”. Lillian is there for a favor: she needs Jim to use his influence to stop the divorce. Hank has purchased everyone necessary to get his divorce and keep Lillian away from his money. All of this happened because Lillian had done critical favors for Jim. He kids her about how she always said she didn’t care about money, but she says she cares about poverty. Bertram Scudder can no longer help, but if Jim could get Wesley Mouch to intervene... Jim explains that the channels of pull have become so convoluted that it is impossible to get favors from the right people anymore.

Jim and Lillian drink champagne. Lillian says that Hank thinks little of Jim, and Jim wants just once to beat him. And in a sense he does in the next few minutes, as he beds Lillian Rearden. She is even less fun than Betty Pope.

Cherryl comes home in time to catch them after the act. She confronts Jim who becomes enraged and then brags about it. She asks why he married her; Jim tells her she was a cheap little guttersnipe from Buffalo who had no choice but to love him as he was – because she was worthless. He wants her to accept his love as alms because she could never hope to earn it. The oncoming headlight finally hits Cherryl, shattering her. She sees through Jim, telling him he is a killer for the sake of killing; he slaps her for her effrontery.

Cherryl runs out of her apartment on a wild but aimless run through the streets of Manhattan. A social worker approaches her and asks if she is in trouble, then grabs her and reprimands her for being a drunken society girl. Tearing herself away, Cherryl screams and runs headlong into the East River.

Howdy Pub’!

Chapter 24 this week, entitled “Anti-Life,” a title that has several shades of meaning. I prefer to call it “Cherryl’s Chapter,” after the young lady for whom at last we have heard the other shoe drop, a shoe that has been suspended since she met Jim Taggart in Chapter 9 and married him three chapters later. She is one of two characters in Atlas Shrugged whose moral standards are admirable on Rand’s terms and whose lives will be blighted and eventually forfeited as a consequence, their own lives’ circumstances placing them in positions of vulnerability and without the strength to fight back. The other shall remain nameless for now.

Jim returns home after sealing quite a deal, really, and he made it all by himself, or so he tells his wife. Orren Boyle’s fingers are in this, along with a mysterious figure from Chile with a wife who knows how to deal, but Cherryl need not be bothered with the details. It’s a betrayal as well, and James wants to toast it with champagne.

But something has changed with Cherryl. She is asking questions she wouldn’t have asked before and it’s making Jim very nervous. She knows something she didn’t before. And the tenor of the questions hints that she suspects that he isn’t the railroad magnate she worshipped after all. We know it was Dagny, but does Cherryl? And if so, how did she find out?

She doesn’t appear all that impressed with Jim’s coup. He is party to an agreement under which various governments intend to nationalize d’Anconia Copper, and he has a lot of money riding on the theft, although precisely how isn’t specified. The looters are finally moving on Francisco.

They’ve already moved on Bertram Scudder, the poison-tongued polemicist on whose program Dagny made a mockery of blackmail by declaring her affair with Rearden. The program is no more as a consequence. We do not mourn Scudder and neither does Cherryl but she does wonder aloud why Jim, in whose circle Scudder resided, didn’t save him. An odd question that makes us realize that Cherryl is now judging her husband on her own terms and has found him wanting.

Cherryl has done some research of her own, some simple inquiries that led her to the office of Eddie Willers. It was Eddie who told her the whole truth. Everything she thought she married in Jim resides, in fact, in Dagny.

“Thank you, Mr. Willers,” was all she said when he finished.

And because Cherryl is, when all is said and done, as scrupulous about her personal honor as anyone in the novel, she looks up Dagny and apologizes. It is interesting that we have not really seen Dagny in interaction with other women to this point, except for the contemptible Lillian Rearden. Cherryl is Lillian’s opposite in every respect. Dagny understands that she has met something clean and brave and struggling to live.

“Dagny, how did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?”

“By holding to just one rule…to place nothing – nothing – above the verdict of my own mind.”

“…What held you through it?”

“The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight.”

“The reason I ask is because…somehow, people always made me feel as if they thought it was a sin…”

That is “anti-life” as Rand has come to make us understand it. One’s life is not one’s own, but someone else has the ultimate claim on it. It is that proposition that Galt’s oath defies.

Meanwhile, Lillian Rearden has come to her own crisis of confidence. She is to be made destitute by a divorce that to her dismay, she cannot stop, even with the sort of connections she thought she had made by presenting her husband and his life’s work to the looters. She has come to Jim for help, and he hasn’t any to offer. They do, however, enjoy a mutual resentment of the productive and a hatred for their superiority. It is sufficient for a quick and exquisitely seedy sexual encounter.

They did not speak. They knew each other’s motive. Only two words were pronounced between them. “Mrs. Rearden,” he said…Afterward, it did not disappoint him that what he had possessed was an inanimate body without resistance or response. It was not a woman that he had wanted to possess. It was not an act in celebration of life that he had wanted to perform, but an act in celebration of the triumph of impotence.

“Anti-life” in another sense. In a third, the matter of procreation, Rand is once again silent and perhaps well so. But this notion of sex as possession is not restricted to those for whom its expression is toward an inanimate object – Rand’s term for Lillian, and we believe it – but, in fact permeates her descriptions of the actual terms of sex between the ubermenschen as well. It explains Dagny’s serial monogamy, surely. But it risks the conclusion that one’s self is not only one’s own most precious possession, but may be given to another unreservedly, at least for the time, and yet is a commitment that may be withdrawn at a whim, just as Dagny’s was from Rearden. She had certainly given herself to him to the degree that when he discovered her antecedents with Francisco, she resigned herself literally to being beaten to death by him. That is a very peculiar frame of mind for someone who considers her own life her highest value. And yet when Galt comes along that commitment evaporates as if it had never been.

One may, of course, choose to regard this behavior as an aberration from the ideal that someone under stress and with less than true moral enlightenment is prone to make, and that once it is all resolved Dagny will be better adjusted. I don’t think that at all. I think Rand was tapping a deep appreciation of human sexuality that does not correlate very well to her ethical theories and describing it accurately, and that in doing so Dagny becomes something more than a pasteboard figure behind which Rand’s mouth is moving, but in a literary sense her own person.

This is a wonderful thing to discover in a novel, and it puts Rand the story-teller in opposition to Rand the theoretician. It pits the inner logic of her narrative against the inner logic of her philosophy. Both are strong enough to make their case, and it’s up to the reader to reconcile them or to choose between them. This is one reason why despite its many failings Atlas Shrugged is a novel that must be taken very seriously indeed.

Cherryl comes home in time to find the unmistakable signs of Jim’s betrayal, and extracts from him an admission that their marriage was always a matter of his desperate need to find someone to whom he could feel superior. The balls at which he paraded her, incorrectly dressed and fumbling, the social affairs at which he smirked in the background as others smirked at her in the foreground, the entire elevation of a lower middle-class girl into the social heights for the purpose of degradation and humiliation, all of that was his highest expression of being. It is, to say the least, a shattering revelation.

The cover has been torn off of Jim and what we see underneath are the writhing worms of mental and emotional pathology. He has married Cherryl because he felt both that she was worthless and that she was committed to a hopeless struggle to find worth. It was the hopelessness on which Jim was feeding, an image that is disturbing because it rings so very true. This too is anti-life, and Jim is Rand’s dark psychological masterpiece.

Cherryl flees the sordidness of their apartment for the sordidness of the street, now rejected in low society for what her clothing makes her appear just as she was rejected by high society for what she actually was, and by both for what she was trying to become.

Why are you doing it to me? – she cried soundlessly to the darkness around her. Because you’re good – some enormous laughter seemed to be answering from the roof tops and from the sewers.

We are reminded here of something that a women of hard-bitten experience told her on her wedding day:

“Listen, kid,” the sob sister said to her… “You think that if one gets hurt in life, it’s through one’s own sins – and that’s true, in the long run. But there are people who’ll try to hurt you through the good they see in you – knowing that it’s the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don’t let it break you when you discover that.”

But it does break her. And Cherryl now thinks she has nowhere to turn – more accurately, she forgets that she does. She forgets her promise to Dagny to come and see her, the only person she knows who might have the strength to pour into the wreckage of her life. She forgets everything but flight.

Then she ran, ran by the sudden propulsion of a burst of power, the power of a creature running for its life, she ran straight down the street that ended at the river – and in a single streak of speed, with no break, no moment of doubt, with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation, she kept running till the parapet barred her way and, not stopping, went over into space.

A creature running for its life that kills itself out of a sense of self-preservation – it is the contradiction that is “anti-life.” It is death by cognitive dissonance. It is also a tacit recognition of soul, for what other aspect of self could Cherryl possibly hope to preserve at the cost of her life? Rand’s philosophy might not be leading us there, but her narrative is.

Have a great week, Publius!

The whole Jim and Cherryl saga of AS is perhaps the most tragic piece in the book. It also illustrates owr own society.

The way I see Cherryl is an illustration of the way the underclass, particularly racial minorities have been rendered asunder by the Great Society programs. The poor helpless blacks, latinos, indians needed the governments help to rise, not so much because of discrimination, but because many of the left felt they really were inferior (who’s the real racist). The result is decades of welfare dependence, the destruction of the family, and whole generations of people who feel a sense of entitlement to yours and mine success. Cherryl is one that woke up, saw the welfare state for what is, what it really thinks of the poor. We see her in the various minority voices that come out and denounce these changes (think Bill Cosby). We saw this in the Prop 8 results. We see this anytime we see someone who was firmly in the democratic party coalition come to the realization the liberals really don’t care about them in the long run.

Here is an example from here in CA. Paul Rodriguez campaigned for all of the democratic office holders, raised money for all of the high level officials from Feinstein, Boxer, Pelosi, and Obama. So what did he get for his efforts? Thrown over the side, traded for the environmentalist faction. He’s has sided up with “the wealthy white growers”, the traditional enemy of the latino farmworkers to get the water back running to the west side farmers. He realized he was betrayed.

Jim, now here is a work of art. I see him as the person with such a sense of worthlessness of himself that instead of working to build him self up, he found it necessary to find someone he deemed more worthless then himself. The result is he thinks he will look good by comparison. The heart breaking truth is that Cherryl was far and away his superior. I liked Cherryl. She exemplified the pull up by the bootstrap ethos that is the only true remedy to poverty. Her sad end is truly a bummer for me.

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