The Early Ayn Rand

MICK WATTS: I hope you've had a good time! I hope you've enjoyed it! But I'm through! KAY GONDA: I'll see you at the studio tomorrow at nine. MICK WATTS: I'm through! God, I wish I could quit!

KAY GONDA: You know that you will never quit, Mick.

MICK WATTS: That's the hell of it! That you know it, too! Why do I serve you like a dog and will go on serving you like a dog for the rest of my days? Why can't I resist any crazy whim of yours? Why did I have to go and spread rumors about a murder you never committed? Just because you wanted to find out something? Well, have you found it out?

KAY GONDA: Yes.

MICK WATTS: What have you found out?

KAY GONDA: How many people saw my last picture? Do you remember those figures?

MICK WATTS: Seventy-five million, six hundred thousand, three hundred and twelve.

KAY GONDA: Well, Mick, seventy-five million, six hundred thousand people hate me. They hate me in their hearts for the things they see in me, the things they have betrayed. I mean nothing to them, except a reproach... But there are three hundred and twelve others — perhaps only the twelve. There are a few who want the highest possible and will take nothing less and will not live on any other terms... It is with them that I am signing a contract tomorrow. We can't give up the earth to all those others.

MICK WATTS: [Holding out the newspaper] And what about this?

KAY GONDA: I've answered you.

MICK WATTS: But you are a murderess, Kay Gonda! You killed that boy!

KAY GONDA: No, Mick, not I alone.

MICK WATTS: But the poor fool thought that he had to save your life!

KAY GONDA: He has.

MICK WATTS: What?!

KAY GONDA: He wanted to die that I may live. He did just that.

MICK WATTS: But don't you realize what you've done?

KAY GONDA: [Slowly, looking post him] That, Mick, was the kindest thing I have ever done.

CURTAIN

Part III THE LATE THIRTIES

Think Twice

1939

Editor's Preface

The Depression years in New York City (to which she moved in 1934) were a difficult financial struggle for Ayn Rand: she lived on the earnings from Night of January 16th and from a series of jobs she held as reader for various movie companies. She wrote when she could find the time. Nevertheless, the work moved ahead. In 1935, she began making notes for The Fountainhead and planning the architectural research that it would require. Realizing that the novel would be a long-term project, she interrupted it several times to do shorter pieces. In 1937, she wrote the novelette Anthem (published separately by New American Library). In 1939, she wrote a stage adaptation of We the Living, produced on Broadway under the title of The Unconquered (it was not successful). In the same year, she wrote her third and last original stage play, the philosophical murder mystery Think Twice. It has never been produced.

Think Twice, written five years later than Ideal, is finished, mature work, in all major respects characteristic of the author of The Fountainhead. It is the only such piece in the present collection. (Red Fawn is an unedited scenario, and Ideal is not fully representative.) The theme is the distinctive Ayn Rand approach to ethics: the evil of altruism, and the need of man to live an independent, egoistic existence. The hero, who now has primacy over the heroine, is a completely recognizable Ayn Rand type. The plot, fast-moving and logical, has an ingenious twist; the story presents an altruist who, acting on his ideas, specializes in seeking power over others, thereby giving them compelling reasons to want to kill him. (The Russian character was originally a German Nazi; in the 1950s, Miss Rand updated the play, turning him into a Communist.) The style is smoothly assured; the mechanics of alibis, motives, and clues are deftly handled; and the writing displays Ayn Rand's clarity, her sense of drama, her intellectual wit. There is even the first sign of the science-fiction element which, years later, would become John Gait's motor in Atlas Shrugged.

One of Ayn Rand's most impressive literary skills, brilliantly demonstrated in her novels, is her ability to integrate theme and plot. That ability is evidenced in Think Twice— in the union of philosophy and murder mystery. This is not a routine murder story, with some abstract talk thrown in for effect. Nor is it a drawing-room discussion interrupted now and again by some unrelated events. The play is a union of thought and action: the philosophic ideas of the characters actually motivate and explain their actions, which in turn concretize and demonstrate the philosophic point, and acquire significance because of it. The result is a seamless blend of depth and excitement, at once art and entertainment.

A decade later, in her journal of August 28, 1949, Ayn Rand wrote the following: