Ideal was written in 1934, at a time when Ayn Rand had cause to be unhappy with the world. We the Living was being rejected by a succession of publishers for being “too intellectual” and too opposed to Soviet Russia (this was the time of America's Red Decade); Night of January 16th had not yet found a producer; and Miss Rand's meager savings were running out. The story was written originally as a novelette and then, probably within a year or two, was extensively revised and turned into a stage play. It has never been produced.
After the political themes of her first professional work, Ayn Rand now returns to the subject matter of her early stories: the role of values in men's lives. The focus in this case, as in “Her Second Career,” is negative, but this time the treatment is not jovial; dominantly, it is sober and heartfelt. The issue now is men's lack of integrity, their failure to act according to the ideals they espouse. The theme is the evil of divorcing ideals from life.
An acquaintance of Miss Rand's, a conventional middle-aged woman, told her once that she worshiped a certain famous actress and would give her life to meet her. Miss Rand was dubious about the authenticity of the woman's emotion, and this suggested a dramatic idea: a story in which a famous actress, so beautiful that she comes to represent to men the embodiment of their deepest ideals, actually enters the lives of her admirers. She comes in a context suggesting that she is in grave danger. Until this point, her worshipers have professed their reverence for her—in words, which cost them nothing. Now, however, she is no longer a distant dream, but a reality demanding action on their part, or betrayal.
“What do you dream of?” Kay Gonda, the actress, asks one of the characters, in the play's thematic statement.
“Nothing,” he answers. “Of what account are dreams?” “Of what account is life?”
“None. But who made it so?”
“Those who cannot dream.”
“No. Those who can only dream.”
In a journal entry written at the time (dated April 9, 1934), Miss Rand elaborates this viewpoint:
Such “dangerous and hopeless ones” may betray their ideal in the name of “social respectability” (the small businessman in this story) or in the name of the welfare of the masses (the Communist) or the will of God (the evangelist) or the pleasure of the moment (the playboy count)—or they may do it for the license of claiming that the good is impossible and therefore the struggle for it unnecessary (the painter). Ideal captures eloquently the essence of each of these diverse types and demonstrates their common denominator. In this regard, it is an intellectual tour de force. It is a philosophical guide to hypocrisy, a dramatized inventory of the kinds of ideas and attitudes that lead to the impotence of ideals—that is, to their detachment from life.
(The inventory, however, is not offered in the form of a developed plot structure. In the body of the play, there is no progression of events, no necessary connection between one encounter and the next. It is a series of evocative vignettes, often illuminating and ingenious, but as theater, I think, unavoidably somewhat static.)
Dwight Langley, the painter, is the pure exponent of the evil the play is attacking; he is, in effect, the spokesman for Platonism, who explicitly preaches that beauty is unreachable in this world and perfection unattainable. Since he insists that ideals are impossible on earth, he cannot, logically enough, believe in the reality of any ideal, even when it actually confronts him. Thus, although he knows every facet of Kay Gonda's face, he (alone among the characters) does not recognize her when she appears in his life. This philosophically induced blindness, which motivates his betrayal of her, is a particularly brilliant concretization of the play's theme, and makes a dramatic Act I curtain.
In her journal of the period, Miss Rand singles out religion as the main cause of men's lack of integrity. The worst of the characters, accordingly, the one who evokes her greatest indignation, is Hix, the evangelist, who preaches earthly suffering as a means to heavenly happiness. In an excellently worked-out scene, we see that it is not his vices, but his religion, including his definition of virtue, that brings him to demand the betrayal of Kay Gonda, her deliberate sacrifice to the lowest of creatures. By gaining a stranglehold on ethics, then preaching sacrifice as an ideal, religion, no matter what its intentions, systematically inculcates hypocrisy: it teaches men that achieving values is low (“selfish”), but that giving them up is noble. “Giving them up,” in practice, means betraying them.
“None of us,” one of the characters complains, “ever chooses the bleak, hopeless life he is forced to lead.” Yet, as the play demonstrates, all these men do choose the lives they lead. When confronted by the ideal they profess to desire, they do not want it. Their vaunted “idealism” is largely a form of self-deception, enabling them to pretend to themselves and others that they aspire to something higher. In fact and in reality, however, they don't.
Kay Gonda, by contrast, is a passionate valuer; like Irene in “The Husband I Bought,” she cannot accept anything less than the ideal. Her exalted sense of life cannot accept the ugliness, the pain, the “dismal little pleasures” that she sees all around her, and she feels a desperate need to know that she is not alone in this regard. There is no doubt that Ayn Rand herself shared Kay Gonda's sense of life, and often her loneliness, too—and that Kay's cry in the play is her own:
Emotionally, Ideal is unique among Ayn Rand's works. It is the polar opposite of “Good Copy.” “Good Copy” was based on the premise of the impotence and insignificance of evil. But Ideal focuses almost exclusively on evil or mediocrity (in a way that even We the Living does not); it is pervaded by Kay Gonda's feeling of alienation from mankind, the feeling, tinged by bitterness, that the true idealist is in a minuscule minority amid an earthful of value-betrayers with whom no communication is possible. In accordance with this perspective, the hero, Johnnie Dawes, is not a characteristic Ayn Rand figure, but a misfit utterly estranged from the world, a man whose virtue is that he does not know how to live today (and has often wanted to die). If Leo feels this in Soviet Russia, the explanation is political, not metaphysical. But Johnnie feels it in the United States.
In her other works, Ayn Rand herself gave the answer to such a “malevolent universe” viewpoint, as she called it. Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead, for instance, strikingly, resembles Kay and Johnnie in her idealistic alienation from the world, yet she eventually discovers how to reconcile evil with the “benevolent universe” approach. “You must learn,” Roark tells her, “not to be afraid of the world. Not to be held by it as you are now. Never to be hurt by it as you were in that courtroom.” Dominique does learn it; but Kay and Johnnie do not, or at least not fully. The effect is untypical Ayn Rand: a story written approvingly from Dominique's initial viewpoint.
Undoubtedly, the intensity of Miss Rand's personal struggle at the time—her intellectual and professional struggle against a seemingly deaf, even hostile culture—helps to account for the play's approach. Dominique, Miss Rand has said, is “myself in a bad mood.” The same may be said of this aspect of Ideal.
Despite its somber essence, however, Ideal is not entirely a malevolent story. The play does have its lighter, even humorous side, such as its witty satire of Chuck Fink, the “selfless” radical, and of the Elmer Gantry–like Sister Essie Twomey, with her Service Station of the Spirit. The ending, moreover, however unhappy, is certainly not intended as tragedy or defeat. Johnnie's final action is action—that is the whole point—action to protect the ideal, as against empty words or dreams. His idealism, therefore, is genuine, and Kay Gonda's search ends on a positive note. In this respect, even Ideal may be regarded as an affirmation (albeit in an unusual form) of the benevolent universe.
- Leonard Peikoff