There were several monthly meetings which Toohey attended regularly; the meetings of: the Council of American Builders, the Council of American Writers, the Council of American Artists. He had organized them all.
Lois Cook was chairman of the Council of American Writers. It met in the drawing room of her home on the Bowery. She was the only famous member. The rest included a woman who never used capitals in her books, and a man who never used commas; a youth who had written a thousand-page novel without a single letter o, and another who wrote poems that neither rhymed nor scanned; a man with a beard who was sophisticated and proved it by using every unprintable four-letter word in every ten pages of his manuscript; a woman who imitated Lois Cook, except that her style was less clear; when asked for explanations she stated that this was the way life sounded to her, when broken by the prism of her subconscious–“You know what a prism does to a ray of light, don’t you?” she said. There was also a fierce young man known simply as Ike the Genius, though nobody knew just what he had done, except that he talked about loving all of life. The Council signed a declaration which stated that writers were servants of the proletariat–but the statement did not sound as simple as that; it was more involved and much longer. The declaration was sent to every newspaper in the country. It was never published anywhere, except on page 32 of New Frontiers. The Council of American Artists had, as chairman, a cadaverous youth who painted what he saw in his nightly dreams. There was a boy who used no canvas, but did something with bird cages and metronomes, and another who discovered a new technique of painting: he blackened a sheet of paper and then painted with a rubber eraser. There was a stout middle-aged lady who drew subconsciously, claiming that she never looked at her hand and had no idea of what the hand was doing; her hand, she said, was guided by the spirit of the departed lover whom she had never met on earth. Here they did not talk so much about the proletariat, but merely rebelled against the tyranny of reality and of the objective.
A few friends pointed out to Ellsworth Toohey that he seemed guilty of inconsistency; he was so deeply opposed to individualism, they said, and here were all these writers and artists of his, and every one of them was a rabid individualist. “Do you really think so?” said Toohey, smiling blandly.
Nobody took these Councils seriously. People talked about them, because they thought it made good conversation; it was such a huge joke, they said, certainly there was no harm in any of it. “Do you really think so?” said Toohey.
Ellsworth Toohey was now forty-one years old. He lived in a distinguished apartment that seemed modest when compared to the size of the income he could have commanded if he wished. He liked to apply the adjective “conservative” to himself in one respect only: in his conservative good taste for clothes. No one had ever seen him lose his temper. His manner was immutable; it was the same in a drawing room, at a labor meeting, on a lecture platform, in the bathroom or during sexual intercourse: cool, self-possessed, amused, faintly patronizing.
People admired his sense of humor. He was, they said, a man who could laugh at himself. “I’m a dangerous person. Somebody ought to warn you against me,” he said to people, in the tone of uttering the most preposterous thing in the world.
Of all the many titles bestowed upon him, he preferred one: Ellsworth Toohey, the Humanitarian.
10.
THE ENRIGHT HOUSE was opened in June of 1929.
There was no formal ceremony. But Roger Enright wanted to mark the moment for his own satisfaction. He invited a few people he liked and he unlocked the great glass entrance door, throwing it open to the sun-filled air. Some press photographers had arrived, because the story concerned Roger Enright and because Roger Enright did not want to have them there. He ignored them. He stood in the middle of the street, looking at the building, then he walked through the lobby, stopping short without reason and resuming his pacing. He said nothing. He frowned fiercely, as if he were about to scream with rage. His friends knew that Roger Enright was happy.
The building stood on the shore of the East River, a structure rapt as raised arms. The rock crystal forms mounted in such eloquent steps that the building did not seem stationary, but moving upward in a continuous flow–until one realized that it was only the movement of one’s glance and that one’s glance was forced to move in that particular rhythm. The walls of pale gray limestone looked silver against the sky, with the clean, dulled luster of metal, but a metal that had become a warm, living substance, carved by the most cutting of all instruments–a purposeful human will. It made the house alive in a strange, personal way of its own, so that in the minds of spectators five words ran dimly, without object or clear connection: “…in His image and likeness…”
A young photographer from the Banner noticed Howard Roark standing alone across the street, at the parapet of the river. He was leaning back, his hands closed over the parapet, hatless, looking up at the building. It was an accidental, unconscious moment. The young photographer glanced at Roark’s face–and thought of something that had puzzled him for a long time: he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything one could experience in waking reality–why the horror was so total and the ecstasy so complete–and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture–and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a path through some woods. He thought of that because he saw that extra quality for the first time in waking existence, he saw it in Roark’s face lifted to the building. The photographer was a young boy, new to his job; he did not know much about it; but he loved his work; he had been an amateur photographer since childhood. So he snapped a picture of Roark in that one moment.
Later the Art Editor of the Banner saw the picture and barked: “What the hell’s that?”
“Howard Roark,” said the photographer. “Who’s Howard Roark?”
“The architect.”
“Who the hell wants a picture of the architect?”
“Well, I only thought…”
“Besides, it’s crazy. What’s the matter with the man?” So the picture was thrown into the morgue.
The Enright House rented promptly. The tenants who moved in were people who wanted to live in sane comfort and cared about nothing else. They did not discuss the value of the building; they merely liked living there. They were the sort who lead useful, active private lives in public silence.
But others talked a great deal of the Enright House, for about three weeks. They said that it was preposterous, exhibitionist and phony. They said: “My dear, imagine inviting Mrs. Moreland if you lived in a place like that! And her home is in such good taste!” A few were beginning to appear who said: “You know, I rather like modern architecture, there are some mighty interesting things being done that way nowadays, there’s quite a school of it in Germany that’s rather remarkable–but this is not like it at all. This is a freak.”
Ellsworth Toohey never mentioned the Enright House in his column. A reader of the Banner wrote to him: “Dear Mr. Toohey: What do you think of this place they call the Enright House? I have a friend who is an interior decorator and he talks a lot about it and he says it’s lousy. Architecture and such various arts being my hobby, I don’t know what to think. Will you tell us in your column?” Ellsworth Toohey answered in a private letter: “Dear friend: There are so many important buildings and great events going on in the world today that I cannot devote my column to trivialities.”
But people came to Roark–the few he wanted. That winter, he had received a commission to build the Norris house, a modest country home. In May he signed another contract–for his first office building, a fifty-story skyscraper in the center of Manhattan. Anthony Cord, the owner, had come from nowhere and made a fortune in Wall Street within a few brilliant, violent years. He wanted a building of his own and he went to Roark. Roark’s office had grown to four rooms. His staff loved him. They did not realize it and would have been shocked to apply such a term as love to their cold, unapproachable, inhuman boss. These were the words they used to describe Roark, these were the words they had been trained to use by all the standards and conceptions of their past; only, working with him, they knew that he was none of these things, but they could not explain, neither what he was nor what they felt for him.