Ayn Rand as Writing Coach

Ayn Rand: My Fiction-Writing Teacher
By Erika Holzer
Madison Press, Indio, Calif. 2005
Ppbk, 301 pgs.,
ISBN: 0-615-13041-0

Reviewed by Robert Cheeks

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907.

Modernity’s search for the “Heroic (Wo)man” may very well have reached fruition in the life and novels of Ayn Rand. A genius, autodidact, and a child of the Diaspora, Ayn (Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum) left her birthplace, Soviet Russia, in 1926 at the age of twenty-one bound for the sunny climes of Hollywood, California. While working odd jobs in the movie industry she met and married actor, Frank O’Connor. The decade of the 1930’s proved propitious for her as she wrote two novels: We the Living (1936) and Anthem (1938), as well as several plays, but her publication of The Fountainhead in 1943 not only provided financial success but gained her notoriety. The 1957 publication of her greatest novel, Atlas Shrugged, a literary rendering of her Objectivist thinking, launched her into the rarified atmosphere inhabited by philosopher/novelists such as Dostoevski, Camus, and Sarte.

Ayn defined “Objectivism” as: “…the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” And, in her philosophical pronunciations, which were an extrapolation of the enlightenment’s desideratum, she managed to alienate, both sides of the political spectrum. She also captivated the literate public.

A harsh and demanding taskmistress, her personal life was, at times, tumultuous. She demanded of her coterie a strict adherence to her perception of Objectivism; she did not tolerate heresy. Given her enormous ego it is a wonder that she took time, and apparently a great deal of satisfaction in teaching but in novelist Erika Holzer’s new book, Ayn Rand: My Fiction-Writing Teacher we find another facet of Ayn’s personality; that of a caring mentor and punctilious tutor.

For those who write or even have a desire to write Ms. Holzer presents Ayn Rand’s writing tenets with an élan and panache gleaned from years of practice, practice, practice. “Write about what you feel,” Ayn said referring to her primary dictum, “It may or may not be courtroom drama (Ms. Holzer is a lawyer). That’s beside the point. Write from two perspectives-one positive, other negative. Choose something that you’re impassioned about, and that makes your blood boil.”

Ms. Holzer’s memoir is unique in that she has taken her relationship with Ayn Rand, Ms. Rand’s teaching skills, and the writing of her two novels and wedded them in a delightful concinnity. Not only does she discuss the elemental aspects of novel writing but also explains the less aesthetic challenges of dealing with publishing houses. And, the reader must understand that while Ms. Holzer’s politics is on the right the majority of east coast publishing executives remember the Soviet Union with a certain nostalgia.

Erika Holzer’s two novels were both well received. Her first, Double Crossing, was written during the miasmatic period of détente and focused on the theme of human rights. Her second novel, Eye for an Eye, was so popular Paramount Pictures bought the rights and made a movie version.

In Eye for an Eye Ms. Holzer describes the breakdown of law in contemporary society. She succeeds in bringing into focus, through the application of her literary talents and legal experiences, the divorce of “natural law” from “positive law,” and the consequent extirpation of “justice” from jurisprudence. Nowhere is the failure of bureaucratic law better explained then in the plot and theme of Eye for an Eye, which has become a classic critique of Modernity.

Ms. Holzer also presents two well-crafted and previously unpublished short stories. My favorite, The House on Hester Street, examines the circumstances surrounding an old family photograph that initiates a journey into the past. It is a story that reveals the possibilities of human nature without being maudlin, and the significance of family, place, and the will to love.

In her writing, Erika Holzer has examined modernity and found sterility, ennui, and decadence, the dying spasms of the “Age of the Bourgeoisie.” In the hope for a return to a humane existence she points to the re-establishment of a moral order, truth, justice, the family, in essence the “recapturing of the sacred.” And, in so doing, she has the acumen to seek the transcendent outside the popular myth.

Erika Holzer’ Ayn Rand: My Fiction-Writing Teacher, is a delightful memoir, how-to-book, and anthology that describes in detail the excruciatingly pleasurable experience of writing with Ayn Rand for a critic!

Robert C. Cheeks is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Human Events, The American Enterprise, The Pittsburgh Tribune Review, The Acton Institute’s Religion and Liberty, and America’s Civil War.