Introduction by Leonard Peikoff
Mary Ann and Charles Sures were longtime personal friends of Ayn Rand—Mary Ann for twenty-eight years, Charles for almost twenty. Their recollections in this delightful memoir make vividly real the Ayn Rand they knew so well.
Their book offers plentiful examples of Ayn Rand’s mind, and intellectual generosity, in action, and also captures many lesser-known aspects of this unique woman. In these pages, we see Ayn Rand the celebrity, the loving wife, the legal client (of Charles), the employer (of Mary Ann). We are with her in her study (including the day she wrote the last page of Atlas Shrugged), at stamp shows, at the opera, on a New York City transit bus, in the White House. We discover new examples of her favorite and least favorite things in clothes, perfume, parties, music. We relish again her sense of humor, her capacity for indignant anger, her benevolence.
The Sures understand and admire the passion for values from which Ayn Rand’s anger stemmed. In Mary Ann’s words, she was someone “who always speaks out, unequivocally, against irrationality and injustice, and who not only denounces evil, but who defends the good. She was mankind’s intellectual guardian, a soldier in the battle of ideas. Her banner was always flying high. When she died, someone made the following comment: ‘now anger has gone out of the world.’ And I thought, it’s true, and it’s the world’s loss, and mine.”
As to Ayn Rand’s response to the good, Mary Ann describes some eloquent scenes, such as: “I had heard that when [Ayn’s] ship reached the pier [from Russia], tears ran down her face as she looked up to the skyline of New York. I asked what those tears were for. Frank answered: ‘They were tears of splendor.’ And Ayn nodded in agreement.”
The unique quality of these memoirs is not only the new content they reveal, but also the perfect balance they achieve among ideas, emotions, and actions, including where appropriate specific dialogue and physical, perceptual details. The result has almost the impact of fiction, specifically of Romantic characterization. From the book one gains not a mélange of random memories, abstract ideas, and disconnected concretes, but rather the experience of an actual larger-than-life person.
The person in this book is the same person I myself knew for so long; reading these pages is almost like having Ayn Rand in the room again. The result on me is partly sadness that the irreplaceable is gone, but mostly exhilaration that she once was real.
Admirers of Ayn Rand owe a debt of gratitude to the Sures for their dedicated work in putting this compelling material on record. They finished the manuscript just before Charles died last December. He spent considerable time during his last weeks and even days in editing and polishing his parts of the book. Knowing how near he was to death, he still said to Mary Ann: “It’s one of the most important things we have ever done. We have to make it just right.” This is the kind of heroism before which one stands hushed, in farewell salute.
Ayn Rand and her husband would have grieved at Charles’s death. I know this because I know the values they shared, and what friends the four of them were. The Sures were among the few people in Ayn Rand’s life who were intellectually honest all the way down: they accepted her philosophy, they lived by it, they remained loyal to it and to her throughout her life and theirs. Thus the special feeling Ayn Rand communicated whenever she spoke of them.
Those who want to know more about the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged now have a new opportunity to do so—thanks to the loving memories of two lovely people, Mary Ann and Charles Sures.
Irvine, California March 2001
Copyright 2001 © Mary Ann Sures. Copyright 2001 © Leonard Peikoff. All rights reserved.