The Fountainhead: Part 2: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

In December, the Cosmo-Slotnick Building is opened with much fanfare. Keating thinks that he should be happy, but he is bored by the rigmarole of smiling and socializing.

Toohey takes Keating out to dinner after the celebration and tells him that this is “the climax of what [he] can expect in life,” but that it might have been even better if he had a wife to share the glory with. Toohey says Catherine might not be good at social events such as these, but that Dominique would be terrific—and that it’s a pity that “Nobody can get her.” Keating says that he doesn’t love Dominique, but Toohey tells him that “Personal love […] is a great evil” since it is “an act of discrimination, of preference.” Toohey says he “must love all men equally,” but to do so he must first kill his “selfish little choices.” Toohey’s idea of universal equality feels “warmly pleasant” to Keating, who is thinking about Roark and how this would mean that he and Roark are equals. 

When Roark begins work on the drawings for the Stoddard Temple, he decides he would like Steven Mallory to make a sculpture for the temple. Mallory is hard to locate, and Roark finally goes to his apartment to meet him. He finds Mallory drunk and living in shabby quarters. Mallory initially finds it hard to believe that Roark really likes his work, thinking instead that Roark wants him for the publicity that hiring the infamous “shooting sculptor” will bring. Roark tells him he thinks he is a great sculptor, even though Mallory shouldn’t care what Roark thinks of his work, since he is “too good for that.” He says he didn’t come to Mallory because he feels sorry for him, but that he came for “a simple, selfish reason”: “to seek the best.”

Mallory begins to cry, and he sees in Roark “the calmest, kindest face—a face without a hint of pity. It did not look like the countenance of men who watch the agony of another with secret pleasure.” He looks “at Mallory quietly, a hard, clean glance of understanding—and respect.”

On Mallory’s table, Roark spots a plaster plaque of a baby, the kind sold in cheap gift shops. Mallory tries to hide it, but Roark is furious to see that Mallory has stooped to making things such as this, and he throws it across the room and breaks it. It is “the only time anyone [has] ever seen Roark murderously angry.”  Then, he sits for hours, listening, as Mallory talks to him about his work.

The next morning, Mallory comes to Roark’s office, and Roark notices that when Mallory is working, he loses his uncertainty and “face[s] Roark as an equal.” He tells Roark that the drawings of the temple seem too good for the city around it. Roark tells him he’d like Mallory to make one statue at the center of the temple: a statue of a naked woman symbolizing “the aspiration and fulfillment” of the human spirit, which is the “heroic in man.” He suggests Dominique Francon as a model, and Mallory enthusiastically agrees.

Roark’s plan for the Temple is to have it “scaled to human height” so it will “not dwarf man.” When a person enters, “he [will] feel space molded around him, for him.” It will be a “joyous place” where a person will feel “sinless and strong, to find the peace of spirit never granted save by one’s own glory.” When Mallory has a hard time getting Dominique to pose in exactly the way he wants her to, Roark walks into the studio and Dominique’s body immediately takes on the exact stance Mallory has been looking for—“a proud, reverent, enraptured surrender to a vision of her own.”

In May, work on the Aquitania hotel is stopped because of the owners’ financial troubles. Lansing promises Roark he will sort it out, but that it might take some time. Toohey is pleased, calling it the “Unfinished Symphony.” Roark wanders through the incomplete building at night, looking at its “black, dead shape among the glowing structures of the city’s skyline.” But after the first few weeks of mourning, he makes “himself forget the Aquitania.”