The Fountainhead: Part 4: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

Keating’s architectural firm has been losing business and has been downgraded to a single floor. He tries to figure out why it happened, but cannot. One of the contributing reasons was that “The March of the Centuries” (part of the exhibition for the World’s Fair) had been a “ghastly flop.” Toohey, and all the other critics, had universally panned it. While he and his group of fellow architects had worked hard, “in true collective spirit,” the public had ended up agreeing with the critics. However, the other architects had seemed to recover quickly from that failure, while Keating’s reputation had not. Nowadays, Toohey praises Gus Webb’s modern architecture in his columns, and Keating is considered old-fashioned. The A.G.A. is considered an “Old Folks’ Home” while Gordon L. Prescott and the Council of American Builders are at the fore.

Keating knows that the change that is coming is too vicious for him to confront. He knows that Gus Webb and Gordon L. Prescott are such poor architects that it is hard for even Keating to pretend otherwise and follow them.

Keating has lost money in the stock market and isn’t getting new work. He has asked his mother to move back in with him. His mother sees his sadness, which points out to her that all her efforts have been in vain. She says he should perhaps marry Catherine Halsey, causing him to feel anger and then the awareness that Mrs. Keating’s sorrow is greater than his pain. On some weekends, Keating goes away to a shack in the mountains where he paints. It gives him a sense of peace, but he knows that his art has a “childish crudeness.”

Toohey no longer is interested in Keating, which Keating finds difficult to bear. His partner, Neil Dumont, tells him to ask Toohey for a favor and get the Cortlandt Homes project since Keating is Toohey’s “special pet” and Toohey runs the “housing show.” The Cortlandt Homes are a government housing project planned as “a gigantic experiment in low-rent housing,” and it will be a very prestigious project for the architect who gets the job.

When Keating goes to see Toohey, Toohey remarks that Keating has put on weight and will soon look “revolting in a bathtub.” Keating insists that he hasn’t really changed but Toohey says that “Change is the basic principle of the universe” and everything changes, including “seasons, leaves, […] morals, men and buildings.”

Keating tells Toohey that it is remarkable how he always picks the next big talents, like Lois Cook and Gordon Prescott. He recalls how the Council of American Builders used to be laughed at, and how they now control architecture in the city. Toohey says that people used to believe in “divide and conquer” but that Toohey believes in “unite and rule.”

Toohey guesses that Keating has come to talk to him about the Cortlandt Homes. He tells Keating it would be a fitting last chapter to Keating’s career, and reminds him of Stoneridge, saying it would be even bigger than that. Keating says he hates Wynand, and Toohey says Wynand is just a person who is “naïve enough to think that men are motivated primarily by money.” Keating says that Toohey isn’t, since he is a man of integrity, which is why Keating believes in him. Keating says he really values Toohey, and wants to know why Toohey no longer wants to associate himself with him and instead only praises Gus Webb.

Toohey says that in all Keating’s time with him, he doesn’t seem to have understood that Toohey is against individualism and believes that people “are all equal and interchangeable. A position [Keating] holds today can be held by anybody and everybody tomorrow.” He says the reason he’d chosen Keating was to “protect the field from men who would become irreplaceable” and to clear the way for the “Gus Webbs of the world.” He explains that this is why he’d fought so hard against Howard Roark.

Keating is very hurt, and he tries to tell himself that the “ideas he heard [are] of a high moral order” and therefore can’t be evil. Yet, he can’t help telling Toohey with some satisfaction that he has lost his fight against Roark, who is now a success. He says that Roark and Wynand are now great friends, and he challenges Toohey to try and stop Roark now.

Keating then gets a grip on himself and tells Toohey he has come to ask him for the Cortlandt project. Toohey says the architect for Cortlandt must deal with a unique problem because “the cost of the building and the upkeep must be as low as humanly possible.” Since it is to be a model for housing projects all over the country, it must be “the most brilliant, the most efficient exhibit of planning ingenuity and structural economy.” He’d tried Gordon Prescott and Gus Webb for the job, but they couldn’t do it. He says Keating is all about “plush, gilt and marble” and doesn’t seem right for the job. He says he can give Keating the details so he can figure out a preliminary plan for it and see if he can, in fact, pull it off.