The Passion of James Valliant’s Criticism, Part II


Neil Parille

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One more detail of publishing history, which I'll include while I'm about it. (I may have broken my all-time posting record in the last 24 hours.) In addition to Atlas having a humongous first printing in the original hardcover edition, its 1st paperback edition made publishing history as Cerf describes in At Random:

From At Random as

reprinted by permission of

Random House in

Libertarian Review,

December 1977

She was just finishing Atlas Shrugged [when he met her], and by the time we published it, we had an enormous advance sale. It was her first novel since The Fountainhead, and we printed a hundred thousand copies, knowing there would be tremendous interest in it. Then the reviews came out. The critics were hostile, as they always were to Ayn Rand, and the sale was badly crimped for a while. We thought it was going to be a failure, but the fact of the matter is: the book has gone on and on and on, through many printings, even in spite of its availability in paperback. Incidentally, the reprint made history. Atlas Shrugged was very long, and there was no possibility Ayn would cut it. So for the first time its publisher, New American Library, dared to price a mass-market paperback above fifty cents--they priced it at ninety-five.

.

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The paperback of Atlas had to be issued with unusually small print, in order to keep the price dowm. It was referred tp as "12-point eyestrain."

Barbara

I wish I had saved my first (paperback) copy of AS. It got so worn from repeated reading and consultation that it began to fall apart, and I just bought a new copy and discarded the old one. A pity - it would have been a great memory-piece.

Bill

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  • 2 weeks later...

Is Valliant incapable of reading even what Reisman said? See. (Reisman says, "Toward the close of the play’s run, an actor prevailed upon this young woman to allow him to alter one of Ayn Rand’s lines in one of the play’s last performances.") The changes were made in a late performance, not prior to production, and Kay is the one who told Rand.

Ellen

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Ellen,

The claims made in Mr. Valliant's book are to Mr. Valliant what the totality of the Objectivist corpus is to a True Believer.

A crack in the tiniest piece, he fears, will bring the whole rigid brittle system crumbling down.

So Jim Valliant can't afford to admit error on the most picayune matter.

The only reason he has conceded that Barbara Branden made her latter-day visit to Ayn Rand: he dare not contradict the Ayn Rand Archives.

Hence the freaky convolution of his replies about the 1981 visit, and the increasing frenzy of his denials about everything else.

Robert Campbell

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Robert,

I suggest that anyone who believes Valliant has any credibility as a researcher should look at the thread where I repeatedly asked him what evidence he had and what research he had done to confirm/refute the 1981 meeting. He basically insulted me and refused to answer these questions. It was only when I confronted him with the statement from the Archives that he backed down.

http://www.solopassion.com/node/4130

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So Jim Valliant can't afford to admit error on the most picayune matter.

Even if so, this one is more than a bit bizarre. It leaves me wondering:

1) Is he really misreading the Reisman quote himself?

2) Does he think that if he says X, his admirers won't notice when they read the quote that not-X is what Reisman said?

Moreover, on another thread (see), he repeats his claim that:

Ms. Branden states with certainty that Rand lost contact with her Russian family precisely because they never knew her new name.

This despite Neil's having documented that Valliant butchered through eliding the quote he cites from Passion. (See Part I of this article, 3rd section, "Back to the Pumpkin Patch.") Valliant might be able to count on many people's having forgotten by this time that Neil documented the misquote, but not on everyone's forgetting.

What Barbara wrote is:

pp. 71-72

[my emphasis]

Ayn never told her family in Russian the new name she had chosen. She had no doubt that she would one day be famous, and she feared that if it were known in Russia that she was Alice Rosenbaum, daughter of Fronz and Anna, her family's safety, even their lives, would be endangered by their relationship to a vocal anti-Communist. Through all the years that she corresponded with her family, until, just before World War II, Russia refused entry to mail from the United States and she lost track of them--they never knew that she had become "Ayn Rand." In her early years in the United States, her original name was known by a number of people, and appeared on all official documents; but after her marriage, when her name legally became O'Connor, she refused to tell anyone what it had been.*

*Footnote: I discovered it only in 1983, when I obtained copies of her birth certificate and her marriage license.

Valliant elided the quote in PARC and then went on to speculate:

pg. 12

[my emphasis]

Ms. Branden also tells us: "Ayn never told her family in Russia her new name...they never knew she had become 'Ayn Rand.'" Ms. Branden may be trying to insinuate that Rand was being neurotically secretive, perhaps even turning her back on her family. This is the sort of vague impression we will see the Brandens persistently attempt to create. Ms. Branden certainly claims that this was an important reason why Rand lost contact with her family prior to World War II--they did not know her name.

But the only person insinuating here is he, and Barbara does not claim what he says she does.

(Apparently Barbara is wrong about Ayn's family in Russia not having known her name; Ayn had told them in some early correspondence.)

-

A further point, this one not pertaining to Valliant's misstating what quotes say: In the same post, he asks in regard to the typewriter/name story:

Mr. Branden claims that Rand herself told him this. We now know that Rand would have known this to be false. So, did Rand lie privately to Branden, even though she had told the press something else -- both before and after telling him that lie?

My belief is that the issue of her family's safety was a concern of Ayn's and is why she began telling the typewriter story, though earlier she'd told the New York Evening Post that the name "Rand" was an abbreviation of her Russian surname. In between, the Stalinist regime had become so oppressive, Ayn would have had good reason to fear that her family might suffer if their connection with her was known. (I'm convinced that Ayn was the origin of the story, though she had to have started telling it later than in the circumstances and manner cousin Fern recalled.)

Ellen

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With respect to Fern Brown, it is a common feature of memory (based on my limited reading) for people to accurately remember something, but place it in a different context. This website http://skepdic.com/memory.html has some examples:

Jean Piaget, the great child psychologist, claimed that his earliest memory was of nearly being kidnapped at the age of two. He remembered details such as sitting in his baby carriage, watching the nurse defend herself against the kidnapper, scratches on the nurse's face, and a police officer with a short cloak and a white baton chasing the kidnapper away. The story was reinforced by the nurse, the family, and others who had heard the story. Piaget was convinced that he remembered the event. However, it never happened. Thirteen years after the alleged kidnapping attempt, Piaget's former nurse wrote to his parents to confess that she had made up the entire story. Piaget later wrote that "I therefore must have heard, as a child, the account of this story...and projected it into the past in the form of a visual memory, which was a memory of a memory, but false"
In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly told a heartbreaking story of a World War II bomber pilot who ordered his crew to bail out after his plane had been seriously damaged by an enemy hit. His young belly gunner was wounded so seriously that he was unable to evacuate the bomber. Reagan could barely hold back his tears as he uttered the pilot's heroic response: "Never mind. We'll ride it down together." ...this story was an almost exact duplicate of a scene in the 1944 film "A Wing and a Prayer." Reagan had apparently retained the facts but forgotten their source

So I think it is quite possible that Fern heard the story from Ayn, and with the passage of years got the source of the memory wrong.

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Valliant's shoddy scholarship, twisted logic and stubborn insistance on the most boneheaded theories have gone way past the line where they can be considered honest mistakes. This is so obvious his supporters are seeing it. Whether Valliant likes it or not, he is becoming totally discredited. And rightly so. Wrong is wrong and crap is crap, regardless of the agenda.

I notice that on SOLOP, he has taken to publishing full chapters of PARC. As of today, his last one (posted three days ago, see here) has had 295 hits. Some of those are by Valliant himself since out of the four comments (as of today), two are by him. That does not mean that 295 people have read this nugget from his earth-shattering tome, though. I would estimate that around 50-60 different people have clicked on it and the rest is repeat clicks to read the posts or reread something.

Surely there are more than 50-60 people in the Objectivist world who endorse Branden-hating.

:)

Basically, Valliant is so boneheaded and discredited that not even his supporters will read this stuff for free. I think we, on OL, read that crap more than his supporters do.

:)

Michael

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Michael,

I also suspect that Mr. Valliant's detractors pay more attention to what he actually wrote than his supporters do.

His supporters need something to wield in order to confirm their faith.

Some acolytes of the Leonard Peikoff Institute will cite his book in comments threads on blogs, giving no evidence that they have read it or intend to read it.

Robert Campbell

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I have to say you guys have gone well beyond the call of duty to attack this book. I'll confess I haven't read it (but may someday for the lulz) but the honesty and rationality in the ARI generally makes me believe what you guys are saying. Though I am surprised it was published by a (apparently) disreputable publisher.

Has anyone been encountered whose devotion to the ARI has been shaken by these critiques?

Edited by Mike11
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Valliant's claim that Barbara insinuates that Rand was turning her back on her family is untrue. Not only does the paragraph he reference not support the claim, but consider this --

1. Page 45: "She would see them again soon . . . or she would make enough money in America to bring them out . . . ." (This was said at her last meeting with her family.)

2. Page 373: "To Ayn, Lilyan Courtois' call seemed like a miracle. Nora was alive! The little sister . . . had survived!"

It should also be remembered that Dr. Gotthelf (no friend of "the Brandens" I assume) said in On Ayn Rand (2000) that Rand got her name from the RR typewriter. He says that he checked all his biographical facts with archivists at the ARI. He also says that whenever he used Branden's bio, he double checked it with the archivists. Actually, his book places the name adoption in Russia rather than the US. Here is my detailed discussion --

http://tinyurl.com/3xyfem

Incidentally, according to the Archivists at the ARI, they interviewed Fern Brown some years ago. Maybe her interview would shed some light on this issue, but Valliant didn't consult it (so far as I can tell). Wouldn't that be a nice thing to do before accusing Brown of making up the story?

Edited by Neil Parille
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Mike,

It is unlikely that many acolytes of the Leonard Peikoff Institute will be swayed by a critique of Mr. Valliant's book. They were worshipping Ayn Rand before the book was written, and only a handful actually needed Mr. Valliant to draw them into the True Faith.

The best to be hoped for is that his book will become a perceived liability to the Institute, and its acolytes will stop citing it or claiming to rely on it.

I believe that the movement away from the book is beginning. The folks at the Ayn Rand Archives obviously think little of Mr. Valliant and his pretensions to scholarship. He has yet to recover from their willingness to reveal evidence of Barbara Branden's 1981 meeting with Ayn Rand.

I've put some effort into critiquing the book, and supporting critiques by Neil Parille, Michael Stuart Kelly, and others, because I am tired of seeing the development of Objectivism hidden or obfuscated to serve some partisan agenda--and Mr. Valliant is just about the most flagrant public apologist for the concealment and obfuscation that one could ever imagine.

I also think the effort to critique the book is necessary because The Atlas Society has failed to respond to it, even though one of their senior people claimed that PARC helped to convince him to quit, and the book is being used by the Leonard Peikoff Institute to undermine their legitimacy.

Hence, the just narrowly averted debacle of Mr. Valliant's ally, Linsday Perigo, speaking at a TAS conference. Averted only at the cost of a public food fight with Messrs. Perigo and Valliant for which several participants on this board got blasted by Ed Hudgins and Robert Bidinotto--even though the principals at TAS have categorically refused to respond to Mr. Valliant's opus themselves.

Robert Campbell

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Neil,

I've mentioned this before, but since we're back once again at the typewriter story, it's topical again.

Ayn Rand's letters to and from her family (before mail from the United States to the Soviet Union was blocked, I presume after the Hitler-Stalin pact) were written in Russian.

Barbara Branden doesn't read or speak Russian. Neither, so far as I know, did any of the members of the "Collective."

Even though the Ayn Rand Institute has had access for some years to the services of at least two people who read Russian (Dina Schein and Shoshana Milgram) no one seems to have put much priority on going through Ayn Rand's letters to her family. Hence the Archives people were still backing up the typewriter story as recently as 1998 or 1999 (whenever Dr. Gotthelf checked with them).

I suspect that Ayn Rand came up with the Rand typewriter story herself, to draw attention away from questions about her real name and keep the heat off any surviving relatives in Russia.

Robert Campbell

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Robert,

A few more points --

1. According to the Archives (I can't find the url), Rand stopped corresponding with her family in 1937 because she got a message from the post office that indicated that it would be dangerous to her family.

2. Also, according to the ARI: "One lead to the actual source of the name comes from Ayn Rand herself. In 1936, she told the New York Evening Post that 'Rand is an abbreviation of my Russian surname.' Originally, we thought that this was a red herring in order to protect her family from the Soviet authorities." Why did the ARI think that Rand employed a "red herring" (i.e. a lie) if there was no other evidence that she tried to conceal her real name.

3. Barbara Branden says she didn't know Rand's real name until 1983. How can you know someone for 19 years and not ask the person her real name? Apparently Rand cultivated a certain "mystery" about it and made it clear that she didn't want people to inquire (I assume this, I don't know). If so, it must have been out of concern for her family.

4. I don't see how anyone can read Barbara's moving account about how Rand cried when she learned that her sister was alive after 47 years and think there is some implication that Rand was turning her back on her family. I think she quotes Nora as saying "we lost contact with her." Nothing suspicious about that, except if you live on Planet Valliant.

-Neil Parille

Edited by Neil Parille
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Hence the Archives people were still backing up the typewriter story as recently as 1998 or 1999 (whenever Dr. Gotthelf checked with them).

Yes; and I question that Barbara Branden's biography is the first place that certain persons connected with ARI had heard that story. Did Leonard Peikoff himself hear it from Ayn?

Ellen

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Neil,

There was definitely an air of mystery.

I recall hearing from one of the Objectivists I knew as an undergrad that Ayn Rand's first name had been... Alissa.

The way the news was imparted, this was a secret, to be repeated only to the cognoscenti--in a whisper.

Robert Campbell

PS. Seeing the words "Alice Rosenbaum" in The Passion of Ayn Rand made it all seem so prosaic.

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