Review of "My Years with Ayn Rand"

I posted this review of My Years with Ayn Rand eight years ago on the Amazon.com Website, and in one of their database glitches, my name was detached from it. Some recent digging into my e-mail archives reminded me of it, as Ellen Stuttle and others wrote to say they liked it. I thought it'd be worth posting here. ~ SR

***** Already a compelling memoir, made better and more pertinent
April 9, 1999

Nathaniel Branden has reworked his memoir of his 20 years of romancing the mind of Ayn Rand -- before, during, and after he knew her on a daily and intimate basis -- into a more focused narrative with this second edition.

He took the subtitle of the previous edition, made it the title of this one, and jettisoned his use of a famous Rand quote as an epigraph. ("Judge, and be prepared to be judged.") All were wise decisions, because this book is really not about Rand's judgments. They would have been difficult to get past -- especially her final sweeping, damaging, slanderous ones about Branden. But to focus too directly upon them ignores the story line, and it's one of a love story that reads like a novel.

Branden fell in love as a teenager with the intellect that shone from "The Fountainhead." And by virtue of his own formidable intellect, along with an uncanny fit into the life of a writer who was missing a genuine challenge and grist in her friendships, he came to love the woman as well. He couldn't handle so many varieties of love at once, and their being present in one skein of interactions that ranged from metaphysics to physical admiration in bed. Such lucid and candid self-admission is what I doubt has been seen this clearly since the extraordinary life of Benvenuto Cellini, in his own famed Renaissance autobiography.

For either edition, I couldn't fathom those who see "self-aggrandizement" running rampant on Branden's part. He doesn't minimize his intellect or achievements in publicizing and even, in part, integrating Rand's philosophic work. Nor should he, with the memory hole that Leonard Peikoff and others have erected regarding his role. (I would have been far more bitter than Branden is about such immature revisionist efforts.)

If anything, Branden is much too hard on himself, considering the detachment from reality that Rand was capable of creating in her worst moments. He bends over backwards to insist on limning many of her best moments. In how he respects and compactly describes Rand's achievements, he shows that in one sense, his "years with Rand" never really ended. They still live in his mind and heart. What had been added to them, after 1968, were the years of Nathaniel Branden, a person and innovator in psychology that he had suppressed.

Branden is, indeed, much less sharp with some of his former associates and "Collective" members than he had been 10 years ago. One exception to Branden's rounder edges, and well aimed in light of 10 years of public absurdity, is with Peikoff. Branden doesn't hesitate to point out the roots of the mess Peikoff has made with the role of Objectivist thought in the wider culture. His own 1950s warnings to Peikoff, his ex-wife's cousin, are even more timely to re-read in light of the many sycophants that Peikoff has gathered to his side. Unlike Branden, Peikoff apparently has never tried to re-own his self.

Another decade has also improved Branden's appraisal of and regard for his ex-wife Barbara, and rightly so. They were not on the best of terms in the mid-to-late '80s, partly from the contrast between their biography/memoir efforts, and that obscured some genuine mutual respect.

The one lengthy addition to this new version, that of his current (third) wife Devers' encounter with Rand, is superbly revelatory of several strains of Rand's personality that Branden depicts throughout his memoir. It makes the tragedy of Rand and Branden more poignant, in showing what emotions and inner conflicts Rand could never quite give up upon in her own life ... even when this could have helped make her whole.

Nathaniel Branden won't say so, here or anywhere, even obliquely, but he was the love of Rand's life, and he remains the prime shaper of all of her public role beyond that of novelist. That makes his story compelling.

I have one mild complaint and one subtle plaudit about this edition. I had hoped for some more detail about Branden's relationship with his third great love and second wife, Patrecia. He may have held back on adding more detail out of wanting to include the episode with Ayn and Devers, and that was probably the better choice for his narrative and for his slice of intellectual history.

Branden did, though, do better this time with his use of photographs. These end up being more evocative than those in the first edition (though slightly fewer), largely from their being placed at timely points in the body of the book, rather than being a single section in the middle.

I was glad that the fascinating Patrecia did, at least, get an additional and striking photo, along with her husband, on an Aspen mountaintop. And, also, that two different photos of Rand, with their handwritten inscriptions to Branden, were newly included. Nice defense against the memory hole ... take that, Lenny.

When I spoke briefly to Branden 10 years ago after a talk he gave about his memoir, I said that the story he told called for a happy ending in the best and most innocent storytelling sense, and that I saw it in how he described life with Devers -- and in the photo of her arms around his neck, the last in the book. You'll understand why I found text and photo so compelling if you try the whole of this intelligent and passionate memoir.

Objectivist Living: Review of "My Years with Ayn Rand" - Objectivist Living

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