AR's Favorite Director (and more, from Hospers)

[Ellen Stuttle]

On a thread started by Chris Grieb to commemorate Alfred Hitchcock's birthday -- link -- Chris writes:

Hitchock was Ayn Rand's favorite movie director .

Peter Reidy adds further on:

I think she liked Ernst Lubitsch just as well and used him à clef in "Her Second Career." In AR Answers she expresses mixed feelings about his most famous movie, Ninotchka.

I think she did like both Hitchcock and Lubitsch, but according to John Hospers, in his Liberty memoir, Fritz Lang was her favorite.

I started out just to type in the passage about Lang, but I find Hospers' discussion of his comparing notes on artistic tastes with Ayn so fascinating, I kept typing. Then I decided that I'd better start a separate thread with the material, since Hitchcock isn't so much as mentioned in it!

Following are three posts with excerpts.

Ellen

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Edited August 15, 2008 by Ellen Stuttle

[Ellen Stuttle]

.

Memoir

Conversations With Ayn Rand

by John Hospers

Liberty

Volume 3, Number 6

pp. 25-26

July 1990

[The "next meeting" referred to is the second of his discussions with Ayn at her apartment; this would have been about a month after he met Ayn in April 1960 when she gave a lecture at Brooklyn College.]

Early in our next meeting we agreed that Garbo was the greatest of the film actresses--an embodiment of intelligence, sensuality, and sensitivity--though Dietrich came in for some discussion, as did Marilyn Monroe, whom Ayn admired not as a sex symbol but as a vulnerable child projecting innocence and vulnerability. This, Ayn thought (and I agreed), was really the secret of her wide appeal.

We lingered fondly on works of art that had meant a great deal to us. We compared notes on plays, films, paintings, and musical compositions. When she said that her favorite dramatist was Schiller, I regretted that I had not known her in time to take her to see Schiller's Maria Stuart, the best performance of a play (starring Irene Worth and Eva le Gallienne) I had ever seen. It would have been great to introduce Ayn to that experience, to savor the work together.

The following week I did take her to see the full-evening Martha Graham dance Clytemnestra. She was very perceptive about what was going on, though unfamiliar with the medium of modern dance. She liked the dance more than the music, as did I. Frank was ill at the time, and she would take care to make dinner for him before we left, and would rush back afterward to make sure he was all right. Her solicitude for him was touching. But when she made sure he was in satisfactory condition, she returned to the living room and we resumed our conversation.

"Who is your favorite movie director?" was one of the questions she asked, presumably to sound me out as to where my likes and dislikes lay. "Fritz Lang," I told her at once. She was instantly suspicious. "How did you know?" she said, frowning.

I was puzzled, then grasped what her suspicion was. "I didn't know," I said. I told her how as an adolescent in Iowa I had haunted the theater to see Fury, about a mob attacking a courthouse to lynch a man who turned ou[t] to be innocent (Spencer Tracy). I told her how I admired most of all Lang's work Hangmen Also Die, about the World War II occupation of Czechoslovakia: its structural complexity--wheels within wheels, just like Atlas--and how impressed aesthetically I was whenever little hints were dropped here and there and apparently forgotten, but then picked up later when they turned out to be essential to the resolution. She sensed my enthusiasm, and her warmth and vivacity increased as I related to her (as if it were new to her) various hints dropped in Atlas that were picked up and used later on. Apparently her suspicion, that someone had told me who was her favorite director, had vanished. Indeed, in an unexpected burst of warmth, she exclaimed, "Then I love you in the true philosophical sense." I was too surprised and flattered by this compliment to question what the "true philosophical sense" was.

---

[He continues:]

I found it incomprehensible that she didn't much like Shakespeare. But I could not disagree with her judgment when I asked her who she thought was the greatest prose artist of the twentieth century. She said "Isak Dinesen." She didn't like Dinesen's sense of life, but thought her a superlative stylist--a judgment in which I concurred. On a subsequent occasion when I brought a copy of Out of Africa and read her a page from it, she was positively glowing. She disliked Dinesen's pessimism, but loved the economy of means and the always-just-right word selection. When Ayn and I both admired the same work, and compared our reactions to it and the reasons for our admiration--that was a high point of our friendship. During these conversations the rest of the world was left far behind; nothing mattered but our experiences of these works of art. We held them up to the light, slowly rotating them to exhibit their various facets, like precious jewels. Ayn was all aglow when our reactions struck common ground; she was no jaded critic, but had the spontaneous enthusiasm of a little girl, unspoiled by the terminology of sophistication. Even today I treasure these moments, and can hardly think of them without inducing the tearducts to flow just a little.

.

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Edited August 15, 2008 by Ellen Stuttle

[Ellen Stuttle]

.

Memoir

Conversations With Ayn Rand

by John Hospers

Liberty

Volume 3, Number 6

pp. 26-27

July 1990

We did get into a bit of a flap about Thomas Wolfe. I had grown up on his novels, and there were passages of his poetic prose that had become so close to me that I had them virtually memorized. I brought a copy of his Of Time and the River one evening and read aloud to Ayn, Nathan and Barbara a passage of about five pages--a part of the description of the young man (Eugene Gant), having left his native North Carolina for the first time, reflecting on his chaotic childhood as the train is pounding away all night through the hills and forests, propelling him forward toward the unknown (his first year at Harvard). I empathized with so much in the passage that I waxed quite emotional in the delivery of it.

When I had finished, Ayn proceeded to decimate it bit by bit. How could I possibly care for such drivel? It was anti-conceptual; it was mystical; it was flowery and overlong. I do not remember the details of the criticism (then as on many other occasions, I wished I had had a tape recorder with me). I remember that they all seemed to be valid points, and I was somewhat ashamed that my emotional reactions did not jibe with these rational ones. But I defended my favorable verdict on the passage with the observation that Wolfe has a tremendous evocative power, the power to generate very intense emotions by drawing on haunting memories of days past and setting them in the context of the present experience.

And then Barbara came to my aid. She said, very simply, "Wolfe is beautiful music." And suddenly it struck me how true this was. I thought of Walter Pater, who said that all great art approaches to the condition of music; and how Wol;fe is as near as American literature has yet come to creating literary music.

---

Some of her other preferences I found surprising, almost unbelievable. I could see why she liked Salvador Dali, though I couldn't see why she preferred him to Picasso. [*] (My own favorite painters were the post-Impressionists--Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh. She had no use for non-representational painting, though I liked Mondrian a lot--and I tried vainly to convince her that a line could be expressive even though that line was no part of a represented person or object.)

I was most surprised of all by her musical evaluations. Of the classical composers, she preferred Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, and not much else. I liked them too--I had none of the anti-Romantic bias that was then fashionable--but I was astounded that she didn't care for Beethoven or Brahms, and that she didn't like Bach at all. Bach and Handel were my favorites, though almost as much as these I liked certain pre-Bach composers such as Ockegham, William Byrd, De Lassus, Victoria--none of whom she had heard of.

[para. break inserted.]

I would bring records to her and play parts of them, but her tastes never changed. When she wanted an inspiring musical theme to introduce her new weekly radio program on the Columbia University station, I played for her some candidates: Purcell's Trumpet Voluntary prelude to Wagner's Meistersinger, Handel's Dettingen Te Deum, introduction to the march from Berlioz's The Trojans. Of all the pieces prior to the 19th century, she said[,] "These represent a static universe," and cared to hear no more. So in spite of all my efforts, the final verdict was still Rachmaninoff. (Were these the composers she heard most during her girlhood in Russia, I wondered, and for that reason made the most powerful impression on her? I brought up to her the difference between differing preferences and differing evaluations. But she stuck to the view that her giving Rachmaninoff the number one place among composers was not merely preference but an "objective" evaluation--though, she added, in the case of music she couldn't prove that the evalution was the right one.)

We discussed the objective vs. the subjective in art. I suggested to her that a traditional Aristotelian canon such as organic unity was objective in the sense that the unity is actually to be found in the work (though it may need some pointing out), and that an indication of this was that the criterion had survived with variations for over 2,000 years. On the other hand, I said, there are times when it is less appropriate to say "That's good" than to say "I like it." For example, I tend to like massive works--Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Bach's B-Minor Mass. She, on the other hand, despite having written Atlas Shrugged, tended to like works small. She once showed me her study, where she had written the last half of Atlas. It was terribly cramped and small, but that was what she felt comfortable with--"infinite riches in a little room," I told her. But the room would have given me claustrophobia within an hour.

[*] [see next post.]

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[Ellen Stuttle]

[*] Judging from what he said on an earlier page, she actively disliked Picasso. I'll include that part, too.

.

Memoir

Conversations With Ayn Rand

by John Hospers

Liberty

Volume 3, Number 6

pp. 24

July 1990

About two weeks went by [after their meeting at the lecture at Brooklyn College and their long conversation afterward at a restaurant]. I had finished Atlas (comments on it below). [He hadn't read any of her books at the time when he met her.] I received in the mail an invitation to attend one of the NBI lectures, the one in a series of 20 on aesthetics. I accepted gladly.

It was probably the wrong lecture for me to begin with. Had I been asked to attend, for example, the economics lecture, I would have found it a revelation. Economics was virgin territory for me then. But aesthetics was the area where I had done most of my work, including my doctoral dissertation (later published as a book entitled Meaning and Truth in the Arts). I found a lot to criticize in the lecture, even though I found myself in general agreement with principal points in Rand's aesthetic.

It was the examples that riled me most. I did not like to see Picasso and Faulkner (to take just two examples) relegated to the scrap-heap. Faulkner was no special favorite of mine, but I had a high opinion of his literary artistry and spoke in his defense. I was almost shouted down by members of the audience who apparently considered my action some kind of treason. Hugo and Doestoyevsky were favorites of Rand's, and mine as well; but we came to loggerheads on Tolstoy. I mentioned in the discussion period that I thought Tolstoy was the keenest observer of details of nature and human behavior that ever wrote, and his ability to provide a rich and vivid impression through the selection of details was probbly unequaled in fiction. Ayn responded that the plot in War and Peace was quite disconnected, with events not leading "inevitably or probably" into each other--which I granted was often true in this enormous saga. But I thought that individual scenes, such as Prince Andrey's encounter with Napoleon, were tremendously vivid and uniquely moving.

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Edited August 15, 2008 by Ellen Stuttle

[Chris Grieb]

Ellen; Thanks for the material. It is fascinating.