The Passion of James Valliant's Criticism

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Barbara,

You knew Rand and, if I am not mistaken, her taped interviews with you for Who Is Ayn Rand? were around that time. So you are in a far better position than I am to say anything about Rand. But she also mentioned to you the help she received from many people.

I have difficulty imagining that Rand meant what she said one minute and meant something else another when she changed the subject.

Maybe that term, "In any sense that matters...," was an escape clause so she could be flexible. (The phrase "contextually absolute" comes to mind.) But I still don't see how to reconcile even that phrase with her letters of gratitude to Cecile B. DeMille, for instance, for teaching her the basics of plot (and what did he get in return?). That's just one example among many and that one certainly would be in a sense that matters as regards to what Rand was talking about.

I could be mistaken, but I think she knew she was exaggerating and even tried to live up to it after she put it out there. I have known oodles of artists who have done that.

Michael

[Neil Parille]

Michael,

I think if someone had asked Rand what she meant by it, she probably would have said something like "I didn't receive any altruistic help." But she also must have known that most people reading the postcript would naturally interpret it as flat-out denial of help. So given this somewhat unusual scenario, I would say that she exaggerated rather than lied.

On the Les Crane Show (available on the web site of The Ayn Rand Institute with the title “Selfishness as a Virtue) she uses equally sweeping language. Most of the listeners probably hadn't read AS. (The discussion starts roughly 3 minutes into the show).

[Ellen Stuttle]

My opinion is that Rand neither "exaggerated on purpose" OR "lied." I of course didn't know her person-to-person, as Barbara did. But Barbara's interpretation is spot on the way I think Rand meant it. Maybe what people have trouble understanding about Rand -- it is pretty damned difficult to understand -- is the way her ideational world could come to have such full force of "reality" to her, she just didn't think of the kind of qualifications and shades and innuendos of ambiguity most of us would.

Ellen

___

[Dragonfly]

Oh, come on people, of course Rand lied when she said that, as any objective outsider will confirm. If it hadn't been Rand there wouldn't have been much doubt about that. But the notion that Rand could lie leads to cognitive dissonance with Objectivists, so they have to find some excuse, some reinterpretation, no matter how improbable, to avoid the ugly truth. It's impossible that our Goddess lied! Yeah, sure.

[Neil Parille]

Ellen,

I see your point, and of course I didn't know Rand.

On the other hand, if you listen to the Les Crane Show interview she is asked about paying taxes when she became succsessful. She tells Crane that he should ask her "what happened before that." She then goes into a melodramatic recitation about how no one helped her, etc. I find it hard to deny that she knowingly created a public persona that was at least exaggerated.

After all, Rand could have said that people did voluntarily help her because they saw her potential or whatever, and used that as a jumping-off point for how a free society would help the down and out without taxes. That wouldn't have been contrary to Objectivism.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dragonfly,

Actually Ellen is probably closer to the truth for the principal motivation, but I still think it is a mix. My reason is that I have known many great artists, but I was very close to two, Maestro Eleazar de Carvalho (also see here) and protest singer Geraldo Vandré (see blog entry here that gives something on him in English) and I see attitudes and actions from the stories about Rand that are identical to what I saw up close with those two. Both had essentially created their own "stylized" world (Eleazar in terms of being a savior of music in Brazil and Geraldo actually constructed an imaginary place called "As Terras de Benvirá"—The Land of Good-Is-Coming), crawled into it and never returned.

However...

This held for about 90%, not 100%. Both were extremely polemical, but both were very much image conscious when they needed to be. (Ironically for me, Geraldo actually did "shrug" at the height of his fame and I got the leftovers a few years later. It's a long, but fascinating story for another time.)

Notice with Rand that she did not allow her image to be denigrated. She would sick Holzer on people. That cuts both ways, though. She stopped others from getting a free ride or distorting her image, but she also knew intimately what she did to construct that image and she made sure it was fed properly. Here is a quote that impressed me a great deal when I read it ("The 'Inexplicable Personal Alchemy'," now included in Return of the Primitive, p. 128).

Today, since I did escape and have acquired a public voice, I felt that I had to speak for them—in the name of justice—even if few will hear me in the empty vastness of a decadent culture.

She knew how to acquire and keep that public voice, even in an "empty vastness of a decadent culture."

I remember reading Nathaniel saying in Judgment Day or My Years With Ayn Rand that she loved to shock people. I can't find the passage anymore since I did not underline it (I will keep looking as time goes on), but Nathaniel was talking about a playful side of Rand—one that liked to be on stage, so to speak. I understand that fully because I have lived with it.

No great artist is completely alienated from his audience. Actually there is a name for one who becomes that way: Has-been.

So this is a good part of what went into Rand's exaggeration. It was not simply a lie to dupe people and show off. On one level (the 90%), Ellen and Barbara are right in that she believed it fully (as part of a world she constructed in her mind), and on another level (the 10%), I believe she knew she was fudging, but it was done to build/maintain her image so she could sell her personal "stylized" world to the rest of the world. She thought her stylized world was far better than the one she encountered out in reality. In this respect, her attitude was identical to Eleazar's and Geraldo's.

This is my speculation, of course. But it is not made in a vacuum.

Michael

[Robert Campbell]

Here are my 2 cents:

I see Rand's declaration that "no one helped me" as a part of a personal mythos, consciously created and cultivated.

She could easily have said, "No one sacrificed for me, and I never expected anyone to"--if that was what she wanted readers to take away from her "About the Author" statement.

Who, among her hundreds of thousands of readers in 1957, knew the first thing about her relatives in Chicago, or the place that she lived in after she arrived in Hollywood, or Cecil B. DeMille, or Albert Mannheimer?

I don't classify this statement with her claim to have made only "editorial line-changes" when she was revising We the Living. That was a lie. "No one helped me" was an exaggeration.

Robert Campbell

[Reidy]

In the same essay Rand said she'd never changed her mind about anything, a claim even the keepers of the flame don't try to defend, having documented her youthful Nietzscheanism in the Journals. More broadly, she liked to claim she was more radical and original than she really was. She may have had second thoughts on this, at least in the case of Aristotle's Ethics.

My impression is that the most potent thinkers and artists are so close to their creations that they honestly see things that way. Let the rest of us work out the details.

Edited August 16, 2007 by Reidy

[Ellen Stuttle]

Oh, come on people, of course Rand lied when she said that, as any objective outsider will confirm. If it hadn't been Rand there wouldn't have been much doubt about that. But the notion that Rand could lie leads to cognitive dissonance with Objectivists, so they have to find some excuse, some reinterpretation, no matter how improbable, to avoid the ugly truth. It's impossible that our Goddess lied! Yeah, sure.

I am not an Objectivist; I have never been an Objectivist. I have thought the "About the Author" statement in Atlas was deuced weird (in a number of respects) since the first time I read it, which was the summer after my freshman year of college. I had never heard of Ayn Rand before I read Atlas Shrugged. I have never at any time since I learned of her thought of Ayn Rand as a "Goddess." Ayn Rand to me is a person I puzzled over a great deal, whom I was around numerous times in the early '70s, some of whose close associates I knew well. I am by no means talking as a Rand idolator. But I do not think that she either lied or exaggerated on purpose. I think that she wrote from utmost sincerity, that she believed what she was saying as she was writing it. And that if you want (make that "if one wants," generic) to understand Ayn Rand's psychology, an important feature to try to understand is the extent to which she did come to believe her own image of herself. It's necessary to be aware of this feature of her psychology really to grasp what's going on in her Journal entries re Nathaniel, how someone could be so "out of it" as to have written some of what she wrote while yet sincerely grappling to comprehend.

Ellen

___

Edited August 16, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[Ellen Stuttle]

I'll go out on a limb and state my point this way -- though I feel some reluctance to use this wording, since I can just imagine how it will be interpreted by various folks on a cognate list: I think that Ayn Rand was close to delusional. She wasn't clinically delusional. She didn't believe that she was Catherine the Great or some such; she didn't have an incorrect self-identification in terms of which human being she was. But she had a self-belief system, a mythos of herself, which came close to being a delusional system. A delusional system is believed by the person who holds it. A lie is something which the person who is saying it knows is not true. I think that Ayn Rand didn't know that she was partly living a mythic image which was as much a fictional creation as her own characters. I think she became one of her own characters in her own inner "eyes."

Ellen

___

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ellen,

What you just described is what great artists do.

Rand used the term "stylized universe" to describe her vision. (I saw this term several times in the PARC journal entries. For example, one which I marked is on p. 332.)

But this vision is not delusional in the non-volitional sense. It is fully chosen, consciously created and sold to the world for a price.

Let's put it this way. Do you think she would have held to all that without the art works she created?

Michael

[Dragonfly]

Oh, no doubt she rationalized for herself the lie away. But that is no excuse. To state publicly that no one helped her during that period is a slap in the face of those who gave her very substantial help, without which she perhaps might never have become a famous writer. That she by evasion might have started to believe her own lie doesn't alleviate her guilt. At least someone should speak out for those whose benevolence is disdainfully swept away by calling their help unimportant and not worth mentioning. The record should be set straight.

[Barbara Branden]

I think that she wrote from utmost sincerity, that she believed what she was saying as she was writing it. And that if you want (make that "if one wants," generic) to understand Ayn Rand's psychology, an important feature to try to understand is the extent to which she did come to believe her own image of herself. It's necessary to be aware of this feature of her psychology really to grasp what's going on in her Journal entries re Nathaniel, how someone could be so "out of it" as to have written some of what she wrote while yet sincerely grappling to comprehend.

Ellen

Ellen, from everything I learned about Rand during nineteen years of being with her or talking with her almost daily, this is exactly correct.

Barbara

[Rodney]

I think that she wrote from utmost sincerity, that she believed what she was saying as she was writing it. And that if you want (make that "if one wants," generic) to understand Ayn Rand's psychology, an important feature to try to understand is the extent to which she did come to believe her own image of herself. It's necessary to be aware of this feature of her psychology really to grasp what's going on in her Journal entries re Nathaniel, how someone could be so "out of it" as to have written some of what she wrote while yet sincerely grappling to comprehend.

Ellen

Ellen, from everything I learned about Rand during nineteen years of being with her or talking with her almost daily, this is exactly correct.

Barbara

Yes. To me all this was obvious the moment I began seeing postings of those entries on the Net.

[Brant Gaede]

I just think that a powerful, artistic mind pared away non-conforming memories the way an artist uses selectivity. It's all part of being in control of the product--she being part and parcel of the product ("And I mean it"). If you forget the lies and misrepresentations you'll eventually become delusional. It's kind of like fibbing about your income on your mortgage application and eventually losing the house you delusionally afforded for a time--like not really affording her peculiar relationship with Nathaniel. She could never admit she embraced moral relativism on such a profoundly personal level spreading horrible poison.

--Brant

[Ellen Stuttle]

Oh, no doubt she rationalized for herself the lie away. But that is no excuse. To state publicly that no one helped her during that period is a slap in the face of those who gave her very substantial help, without which she perhaps might never have become a famous writer. That she by evasion might have started to believe her own lie doesn't alleviate her guilt. At least someone should speak out for those whose benevolence is disdainfully swept away by calling their help unimportant and not worth mentioning. The record should be set straight.

Dragonfly, if that's addressed to me, you misunderstand if you think that what I'm doing is making an excuse for her. I consider the picture I've painted significantly less flattering than if her statement had been an outright lie. I think she'd done things in her mind such that by the time she made the statement she believed it was true.

And, Michael, I don't agree that what I described is "what great artists do." There have been other great artists who have done similar things to different extents. There are people who aren't artists who do similar things. With Rand the process was connected with her art, and I don't think she would have produced the specific art she did without this process. But what I'm describing isn't something which I see as necessary part and parcel of being a great artist, or as something confined to artists.

Earlier this evening -- about 6:30 my time -- I tried to access OL, wanting to add further comments about the "About the Author" piece. I couldn't access the site for some reason, I don't know whether a problem with the site itself or with the UHa server (I could access every other site I tried).

I wanted to elaborate further on my remark in post 359 that I found "About the Author" "deuced weird (in a number of respects)."

Here are the two remarks in the piece which I found the weirdest:

I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written--and published--is my proof that they do.

He is my intellectual heir.

Both assertions sounded to me grandiose and peculiar. The idea of a philosopher naming an "intellectual heir," for instance, is...weird. Also, the book's having been written and published isn't a proof that "men" ("persons," including Dagny) such as she was writing about exist. And even then, at the ripe old age of 18 and a half, I didn't think that people such as she was projecting exist except in an archetypal way (I didn't have the word "archetypal" then, but it suits for what I meant). Yet the whole book sounded to me as if she was extremely sincere; I thought that she had to really believe what she was saying to be able to write it. Thus from the start of my "relationship" with Ayn Rand, I had a puzzled feeling about her, a feeling of something definitely odd going on in her psyche.

Ellen

___

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ellen,

I was going to answer your email about difficulty in accessing the site, but since you mentioned it here and others might have had this problem, I will answer here.

Sometimes the forums I visit have downtimes (never over an hour) and so does OL. I presume this is because of some kind of maintenance going on at the server end. At any rate, I made a ticket about it to the Invision Power Board people and I will post what they respond. This may take a day or two since I did not tag it as an emergency.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ellen,

I think like an artistic producer, but I will not belabor the point.

There is another term for how you are describing Rand: religious fanatic.

I do admit that there is nothing more poignant than watching a religious fanatic sincerely try to analyze the why of great loss when his belief did not lead him to where he thought it would. (Of course, he always ends up blaming it on something outside himself. Even Jesus on the cross, with foreknowledge, called out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" - Matthew 27:46)

I am going to think about this a bit before commenting more.

Michael

[Barbara Branden]

Ellen,

There is another term for how you are describing Rand: religious fanatic.

Michael

Michael, this is not something peculiar to religious fanatics; it is something people do constantly, in moderate or extreme forms -- that is, convince themselves that something is true, however unjustified or even outlandish it might be, and proceed to speak and act accordingly with an air of great certainty.

Barbara

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Barbara,

Of course there are degrees.

I was merely taking the full group of Ellen's observations. I will let Ellen speak for herself, but I don't think she was talking about isolated and disconnected items. I got the impression she was talking about the full world-view from the lens of self-image.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Another thing to consider is an altered state of consciousness, maintained and magnified over a lifetime.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On seeing that Wendy McElroy was the only libertarian to find anything good about PARC (see her review on Lewrockwell.com), I was delighted to see her publishing Neil's article above at ifeminists:

The Passion of James Valliant’s Criticism

(published yesterday, Aug. 28, 2007)

Valliant recently claimed the following here, Wendy McElroy Celebrates "The Woman - Ayn Rand", where he was plugging her site.

Despite our differences, she remains one of the most rational voices out there on the subject of Ayn Rand and always worth checking out.

I am sure he appreciates her rationality in posting Neil's critique of his shoddy standards. After all, Rand does deserve the best and all that...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Wendy McElroy has now removed Neil's article (August 31, 2007).

It stayed up three whole days. I wonder if she ever read it to begin with.

I heard on the grapevine that certain of her new interests were not being served by featuring Valliant's incompetence. Her orientation is to bash the Brandens, not Valliant. Boy, did she screw up!

It's all about rational passionality or something like that...

Michael

[Alfonso Jones]

MY OPINION ABOUT ALL OF THIS

A far better course of action than Valliant's silly reasoning and his snippets from Rand's journals would have been to have just PUBLISHED THE UNEDITED JOURNALS! At least from November 1967 - whatever he chose to cite last in his book.

We should of course remember as we interpret even the snippets we have from Rand's journals that Rand was intelligent - and had to realize, as she wrote in her journal, the high probability that what was in the journal would eventually be made public some time after her death. It happens. Given how Rand chose to portray the causes for the break, it is not unrealistic to be cautious about assuming that everything in those journals (even if we were to have the unedited version) comes from a totally disinterested observer.

Alfonso

[Robert Campbell]

I've corresponded with Wendy McElroy concerning her initial acceptance and later rejection of "The Passion of James Valliant's Criticism."

Here, with her permission, is a statement on the matter. I've put two explanatory remarks in square brackets, for those who don't know her site.

I didn't evaluate the essay harshly. I said rather nice things to Mr. Parille about his work. What I did not know is that by posting his piece [on the ifeminists site] I would be importing an ongoing and very acrimonious infight onto my site; if I had known this, I would not have posted it. From a follow-up note, Mr. Parille clearly did know this would be the case and he did not inform me ...for whatever reason. When it became clear that infighting was indeed going to consume my fledgling effort to celebrate Ayn Rand, I deleted it. That is the beginning, end and middle of my motivations and I would be pleased to have other pieces by Mr. Parille with the caveat as long as they are of equal quality and are not part of ongoing intra-BB battles. As to maintaining Valliant's piece [his review of Stephen Cox's book, still posted on ifeminists]...one of the reasons I am now determined to do so is that I will NOT let other people dictate the content of my own site. Quite frankly, my back is up and it has nothing to do with taking one side or another; it has everything to do with people demanding that I morally justify what I do on my own site with my own time and money. Also I continue to refuse to visit any Objectivist or objectivist BBs in order to read whatever is going on in this particular squabble because such squabbling is what drove me away from Objectivism in the first place. I am trying to regain the joy in reading Rand not renew my horror at how her various followers with various interpretations love to savage each other.

Robert Campbell