Wagner

[Barbara Branden]

Ellen: "There was something even in her earlier 'Who Is Ayn Rand?' essay which had echoes of Wolfe to my ear."

You are remarkably perceptive. (It's fortunate for me that Rand didn't see it.)

Whatever virtues I may share with Thomas Wolfe, there is one fault we definitely share. No one who reads me can avoid knowing that I rarely use one adjective when two will do. You can't imagine how many of them I edit out before publication -- but the truth is that I often want that kind of repetition when it results in the rhythm, the song, that I want. Writing to me is very like music. If a paragraph has the cadence, the music that I want, then I know it's right. If it doesn't have it, I'm disastified, no matter bow clear the content might be or how suitable in other respects.

Barbara

[Barbara Branden]

I'd like to ask a favor of the members of Objectivist Living. Each time someone refers to "PAR," I cringe. It's a horrible version of The Passion of Ayn Rand, a title I dearly love. Would you save me from constant cringing by referring to my book either by its full title or as Passion,, which is what I call it?

Barbara

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Barbara,

As one of the regular offenders about using "PAR," I most certainly will change that habit. I did not know it bothered you and, for me, to change it is no trouble at all.

It's too close to PARC anyway...

Michael

[Rodney]

And I guess, when spelling it backwards as jokesters like me are wont to do, "RAP" would connote the wrong kind of verbal music!

[Chris Grieb]

Barbara; I will follow your request and be honored to do so.

[Rodney]

I've always greatly admired the writing in Passion, so perhaps Wolfe could benefit from the pruning of adjectives. As it is, although I love good poetry no matter how lengthy, I could not endure reading a novel written in Wolfe's style.

[Judith]

Writing to me is very like music. If a paragraph has the cadence, the music that I want, then I know it's right. If it doesn't have it, I'm disastified, no matter bow clear the content might be or how suitable in other respects.

I agree. Writing has to sing. Similarly, I really hate singing musical works in translation; to me, the sound of the words is part of the music the composer had in mind, and changing those words is an abomination.

Judith

[Wrighty]

Writing to me is very like music. If a paragraph has the cadence, the music that I want, then I know it's right. If it doesn't have it, I'm disastified, no matter bow clear the content might be or how suitable in other respects.

I agree. Writing has to sing. Similarly, I really hate singing musical works in translation; to me, the sound of the words is part of the music the composer had in mind, and changing those words is an abomination.

Judith

Absolutely! "Madamina, il catalogo è questo" from Don Giovanni sung in anything but Italian? No thanks.

Can you imagine what the finale of Beethoven's 9th would sound like in English?

[Judith]

Absolutely! "Madamina, il catalogo è questo" from Don Giovanni sung in anything but Italian? No thanks.

Can you imagine what the finale of Beethoven's 9th would sound like in English?

As a serious choral singer, I've been in the unfortunate position of having to sing works in translation many times. I hate it! One can always print the translation in the program. And for those who argue that people shouldn't be burying their heads in the program during the performance -- I agree! Get there early enough to read the program in advance and then be present during the actual performance.

Judith

[Ellen Stuttle]

It's fortunate for me that Rand didn't see it [the echoes of Wolfe in Who Is Ayn Rand?.)

Indeed. Wouldn't have been pleasant for you if she had!

I think that she was blinded -- or, more precisely, deafened; but that wrecks my metaphor -- to the Wolfe-ness by the shell of the Rand-ness. I felt a sense of a spirit pushing against the shell, trying to spred its wings. And this was from the first time I read the piece. My feeling of the Rand-type prose being a constraint to your natural form of expression was one of those signs which made me uneasy about the whole "atmosphere" I was picking up from the batch of Objectivist material I'd acquired. (I'd found out in spring of '63 that NBI existed and was offering courses on Rand's philosophy, and, along with all the back copies of The Objectivist Newsletter, I'd ordered Who Is Ayn Rand?.) There are places in the work where your writing soars, for example the beginning, which I think is gorgeous. But other places it seemed that you were trying to write in a style similar to the way she wrote, and that this style was sounding "forced." Thus I wondered, did Rand have strictures as to how one was "supposed" to write?

Another thing which bothered me was the hagiographic character of the piece. I wondered why Rand would want to be written about in that vein.

Some years later, of course, I learned the answers to these wonderments.

You can't imagine how many of them [adjectives] I edit out before publication [...].

How large are your wastebaskets? ;-)

Speaking of editing out, I'm curious to read the original of Look Homeward, Angel and hope I'll one day get around to doing that. It was a long-standing publishing legend, the tale of how ___ (drawing a blank on the oh-so-famous editor's name) salvaged the impossibly diffuse original. But I've heard others besides you -- including some others who aren't even Wolfe fans -- who say that the legend is a false story, that the original was better than the edited version.

Ellen

___

[Ellen Stuttle]

Ellen, I haven't read My Cousin Rachel , but I'll read it. I would kill to have written an opening line like "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." And I'm interested to read more of the writer you would most like to sound like if you wrote fiction. I remember that du Maurier does cast a powerful and lasting spell, but it has been many years since I've read anything of hers.

Barbara

I would be exceedingly interested to hear how you would react to Rachel. I find her one of the most fascinating female characters I've ever encountered.

Another is Anna Karenina. Ever since I read Anna K., which was after I learned that Rand hated it, I've felt that Rand badly missed the boat in her assessment of what Tolstoy is "saying." I can understand why she'd have reacted as she did, reading the story as a student in Russia; but I think she didn't recognize that Tolstoy was on Anna's side -- and was in love with her himself.

I don't like the Greta Garbo movie. A filmed version I saw which I thought was perfect was a BBC Masterpiece Series several-part production with Nicola Paget as Anna. To me, the way Nicola Paget played the role was Anna.

I was thinking today, reminded of Rachel, and then of Anna, of some other female characters who appeal to me with a particular sort of fascination. One is a character whose name I'm not sure of -- maybe it's Amelie -- and whom I don't remember well, just the feeling of being intrigued by her. She's featured in one of Samuel Shellabarger's novels set in Italy during the Renaissance, a novel called Lord Vanity. Another -- who in my opinion appears on stage much too seldom in the tale -- is M'Lady from The Three Musketeers. Another is Janna from Penmarric. (Have you ever read Penmarric?)

If/when you read My Cousin Rachel, we could have a wonderful time discussing what I see as a common characteristic amongst these women (they have multiple differences, too, but there's a typologic thread) -- and why I think that Ayn could never have delineated that type of female.

"Your mission, Barbara, should you choose to accept it," is to read the du Maurier. ;-)

Ellen

___

[Greybird]

[...] In Rand's case, I think she caused untold grief and pain, to herself and to everyone around her, with her need to have her associates be convinced that their aesthetic responses should be what hers were. It's true that she'd have felt threatened, betrayed by Barbara's loving both Thomas Wolfe and her, AR's, writing. But this was Rand's mistake, not in fact an indication of contradictions in Barbara's psyche.

Yes, he said, yes, I will, yes. (To quote James Joyce. {grin})

Rand caused pain. We all do, but it takes a great deal of courage to admit that one does. That esthetic meat-grinder was one area where she most definitely fell short.

I was thrilled by many details brought forward in The Passion of Ayn Rand, disappointed by others, but I recall that Ayn's trashing of Barbara's love of Thomas Wolfe was almost the only moment where I was purple with rage.

How dare she! I thought. To go against the value of someone's strongest passions, even if they weren't directed toward what one "ought" to value. Didn't Rand read her own "Art and Sense of Life," I thought?

I say this from my not being a particular fan of stream-of-emotional-consciousness writing, and if Barbara's quotations are fair excerpts, I wouldn't be able to stick with Wolfe's efforts for long. Yet whether I could enjoy Wolfe or not is really beside the point.

Barbara's passions deserved respect, dammit. The working of a conceptual consciousness that had demonstrated its consistent acknowledgment of the facts always deserves such respect. Her emotional response was, and is, one of those facts.

With hindsight, I now know why the scene-setting opening passage of Barbara's biographical essay in Who Is Ayn Rand? seemed so different in style from the rest of it. It was the Wolf(e) in her trying to escape. (And, by the way, that essay was admiration, however overemphatic. Paxton's film, THAT is hagiography.)

[Greybird]

I originally had here a quote from a post by Barbara Branden in this thread, and a reply discussing the author Donald Harington and his fiction, but I've moved them here to begin a new thread instead. ~ SR

Edited March 9, 2007 by Greybird

[Greybird]

And, finally, as to Wagner: I haven't had the emotional stamina to take in his work for more than a few dozen minutes at a time. I'd be hopelessly swamped by esthetically digesting any full installment of the "Ring" cycle.

Yet they're going to have to pry my recordings of many of his shorter works from my cold, dead hands.

Especially that of the prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg as performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under Daniel Barenboim, live outdoors in the Berlin Waldbuehne in 1990. With thousands cheering, in the wake of the fallen Wall, for the liberation of their city.

The concert disc begins with Wagner, and ends with the audience singing (and whistling) to the lively and beloved "Berliner Luft." This moving and delightful experience is selling for as little as 58 cents right now at Amazon.

Edited March 8, 2007 by Greybird

[Ellen Stuttle]

I was thrilled by many details brought forward in The Passion of Ayn Rand, disappointed by others, but I recall that Ayn's trashing of Barbara's love of Thomas Wolfe was almost the only moment where I was purple with rage.

How dare she! I thought. To go against the value of someone's strongest passions, even if they weren't directed toward what one "ought" to value. Didn't Rand read her own "Art and Sense of Life," I thought?

I'm of course in synch with the emotional thrust of the question. But I think it's worth pointing out that the question is anachronistic -- "Art and Sense of Life" wasn't penned until years after Ayn had first trashed Barbara's love of Thomas Wolfe. Also, I'm not sure from memory if "Art and Sense of Life" contains passages which would imply that one shouldn't moralize about aesthetic tastes. I suspect it contains intimations of the opposite. I suppose I'm going to have to re-read the article. ;-)

Meanwhile, in regard to the difficulties Barbara encountered with Ayn over Barbara's love of Thomas Wolfe's writing -- and similar difficulties others were to encounter over various artistic loves -- I'll type in some pertinent excerpts from The Passion of Ayn Rand. The first excerpt is long but I thought it so illuminating in its entirety, I've quoted all of it.

pp. 241-243,

The Passion of Ayn Rand

[i've added some extra paragraph breaks for easier reading.]

During the happy excitement of our first months of seeing Ayn--months full of questions and answers and talking and learning--it was Ayn's fear of "the irrational" that planted the first small seed of the problem that finally was to engulf all our lives. One evening, I casually mentioned that I liked to look at mountains and the ocean, that the sight of them gave me a special feeling of peace. "Why?" she demanded, a slight edge in her voice. "Because they're beautiful, and, I suppose, because they never change, they're always just what they are." "And human beings?" she asked. I shrugged. "Human beings change constantly, they shift, they seem to dissolve from one identity to another."

The edge in her voice was sharper as she said, "That's always why people prefer nature to man." And she began to speak of skyscrapers, of city pavements, of giant industries, of all the mighty creations of the human mind--almost as if I had been denouncing man's achievement. "It's a 'malevolent universe' emotion--it's the subconscious belief that man's life is inevitably tragic--that makes you prefer nature to the man-made," she told me, and I saw, bewildered, that she was deeply angry.

I listened uncomfortably as she continued speaking, wondering why a philosophical disagreement--if that was indeed what was involved--had become the occasion for an analysis of my psychology. But I had learned the quality of Ayn's intelligence: that behind every statement stood an enormous breadth and complexity of thought and integration; if I took it seriously when that intelligence was directed to philosophical issues, then I had to take it no less seriously when it was directed to what she saw as errors in my thinking and reactions.

And I knew that some part of what she said was true. Her sensitivity to the slightest implication of a statement was honing in like a laser beam to something that was real. Some part of me was not convinced of what my mind had accepted: that reason and achievement were man's natural state. The issue remained unresolved in my mind, and left behind the first faint tinge of guilt.

On another evening, we were discussing the aesthetics of literature. I was telling Ayn that I deeply loved the novels of Thomas Wolfe, that I had discovered Look Homeward, Angel when I was twelve years old, then devoured all of his work. As I spoke, I dimly observed that Ayn's face was an expressionless mask, and that her eyes, usually so warm when she looked at me, were icy with disapproval. She interrupted only to ask me an occasional question. When I was silent, she reminded me of our former discussions of literature.

"Plot, theme, characterization, style--those are the essential ingredients of fiction, are they not?" I nodded. Her voice had become driving and sharp as the ice of her eyes, her words followed each other with machine-gun-like rapidity. With devastating logic, the logic that had drawn and held me to her from the beginning, she demonstrated Wolfe's shortcomings with regard to precisely the elements of fiction I had agreed were essential. She spoke of his indifference to plot; she spoke of his thematic confusions; she spoke of the overwriting that was an omnipresent part of his style. I had no answer; it seemed irrelevant to explain what he meant to me emotionally--that the majestic songs he sang had reached into my deepest being, that I often felt they were me.

I sat with my friends in a quiet room, talking in a civilized manner--and feeling a small death occurring inside me. In the choice between my emotions and the commandments of reason, I had no choice. Then, and always, the greatest value Ayn offered me was the rationality of her arguments; then and always, that was her greatest intellectual and emotional hold on me. I had told her, at our first meeting, that reason was an absolute to me; that had not changed, it could not change. Whatever the emotional consequences, I would not turn my back on what I believed to be the truth.

In the weeks that followed--indeed, the years--I never learned to tear out of myself my passionate response to Thomas Wolfe's novels. Instead, I learned repression, as so many of her young friends were to learn it in later years. I learned not to recognize my authentic feelings--not to recognize them nor to experience them nor to know that they remained, never to acknowledge them to myself or others. The first step toward placing my emotions into a destructive vise had been taken. I was to continue along that path for many years.

Ayn had convinced me--as she was to convince me that the paintings of Vincent van Gogh were too undisciplined, too chaotic and wild to be considered great art--as she was to convince me that Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage propounded a deeply malevolent view of life--as she was to convince me that Wagner's Tristan and Isolde was profoundly tragic. She convinced me, as, over the years, I would see her convince so many others, of the invalidity of their artistic tastes--the tastes and the loves that so often, in fact, represented the best within them.

It did not happen all at once. It could not have happened all at once. Such conversations occurred over a space of months and years--always interspersed with the great experience of dealing with a mind that presented the rich texture of a total world view and a systematic philosophical system of awesome logical consistency.

[continued in next post]

___

Edited March 8, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[Ellen Stuttle]

Continuing from my previous post

pp. 243-244,

The Passion of Ayn Rand

[This part continues directly from the above post.]

When I had met Nathaniel, the first book he gave me to read was Rolland's Jean Christophe. But Rolland was a socialist, Ayn pointed out, and the philosophical underpinnings of socialism had made him a realist, rather than a romantic, in literature. [i INTERJECT TO OBJECT: Romain Rolland not a romanticist in his writing syte? Is she talking about the same Rolland I read? Rhetorical question.] While I was dealing with my private aesthetic agony, Nathaniel was abandoning Jean Christophe. Over the years, we were to hear Ayn excoriate the "grim, unfocused malevolence" of Rembrandt--to a painter; Shakespeare's "abysmal failure" to present human beings with free will--to a writer; Beethoven's "tragic sense of doom"--to a musician. And we were to see the painters, the writers, the musicians, fail hopelessly to refute her arguments and unhappily grant the logic of her position. Some ran from her, unwilling to renounce their deepest aesthetic values. Most remained, and from then on their work reflected the air-tight underground into which they had placed their aesthetic emotions: in the name of reason, their work became thin, and tight, and without originality.

But in those early months, when the future storms were only the first faint wisps of clouds far off at the horizon, there seemed nothing that could for long blemish for Nathaniel and for me the joy of our new intellectual discoveries, and our conviction that we had found a woman as noble and admirable as her ideas. Ayn was first and foremost a rationalist and a moralist. These qualities brought her admiration and respect; they did not bring her love. But Ayn was loved, by Nathaniel, by me, by many others who had been and were to be her friends.

The source of that love, for some of us, was that quality in her which I often felt was most profoundly, most nakedly, Ayn Rand: the quality of passionate idealism, the exalted vision of life's possibilites. In The Fountainhead, she had written that love was "a command to rise." In Ayn's presence, and in her work, one felt that command: a command to function at one's best, to be the most that one could be, to drive oneself constantly harder, never to disappoint one's own highest ideals.

There's only one other incident described in the biography where Barbara specifically mentions Ayn's treatment of her love of Thomas Wolfe's writing. That incident occurred in the context of the informal course on fiction writing Ayn gave for several of her friends during the stretch when she was at work on Galt's Speech.

pp. 278,

The Passion of Ayn Rand

[The business of Ayn's requiring Barbara to read aloud the Wolfe passage Ayn was about to savage makes me feel a gimlet-eyed cold sense of anger against Ayn.]

[....] The course was fascinating, as Ayn explained her own principles of writing and the reasons for those principles, and illustrated her points with excerpts from her work and the works of other writers. One evening, she decided to compare three writers stylistically: Ayn Rand, Thomas Wolfe, and Mickey Spillane. Spillane had become her favorite contemporary novelist, from the aspects of originality, imagination, sense of drama and, above all, plot-structure; she admired him as "a moral crusader," saying that he approached conflicts in uncompromising black-and-white terms and that his hero, Mike Hammer, was a moral avenger.

For the purposes of comparison and contrast, Ayn chose a section from Atlas Shrugged, one from Spillane's I, the Jury, and another from Wolfe's Of Time and the River. She insisted that I be the one to read the selections aloud: I had a very attractive speaking voice, she said: she always loved to hear me reading her work. The selection she had chosen from Wolfe--as an example of bad writing--was a few paragraphs of a description of New York that I had shown her, when we first discussed Wolfe, as an example of what I most loved and cherished in his work.

[Next is recounted the horrific scene which followed Nathaniel's reading a section from an early story of Ayn's, "Good Copy," without telling the group who the author was. Barbara describes the story as "rather charming," then continues: "but it was awkward stylistically, it seemed blatantly imitative of Ayn, and was without real drama despite an original and professionally handled plot. When [Nathaniel] had finished, I was the first to present my negative opinions." The aftermath continued far into the wee hours.]

Ellen

___

[Greybird]

[...] How dare she! I thought. To go against the value of someone's strongest passions, even if they weren't directed toward what one "ought" to value. Didn't Rand read her own "Art and Sense of Life," I thought?

I'm of course in synch with the emotional thrust of the question. But I think it's worth pointing out that the question is anachronistic — "Art and Sense of Life" wasn't penned until years after Ayn had first trashed Barbara's love of Thomas Wolfe.

C'mon, you know what I meant. Remember this bit from "About the Author," in Atlas, which you were kind enough to type in yesterday?

I have held the same philosophy I now hold, for as far back as I can remember. I have learned a great deal through the years and expanded my knowledge of details, of specific issues, of definitions, of applications — and I intend to continue expanding it — but I have never had to change any of my fundamentals.

If Rand really had her "fundamentals" thus in hand, I'd think she would have realized by the early Fifties that moralizing about one's reaction to "a philosophical composite," as she later referred to art, was problematic, to say the least. When it involved a young woman who adored her achievements and who had a consistently serious, perceptive approach to reality, it also was unjust.

I'm inclined to think not only that Rand knew better, but that she knew that she knew better. Certainly in regard to dealing with others' appraisals of art. She'd been a working writer for a quarter-century. She'd had a great deal of experience and heartache in trying to apply her (perhaps implicit) esthetics in the real world, against critics, publishers, and producers who dealt in nonessentials. She'd published three novels and had more than one play go into production by the time she trashed Barbara's literary and other passions.

She knew that sense of life and explicit philosophy were separate, and highly separable, elements, and that most people couldn't untangle the two, and were mystified at what art aroused in them and why. She'd read and loved the work of that ol' altruist Hugo for nearly a half-century by then, and knew how that didn't mesh with her explicit philosophy. If those weren't enough clues, she didn't show half the perceptiveness that Barbara and Nathaniel give her credit for possessing.

In any event, thanks for the quotes that touched on these and other elements of such an attitude on Rand's part. I wouldn't have had a tenth the fortitude Barbara had to stick around and benefit from the far more productive portions of her mentor's personality and outlook.

Reading about the downside, Rand's furious impulse toward encouraging repression — and the session of "self-criticism," picked up from the collectivists she despised, and imposed on her closest female friend — got me furious all over again.

(You shouldn't have had to actually type all that, I'd have to say. Shall we try pulling together a Neo-Objectivist Reference CD-ROM? {rueful smile})

Edited March 9, 2007 by Greybird

[Ellen Stuttle]

[...] How dare she! I thought. To go against the value of someone's strongest passions, even if they weren't directed toward what one "ought" to value. Didn't Rand read her own "Art and Sense of Life," I thought?

I'm of course in synch with the emotional thrust of the question. But I think it's worth pointing out that the question is anachronistic — "Art and Sense of Life" wasn't penned until years after Ayn had first trashed Barbara's love of Thomas Wolfe.

C'mon, you know what I meant.

In point of fact, no, I didn't. I thought you meant what you wrote.

Ellen

___

[Greybird]

[MildExasperation] Is a member allowed a lack-of-caffeination lapse here? [/MildExasperation] Yes, I inverted the chronology. I don't really think that's particularly significant. What I clearly failed to get across until my last response (if then) was that the esthetic ideas were in her head, or so she maintained, even if the Brandens hadn't helped set up her forum yet for putting them in published form.

I'm not inclined to use "malice aforethought," in the legal sense, in regard to Rand. She had no conscious malice that I could see, at second hand, from Barbara's and others' accounts. Yet that self-criticism session came damn close to exhibiting malice. The "aforethought" comes from Rand having had to know for decades, long before "The Objectivist Newsletter," that such moralizing was misplaced and mistaken.

[Ellen Stuttle]

Steve,

I would never have figured out had you not explained further that your point was that Rand not only "knew better," but that "she knew that she knew better" (quoting from your post #117) than to treat Barbara's love of Wolfe the way she did, since I don't believe that she ever did know better, or learn better. As of the time when I last heard direct almost-real-time-frame reports of things she was saying about aesthetic tastes -- from Allan Blumenthal in the months after he and Joan had split with AR -- as of their last conversations with her she was still making a practice of raking Allan and Joan over the coals about their aesthetic divergences from her tastes. I'm aware that in her formal essays there are wordings which might seem indicative of her knowing better -- but then, as I recall, these wordings are contradicted by other things she says in the same essays. It's been some years since I read the complete versions of the pieces she wrote on aesthetics, but I always thought they contained contradictory features. I also thought that the unstated thrust of her argument was the attempt to prove that her own artistic tastes were morally superior. So I can't say I agree with you that she ever realized -- neither "by the early Fifties" or at any later time -- that "moralizing about one's reaction [...] to art, was problematic."

Ellen

___

[Barbara Branden]

Ellen and Steve,

Your anger on my behalf -- especially in view of the attacks I have been receiving lately -- is like a cool hand on my forehead. I thank you.

I believe there was a source for Rand's moralizing about the esthetic reactions of her friends that has not been named. And it has to do with "sense of life." Her own esthetic reactions were powerful; I've never seen her "sort of like" or "sort of dislike" something; it wss love or hate, with nothing in between. And more: It was "this is me" or "this is against me." In an early chapter of Passion, I describe her first encounter with her "tiddlywink" music:

"It was her music, she felt. It was untouched by the world, untouched by alien values.. . .

"When Alice spoke of the wonders of her tiddlywink music to her mother and other adult relatives, they wee appalled that such a bright child. . . should have what they considered such uncultured tastes. It was the beginning of a series of value clashes with the people around her that was to mark the whole of her life. Years later, she remembered feeling -- and still projected -- an angry defiance in the face of their rejection of her musical choices. It was a defiance that was to characterize her attitude toward all of her values. 'I know, but they don't. This is mine. It's not theirs.'"

And later, describing Rand's reaction to young Daisy, the British girl she so admired and who became the inspiration for Dagny, I wrote:

"Daisy served for Alice as a focus, a projection, an image that she was to use in her fiction-- most particularly, she later said, in the creation of the heroine of Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart, the beautiful woman who ran a great railroad. It was an image which she 'held defiantly against everyone else. I didn't want others to share this value. I felt: This is my value, and anyone who shares it has to be extraordinary. I was extrremely jealous -- it ws literal jealousy -- of anyone who would pretend to like something I liked, if I didn't like that person. They have no right to admire it; they're unworthy of it.'

"This passionate concern with spiritual consistency -- with a single-tracked purity of value-choices -- was a significant element in alienating the small child from the people and the world around her. She felt, always, as she later said, a painful kind of anger -- of contempt -- for anyone who seemed to love what she loved, but also responded to what she considered boring and stupid; it was as if, through such a response, her love was desecrated. One may not light a candle before a god -- and also before the figure of a clown."

And here is the source of the violence of her denunciations of friends whose esthetic responses differed from hers: She felt a painful kind of anger -- of contempt -- for anyone who seemed to love what she loved, but also responded to what she considered boring and stupid; it was as if, through such a response, her love was desecrated.

Rand did not easily admit someone into her private world, into the tight, carefully monitored area of her friendship. In order for her to do so, she had to feel that they would not betray her by adopting alien values. That is why her worst denunciations in the area of esthetics were directed at her closest friends. If a casual aquaintance admired Wolfe, that was of little concern to her. If Barbara, whom she loved, admired him, that could not be allowed.

It was not logically possible, was the unnamed message of her denunciations, that Barbara loved both Atlas Shrugged and Look Homeward , Angel. To do so would be a desecration of Atlas. Barbara must renounce Wolfe in order fully to love Atlas , in order to deserve Ayn's friendship - in order to prove that she shared Ayn's sense of life. Her love for Wolfe must be stamped out; Barbara must be returned to her. And similarly with Joan and Allan Blumenthal; it was not logically possible that Joan loved the French Impressionists and also Vermeer, or that Allan loved Rachmaninoff and also Beethoven. They must renounce their false loves in order to share Ayn's sense of life.

Barbara

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Barbara,

The oddest thought just came into my mind. It was prompted by your last post. The traditional Objectivist explanation for love is psychological visibility. The orthodoxy claims that this is all there is and the other Objectivists and Objectivism-friendly people find it to be an important component, but all agree that psychological visibility is fundamental to love.

What about psychological cloning?

My impression is that this kills love since it is impossible.

Michael

[Judith]

I believe there was a source for Rand's moralizing about the esthetic reactions of her friends that has not been named.

. . .

And here is the source of the violence of her denunciations of friends whose esthetic responses differed from hers: She felt a painful kind of anger -- of contempt -- for anyone who seemed to love what she loved, but also responded to what she considered boring and stupid; it was as if, through such a response, her love was desecrated.

Rand did not easily admit someone into her private world, into the tight, carefully monitored area of her friendship. In order for her to do so, she had to feel that they would not betray her by adopting alien values. That is why her worst denunciations in the area of esthetics were directed at her closest friends. If a casual aquaintance admired Wolfe, that was of little concern to her. If Barbara, whom she loved, admired him, that could not be allowed.

It was not logically possible, was the unnamed message of her denunciations, that Barbara loved both Atlas Shrugged and Look Homeward , Angel. To do so would be a desecration of Atlas. Barbara must renounce Wolfe in order fully to love Atlas , in order to deserve Ayn's friendship - in order to prove that she shared Ayn's sense of life. Her love for Wolfe must be stamped out; Barbara must be returned to her. And similarly with Joan and Allan Blumenthal; it was not logically possible that Joan loved the French Impressionists and also Vermeer, or that Allan loved Rachmaninoff and also Beethoven. They must renounce their false loves in order to share Ayn's sense of life.

The oddest thought just came into my mind. It was prompted by your last post. The traditional Objectivist explanation for love is psychological visibility. The orthodoxy claims that this is all there is and the other Objectivists and Objectivism-friendly people find it to be an important component, but all agree that psychological visibility is fundamental to love.

What about psychological cloning?

My impression is that this kills love since it is impossible.

My thoughts throughout this discussion have been (1) the obvious, that Rand was thoughtless and cruel, but also (2) Rand had a real problem with seeing her own close friends as ends in themselves rather than as extensions of herself.

There's a real separation problem here, wherein she can't allow her friends to differ from herself in matters that aren't of philosophical right/wrong significance. It's not that she doesn't want them to be WRONG, philosophically, but that she can't bear for them not to be just like her.

I can sympathize greatly for her, because she's obviously unbearably lonely and trying to make up for all those lonely years. But I also feel great anger on behalf of her friends.

Judith

[Barbara Branden]

Michael: "The traditional Objectivist explanation for love is psychological visibility. The orthodoxy claims that this is all there is and the other Objectivists and Objectivism-friendly people find it to be an important component, but all agree that psychological visibility is fundamental to love.

"What about psychological cloning?

"My impression is that this kills love since it is impossible."

Michael, I agree that it's impossible, and, further, I don't know why anyone would think it desirable, would seek a psychological twin. Would it not be boring? I don't want to know what a a friend or a lover is going to say or do or think in any situation. I enjoy being surprised by an idea, a perspective, an attitude that is not mine. Of course we want a lover with whom we share essentials; we would not be happy with -- or even attracted to -- someone who hated everything we loved and loved everything we hated, or someone who had qualities of charcter we could not respect. But I think that often our very differences from the person we love can be valuable and exciting.

I'll use myself as an example. Because emotional repression was a problem I struggled with for many years, I found myself drawn to men who were very open emotionally, at home with and accepting of their emotions. It wasn't just that I learned from them, which I did, but that I found this qualitiy very attractive and an important addition to my own life -- so much so that I cannot imagine myself falling in love with an emotionally repressed man, whatever his virtues might be.

Some of the happiest relationships I know of are among couples who are very different, but in complimentary ways. It is as if -- I don't know how to put this very elegantly -- they fill up the empty spaces in each other, and thus fulfill a significant need.

Judth: "Rand had a real problem with seeing her own close friends as ends in themselves rather than as extensions of herself.

"There's a real separation problem here, wherein she can't allow her friends to differ from herself in matters that aren't of philosophical right/wrong significance. It's not that she doesn't want them to be WRONG, philosophically, but that she can't bear for them not to be just like her.

"I can sympathize greatly for her, because she's obviously unbearably lonely and trying to make up for all those lonely years."

Judith, you are exacly right. I, too, believe that at least a part of Rand's need for her friends' total agreement with her was the result of a painful loneliness. And, tragically, her attitude made her loneliness worse, because it led her to break with so many of her friends. It was as if her dread of their possible disloyalty drove her to find disloyalty in differences that were not significant, and so to end the relationship.

Barbara

[Ellen Stuttle]

Judith, you are exacly right. I, too, believe that at least a part of Rand's need for her friends' total agreement with her was the result of a painful loneliness. And, tragically, her attitude made her loneliness worse, because it led her to break with so many of her friends. It was as if her dread of their possible disloyalty drove her to find disloyalty in differences that were not significant, and so to end the relationship.

And even, by the last years of her life, to push at people as if to exacerbate the differences and then become angry with them for the differences. As you know -- you reported the report in Passion ;-) -- Joan described how it seemed to her and Allan as if Ayn was actually trying to find things to object to in their tastes, as if she was actively looking for bones of contention to pick with them. They would have just let the differences go, but Ayn would not. It was as if she was driven to precipitate the very desertion she feared.

Ellen

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