| | Because of the level of antagonism involved, I must support Joe's policy regarding Barbara Branden. I was so involved with the issue under discussion I put up Barbara's emails to me without deleting the last paragraph in the first one as I should have. That at the time was my understanding of the policy regarding her. If I had done that though, Joe would still have objected for the reasons he gave. In other words, the restrictions are tighter than I thought. Barbara's biggest mistake was having David Brown (got the name right?) put up her blocked "Drooling Beast" post in the "Drooling Beast" thread. She was absolutely wrong to do that and it left her without a leg to stand on.
But nothing of this makes the Valliant crowd right about Valliant's thesis about what a liar the Brandens are and how much damage they have done to Objectivism because of a biography and a memoir that didn't sanitize Ayn Rand, but tried to present her as a human being in human relationships. Nathaniel's memoir was self-serving, yes, but a memoir is always just that. It doesn't mean that there was an intended gross misrepresentation of Ayn Rand or that it lacked its significant value. Barbara's biography was written out of love for Ayn Rand, whatever mistakes one might be able to distill out of its pages. Put a blowtorch on any biography and something will fall out of it dead. That includes my grandfather's (Irving Brant's) biography of James Madison.
Read James Valliant's book "The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics," yes, I am recomending it, then read or reread Barbara's biography "The Passion of Ayn Rand." Consider the tone, the focus, the perspective and the grace or lack thereof. A case can be made that Nathaniel's "Judgment Day" had a lot of unacknowledged anger for Ayn Rand (he had been through love and hell with that woman), but I don't see how that that was Barbara's case. Barbara said to me __________ and _______________ in a just received eMail. Since I can't quote or paraphrase her even, let me do something else that Joe said I could do.
"The subject she most enjoyed during her high school years, the one subject of which she never tired, was mathematics. 'My mathematics teacher was delighted with me, When I graduated he said, 'It will be a crime if you don't go into mathematics.' I said only, 'That's not enough of a career.' I felt that it was too abstract, it had nothing to do with actual life. I loved it, but I didn't intend to be an engineer or to go into any applied profession, and to study mathematics as such seemed too ivory tower, too purposeless--and I would so today.' Mathematics, she thought, was a method.
Like logic, it was an invaluable tool, but it was a means to an end in itself. She wanted an activity that, while drawing on her theoretical capacity, would unite theory and its practical application. That desire was an essential element in the continuing appeal that fiction held for her: fiction made possible the integration of wide abstract principles and their direct expression in and application to man's life. She wanted to define a moral ideal, to present her kind of man--and to project, through fiction, the living reality of that ideal. She wanted to project it, using as her tool the precise, unsentimental mind of a mathematician."
THE PASSION OF AYN RAND, page 35.
I just opened the book and started quoting the above. There are many Objectivists today who have never experienced Ayn Rand first-hand, unlike myself and Barbara Branden and still quite a few others. Would it be a value to them to rid the earth of her biography as if it had never been written? What would you have left if so? Even Nathaniel Branden's memoir? Would you say as the Valliant crowd is wont to say, "SHUT UP BARBARA AND NATHANIEL BRANDEN! WE DON'T NEED YOUR LYING LIES!"?
--Brant
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