"...when the bells rings, the angel will fly..."

So Here It Is, Ayn Rand on
Nathaniel Branden, Circa 1968

by David M. Brown

Plumbing the depths of the soap opera with a fine-tooth partisan comb.

– 04-22-05 –

Dorothy Parker once said of a novel that it was not a book to be tossed aside lightly, but thrown with great force.

Here comes a book, not a novel, holding a morbid fascination for those interested in the life of Ayn Rand (1905-1982) and in the Objectivist movement born of her ideas and the organizational efforts of her erstwhile disciple, psychologist Nathaniel Branden, who met her when he was twenty and Rand was forty-five. The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics by James S. Valliant is an artifact of cultist mentality that should neither be tossed aside lightly nor thrown with great force but lifted by thumb and forefinger and dropped into the garbage chute across the hall. One can virtually hear the author yelling from the bleachers, cheering Ayn Rand on as she struggles to make sense of Branden's protestations during the long-drawn-out devolution of their affair; as if she were hitting lobs out of the park with each new observation and query.

There is a case to be made for publishing these excruciating notes, much as one suspects she would have preferred they never see the light of day. It is the only "response" Ayn Rand can ever make to the accounts published years later by Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden. Unless, of course, one regards James Valliant as channeling Miss Rand's ghost.

The first half of the book is a kind of tediously belabored book review of Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), Nathaniel Branden's Judgment Day (1989), and "In Answer to Ayn Rand" (1968), the Brandens' response to an attack by Rand in The Objectivist. One debunking chapter, "Less Than Zero," expends ink on the question of how Rand picked the name "Rand" (she had been born Alice Rosenbaum); it apparently wasn't based on the typewriter, contrary to what Barbara Branden suggests in her biography. Well, assuming that Barbara Branden credited testimony she should not have credited, could this simply be an innocent mistake?

continued...