Ayn Rand on Negatives

ARI

I’ve heard that Miss Rand was not shy about expressing her evaluation in public of something that displeased her. Did either of you ever witness this?

MARY ANN

Along with a few friends, I attended a piano recital at Carnegie Hall with Ayn and Frank. The artist was Witold Malcuzynski, and the program was predominantly Romantic music. We were seated in the front row, directly beneath the pianist. At the end of each Romantic piece, Ayn expressed her approval by smiling broadly and holding her hands up as she applauded. Then, he played a modern piece; I don’t remember what it was, but it was awful. At the end of that piece, some people in the audience stood up and applauded. Ayn—without taking her eyes off the pianist—remained seated. She raised her arms slowly, then lowered them and sat on her hands.

ARI

Did he see it?

MARY ANN

Oh, yes. I was watching him watch her. He saw her disapproval. She said later that sitting on one’s hands was a common practice in Europe and that he would know what the gesture meant.

CHARLES

I had a similar experience, although in this case she was vocal. In the late seventies, Ayn, Frank, Sue, Leonard, Mary Ann, and I went to the Metropolitan Opera for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, an opera that Ayn knew and liked. She was seated between Frank and me, and seemed to be enjoying the performance. However, during the ballroom scene, she got very annoyed. I heard her take a deep breath, she nudged my arm and said, “Oh!” and words to the effect that it was terrible. She did the same with Frank. She expressed her disapproval loudly enough to be heard by those seated around us. When Frank and I whispered that she was disturbing people, she stopped. But she had made her point.

ARI

What did she object to?

CHARLES

The scene was romantic: the music was beautiful, the setting was elegant. Suddenly, members of the female chorus broke out into something like a can-can dance. They turned their backs to the audience, raised their filmy skirts, and pushed out their behinds and wiggled them at the audience. It was ugly and shockingly out of context—a deliberate undercutting of the romantic values of the scene. Ayn made her disapproval known. When the opera was over, she vowed never to go to the Metropolitan Opera again. She said that it had to have been done by conscious intention, a deliberate slap in the face at a Romantic work of art. She said she couldn’t sit there and be silent, not when values were being attacked. That was a vintage Ayn Rand incident.

ARI

Is it true that she expressed disapproval during question periods after lectures?

MARY ANN

Yes, but her critics have made too much of those incidents, especially about their frequency in public; they’ve magnified it out of all proportion.

No one should forget that she defined a philosophy which has improved countless lives. She has inspired readers, by telling them that their minds are capable of understanding reality, and by giving them a morality of life. She has given them the incentive to achieve goals and move forward; she has created works of art in which man is an exalted being. Who else is doing that today in literature? Now, there were times when she did get angry in public, during question periods after a lecture. But to focus on those occasions is misleading. You have to ask: what is important about Ayn Rand? That she wrote Atlas Shrugged and defined a philosophy one can live by, or that, at times, she was capable of getting very angry? They are not equivalents.

ARI

You saw this anger yourself, during the question periods?

MARY ANN

Yes, but certainly not at every question period. And it’s important to understand that she was not angry at anyone personally. She did not know the people involved; she was speaking to strangers. And many of the questions she answered were written questions—neither she nor the audience knew who had asked the questions; only the questioners knew. What’s relevant here is that she expressed anger and indignation, not so much at the person asking a question but at the ideas expressed, or ideas she thought were implicit in the question asked. That was the focus of her anger.

ARI

Can one of you elaborate on this point?

CHARLES

Ayn was perceptive. She could see what assumptions were behind certain questions; she could detect the hidden agendas, the unnamed ideas. She knew when someone was, for example, really questioning the validity of reason or advocating altruism—without saying it openly. And she knew what those ideas would lead to if put into effect; she knew the practical consequences of those ideas. She understood that man’s survival was at stake. Ayn was always the defender of man’s life and values, and when she saw them being attacked, in any form, she responded forcefully. She was not a “tolerant” person. If what you said was evil or seriously wrong, she let you know it and she let you know what she thought and felt about it. (There were other reasons for her anger, as well—see Leonard Peikoff’s memoir mentioned above.)

ARI

Were there any kinds of questions she especially disliked?

MARY ANN

She didn’t like questions that began with: “Miss Rand, I understand what you said about so-and-so, but don’t you think. . .?”—followed by the questioner presenting a different point of view. That form of the question implied that Ayn was saying one thing while thinking something else, that she was being hypocritical. Often her response was, “No, if I had thought so, I would have said so.” It was said in a very matter-of-fact tone of voice. But sometimes she answered with anger. One night, I heard her explain to an audience just why that form of the question was offensive and improper, what it implied, and why she was indignant. Everyone benefited from hearing her analysis.

ARI

Can you give a specific example of when she responded angrily to a question?

MARY ANN

Someone asked her for her views on immigration, if she thought it was a good thing. And she got indignant immediately at the very idea that anyone might be opposed to immigration, that a country might not let immigrants in. One of the things she said in her answer was, “Where would I be today if America closed its doors to immigrants?” That really hit home; I’m sure everyone there realized that she would not have survived in Soviet Russia, that a person with her ideas would have died in prison, somewhere in Siberia. In her answer, she was defending people who were seeking freedom and a better life. And I think she was assuming that immigrants would be like she was—ready and able to make their own way, accepting help if voluntarily given by individuals but not expecting government handouts. But it was clear that she was angry at the idea, not at the person asking the question.

I heard people saying things like “I had no idea what I was really advocating.” Ayn was teaching the students the importance of analyzing their ideas, of understanding what was implicit in what they had been taught to believe and why it was wrong and often evil.

CHARLES

I’d like to add two points here. One is that her expressions of anger were the exception, not the rule. Two, they were often followed by applause from the audience—because the listeners were inspired by hearing someone speaking up for and defending what was right and good. They had heard, over and over again, mealy-mouthed speakers afraid to take a position—or suggesting that there are always two sides to a question —or that nothing is black and white. To have been subjected to those attitudes from childhood on up, and then to hear Ayn Rand take a firm position and defend it with conviction—this was a cause for cheering. The audience response was not only to the content of her ideas, but to her manner of expressing them. She was medicine for the soul.

MARY ANN

All those adults who taught us never to get angry, or if we did, not to express it, to hide our emotions when we were offended or felt we were being treated unjustly, to remain calm, to maintain an even keel, for God’s sake, don’t blow up, no matter what—these people didn’t do us any favors by urging us to suppress, to live like glazed, non-reacting creatures.

ARI

Did she ever get angry during philosophical discussions when people were slow to get her point?

MARY ANN

I wouldn’t call the response “anger”—it was more exasperation bordering on impatience. The best example of this I can remember was a group discussion, before Atlas was published. Some of the Collective, myself included, were having difficulty demonstrating that life is the standard of morality. So, the issue was explained again, and we were asked to write an essay on the subject and bring it back the following Saturday night. A few of us did, and she was surprised to learn that only Leonard was able to do it correctly. The rest of us made errors or left out steps in the argument. I remember her looking puzzled by it, for the issue had been discussed in detail and we had all read that section of Galt’s speech over and over. But she did get very annoyed when someone, I think Nathan, suggested that maybe that section needed more explication.

ARI

What did she say?

MARY ANN

She said that she couldn’t make that section of the speech any clearer than she had. But what really interested her was how our minds were working, how we were processing the information, what we were doing mentally, what we were doing right and what we were doing wrong in our thinking.

I’ve never forgotten that evening, because it opened up a subject new to me—introspecting to analyze one’s thinking processes. I had the same experience with her some years later when I was revising my lectures on esthetics. I hadn’t given sufficient thought to a certain issue of style, and I couldn’t explain my reasons for introducing it in the way I did. I could see her growing impatience, and I remember clearly her frowning and saying, “What’s happened to your epistemology, Mary Ann?” So, we spent the rest of the evening discussing that. She wanted to get at the reasons for my muddled thinking, to identify why, as she put it, my mental wires were crossed. That was typically Ayn. If she saw you floundering and having difficulty thinking clearly, she wanted to help you, to get you back on track.

ARI

Any final thoughts on the subject?

CHARLES

Just this: her expressions of anger were not the outbursts of someone run by wild and uncontrolled emotions. She didn’t use anger to intimidate people, as bullies do. When she got angry, it was precisely because she was a thinker and an evaluator who was certain of her convictions. She judged something as right or wrong, good or evil—and she responded accordingly. She didn’t simmer and stew; she came to an immediate boil. Her thinking was not hampered and slowed down by chronic doubt, and her emotions were not suppressed or muted by it, either. Moreover, her emotions never clouded or distorted her thinking. And the anger didn’t last. It was over almost as soon as it began.

MARY ANN

At some point, you are going to ask me what I miss about her. One of the things I miss most is what we’ve been talking about—her anger and righteous indignation, and what it came from. I miss knowing that there is someone in the world who always speaks out, unequivocally, against irrationality and injustice, and who not only denounces evil but who defends the good. She was mankind’s intellectual guardian, a soldier in the battle of ideas. Her banner was always flying high.

When she died, someone made the following comment: now anger has gone out of the world. And I thought, it’s true, and it’s the world’s loss, and mine.

CHARLES

And mine.