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ESSAY ON SOURCES
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Harriman, defends his practice of eliminating Rand’s words and inserting his own as
necessary for greater clarity. In many cases, however, his editing serves to signifi cantly
alter Rand’s meaning.
Many of the edits involve small words that carry great weight, such as “if” and “but.”
Sentences that Rand starts with the tentative “if” are rewritten to sound stronger and
more defi nite. Separate sentences are joined with “but.” Changes are sometimes made for
what seem to be unarticulated aesthetic preferences, such as replacing Rand’s “heatedover”
with “warmed-over.” 4 Rand’s original wording here is signifi cant, for it provides
evidence of her lingering diffi culty with idiomatic and vernacular English. These rough
patches have been edited out of her fi ction and published writing but remain in her
private notes as a valuable testimony to her origins and linguistic development.
The editing also obscures important shifts and changes in Rand’s thought. Early in
her career Rand idolized the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she used as inspiration
for Howard Roark. Even in this early phase of infatuation, however, there were
seeds of Rand’s later disillusionment with Wright’s “mysticism.” Reading his book
The Disappearing City she noted to herself, “More of Wright’s ideas. Some beautiful,
a great many too many not clear.” That hint of disappointment is muted in the published
journals, which render Rand’s sentiments more positively as “Some beautiful,
a great many not clear.” 5 Gone too is the Nietzschean-style repetition of “many too
many,” which marks Rand’s continued attraction to the German philosopher.
Even more alarming are the sentences and proper names present in Rand’s originals
that have vanished entirely, without any ellipses or brackets to indicate a change. While
arguing in her notebooks against a specifi c point of view, Rand would often attack by
name an exponent of that view. For example, she mentions two libertarians, Albert Jay
Nock and James Ingebretsen, while disagreeing with ideas she attributes to them. The
erasure of these names from the published diary changes the nature of Rand’s intellectual
work, making her ideas entirely self-referential instead of a response to the larger
social and political world in which she operated. 6
Other omissions serve to decontextualize Rand entirely. Gone is a pessimistic musing
about the degeneration of the white race, as well as casual slang like “nance” (homosexual).
7 It is not surprising that Rand’s diaries refl ected the prejudices and prevailing ideas
of her time; indeed, it would be more surprising had she remained unaffected.
Considered individually, many of the changes to Rand’s diaries are minor, but taken as
a whole they add up to a different Rand. In her original notebooks she is more tentative,
historically bounded, and contradictory. The edited diaries have transformed her private
space, the hidden realm in which she did her thinking, reaching, and groping, replacing it
with a slick manufactured world in which all of her ideas are defi nite, well formulated, and
clear. Even her outlines for her major novels have been rewritten, with different drafts collapsed
into one another. Given Rand’s titanic clashes with editors who sought to modify
her work, it is not hard to guess what her reaction would be to these changes.
The Journals of Ayn Rand are thus best understood as an interpretation of Rand rather
than her own writing. Scholars must use these materials with extreme caution. They
serve as a useful introduction to Rand’s development and a guide to the available archival
material, but they should not be accepted at face value. Accordingly, I quote from the
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