Journals as Kernels

Oxford University Press has a book on Ayn Rand coming out, by Jennifer Burns, a historian at the University of Virginia, who has been allowed access to the estate's collection of Ayn Rand's original journals.

For people, like me, who own a copy of the published Journals Of Ayn Rand, the early news is not heartening.

Burns writes, “On nearly every page of the published journals an unacknowledged change has been made from Rand’s original writing. In the book’s foreword the editor, David Harriman, defends his practice of eliminating Rand’s words and inserting his own as necessary for greater clarity. In many case, however, his editing serves to significantly alter Rand’s meaning.” She says that sentences are “rewritten to sound stronger and more definite” and that the editing “obscures important shifts and changes in Rand’s thought.” She finds “more alarming” the case that “sentences and proper names present in Rand’s original …have vanished entirely, without any ellipses or brackets to indicate a change.”

This is related to an interesting complaint that you hear about Rand's characters - that you are given little idea of how they developed into what they are. There's a reference to Galt seeming as if he had appeared in the world fully formed - a bit like Athena in Greek legend. And Rand sometimes presented herself in a similar way.

But I think we all can agree
that a seed is not yet a tree.