James Day interviewing Ayn Rand in 1974. In addition to explaining her Objectivist claptrap, Rand names Victor Hugo as her greatest literary influence.
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Tags: Ayn Rand, James Day, Victor Hugo
"Make her a pretty frock at once."
Generals in Napoleon’s army apparently didn’t want their sons crying, as little Victor Hugo learned, much to his chagrin. From an article in the August 1, 1897 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“The great French writer, Victor Hugo, tells this story about his own childhood–his father it is remembered, was one of Napoleon’s generals.
‘When I was five or six years old, I was crying. My father, who heard me, did not reprove me, but this is the way he punished me:
‘Why, the poor, dear little girl,’ he said, in a cool, ironical manner. ‘What’s the matter with her? What’s making her cry? She shan’t be found fault with. It’s right for little girls to cry. But how’s this? What have you been dressing her in boys’ clothes for? Make her a pretty frock at once, and to-morrow she shall go and take a walk in the garden of Tulleries.
‘Sure enough, the nurse put the girl’s dress on me the next day, according to order, and took me to walk at the Tulleries. I was well mortified, as you may perhaps imagine. But I never again cried from that day until I had become a man grown.'”
Tags: Victor Hugo
The Objectivist novelist Ayn Rand sat down for an interview with Playboy in 1964, back when that magazine routinely did Q&As with incredible subjects. She gave opinions on everything from politics to philosophy to religion to literature. An excerpt from the interview, conducted by Alvin Toffler, in which she shares her ardently contrarian views of novelists of that era:
“Playboy: Are there any novelists whom you admire?
Ayn Rand: Yes. Victor Hugo.
Playboy: What about modern novelists?
Ayn Rand: No, there is no one that I could say I admire among the so-called serious writers. I prefer the popular literature of today, which is today’s remnant of Romanticism. My favorite is Mickey Spillane.
Playboy: Why do you like him?
Ayn Rand: Because he is primarily a moralist. In a primitive form, the form of a detective novel, he presents the conflict of good and evil, in terms of black and white. He does not present a nasty gray mixture of indistinguishable scoundrels on both sides. He presents an uncompromising conflict. As a writer, he is brilliantly expert at the aspect of literature which I consider most important: plot structure.
Playboy: What do you think of Faulkner?
Ayn Rand: Not very much. He is a good stylist, but practically unreadable in content–so I’ve read very little of him.
Playboy: What about Nabokov?
Ayn Rand: I have read only one book of his and a half–the half was Lolita, which I couldn’t finish. He is a brilliant stylist, he writes beautifully, but his subjects, his sense of life, his view of man, are so evil that no amount of artistic skill can justify them.”
Tags: Alvin Toffler, Ayn Rand, Mickey Spillane, Victor Hugo, Vladimir Nabakov, William Faulkner