Ayn Randiness

Like many young men, in my youth I became fascinated with a fantasy series of novels with wooden dialogue, stilted characters, and naive models of human interaction: the writing of Ayn Rand.

There is so much that is inept, odious, gross, ugly and base in her writing that boasts self-importance and depth while it possesses neither. But there is one area where Rand showed an aptitude if not an outright gift: horniness. Especially the rush to rut as sublimated into … industrial Pennsylvania.

Rand’s description of fresh, hot, molten steel slugs rolling out of Pennsylvanian foundries - surely shepherded by tall, fair Polish men sweating in coveralls of leather and rivet - are a weird capitalistic foreplay:

[Passers-by in trains] saw towers that looked like contorted skyscrapers, bridges hanging in mid-air, and sudden wounds spurting fire from out of the solid walls. They saw a line of glowing cylinders moving through the night; the cylinders were red-hot metal…To the men at the tap-hole [Huh-huh] of the furnace inside the mills, the first break of the liquid metal into the open came as a shocking sensation of morning. The narrow streak pouring through space had the pure white color of sunlight. Black coils of steam were boiling upward, streaked with violent red. Fountains of sparks shot in beating spasms as from broken arteries…

Elsewhere she describes sheets of sparks as being like satin. Well, well, well, Ms. Rosenbaum.

The other sample of her curious gift is the big bisexual energy she brings to the descriptions of all of her woman protagonists (Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead) and here again her ur-woman protagonist Dagny Taggart:

Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high- heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car and oddly incongruous with the rest of her. She wore a battered camel’s hair coat that had been expensive, wrapped shapelessly about her slender, nervous body. The coat collar was raised to the slanting brim of her hat. A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfemi- nine, as if she were unconscious of her own body and that it was a woman’s body.¹

Wow. Freud woulda had a field day.

In Rand, were capitalism is religion and therefore conspicuous consumption therefore an act of piety, Taggart’s pants’ swish is an act of seduction.

Footnotes

Notably, Rand cannot help but lean on the fetishization of Taggart’s outfits; she spent years ahead of the blacklist working as a costumes minder in the studio system in Hollywood.