Rand’s signature created in vector format by Scewing, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
A few months ago, as a result of the strange, hazy possession that occurs while sitting in front of the laptop screen, I “found myself”—a phrase I’ve disliked ever since I read a tweet by Elisa Gabbert pointing out its imprecision (although in this case it’s appropriate)—staring at Ayn Rand’s marginalia in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.
I’ve never read Ayn Rand, even though I’ve owned a copy of The Fountainhead since I was twenty-two, when my depressed friend moved to the West Coast and left me his book collection. I agree with Walter Benjamin that it’s good to keep a library regardless of whether or not you actually read the books, and so I brought The Fountainhead with me wherever I moved. My friend Megan, while visiting, said she “actually liked” The Fountainhead, and I took great satisfaction in being someone people felt free enough around to confess things like their love of The Fountainhead to. This was 2017—a time when a Fountainhead confession could get you into real trouble. And so The Fountainhead became a kind of litmus test: if, when perusing my book collection, someone mentioned liking The Fountainhead, I felt I could trust them; if they asked in a baffled, catty tone why I had it, I lost a little respect for them, despite my not having read it and still having only a vague sense that certain people didn’t like Ayn Rand because she was a “capitalist.”
Sometime during 2018 or 2019, my YouTube algorithm started giving me videos from the Ayn Rand Institute, most often by a guy named Yaron Brook, who has a speech impediment that makes him unable to pronounce r’s and th’s. Around that time, too, a guy I used to follow on Twitter, “Jack the Perfume Nationalist,” was promoting Ayn Rand; in particular I remember Jack, a gay guy, praising Rand for something she’d said about how blowjobs are for the pleasure of the giver, not the receiver.
While doing research for my novel Muscle Man, I read some books by the bodybuilder Mike Mentzer, who based his entire bodybuilding philosophy on Ayn Rand. Like Rand, Mentzer believed that men were meant to be heroes. In Mentzer’s case, he believed that he could communicate heroic virtues—what he called HUNGER (height, uplift, nobility, grandeur, exaltation, and reverence)—by building a back that looked like bat wings, quadriceps like chicken breasts, a thin and rippled waist, bulbous biceps, and so on.
When I searched my email inbox for “Ayn Rand,” to see what I had said about her prior, I found an email about Lexi Freiman’s novel The Book of Ayn, and an email to Olivia Kan-Sperling, an editor at The Paris Review, in which I told her that The Paris Review had linked the wrong Twitter account when they posted my and Tao Lin’s interview: they’d mistakenly linked a Jordan Castro parody account, meant to mock me, which I could tell had been made by a specific ex-friend, because this specific ex-friend would always accuse me of “loving Ayn Rand,” and the bio on the fake Twitter account said “Randian Objectivist.”
So, when I emerged from my screen blackout to “find myself” staring at the marginalia on this random blog, which I’d assumed was an Ayn Rand blog but was in reality a C. S. Lewis blog called LEWISANA, I was immediately delighted when I started reading Rand’s notes, taken in the margins of her copy of The Abolition of Man. They were hilarious, feral, aggressive, and dismissive. Plus, she was chimping out about a book that meant a lot to me, which I actually had read, by an author whom I appreciated, and who had influenced my worldview.
The Abolition of Man was originally a series of lectures at King’s College in Newcastle (then printed by Oxford University Press). The text argues for the reality of objective, cross-cultural moral values, and warns that, in our attempt to create new values (an impossibility in Lewis’s view), we inevitably delude ourselves, cease to be fully human, and banish ourselves to an existence of “obedience to impulse.”
I’d read The Abolition of Man in 2018, along with almost all of C. S. Lewis’s other Christian apologetic works. Until then, I’d only vaguely associated Lewis with The Chronicles of Narnia—but, as I started taking Christianity more seriously, after being as dismissive and uncharitable toward it as one could possibly be, people kept telling me to read C. S. Lewis, so I read C. S. Lewis, and—despite the occasional cringe, in addition to, I’d later learn, some questionable theology—it was helpful, in part because he wrote for secular and at least semiliterate people like me, who’d never spent much time seriously considering many of the beliefs they had but taken for granted.
Reading Rand’s marginalia, I felt a kinship with her. I hadn’t read her books, but we had read the same book, and in these small, private responses I could relate with Ayn Rand the person; I felt a closeness that I rarely felt with authors, even when I read their whole books; instead, Ayn Rand and I were one, like she was sharing her private thoughts with me directly, such that they were mine.
Ayn Rand, in CS Lewis’s The Abolition of Man
You bet he couldn’t!
The abysmal bastard!
!!
The cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-metaphysical mediocrity!
What’s that, brother?
(The bastard!)
The cheap, drivelling non-entity!
This is monstrous!
!!!
!!
!!!
!!! … you God-damn, beaten mystic at the Renaissance!
This is true—but even here he’s lying.
Oh, BS!—and total BS!
(The abysmal scum!)