Weird Rand Mention

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Weird Rand Mention

This one's for the quirky. Don't be shy. I like quirky.

I have been reading through the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald. Right smack in the middle of The Quick Red Fox (1964 - the fourth in the Travis McGee series), there is a description of a small city in California called Santa Rosita that Travis and a lady are driving through. At least I think it is a small city since I can't find it.

The story is typical for the mystery mixed with thriller genre. A movie star named Lysa Dean is being blackmailed with photographs of an orgy she once participated in (during a moment of emotional vulnerability, obviously  ) and she hires Travis to dig up and obtain all the copies and discover who the blackmailer is. There we have it. Instant plot. Travis gets to contact--and have lethal adventures with--a list of colorful characters taken from the orgy photos while getting involved with the lovely assistant, Dana Holtzer, that Lysa Dean hired to help him. Dana is cold and frigid and, of course, Travis thaws her along the way as he gets the bad guy.  

As I have been discovering, MacDonald uses a quirky form of digression as part of his writing techniques. He sometimes has flights of fancy where he goes on a rant about groups or places within American society that he finds particularly superficial. This is probably to help explain or illustrate the why of Travis McGee's main lifestyle as a beach bum who lives on a houseboat (called The Busted Flush). Travis simply doesn't fit in.

During one of these rants in The Quick Red Fox, MacDonald mentioned Ayn Rand. This is the weirdest allusion to her I have read in popular entertainment. See for yourself.

Quote

Santa Rosita was a stunted version of the Santa Barbara code of existence. Three industries, electronics, plastics and tourists, and squeeze the bejaysus out of all three. It was sharing the big boom-boom. The incomparably dull tract houses, glitteringly new, were marching out across the hills, cluttered with identical station wagons, identical children, identical barbecues, identical tastes in flowers and television. You see, Virginia, there really is a Santa Rosita, full of plastic people, in plastic houses, in areas noduled by the vast basketry of their shopping centers. But do not blame them for being so tiresome and so utterly satisfied with themselves. Because, you see, there is no one left to tell them what they are and what they really should be doing.

The dullest wire services the world has ever seen fill their little monopoly newspapers with self-congratulatory pap. Their radio is unspeakable. Their television is geared to a minimal approval by thirty million of them. And anything thirty million people like, aside from their more private functions, is bound to be bad. Their schools are group-adjustment centers, fashioned to shame the rebellious. Their churches are weekly votes of confidence in God. Their politicians arc enormously likable, never saying a cross word. The goods they buy grow increasingly more shoddy each year, though brighter in color. For those who still read, they make do, for the most part, with the portentous gruntings of Uris, Wouk, Rand and others of that same witless ilk. Their magazine fare is fashioned by nervous committees.

You sec, dear, there is no one left to ask them a single troublesome question. Such as: Where have you been and where arc you going and is it worth it.

They are the Undisturbed. The Sleep-Lovers.

And they fill out an enormous number of forms every year, humbly and sincerely. Each one is given a number to use all his life.

Are they going to be awakened with a kiss? They feel vaguely uneasy about their young. My God, why can't these kids appreciate this best of all possible worlds? What's wrong with these restless punks? These . . . these goddam dropouts!

Virginia, dear, through the strange alchemy of the gods, there are a disproportionate number of kids coming along these days with IQ's that are soaring toward a level too high to measure. These kids have very cold eyes. They arc the ones who, one day, will stop playing with transistors, diodes and microcircuitry and look at Barrentown and start asking the rude questions. Or build a machine that will ask.

In the meanwhile, Virginia, Santa Rosita still exists, and it is as if some cynical genius had designed a huge complex penal colony in the sunshine, eliminating the need for guard towers and barbed wire by merely beaming a gigantic electronic message at the inmates, day and night, saying, You are in heaven! Be happy! It you can't be happy there, you can't be happy anywhere! Vote! Consume! Donate! And don't forget to use your number. 

Did you catch it? "... the portentous gruntings of Uris, Wouk, Rand and others of that same witless ilk."

I have read works by all three and I can think of many things to call them in common, but "portentous gruntings" and "witless" are not contenders. What on earth was MacDonald smoking when he wrote that?

Ditto for the Stepford Wives kind of people MacDonald gives that particular literary taste to. If he had mentioned Reader's Digest or Kahlil Gibran or novels by Irving Wallace or Arthur Hailey, I could see it. But Leon Uris, Herman Wouk and Ayn Rand? These are reading fare for middle-class overly commercialized Babbits of the 60's? 

It's kinda breathtaking. And weird as all hell.  

btw - Don't let this excerpt spoil any interest you may have in reading any Travis McGee book. The ones I have read so far are good stories with loads of entertainment value.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

As a follow-up, I'm getting the itch to do some portentous grunting if I can figure out how.

It sounds like fun.

Michael

[Peter]

Posted April  1, 2010 by Barbara Branden.

Tony: "This reminds me of the excellent thrillers of the critically ignored, incredibly popular, John D. MacDonald . . . I own the full collection."

MacDonald was a wonderful writer, who never received the critical understanding and acclaim he deserved. I, too, once owned all his books -- and I now regret that I gave them away. He once did something astonishing. I don't remember what book it was, but in the first two or three pages, he introduced nine or ten characters. each with only a sentence or two of characterization. But so striking and memorable were those characterizations that as the characters kept reappearing throughout the book, one never had to go back to see who any of them were. Enough said. I don't mean to change the subject of this thread, Barbara

"The fox has many tricks, the hedgehog only one. One good one" –Archilochus

Tony Garland wrote in 2015: Both John D. MacDonald and O'Brien terrific authors. I sort of passed by L'Amour, but he looks to be worth reading. Appears you enjoy a series, with a consistent central character, Peter. I'm reminded of Arkady the investigator, of Martin Cruz Smith's series. Gorky Park, etc. Another great writer.

William Scherk wrote in 2018: My mental imagery of Florida is forever ruined by John D MacDonald tales of corruption and criminality. It seems a vividly proud, restless, striving, changing place, with a dynamism of its own, fed perhaps by its in-migrating streams. Snowbirds in Florida would probably be among the least dynamic next to Forest Lawn.

And a John D. MacDonald quote: “Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will.” 

[Peter]

I think Rand mentioned John D. MacDonald. Was it in her interview with Tom Snyder? I don’t remember, but I think Rand liked his books. MacDonald was certainly a mish mash of ideas and not very consistent. I read all of his books and enjoyed them with an occasional shrug. Peter

Notes. Corporate greed and disaster? Like pages from a crime novel By Garry Emmons December 15, 2009 . . . DECADES LATER, the gig with the economy would end badly for the erstwhile saxophone player. But in the 1950s, jazz musician Alan Greenspan was just another cat under the spell of a dame, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, in thrall to the novelist Ayn Rand and her torch song of laissez-faire business, free markets, and capitalist elitism.

If only the Fed chairman-in-training had swung to a different drummer. In 1957, for example, instead of Rand’s pie-in-the sky “Atlas Shrugged,’’ imagine if Greenspan had taken to heart another book published that year, John D. MacDonald’s “A Man of Affairs.’’ (The two authors were contemporaries and both sold well, but MacDonald was “the best novelist in America,’’ according to writer Pete Hamill.)

If only young Alan had shrugged off Rand for MacDonald, maybe we’d all be better off today. A hard-boiled crime writer who maintains legions of fans decades after his death, MacDonald had no illusions about how people and institutions behave when big sums of money are around. And because MacDonald actually knew how business works, he had a more trenchant view of American enterprise.

The son of an executive, MacDonald earned an MBA at Harvard (Robert McNamara was a classmate) and then spent several years in factories and industrial plants procuring matériel for the Army, an experience he later used in plots involving business.

MacDonald is best known for his paperback series starring Travis McGee, a private operative who takes care of violent bad guys but also rights financial wrongs perpetrated by slippery businessmen and corporate malefactors. To do this, McGee often calls upon the financial acumen of his brainy buddy Meyer, a “retired economist’’ who lives on a boat named the John Maynard Keynes.

But MacDonald also wrote nonviolent novels of contemporary American manners featuring organization men in corporate middle management or family businesses. These characters are dragged down by their own moral failings but also by the numbing impersonality of business and by predatory corporations and financiers. So while “Atlas Shrugged’’ is Rand’s paean to unbridled, heroic capitalism, personified in the character John Galt, in “A Man of Affairs,’’ MacDonald’s capitalist icon is a corporate raider named Mike Dean. In a tirade directed at the novel’s protagonist, Dean lays it out: “You sicken me. You pollyanna boys want to go around thinking the business world is honorable and reasonably decent . . . . Listen to me. There’s no more morality or ethics in industry than there is in that pack of barracudas out there . . . . I tell you that the only limitation is the law. And everything else goes.’’

Everything else indeed goes in MacDonald’s 1977 national bestseller “Condominium,’’ in which Florida developers and bankers are portrayed as environmental pillagers and corner-cutting fast-buck artists. A Katrina-like hurricane eventually collapses the slapdash apartment buildings the villains have constructed, killing the guilty and innocent alike. Lax oversight combined with business as usual is a recipe for disaster, MacDonald implies, a prescient moral for our recent economic cataclysm.

MacDonald, who died in 1986, once wrote that “no matter how much feeling of public obligation the executive staff of any corporation might possess, the corporate entity is involved in maximizing short and long run profit. . . . The old yardstick is deadly but we cannot abandon it because it is what makes our society function. But it is turning our land, from sea to shining sea, into a sour jungle, noisy, dirty, gritty, and infinitely depressing.’’

Unrestrained capitalism, MacDonald suggests, contains the seeds of its own destruction. And markets and powerful business forces, left to themselves, will seek to satiate their own, intrinsically amoral, needs - not unlike MacDonald’s terrifying sociopath Max Cady in “Cape Fear.’’

MacDonald apparently believed that no serious person could be influenced by Rand; even Travis McGee dismisses her writing as “portentous gruntings.’’ It was one of MacDonald’s few misjudgments. But as we now know, it was nothing compared with staking America’s well-being on a Randian belief in the inviolable sanctity, security, and wisdom of markets. Garry Emmons is a Cambridge-based business writer.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

56 minutes ago, Peter said:

MacDonald was certainly a mish mash of ideas and not very consistent. I read all of his books and enjoyed them with an occasional shrug.

Peter,

I've only read 4 of the  21 Travis McGee stories so far, but in these four, I found certain consistencies in Travis McGee himself. He's a reluctant knight of old in modern form. He's openly self-serving, more intelligent than he seems, and at times violent, but if the cause turns out to be unjust, count him out. Hell, he'll even turn on his employer. That means if the self-serving part has to be sacrificed for a higher moral good and justice, poetic or otherwise, count him in. He's reluctant to get into a fight, but once in, he's reluctant to stop until it has been settled.

Also, he's always on the lookout for a damsel in distress. Except the dragon he slays that is imprisoning her is always her own psychology, her own pain and insecurities caused by some trauma or other that only a bunch of psychobabble and a romp with a loving and considerate Real Man (like Travis) can cure.  

That always leads to an involvement, but she knows in the end that he has to move on, as does she, and she's cool with that...

Well, there is an exception. If she gets killed first (as one did), that part doesn't play out, but you can see it waiting in the wings.

Michael

[william.scherk]

If you like MacDonald and Travis McGee, you might also enjoy James Lee Burke's series featuring the character Dave Robicheaux. Burke is a tremendous writer, and finds corruption and criminality in and around The Big Easy.

See Goodreads for more detail on the series. My favourite was Last Car to Elysian Fields. From a customer review at Amazon:

In "Last Car to Elysian Fields" fans of the Robicheaux series find their beloved but flawed hero moving into a new stage of his life. With wife Bootsie having died and daughter Alafair away at college, and his childhood home burned to the charred ground Robicheaux is presented with the opportunity to reboot his life. True to the dark beauty that is JLB's writing, it only takes a few pages to realize that Robicheaux, at least for the time being, is an emotional recidivist for whom such change is unobtainable.

Shackled by his dislike for the powerful and the greedy, sparked by his deep well of anger, and enabled by his friend Clete Purcell, Robicheaux lurches forward in yet another misadventure. Even in the search of truth and justice, Robicheaux manages to leave loss and despair in his wake.

For the JLB fan, this novel may not plow new territory; the writing is as strong as ever though, and this is Robicheaux just the way we know and love him.

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On 1/30/2020 at 3:13 PM, william.scherk said:

If you like MacDonald and Travis McGee, you might also enjoy James Lee Burke's series featuring the character Dave Robicheaux. Burke is a tremendous writer, and finds corruption and criminality in and around The Big Easy.

William,

Last night I finished the last of the Dave Robicheaux novels by James Lee Burke (audiobooks--they are all on Scribd). There are 23 of them. I started the first about 6 months ago.

In the beginning, I didn't like the style or the main character. And Clete (Dave's sidekick) had not yet turned into the one-man random wrecking ball service against  the bad guys he later became. (Some of that stuff got hilarious, too. Including his innocent cluelessness about what he had just done. Burke in one of the books described Clete as a junkyard falling down a stairway.  )

 

As I read into the series, I think my fiction writing matured, although I won't know for sure until I put my learning down on paper  in practice. But I'm not worried. This exposure pushed me way out of the realm of the beginner. It makes me feel competent whereas before, I felt anxiety when I worked on a story.

For a concrete example, I feel differently about first-person narrative writing than I did before. The entire series is in first person except when Burke moves the point-of-view to another character. Then it goes into third person. I saw from this series many examples how it's OK to shine the introspection light on the dark corners of the hero's mind as the story unfolds to show his (or her) inner struggles. When tied to the main themes, this made for real satisfaction at the end when Dave triumphs or finds peace (even if only temporary) where there was once unease.

Also, there are the long descriptions. In settings, long descriptions are a no-no these days. And in the early books, they actually were too long and too boring. But Burke's way of describing the Louisiana he is trying to hold on to, and by extension, the good side of the old South, is like small poems injected into the narrative. Very beautiful. Incidentally, I've seen him interviewed by Lee Child and other mainstream thriller writers. They all praise his narrative descriptions and they all praise his style.

And they are right. Burke is one hell of a writer. (As an aside, I did not find anything from Bidinotto on James Lee Burke. I mention this because Bidinotto offers extensive praise of many modern thriller writers. But he resists going to the wells of inspiration they go to, the wells from which they spring, so to speak. He praises them only in Rand-oriented terms. I think this is a mistake as it misidentifies what they set for themselves as their creative tasks.)

 

Plot-wise, this is where I got enormous value. Burke makes reference to classical literature all the time, including many Biblical references. His form of plotting is to graft a murder mystery-thriller outline onto the main events of a classical tale like Beowolf, then let his characters take it from there.

What I mean by murder mystery-thriller outline is this: Innocent victim(s) is killed, then the good guy(s) tries to figure out who did it and chase them down to punish them. And the bad guys are resilient, powerful, resourceful, cunning as all hell, and so on.

The interwoven main events of classical plots provide the platform for unfolding his themes, symbolism, and mythic universality of the stories. This makes plotlines feel a bit meandering at times, but I've grown to like this form a lot. Burke himself talked about this in some YouTube video or other. And he mentioned that as the story grows while he's writing (he's mostly a pantser), he ends up screwing up the plot points of the classical plots. His characters just don't want to go there after a while.  I think the issue is the specific narrative questions that arise. (A narrative question is what the reader wants answered, not necessarily what a character wants answered.)

 

For people with a Randian approach, Burke may not shine as a presenter of heroes until it becomes clear he gives his heroes a quirk most heroes don't have. This goes for both Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel. And just to be sure this is clear, Burke spells it out explicitly in his later books by having Dave tell Clete he doesn't see his own good and, in other situations, Clete telling Dave that he's like this.

These heroes are virtuous--virtuous to a fault at times--and see the same virtues they practice in others, but they just don't see such virtue in themselves enough to articulate it in words. They certainly see it when it's time to act. But when it gets time to put their own words to it, they are always trying to figure out how to improve and always beating themselves up when they succumb to different temptations, like Dave's alcoholism, Clete's need to get involved with women who damage him, or when the urge to lash out violently at the bad guys overpowers them so much, they fall outside good-guy lines.

Also, the people who serve as the innocent victims are often poor and from the underground culture. But not always. Burke's moral judgments are against bullying, rich or poor. 

I can't find fault with this form of hero character. Rand-wise, I think he's the poor cousin of a typical Randian hero, but he's still a hero. (I don't care what Rand said about the fly on a painting of a gorgeous woman being evil.) This goes for the different women heroes throughout the books, too.

 

On the negative side, Burke includes ghost stories, of all things. Robicheaux at times, sees the ghosts of long-dead Confederate soldiers in the mist of the bayou. He also sees people he's loved and they talk to him until he snaps out of it. In several of the books, he sees different versions of the devil, some of whom strive for redemption as they go about their killing, destruction and mayhem. (He went way overboard in the last book, A Private Cathedral, which had a friggin' phantom ship from ancient Greek times sailing in and out of the story with a grim reaper kind of character collecting souls to put on it. This one is my least favorite book of his.)

For Rand-people, going through this series is an excellent exercise in checking certain premises about creative writing, especially ones coming from Rand that I believe cause writer's block--at least they did for me. (I've written about this elsewhere.) This is not a swipe at Rand. It's merely an observation of how to step around a pitfall for novices or more advanced writers who are stuck. Of course, she provides a lot of great writing advice along with the pitfalls.

 

After this effort of reading the entire series, I can say the following with certainty. It took me a while to get to know Burke's characters and some of his literary techniques. But now that I do, I would never give them up. I can't imagine not knowing these characters nor how Burke presents them.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I just saw this was a thread on a weird Rand mention.

I have another, although I am not going to look it up for an exact quote just for this post. It is in the Hit Man (Keller) series by Lawrence Block.

Keller is a hit man who is a sociopath who feels no guilt for offing people, But he is not a sadist or control freak. Instead, he is amiable (except when killing), reflects on life as he goes along and gets into stamp collecting.

It's hilarious at times.

However, there is an Ayn Rand reference in one of the books (I think is was in Hit and Run) that was a bit irritating.

Keller (the hit man) had been framed for the assassination of a governor and was on the run with little money, a stolen car, and so on. He stopped at a gas station out in the middle of nowhere to put $20 worth of gas into his tank from the meager cash he had left. This meant he has to pay inside first.

The owner, an obnoxious redneck, recognized him from the TV and pulled a shotgun on him. Keller managed to kill him, but then went off into a moral crises about stealing what he needs. He had never stolen anything from one of his victims before and the guilt was killing him.

But then, in the back room where the redneck slept, he discovered a cache of Ayn Rand novels and an inflatable life-size sex doll that looked like Ann Coulter. His moral crisis came to an instant end.

Even though this is irritating, it's still funny as all hell.

 

(On a side note, the Hit Man books are mostly strings of loosely connected short stories. Most of them appeared in Playboy Magazine when first published.)

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

5 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I just saw this was a thread on a weird Rand mention.

I have another, although I am not going to look it up for an exact quote just for this post. It is in the Hit Man (Keller) series by Lawrence Block.

Keller is a hit man who is a sociopath who feels no guilt for offing people, But he is not a sadist or control freak. Instead, he is amiable (except when killing), reflects on life as he goes along and gets into stamp collecting.

It's hilarious at times.

However, there is an Ayn Rand reference in one of the books (I think is was in Hit and Run) that was a bit irritating.

Keller (the hit man) had been framed for the assassination of a governor and was on the run with little money, a stolen car, and so on. He stopped at a gas station out in the middle of nowhere to put $20 worth of gas into his tank from the meager cash he had left. This meant he has to pay inside first.

The owner, an obnoxious redneck, recognized him from the TV and pulled a shotgun on him. Keller managed to kill him, but then went off into a moral crises about stealing what he needs. He had never stolen anything from one of his victims before and the guilt was killing him.

But then, in the back room where the redneck slept, he discovered a cache of Ayn Rand novels and an inflatable life-size sex doll that looked like Ann Coulter. His moral crisis came to an instant end.

Even though this is irritating, it's still funny as all hell.

 

(On a side note, the Hit Man books are mostly strings of loosely connected short stories. Most of them appeared in Playboy Magazine when first published.)

Michael

One if Nathaniel Branden's therapy clients told him (mid or earlier 70s) that he had been a hit man.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

On 1/30/2020 at 1:05 PM, Peter said:

 

MacDonald apparently believed that no serious person could be influenced by Rand; even Travis McGee dismisses her writing as “portentous gruntings.’’ It was one of MacDonald’s few misjudgments. But as we now know, it was nothing compared with staking America’s well-being on a Randian belief in the inviolable sanctity, security, and wisdom of markets. Garry Emmons is a Cambridge-based business writer.

No. Rand believed in the rule of law, in property and other rights. Done properly you'll have laissez faire capitalism. She started with morality. What could be described as the libertarian position is what is quoted. Libertarians find their philosophy inside economics. It is severely truncated with no real foundation.

--Brant