JOURNALS OF AYN RAND.<i> Edited by David Harriman with foreword by Leonard Peikoff</i> .<i> Dutton: 728 pp., $39.95</i>

Like heavy metal music, Kamikaze piloting and chugging bottles of Boone’s Farm Apple wine, Ayn Rand is one of those experiences that is best appreciated by the very young. There may be some mature souls who find themselves stomping along to her brazen one-note samba, but her ideal readers are college sophomores who are trying to reinvent themselves as jutting-jawed Heroes of Reason. You see them here and there, the intense ones, clutching their copies of “Atlas Shrugged” like backstage passes to the World Superiority Tour ’97.

I was as high-strung and prone to self-aggrandizement as the next 19-year-old, but I avoided Rand. I had the idea that her work was artistically tacky, philosophically rigid and vaguely scary, a kind of literary precursor of est. Besides, all my rebellious uberteen energies went into worshiping what I took to be a higher-grade seducer of youth, Nietzsche. Recently, however, I read Rand’s two major works, “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” which may make me the only non-Rand-disciple over 25 ever to voluntarily wade through 1,900 pages of The Master. I cannot say that the experience was a pleasurable one, but it has increased my store of information: I now know that her novels are artistically tacky, philosophically rigid and vaguely scary.

Rand may not be the worst novelist ever to pick up a pen, but she is without a doubt the worst novelist ever to inspire a cult following and sell zillions of books. Her novels are awe-inspiringly bad, ludicrous on a heroic scale. They are comic books with Wagnerian dialogue--like Danielle Steel channeling Milton Friedman, with some fake Nietzsche-chips sprinkled on top. Their plots are bottom-of-the-pile Hollywood schlock worthy of serving as fodder for “Mystery Science Theatre 3000,” complete with melodramatic courtroom scenes, planes crashing near the SuperRand Fortress of Solitude and heroes rushing in to pull their leader off a high-tech torture machine. Rand’s characters are clanking robots whose mouths jerk mechanically as philosophical speeches appear in balloons behind them. As for that dialogue, it is made of the finest hardwood veneers. A sample 2-by-4: “You, the heir of the d’Anconias, who could have surpassed all his ancestors of the miraculous hand that produced, you’re turning your matchless ability to the job of destruction. . . . Yet you and I were the kind who determine the fate of the world.”

What keeps you turning the pages, however, is that these books are not just incredibly bad, they are incredibly weird. Their aridity, their lack of development, psychological depth and flexibility is so absolute that it is fascinating: You keep waiting for something light, something human, something different to appear, and it never does. Rand’s formula is a rigor mortis-like adherence to her icy first philosophical principles, combined with grandiose wish-fulfilling plots. The results are simultaneously banal and hysterical: like Aristotle (the only philosopher she respected, despite his many “errors”) crossed with Mickey Spillane (her favorite contemporary novelist).

Rand’s works have a bizarre tone, at once smug and shrill, sadomasochistic and sentimental. Her psychosexual ventings can be best observed in the sex scenes in “The Fountainhead,” which read like a cross between a Harlequin romance and the woollier ravings of the Marquis de Sade. Take this unusual come-hither speech delivered by the heroine, Dominique Francon, after she has intentionally caused Mighty Rand Hero No. 1 and super-Wrightian-architect Howard Roark to lose an important commission: “ ‘You know that I hate you, Roark. I hate you for what you are, for wanting you, for having to want you. I will fight to starve you, to strangle you on the things you won’t be able to reach. I have done it to you today--and that is why I shall sleep with you tonight. . . . I have hurt you today. I’ll do it again. I’ll come to you whenever I have beaten you--whenever I know that I have hurt you--and I’ll let you own me. . . . What do you wish to say now ?’

‘Take your clothes off.’ ”

Well, whatever turns you on. But after 700-odd pages of this kind of stuff--or, more commonly, of characters who bear an uncanny resemblance to Ayn Rand’s authorial voice constantly saying to each other “I love you because in my rational calculation you are worthy of my lofty respect”--one begins to grow somewhat restless.

Rand’s defenders might object that hers are novels of ideas, formal experimentations more like philosophical arguments than conventional works of fiction, and so should be judged by different standards. Certainly Rand’s novels contain eloquent arguments for her central ideas--in particular, her exacting individualism (an important intellectual source of contemporary libertarianism) and her critique of altruism. But even novels of ideas are not necessarily philosophical arguments: To succeed as fiction, they must--like such exemplary works as Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” Mann’s “Dr. Faustus,” Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black” and Melville’s “Moby Dick”--embody their ideas in characters that have an imagined existence independent of those ideas. It is the imagination, open to irrationality and irony, to chance and humor, that is the true laboratory in which ideas are tested in fiction.

But Rand’s talents were purely cognitive. As her prosaic cookie-cutter journals indicate, she had little imagination and no humor. Her books are reenactments of giant chess games in which the characters are mere pieces and the outcome is foreordained. One of her countless vile “second-handers” (Randspeak for a parasitic person who derives all her values from what others think) is no more going to be revealed to have hidden virtues than a pawn is going to start moving like a knight. In the Rand universe, the bad guys always wear black hats and have ignoble faces, often with weak, ugly mouths. (To give her her due, Rand does write excellent gargoyles, and some of her villains--in particular the bizarre, effete archvillain Ellsworth M. Toohey--are weirdly memorable.)

Rand may be the only fiction writer ever to denounce irrationality as evil, and reading too much of her work can make you feel like a POW deprived of dreaming sleep by sadistic captors. Her hyper-rationalistic, Manichean credo prevented her from even trying to imagine exceptions to her tenets: If a Randian hero were to have an affair with an “unworthy” woman, or a villain were to turn out to be a great artist, her entire system would fall apart. Philosophically, her arguments can be potent; in fictional terms, they are completely tautological. She is the great enemy of collectivism, but in certain ways, her works resemble their exact ideological opposites: novels of Socialist Realism, the “boy-meets-tractor” schlock cranked out by Stalinist party hacks in the Soviet Union.

Grandiose, intense, bombastic, hypnotic, sterile, it is a fascinating body of work, larger than life and twice as clumsy, and the reader is bound to wonder what sort of person could have created it. Unfortunately, if not particularly surprisingly, the recently published “Journals of Ayn Rand” sheds very little new light on that subject or, for that matter, on any other. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine what audience, outside of Rand scholars or acolytes interested in the minutiae of how Rand composed her books, these journals will appeal to.

“Journals of Ayn Rand” consists of a chronological presentation, starting in 1927 and ending in 1966, of most of Rand’s unpublished work. It includes early material written when she was working as a Hollywood screenwriter, notes to herself written before and during the writing of her novels “We the Living,” “The Fountainhead” and her magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged,” as well as extensive notes for a never-published philosophical treatise titled “The Moral Basis of Individualism,” a defense of the House Unamerican Activities Committee’s investigation of Hollywood Communists (Rand’s testimony before HUAC is also included) and late notes for her last proposed novel, “To Lorne Dieterling” (which was never written).

In his introduction, editor David Harriman, who appears to have done a creditable job of selection but whose evident status as a True Believer renders him insufficiently critical, writes “this book presents AR’s working journals--i.e., the notes in which she developed her literary and philosophical ideas. Notes of a personal nature will be included in a forthcoming authorized biography.” Alas, if ever a book needed “notes of a personal nature,” it’s this one. There are a few items of interest here but, for the most part, it’s tedious inside-baseball stuff, mere construction scaffolding, a pale simulacrum of her novels.

A writer’s journal can reveal an intellectual odyssey, provide valuable insights into how major works are written, recount the writer’s quirks and wrong turns and inspirations; it can also achieve its own literary greatness. Rand’s journals do none of these things, for three reasons. First, she had no intellectual odyssey. As Rand herself proudly proclaimed, and as her sensitive former disciple Barbara Branden demonstrates in her remarkable biography “The Passion of Ayn Rand,” Rand’s literary and philosophical ideas were formulated very early in her life and never changed substantially. “I have been asked whether I have changed in these past twenty-five years,” Rand writes in her introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of “The Fountainhead.” “No, I am the same--only more so.” How do you spell r-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-o-n?

That Rand held essentially the same views all her life is shown in the “Journals” by notes she wrote when she was 23, for a never-written novel called “The Little Street.” “Show that the world is monstrously hypocritical,” she exhorts herself. “That humanity has no convictions of any kind. That it does not know how to believe anything. That it has never believed consistently and does not know how to be true to any idea or ideal. That all the ‘high’ words of the world are a monstrous lie.” A bit later, in notes about the novel’s hero, she writes, “Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob and intensely, almost painfully conscious of it. Restless. High-strung. An extreme ‘extremist.’ A clear, strong, brilliant mind. An egoist, in the best sense of the word.”

These pronouncements about the vileness of the world and the how-dare-you-approach-me-varlet hero are Randian to the core: They embody a vision from which Rand never deviated. Harriman argues that “The Little Street” “was not a novel she could have written; to her, the purpose of fiction writing is not to denounce that which one despises, but to exalt that which one admires.” But Rand’s novels, though putatively celebratory, overflow with bile: ostensibly “joyous,” they are spectacularly weighed down by the spirit of gravity, by hatred and contempt for mankind. (The “happy ending” of “Atlas Shrugged,” in which a handful of noble spirits leave the world to stew in its corrupt juices while they pursue their superior destinies in a Rocky Mountain fastness, is a fairy tale that only heightens the pervading sense of despair.)

The second reason that Rand’s journals aren’t interesting is that her fiction--expository, told not shown, with authorial finger always pressing blatantly on the moral scales--is virtually indistinguishable from her nonfiction. Her journals are simply weaker, less polished versions of her novels: There’s not enough difference between the two forms to make the informal one interesting. Reading her notes on the character of Howard Roark or John Galt, or on Galt’s notoriously interminable speech, is like reading an earlier, slightly less elegant version of a complex mathematical proof that was later published in a professional journal: There’s really no point. Of course, these reasons pale beside the third one, which is that Ayn Rand is just not a very good writer--and the journals of a mediocre novelist hold limited appeal.

Yet it would be wrong to deny that there is a burning core in Rand’s work: an intense apprehension of the possibility of living without illusion, without the comforts of religion or of group thinking, in some icy region far above the flabby, flat compromises most of us make sooner or later. Even through her inept fictional constructions, this fire can be felt.

But in the end, Rand’s flame burns in a void. Her work is an endless hall of mirrors, reflecting only an enormous eye and empty space. For all of her Nietzschean praise of “the Earth,” Rand took no delight in the things of this world; she never learned, in his phrase, to “stop bravely at appearances.” A chill instinct, at once noble and callow, led her to separate herself from mankind, but she was unable to forget those she despised and go her own way. To feel superior to others is to allow them to define the terms of one’s identity: The master cannot be aware of the slave without ceasing to be the master. By a tremendous irony, Rand, the self-willed one, the enemy of all borrowed thoughts, was walled into a nutshell by other people.

She once wrote, “one of the most effective lines in ‘The Fountainhead’ comes at the end of Part II, when in reply to Toohey’s question: ‘Why don’t you tell me what you think of me?’ Roark answers: ‘But I don’t think of you.’ ” Rand always did think of those she despised, she despised too much--and that is why her books resonate not with music but with the clang of useless iron.