In an attempt to continue to read more Mississippi authors, and at the behest of a friend, I recently finished Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. This book had at face value all the components of a story that I would find enticing. It falls within a strange sub-genre known as “dark academia”, essentially a genre that places a narrative within a private liberal arts college setting with students studying the Classics [Greek and Roman civilization and languages]. The aesthetic of this genre is all houndstooth and tweed, Oxford shoes, autumn leaves, and neo-Gothic architecture in some quaint New England town. Underneath this veneer of serious study and high Western sensibility lies an insidious plot, a dagger in the library, a trail of blood in the woods. Whether Tartt popularized or just built upon this genre, she certainly lived a portion of it in her own life.
Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and was raised in Grenada. A bibliophile from birth, she went on to The University of Mississippi for undergraduate studies where her writing caught the attention of literary giant Willie Morris, who considered her a genius. She was subsequently encouraged by Morris to transfer to Bennington College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, to seriously pursue her talent as a writer. She studied Classics at Bennington and following graduation, at the age of 29, she published The Secret History, which was a critical and financial success. In 2013, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her third novel, The Goldfinch. She is known for being an enigmatic figure, a social recluse who converted to Catholicism later in life and has vowed to never get married. She takes approximately 10 years to write each of her novels. Only such an individual could concoct the story contained in The Secret History.
The book takes place at the fictional Hampden College in Vermont, a thinly veiled nod to her own elite liberal arts alma mater Bennington. It is an inverted detective story, in which the protagonist Richard Papen reflects on the murder of his friend Edmund ”Bunny” Corrigan at the hands of his group of friends. Not exactly a spoiler alert, this jarring incident actually opens the book, and the rest of the work is a sequential telling of the events leading up to the murder of Bunny and the aftermath of the situation. The story is dark, but almost humorous at times, as one gets to know and appreciate Bunny over the course of the book all the while knowing his eventual demise.
The friend group of students surrounding Richard are some of the most well-developed characters I have ever experienced in a novel. Tartt certainly has a gift for character as well as plot building, and towards the end of the novel the reader feels as if he knows the characters personally. Richard is a transplant from Plano, California, who moves to Hampden after reading about the college in a pamphlet received in the mail. Upon arriving at Hampden, he seeks to enroll in Greek, a class in which he had some prior experience, but is denied entry into the Greek class as enrollment into it is at the strict discretion of Classics professor Julian Morrow. Richard soon comes to realize that a very elite and separate group of students are under the direct tutelage of Morrow – Bunny Corrigan, fraternal twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay, Francis Abernathy, and Henry Winter. Upon inadvertently entering their confidence, Richard is finally accepted into Julian’s Greek class only to learn that he must drop every other course and instructor and take all of his classes in Classics with Julian and this select group of students. Against his better judgment, Richard agrees and plunges into a sequence of events that escalates far past what he could have imagined.
Julian has a cult of personality influence upon his students, particularly Henry, and they become totally isolated from the rest of the campus, consumed in the exclusive study of the Classics according to Julian. He inspires them with tales of Greek ideas of beauty and he uses the example of a bacchanal to explain how beauty and terror are so intertwined as to be practically inseparable concepts. “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beauty, we quiver before it.” This simple idea inspires the students to embark on a course from which they can never turn back, and which Julian never intended to inspire them to journey down. Richard is at times in the story a completely dissociated character; one who cannot help but continue down the path but almost assumes the role of one caught in an inevitability when it certainly is not. He attributes his decision to stick it out with the Classics group to his “fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life… mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
Perhaps this book affected me more than it would others because I was a Classics minor [emphasis in Latin] and certainly have had professors that struck me as eerily similar to Julian. Many of the references in the book were too deep for my cursory understanding of Greek and Roman literature and mythology, but they highlight just how masterful a command of these subjects Tartt had upon her graduation from Bennington. The book particularly highlights the profound influence that a teacher can have upon a small and impressionable group of students who revere him. It calls to mind that Socrates was put on trial and ultimately condemned for his “corruption of the youth”.
The most memorable professor that I had in my undergraduate studies was in an Honors College discussion group. We had a professor of philosophy who met with our small group of ten to fifteen students in the evenings after classes to read carefully through and discuss Plato’s Republic. I had never even heard of The Republic before meeting this professor, but his mastery of the book was unparalleled and soon I was occupying my daily thoughts with the philosopher-king, the allegory of the cave, and the making of a just society. It was not as if I abandoned my other college endeavors at the time – my fraternity, attending football games, going to concerts and shows – but the seed of the ideas from The Republic were planted into my thought life by a philosophy professor and grew daily into an inescapable part of my worldview.
It is remarkable to think now that I have been out of college more years than I was in it. Looking back on that time, especially my freshmen year, I realize how young I really was when pondering the Classics with professors much older than me. Surely, they must have regarded me as a mere youth, incapable of more than a superficial understanding of the concepts they were attempting to teach me, concepts that they had dedicated their lives to studying. Especially in the realm of Greek and Roman studies, this is particularly true. Everything surrounding these ancient peoples is arcane and mysterious. One gets the impression that these people would pay any cost for access to the divine or the form of beauty. This idea put into the wrong head of malleable youth can certainly result in costly consequences.
This personal experience with an intimate tutor teaching me the Classics and the profound impact that it had on me is the primary way that I relate to the story that Tartt pens. A mild-mannered transfer student from California comes to Vermont to study the classics and winds up with a group committing murder. Tartt makes this transition totally believable. She is an exceptionally gifted author, and her first novel is absolutely worth the read. It combines solid character development, an uncanny knowledge of the classics, a murder told in reverse, and dark humor into one neat package within a niche sub-genre. This product of Greenwood, Mississippi, certainly established herself as an icon of American literature with this story, and it will stick with the reader long after finishing the last page.
Written by Cal Wilkerson
Donna Tartt
Brains and Brawn 