The Secret History and Me

Tara Isabella Burton has a piece up at Gawker about Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History. The framing is a tempting one for me: Burton talks about how she found the novel at seventeen and about re-reading it now when she is thirty. I too first read The Secret History at seventeen (and read it again, and read it again, through my college years as I earned my BA in Classics) and I sat down and re-read it with middle-aged eyes a couple years ago at the age of forty-one.

Unlike Burton, I liked Tartt's book a great deal at both ages. And given her reasons for disliking the book, the desire to write an explanation for my own feelings has been gnawing at me. 

Burton's complaint is rooted in her conclusion that The Secret History expresses an essentially nihilistic worldview and fails to convey a sense of beauty which is rooted in truth. I don't think that Tartt's world is one of nihilism, though I do think that the truth is not grasped fully by any of her characters.  

I thought about block-quoting sections of Burton's post, but it's really best to read it yourself if you want more than the one sentence summary. What follows is primarily my own reaction to the novel and how I came to it rather than a rebuttal of hers.  After all, how can one rebut a reaction?

You know, from the short prologue, that The Secret History is the story of a set of friendships gone awry. You know that the novel is about the murder of one of the set of college friends before you even know who are they are. The reason for the killing takes many more pages to lay out.

With this dark hint of what's to come, the story unfolds linearly, though it is told by the narrator from memory and with a consciousness of what comes after:

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of life, exist outside of literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

A moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies.

My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I had never seen New England or Hampden College until I was nineteen.

As a seventeen year old, this suggested to me a narrator telling the story long after the fact. Twenty-eight seemed terribly old.  Today, it more conveys to me that the narrator is still fairly young, and although he has a different perspective than his twenty year old self, he is still somewhat trapped in the self dramatization of youth.

Richard feels an alien within his family, and in the suburban wasteland of Plano, California where he grew up. And after various false starts (pre-med where he finds himself revolted by dealing with dissections, switching to English out of rebellion, taking Greek as his foreign language because the class time doesn't require him to wake up early and then finding that he's good at Greek) he becomes enamored with a brochure he finds for a tiny liberal arts college in Vermont. Succeeding in transferring there, he seeks to follow up on his Greek studies and discovers that the sole Classics professor, Julian Morrow, runs his department like a members only club, with only the few students he selects permitted. These five students immediately capture Richard's imagination, and in a desperate attempt to join them he goes to Julian and manages to bluff and plead his way into being accepted as a student.

What follows is a seemingly idyllic period. Having yearned for a different life which offers beauty and a feeling of insight into the deeper and better things, Richard seems to have found this both in the small social circle of Julien's students and also in their studies in Greek and Latin. 

There are hints around the edges that this is not as true as it seems. The bits of Julian's teaching we see are perhaps a little pat, perhaps more focused on aesthetics that truth. And the bits of description of what it's like to study Greek and Latin are perhaps more what you could wish it felt like than like my own (admittedly mediocre) experience of studying ancient languages. The different sets of characters also can seem either too achingly perfect or too shallowly depraved. 

I don't think this is because Tartt (whose prose throughout is gemlike in its perfection) doesn't know about Classics or about people. Rather, it's a function of who Richard is and what his temptations are. Richard desperately wants to discover the beautiful, something wholly other from the background he is rejecting, and something he can become a part of. He has a tendency to read all cultural and intellectual virtues into the group that he aspires to fit in with, and it is only slowly (in the fallout of the crime they commit in order to protect their little group) that the narration begins to make it more clear that Homeric epithets aside they are not so very different from their fellow students, except by virtue of having done something particularly terrible.

Of course, the difficulty for a novelist in sketching an idyllic landscape in order to show how people have come to set up for themselves an idol, some other good than God, is that for a beauty-craving reader the idyllic landscape may itself become an idol. Given the idyllic college setting early in the novel, and the consciously anachronistic aesthetics of the Classics set into which Richard is trying to fit, it's natural for readers to think of another idyllic college setting: the first third of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. Burton, in her critique, goes all in on the idea of a relationship between Secret History and Brideshead:

Take Richard Papen, our disaffected narrator, who comes to Hampden and soon falls under the spell of mysterious Classics professor Julian Morrow and his coterie of favored students, each of whom is characterized by little more than aesthetic tropes: everyone’s Homeric epithets plucked from performing sortilege on a copy of Brideshead. There is intellectual Henry, posh gay Francis, ambiguously incestuous siblings Charles and Camilla, and foppish jerk Bunny, Hampden’s counterpart to Anthony Blanche.

Though how she makes Bunny out to be either a fop or similar to Anthony Blanche I can't make out.  If one were to draw a line between Tartt's characters and those in Brideshead, it seems to me that Bunny would be a down-at-the-heals Boy Mulcaster. But actually, I don't think there's much similarity between Tartt's character's and Waugh's.

What is, I think, similar is that the picture drawn by both authors is so attractive at a surface level it's easy for an unwary reader to see it as being intended as an ideal. But, of course, neither is intended as an ideal. Waugh's narrator Charles says of the Oxford interlude:

Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.

It's easy to lean hard on the "joy of innocence" phrase and think of all the antics of Charles and Sebastian during their Oxford years as fundamentally good, while seeing dour religion as the cruel force which came and ruined it all.  Or even if accepting the fundamentally saving nature of religion later in the book, to at least see the Oxford interlude as good and beautiful and an important introduction to truth. And, of course, in a sense it is. It is during his time with Sebastian that Charles learns to love another person, and that is a first step on his long path to learning to love God. But it is also a period during which Charles and Sebastian infuse themselves with the grave sins which will haunt them through the rest of the novel. 

Similarly, I think the idyllic period in The Secret History is so successfully executed that it is perhaps too easy for a reader to see it as something that we're supposed to see as fundamentally good. But, of course, we know from that prologue that something went very wrong in this little group of friends. And as we get further into it, we find that this is in great part because they have allowed themselves to think of others -- those who don't share their learning, those who don't share their aesthetics -- as not being real people worth considering.

It's a risk I recall well from my college days, when people tended to divide themselves up into precisely defined social and aesthetic groups: the party kids and the hobbits, the flip flop people and the trench coat people. So many ways we found to classify ourselves. 

The fictional Hampden College with its party kids and hippies and self-styled intellectuals wearing tweed and chain smoking fit well with the brushes with secular liberal arts colleges I'd had.  During a surreal stay at St. John's College, New Mexico (a small liberal arts college focused on reading the Great Books) my student guide assured me through a cloud of clove cigarette smoke that "You come here believing stuff, but once you've read Plato you realize that nothing is true."  Then she kindly invited me to come a basement party to smoke pot and read poetry in French with her friends. While at the other pole of the college experience from this self conscious but empty intellectualism was the Halloween party I briefly visited, in search of a drink, a a different secular college, with its beer-slick floor, people throwing up in corners, and one drunk guest methodically smashing all the panes out of a set of French doors with his fist, while pausing every few crashes to examine the accumulating cuts in his fist.

It was this impression of people who treated their intellectualism as a drug rather than a search for truth, as compared to the 'normies' who went straight for the drugs and didn't bother with the intellectualism, that was to a great extent responsible for my deciding to head off for the calmer waters of a wholesome, if at times mediocre, religious college.

With this experience of mid-nineties college culture, the world of Tartt's creation was entirely believable to me.

The characters, with their attraction to the Classics, but as a source of intense experience rather than as a window to a higher truth, seemed to be playing a beautiful but dangerous game. Is it not the most dangerous game to seek the old gods while not believing in them? No good reader of Euripides will be surprised that entering into Bacchic rites leads to tragedy.

This is not, as I said before, a book much like Brideshead, and if one wants to see it go all the way from college idyll to tragedy to the halting Sign of the Cross that marks the culmination of the history of Charles Ryder's interactions with the Flyte family, then one will be disappointed. 

I don't think that the book leaves us in a place of nihilism. But as it wraps up the post-college lives of its characters up until the point of the narrative (not quite ten years after the core events) it seems clear to me that the characters are coming to some realizations of what sin is, and what part is has played in their lives. It's a book peopled largely with lapsed Catholics (in this sense, too, Richard Papen is an outsider) and a scene on Ash Wednesday near the end provides some of its closing notes. And yet, Ash Wednesday, as Catholics know, is much more a beginning than an end. Whether these characters will choose to talk the forty long days to Easter is not within the scope of the book. But it seems to me they know more of the world at the end than at the beginning, and I am not without hope, however much Richard may be so in the moment that he narrates to us.