The Secret History, Donna Tartt, 1992
My shock of the day was in my listening to The Book Club’s podcast episode on The Secret History and learning that Donna Tartt began writing her brilliant debut at only nineteen years old. It took ten years to complete it.
This checks. The novel sits pretty in the world of academia, which Tartt was very much a part as she was writing it. Her world was definitely that of a student’s, and she masterfully created the likes of it on paper. Its atmosphere—and its aesthetic particularly—are so consummately drawn that they are a character in themselves, or at least the chief driving force for the story’s drama. That’s actually maybe the story’s most compelling piece—we follow the characters through some morally gray happenstance, and we can’t quite decide if they are fundamentally bad people, or if they are merely engaged in a fundamentally unethical (pretentious, elitist, veneered) world without the agency, or magnitude, to lay above it. It’s difficult to decipher if Tartt’s dark ridicule of the elitist world of academia is intended to call out its fluff and pompousness or to call it back into existence as a place she is dearly fascinated by and yearning for.
The novel has six main characters, one of which is Richard, first-person narrator, and then his five little focal points Henry, Francis, Charles, Camilla, and Bunny. This is mostly an impression gotten from the book’s first quarter in which the characters are introduced to Richard as strange, picturesque, fictitious caricatures. The care in which Tartt writes them corroborates my claim that they are dear to her—that although they may be slightly ridiculous, they are rich in her psychology.
The five are all students of Greek, led by one professor Julian, very selective about the students he takes on. It is known around Hampden college (fictional, in Vermont) that Julian allows only the most elite students to study under him, belonging to their own little clique. They are seen by others on campus to be grandiose, or feel they are superior.
Richard, engrossed by the beauty of the characters, convinces Julian to take him on as a student. Beauty as a moral question runs through the novel, and is made clearly a point of the plot early on. In a class discussion, Julian teaches, “‘Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is quite alarming.’ I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun…” (39). The connection Julian makes between beauty and terror is the book’s overarching theme. We have these beautiful characters—all except Bunny, who, through Richard’s perspective at least, is made to seem somewhat of a grotesque—continually committing terrifying acts, and we have these terrifying acts revealed amongst such a beautifully atmospheric manner of writing. Tartt has undoubtedly made the argument that beauty and terror can absolutely coexist.
Spoilers on:
Most pertinent in my reflection of the book’s use of beauty and terror, other than the book’s recurring motif of dreamlike states, are the days following Bunny’s murder. We have an image of his corpse lifeless at the bottom of the ravine, and in the ensuing search for his body, the town is covered in snow: “I walked home fast, because I was cold. A November stillness was settling like a deadly oxymoron on the April landscape. Snow was falling in earnest now—big silent petals drifting through the springtime woods…” (280). The obvious metaphor is the chilling manner of Bunny’s murder. The universe, snowing hard in April, reminds Richard that what they’ve done is cold and uncanny.
More prominently, and dare I say compelling, is the beauty and terror of the bacchanal rites. Julian makes a point of its beauty and terrifyingness, the thought of completely losing control of oneself—being truly free of the self, both beautiful and terrifying, and alluring enough to Henry and co. as to try and achieve it. Here is Tartt’s conception of what Plato calls the “telestic madness” (163): “It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning…Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no ‘I’” (167). Actually, it sounds pretty magnificent. Things, of course, go awry when Henry ends up mutilating and killing a man.
I’ve gotta wonder about Henry here. Henry is the most looming question I have in the aftermath of reading. Is he a psychopath? Is he not? Just deluded in society and the arts, and disarmingly obsessed with the Classics? My notes on Henry in this novel range from “Henry’s character – a pure, good friend; morally sound” to “Why is Henry the leader? Why do they follow him?” to “Nahh, there’s something off about Henry.” At first he’s the friend lending Bunny thousands because Bunny leeches off them all (Bunny is painted as quite an insufferable character), and he gives Richard a place to stay when he’s homeless and sick. His fatal flaw seems to be a genuine over-nerdiness—studious to the point of being pretentious. It isn’t until he’s admitting to Richard that he’s murdered a man that there’s a change in his demeanor—arrogance, teasing, and an absconded sense of remorse.
It is Henry’s plot to murder Bunny. Bunny was left out of the bacchanal rites, but used the murder as leverage over Henry, Camilla, Charles, and Francis after finding out. It is when Richard betrays Bunny, telling Henry as soon as Bunny spills to him about the murder, that they surprise him on his hike in the ravine and Henry, filled with malice, and dare I say satisfaction, pushes him over the edge.
An important point made by The Book Club podcast, which I hadn’t conceived of previously, is that Bunny, not taken seriously by the rest of the group, is actually the most normal of them all. He is less sincere about his Greek studies, and so is generally less of a severe caricature. For his lack of severity, he is essentially judged as an imposter by Henry and co. But the point that is often neglected, as the reader tends to see Bunny as a nuisance, the way his friends do, is that Bunny is the only one of the friends jarred enough by the murder to spill the beans.
It is at the halfway point that the murder happens. The novel here becomes a bit Dostoevsky-like, intelligently using a quote from Crime and Punishment in a moment of guilty rumination. Like Raskolnikov, Richard is paranoid by his sin, suspicious of his friends, and feels outside of himself, at points strange and delusional. But it isn’t just Richard. Henry, Charles, Francis, and Camilla are all going through pains to keep their guilt hidden. In this regard, The Secret History is even more of an estimable psychological account of committing murder than Crime and Punishment, as Crime and Punishment shows the degradation of one individual after committing the heinous act while The Secret History shows four degradations, and interlaces the psychology of the group and of the bystander. In these four degradations we understand dangerous power dynamics in friendships. Henry, who the others all blindly follow (Richard says to Charles once, “You know what I wonder…Not why he tells us what to do. But why we always do what he says.” p. 447) and seems to grow in ego and pride; Francis, who becomes suicidal and sick with panic disorder; Charles, who depletes into alcoholism, and becomes abusive to his sister Camilla; and Camilla, who seems to be wrapped in a case of Stockholm Syndrome, dependently involved with Henry.
Richard’s stance as a bystander becomes very clarified by the end of the novel. The story culminates to feel as though Tartt’s main imperative is to have written a story about the evil of the bystander—and also to let him get away with it, in a very cryptic, woeful, and nearly shameful existence. The epilogue does some great things (I normally don’t love an epilogue, but here I do). For one, Richard talks about retrospect—which the novel, really, is—with which he thinks about the first sentence he ever learned in Greek, beauty is harsh (p. 544), closing the story in a full circle, as it began with the idea that beauty and terror are the same, and reiterates it in the end. Secondly, the idea of the bystander is blatantly acknowledged: “And [a rumor] made me feel better in some obscure way…instead of merely [not acting]…like the bystander I so essentially am” (p. 544), and in Francis’s letter to Richard where he says “Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones I did not” (p. 548). The book begins to have a very meta-aspect with the acknowledgement of the bystander. Our perspective switches to a bird’s eye view in which we see how totally biased Richard’s story is, as he essentially shared a recollection of observations and judgements. The whole book has been him playing this part of bystander. Even in his experience of retrospect, Richard hasn’t changed.
In the end, the characters have gotten away with murder. But Charles is out of contact with even his sister, Francis is marrying a woman he despises, and Richard asks Camilla to marry him but she says she can’t because she loves Henry (who, spoiler, is dead). They are fated to live agonizing lives. The novel ends with a really unsettling dream sequence of Bunny visiting Richard and saying a series of offputting things. Richard asks if he’s happy where he is to which he says “Not particularly…but you’re not very happy where you are either” (p. 559). The novel closes with a feeling of desolation, pessimism, and disorientation.
A really magnificent read. New on my list of favorites. I’ve heard it said that The Secret History will become a contemporary classic, and I do agree. I think Tartt’s riddling of fairy tale imagery congeals to create a storybook feeling of mystique and nostalgia. Some great writing to gratify you:
In description of Hampden before classes began, page 13:
Trees creaking with apples, fallen apples red on the grass beneath, the heavy sweet smell of apples rotting on the ground and the steady thumping of wasps around them. Commons clock tower: ivied brick, white spire, spellbound in the hazy distance. The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.
A powerful paragraph while Richard is having doubts about joining Julian’s group of students, page 72:
Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia. I spent the nights reading Greek until four in the morning, until my eyes burned and my head swam, until the only light burning in the Monmouth House was my own. When I could no longer concentrate on Greek and the alphabet began to transmute itself into incoherent triangles and pitchforks, I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.
A sentence of Henry’s, a nod toward beauty and terror, page 83.
“It’s beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”
An achingly true account of catastrophe (though in this case, it is just that Camille is bleeding), and once more, the beautiful and terrifying, page 98.
Sometimes, when there’s been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things—a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf—are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus. And that was what happened then, walking over the meadow to the house. It was like a painting too vivid to be real—every pebble, every blade of glass sharply defined, the sky so blue it hurt me to look at. Camille was limp in Henry’s arm, her head thrown back like a dead girl’s, and the curve of her throat beautiful and lifeless. The hem of her dress fluttered abstractly in the breeze.
Suicidal ideation, Richard at the crux of destitution, page 120:
When I walked home at night, things got white around the edges and it seemed I had no past, no memories, that I had been on this exact stretch of luminous, hissing road forever.
…
One bitter night I tried to call my parents from the pay phone outside the Boulder tap; sleet was falling and I was shivering so violently I could hardly get the coins in the slot. Although I had some desperate, half-baked hope that they might send money or a plane ticket, I didn’t know what I wanted them to say to me; I think I had some idea that I, standing in the sleet and winds of Prospect Street, would feel better simply by hearing the voices of people far away, in a warm place.
Around the point when Bunny is becoming exhausting to the rest of the group, between Richard and Camilla, page 205:
I blinked at [Camilla]. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.
When Richard betrays Bunny, tells Henry that Bunny told him about the murder, page 259:
My palms were sweating. In spite of the open window, the room seemed close and stuffy. I could hear everybody breathing; quiet, measured breaths that came and went with awful regularity, four sets of lungs, eating at the thin oxygen.
A strong paragraph in which Richard is feeling badly about Bunny’s death, page 420:
He hadn’t seen it coming at all. He hadn’t even understood, there wasn’t time. Teetering back as if on the edge of the swimming pool: comic yodeling, windmilling arms. Then the surprised nightmare of falling. Someone who didn’t know there was such a thing in the world as Death; who couldn’t believe it even when he saw it; had never dreamed it would come to him.
Really a jarring and disorienting moment of random violence, rare from Richard, page 484:
The sun came suddenly from behind a rain cloud, flooding the room with glorious light that wavered on the walls like water. Camilla’s face burst into a glowing bloom. A terrible sweetness boiled up in me. Everything, for a moment—mirror, ceiling, floor—was unstable and radiant as a dream. I felt a fierce, nearly irresistible desire to seize Camilla by her bruised wrist, twist her arm behind her back until she cried out, throw her on my bed: strangle her, rape her, I don’t know what. And then the cloud passed over the sun again, and the life went out of everything.
