The novel’s opening paragraphs reveal that Bunny will be killed, and so we are primed to have some sympathy for him. And in particular, knowing about the tension between Tartt and Jacobsen illuminates one of the novel’s most brilliant aspects: its treatment of the murder victim. The information in Anolik’s podcast reveals the straightforward literary payback at the heart of The Secret History. And Claude Fredericks, the professor whose class she couldn’t join, becomes Julian Morrow, a hollow poseur who, when the crimes of his students are revealed, simply flees from the consequences of his own teachings - the ultimate moral coward. Matt Jacobsen, the most openly hostile to her, becomes Bunny Corcoran, the cruel, messy, unintelligent student who will be murdered by his own supposed closest friends at the end of the novel’s first half. Todd O’Neal, with whom she seems to have had a strained though not outright antagonistic relationship, becomes Henry Winter, the cold (notice his symbolic surname), emotionally stunted linguistic genius who is the star of the Greek class. This hostility accounts for the element of revenge in Tartt’s transformation of the members of the Greek class into their fictional alter egos. He calls Tartt “a Miss Buttinsky” and compares her, melodramatically, to Yoko Ono, saying she’d decided “if she couldn’t be a part of our tight group, she would destroy it.”
Talking about Tartt, O’Neal sounds more puzzled than anything else, describing her as “evasive” and “impenetrable.” But Jacobsen seems to have genuinely disliked her. According to Anolik’s interviews, Tartt worked her way into the Bennington classics group by another route: becoming Paul McGloin’s girlfriend.
But there’s a faint aura of wish fulfilment about this. With a quickness that somewhat strains believability, Richard is invited into the class and their inner circle. Tartt wasn’t a part of their Greek class, but she remedies this in the novel by having her narrator, Richard Papen, help the classics students out with a tricky Greek homework assignment. (Anolik also wrote the 2019 Esquire article “ The Secret Oral History of Bennington.”) Through interviews with people who attended Bennington in the early 1980s, she paints a portrait of Tartt as an insecure transfer student from Ole Miss who quickly became fascinated by classics professor Claude Fredericks and the three senior Greek students surrounding him: Todd O’Neal, Matt Jacobsen, and Paul McGloin.
That’s the impression created by Lili Anolik’s podcast, Once Upon a Time … at Bennington College, which exposes the dense, elusive matrix at the root of art, the place where real life and fiction intermingle. Is Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, actually an incredibly elaborate and sophisticated burn book - an act of literary revenge against those she felt disrespected her in college?
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