Donna Tartt - Bennington
Q: When were you happiest?
A: At Bennington.
Donna Tartt, from an interview in The Guardian, October 26, 2013
Brixton Smith: Bennington looked like something out of a child’s fairy tale. It was so isolated and so beautiful, and it was green and surrounded by mountains. At the center of campus was a building—tall, white, very grand, with columns and a bell clock—called Commons. If you stood in front of Commons, you’d see, if you looked to one side, an old graveyard, and to the other side, a meadow. And then, if you looked straight ahead, a long, lush, rolling lawn lined by lovely, New England-y clapboard houses, creating this visual corridor so that your eye was drawn to the end of it, where the earth suddenly fell away, just—poof—vanished. Not really, of course, but it looked as if it did. We called it “the End of the World.” Mists would roll in there at night, these swirling mists so thick you couldn’t see your hand when you held it up to your face. The rumor was that the campus was the site of an ancient Native American burial ground. Supposedly it was one of the few spots on earth where all four winds met at the same time. And there was something sacred about it, something haunted. When I was at Bennington, I felt like I was in a kind of I don’t know what—a time warp or a different dimension or something. It was like all of us, collectively, were tapping the source. The energy was like nothing I’ve experienced anyplace else. It was amazing.
The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s' Most Decadent College. (2019, May 28). Lili Anolik. Esquire. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a27434009/bennington-college-oral-history-bret-easton-ellis/
At Bennington she met other apprentice authors: Jonathen Lethem, Jill Eisenstadt, Bret Easton Ellis. She blind-dated the latter after the pair swapped manuscripts: a chunk of The Secret History from her, the first chapter of Less then Zero from him. This outlandish clique adhered to a charismatic Greek tutor, Claude Fredericks — a more harmless form of the devotion to the scholarly Svengali, Julian Morrow, that leads to hysteria and homicide in the novel.
And all three (Brett Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt) would mythologize Bennington—the baroque wickedness, the malignant glamour, the corruption so profound as to be exactly what is meant by the word decadence—in their fiction that, as it turns out, wasn’t quite, and thereby become myths themselves.
It wasn't really surprising that people drew the conclusion that much of The Secret History echoed some truth: it is set at Hampden college, a small, elite, artsy place in Vermont - Tartt went to Bennington, a small, elite, artsy place in Vermont. She had a tutor who, like Julian Morrow in The Secret History, was eccentric and elitist. She was a member of a high-minded, Greek-quoting clique. Her classmate was novelist Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote in The Rules Of Attraction about "that weird Classics group... probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals," precisely echoing (or, more likely, parodying) Tartt's first novel. There doesn't have to be a murder in real life for the novel to say something about the author; novels are not just feats of technicality, like mending a car, they are works of art, which come from the mind and soul and energy of their authors. Why wouldn't they be influenced by the author's experiences? That is not the same as saying they are the whole truth or the full story.
"I put Easter egg references to The Secret History in The Rules of Attraction... because I thought it would be funny, an inside joke." Brett Easton Ellis, Esquire Magazine
"She was sort of a star early on - she was a big influence on me," says the novelist Jill Eisenstadt. "There was a lot of awful writing at Bennington, but Donna's stories were very sophisticated, very mysterious, very structurally sound. She was the only person I knew who'd studied Greek and Latin, who'd read all of Proust."
Then, as now, the story centered on a small group of over refined classic students; only then no one had any doubts about the book's sources. Early on at Bennington, Tartt had fallen in with a small clique of literature students that clustered around Claude Fredericks, a brilliant but odd teacher who admitted few people to his classes. "I wanted to take Greek from him, but he turned me down," Jill Eisenstadt says, raising an eerie echo of The Secret History. "I always thought if you wanted to take Greek, why should anyone turn you down? I don't think he liked women."
Like Fredericks, the group was exceeding well-tailored - a startling eccentricity at Bennington, where even the children of the super-rich wore the rattiest jeans and T-shirts. Tartt was the only female in the group. Soon her friends noticed she'd exchanged skirts and dresses for trousers, and begun getting her hair cut boy-style. She also developed an intense friendship with Paul McGloin - a tall, thin, pale upperclassman with a dry, sarcastic wit, a dazzling facility for languages, and a partiality for dark suits, who reminded one classmate of a quieter William S. Burroughs.
The group kept very much to themselves. An encyclopedia entry about Bennington notes, "A close relationship between students and faculty is encouraged." Some would say this understates the case. The school has always had a hothouse atmosphere, and tutorials are the rule. "Cliques grow up around certain teachers, and the mentor relationships get very intense," an alumnus says. "Very intense. There was definitely an air of Svengali about Fredericks - it seemed to go beyond even what was normal for Bennington."
No one is suggesting human sacrifices took place. But friends noticed the changes in Tartt - who was a wonderful storyteller, but famously closemouthed when it came to her own life - and wondered whether the novel was somehow a key.
"And you couldn't say anything about Claude Fredericks in front of her," Ellis adds. "It'd be the end of the evening."
Ellis, who took one course with Fredericks and failed, paid an esoteric tribute both to the strange coterie and Tartt's nascent novel in The Rules of Attraction, referring en passant, to "that weird group of Classics majors stand[ing] by [at a party], looking like undertakers," and "that weird Classics group . . . probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals." How far was his tongue in cheek? It's always hard to tell with Ellis.
As for Tartt's relationship with McGloin, "I never did get a handle on it - it didn't seem right to ask," says a friend. "They were very, very private people. The kind of people who would invite you into the drawing room, but never upstairs."
The Secret History is co-dedicated to Bret Ellis and to Paul McGloin, "muse and Maecenas . . . the dearest friend I can ever hope to have in this world." Some say that Tartt and McGloin shared lodgings, in Boston and New York, after her graduation from Bennington, and that he supported her while she finished her book. "After I graduated from college, I lived with a friend who didn't make me pay rent" is all she will say. "My mother was helpful. I was in Boston, then I was in New York. I worked at a bookstore called the Avenue Victor Hugo for three months, in Boston. Then in New York I worked as an assistant to a painting teacher at Parson. I was the monitor, and I helped him in his classes."
Was the accommodating friend McGloin, who went to Harvard Law School after graduating from Bennington, and who is now a member of a Manhattan law firm? She won't tell. The one thing she allows is "Paul was very good on sloughs of despond." Of which there appear to have been several. Even though Tartt's preternaturally graceful writing style seems to have been with her almost from the beginning, there were times when the structural challenges - not to mention the demands on her energy - of constructing such a huge novel almost defeated her. "There were nights I thought, I've just wasted my life," she says.
Another classmate of Tartt's, Matt Jacobsen, believes he was the inspiration for Bunny: 'I wore wire-rimmed glasses like Bunny. I had dyslexia ... like Bunny. And, like Bunny, I was an extremely affected young man... I called my mother and said, 'I've been caricatured in a book, and my character gets killed.' And she said, 'No, no. No one would ever kill you, not even in print, no.' Then she read the book and said, 'That's you all right.'
The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s' Most Decadent College. (2019, May 28). Lili Anolik. Esquire. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a27434009/bennington-college-oral-history-bret-easton-ellis/
4. DONNA TARTT'S OLD-TIMEY VICTORIAN STEAMSHIP TRUNK
JONATHAN LETHEM, FROM THE ESSAY "ZELIG OF NOTORIETY": Donna was among the first friends I made at college....My roommate Mark and I helped her move an ancient and gigantic trunk from the maintenance building to her room, as if she'd arrived in Vermont on a steamship.
One of the single most difficult things about not being Donna Tartt Attending Bennington College in 1982 is that there are so, so many ways in which I am so, so close to being Donna Tartt Attending Bennington College in 1982, but I know I will never fully close the gap.
For example: I was once moving an ancient steam trunk by myself, in an Uber, while wearing a vintage Ralph Lauren blazer that I can only get away with wearing for about a week and half every spring and fall. The entire time, I was thinking, "This trunk is lovely, but I will never, ever be Donna Tartt Attending Bennington College in 1982. Goddamnit." I'm sure the Uber driver was thinking the same thing.
ANYONE ELSE PHYSICALLY ACHING TO SWAP BODIES WITH DONNA TARTT AFTER READING THAT ESQUIRE ARTICLE ABOUT BENNINGTON COLLEGE IN THE EIGHTIES? ANYONE? NO? JUST ME?. (2019, June 23). Catlin Evelyn Grace. The Niche Blog. https://the-niche.blog/2019/06/23/anyone-else-physically-aching-to-swap-bodies-with-donna-tartt-after-reading-that-esquire-article-about-bennington-college-in-the-eighties-anyone-no-just-me/
She's someone who really believes in the mystique of the novelist, I think, and at some level, the podcast is about demystifying that, at least a little. My sense about Donna is that she was this dreamy, highly imaginative, alienated kid living in a one-horse town in Mississippi. Her background was workaday and unglamorous, and I think she's somebody who wanted to inhabit an Evelyn Waugh novel.
This is kind of a funny thing, but to me, this podcast is meant to be a high five or a hug. It's a celebration of these three people who are some of the most important writers of their generation. Donna wrote the American Brideshead Revisited. She's a triumph. She shows you can come from modest means and become hugely successful because you love what you do so much. I know this is probably not a delightful thing for her. But to me, it's celebratory. I don't know what else to say.
I guess I also feel like, in some weird way, I'm performing a kind of service, because it's almost like we're living in a post-literary world now. People just don't seem to read anymore, and yet the need for story is stronger than ever. One of the things I wanted to show with this podcast is that you can be a young writer reading The Secret History and be like, "Oh my god, that world is so wild and thrilling and I could never come up with something like that." Donna didn't either. She was living it, and she figured out a way to build a story around it.
Lili Anolik Dishes on Her Gossipy Bennington College Podcast. (2021, November 23). Nicholas Quah. Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/2021/11/bennington-college-podcast-interview-bret-easton-ellis-donna-tartt.html
Welcome to "Once Upon A Time... at Bennington College"
Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College
Society & Culture/Apple Podcasts
It's the groves of academe: Bennington College, the wildest and wickedest school in America. In the last great decade: the 1980s. Bennington class of '86, class of Bret Easton Ellis, future writer of American Psycho and co-leader of the literary Brat Pack; Jonathan Lethem, future writer of Motherless Brooklyn and MacArthur Fellow; and Donna Tartt, future writer of The Secret History and Pulitzer Prize winner. All three are, at various times, infatuated and disappointed with one another, their friendships stimulated and fueled by rivalry as much as affection. And all three will mythologize Bennington in their fiction—fiction that, as we'll discover, isn't always fiction, is often fact—and thereby become myths themselves. From the Peabody-nominated C13Originals studios and Vanity Fair's Lili Anolik, comes the latest installment in the "Once Upon a Time..." franchise, Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College. This is a tale of money, murder, madness, and—of course—genius. This is, too, a multi-dimensional expose: the secret history of The Secret History revealed; the secret history of three of the greatest writers of Generation X revealed; and the secret history of Generation X itself revealed.
Episode 1: Dis-Orientation
Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College
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Bennington. Autumn, 1982. Donna, Jonathan and Bret arrive on the campus of the school nicknamed "The Little Red Whorehouse on the Hill." One of them comes with a steamer trunk. One of them comes with a Kangol cap. One of them comes with a "suitcase full of drugs."
Episode 2: Bret Ellis, Valley Boy
Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College
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Los Angeles, 1980-1981. "There was just this huge sense that the world was gay, gay, gay." The origin story of Bret Easton Ellis (and Less Than Zero), Part One.
Episode 3: An Alley Along Melrose
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Los Angeles, 1981-1982. "This rumor went around in 1981, 1982, that kids just were brought to see the body of another kid." The origin story of Bret Easton Ellis (and Less Than Zero), Part Two.
Episode 4: Disappear There
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Bennington. Autumn, 1982. Bret and Donna go on a date.
Episode 5: Bennington Revisited
Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College
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Bennington. Autumn, 1982. Donna falls under the thrall of a magus-like professor, and the very small, very elite, very male band of students to whom he teaches Ancient Greek. "I can absolutely distinctly remember the three of them, and then the four of them—the three guys but then the four. The guys with Donna."
Episode 7: Donna Lou
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Mississippi, 1963-1982. Donna's origin story. And Lord Jim... revealed?
Episode 8: Murder By Numbers
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Bennington. Spring, 1983-Spring, 1985. Bret lives The Rules of Attraction, then sells Less Than Zero. Bret befriends David Lipsky, then be-enemies David Lipsky.
Episode 9: Entering Into the Sublime
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Bennington. Spring, 1983. Donna Tartt becomes "Donna Tartt." Jonathan Lethem becomes an angry young man.
Episode 10: An Impossible Shade of Green
Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College
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Bennington. Autumn, 1983-Spring, 1986. Donna begins The Secret History. Donna throws tea parties and frequents martini hours. Donna bides her time. Jonathan drops out of Bennington only to hang around Bennington.
Episode 11: Disturbing Michiko Kakutani
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Bennington and New York City. Autumn, 1985-spring, 1986. Less Than Zero is published and Bret becomes a cultural phenomenon. Bret also becomes a college senior. The most famous artist of the 20th century crashes his graduation party.
Episode 12: Sensational Sensationalism
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New York City. Spring of 1987 to Spring of 1991. Patrick Bateman is born.
Episode 13: The Farmer's Granddaughter
Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College
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Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York, New York. Spring of 1986 to Fall of 1994. The Secret History is published. Plus, "The Purge" comes to Bennington.
Episode 14: It Was Like I Went Where I Failed To Go
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1994 to the present day. Jonathan Lethem comes from behind. And just whose world are we living in anyway—Bret's, Donna's or Jonathan's?
The Unsolved Disappearances of the Bennington Triangle
Paul and her were in a relationship before publication of the THS, and for sometime after. However, after the novel was published the relationship's end seemed inevitable because of her new life style. She was "meant for bigger things".