The Secret History

Donna Tartt (Knopff, 1992)

Californian parvenu Richard Papen falls in with an exclusive clique of tag-dropping, snook-cocking Classics scholars at a minor college in the Eastern US. Gradually he worms his way in with the incestuous twins Camilla and Charles, aesthete Francis, and the brilliant, chilly Henry. He discovers that the four of them have torn apart a local farmer in a Bacchic frenzy and, under their spell, helps them kill their mutual friend, the clubbable (sic) Bunny, who has been threatening to reveal their secret. They appear to get away with the murders, but then the guilt slowly drives them all insane. The furies descend and their hubris dooms them, summoning our terror and pity, like all good Classical tragedies.

Arcana

For a book about a group of students determined not to have anything to do with the zeitgeist, The Secret History was remarkably well timed. For me, at any rate. I graduated in 1992, the year A Secret History was published; indeed, it would have been about the time the narrator might have graduated, if he hadn’t been so busy murdering his fellow students.

The book is carefully vague about when it is set, but a lot of pop cultural references place it in the ‘80s, and the Dean of Studies refers to the clique’s charismatic tutor as ‘Hampden’s own Salman Rushdie.’ The Satanic Verses was published in ‘88, and the fatwa against Rushdie was declared in ‘89. This raises the intriguing possibility that the book is actually science fiction, narrated in the future by an older Richard who is recounting his youth in the early ‘90s.

Not that anyone (other than me) has accused The Secret History of being anything so vulgar as science fiction. With all those Latin tags and Greek asides, it is self-evidently highbrow stuff. Or at least high-middlebrow: a heightened brow, somewhere — appropriately — above the temples.

At the surface level, the story would have worked equally well if the students were studying drama or medicine; Tartt could still have worked in all the tragedy and blood. Ostensibly, it obeys Mike Royce’s dictum: ‘you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you’re also trying to solve a murder.’ But the murder is not incidental, and nor is the students’ choice of Classics. The action of The Bacchae, the mechanics of Greek tragedy, and the hermetic isolation of Classics students on a twentieth century campus are all integral to the functioning of the book.

Also, a book about drama students wouldn’t have been nearly so interesting. I had been one of those (more or less), titting about in a scuffed ecru breeze-block studio on a Brutalist campus. There was very little magic in it. The burning of the topless towers; the dipping of oars in the wine-dark seas; the seductive mysteries of the gods in the panting and panicked woods… they all beat a £1 bottle of Merrydown in the college bar.

A great deal of the initial appeal of The Secret History can be summed up in the figure of the teacher, Julian Morrow: ‘Julian’ for the Apostate, surely, the Emperor who defied convention and returned the Empire to paganism; and ‘Morrow’, a conjunction of future and past, tomorrow and the archaic ‘Good morrow!’ His classroom, the ‘Lyceum’, is set apart from the rest of the campus, a secluded idyll of books and art and conversation. This was the experience of university we all craved, and that few of us got: a kindly sage who would welcome us into his wood panelled sanctum, guide us through the labyrinth of the crepuscular library, and uncover the secrets that would allow us to make history.

And what could be more literally academic than Classics: the source of the academy, and almost perfectly useless outside of it (unless you want to explain a Renaissance painting or put a grammar school boy in his place). It is the epitome of apparently useless knowledge that also happens to underlie a great deal of the cultural, political and social structures of European and American ‘civilisation’. It is perfectly outré.

The characters in the novel regard the academic mainstream of the time with disgust; Richard thinks an artist who uses the term ‘postmodern’ is a ‘swine’. What more splendid way could there be to épater les bourgeois critical theorists than to revolt into conservatism and study the classical canon in a classical manner? What better way to establish your outsider status than to rebel against the cultural rebellion?

That exclusivity is part of the appeal, just as the exclusivity of friendship is. Richard Papen is very obviously a descendent of Charles Ryder from Brideshead Revisited (1945), the bourgeois striver trying to climb in through the window of the aristocracy. The book is extraordinarily interesting to a British reader to whom the structures of the American upper class, of wealth and status, are opaque.

But the theme of class is as much a theme of exclusivity. The exclusivity of Julian Morrow’s group is one of taste and background. And how else would one describe any university friendship group? This was the other half of the university fantasy: that one would find friends with whom one could, if not conduct a murderous Bacchic orgy, at least do a modern dress performance of The Bacchae in the Drama Barn.

Historia

As well as being well timed, A Secret History was very much of that time. It is a novel about late-‘80s/early-’90s students who talk almost exclusively in references and quotations. The book makes fun of Richard’s fellow Californian Judy Poovey, who is recognisably Gen X: her conversation is peppered with references to TV and Philip K. Dick, and her room door is ‘adorned with photographs of automobile crashes, lurid headlines cut from the Weekly World News, and a nude Barbie doll hanging from the doorknob by a noose.’ But Richard’s clique, of course, is endlessly quoting too; they’re just doing it in dead languages. Not so much the ‘quotation generation’ as generatio citationum.

Tartt, though, doesn’t confine herself to classical allusions, or even to literary ones. Beyond the textual references to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, there are more subtle, wider pop cultural traces. That description of Richard’s fellow students’ doors mentions a ‘poster of the Fleshtones’, surely of their 1982 album Roman Gods. Clique ringleader and supreme intellectual Henry claims not to know that man has landed on the Moon, a blatant callback to Watson’s discovery in A Study in Scarlet (1887) that Sherlock Holmes does not know the Earth orbits the Sun.

Above all, the book is a prime example of the Gen X habit of taking a pulp medium seriously. It is essentially an episode of Columbo with pretensions, a why-dunnit in which the mystery is not who committed the crime, but what led them to do it and how they might escape it. It even puts the reader in the place of Lieutenant Columbo, an autodidact working class stiff who discomforts the comfortable elites with his shabby affect and sharp mind. Detection, after all, is an exercise in applying intellect and analysis to emotional, irrational actions. It reassures us that chthonic motives can be arrested and contained. The Secret History gives us a crime motivated by intellect, in which the analytical is defeated by the irrational. The protagonists are brought down by their own high intelligence and their inability to understand their own emotions. They are destroyed by their own intellectual and cultural hubris.

Even the cause of that downfall, the Bacchic frenzy that precipitates the murders, felt extraordinarily relevant in the age of rave, as great groups of young people gathered secretly in bosky woods to lose their minds and thrash about under the influence of an irrational power, while the government wrung its hands within the city walls like Pentheus in a grey flannel suit.

A detective story that was secretly a history of philosophy and mysticism; a book that was a Borgesian library of other books, of references and allusions and quotations; a book that was a paean to dark academia, to fierce friendship, to outsider self-indulgence and to being a little weirdo; a book that was, above all, incredibly readable and engrossing. No wonder it was so successful.

Although success, as we know, is the least Gen X achievement of all.

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You know who absolutely would have caught the murdering Classics students of A Secret History? Inspector Morse. Although the more Gen X appropriate version, thick with allusions and its own secret version of pop cultural history, is surely the prequel Endeavour.