the cult of donna tartt

Why does Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” inspiresuch devotion?

Author prospectmagazine.co.uk

When The Secret History was published inSeptember 1992, hype had been building formonths. The author, Donna Tartt, was 28.She had received a $450,000 advance. Shewas elegant and miniature (“I’m the exactsame size as Lolita,” she told an interviewer)and enigmatic. She could recite poetry, evenentire short stories, by heart. As anundergraduate, legendary writer and editorWillie Morris had read her work andapproached her with the words, “My name’sWillie Morris, and I think you’re a genius.”

Tartt’s vogueish glamour was boosted by herconnections to the “literary brat pack,” a young, East Coast group of writers whose talesof drug use and disaffection were, in the late 80s and early 90s, a by-word for literarycool. Bret Easton Ellis, one of the leaders of the pack, had been Tartt’s close friend andclassmate at Bennington College in Vermont. Tartt had started The Secret History atBennington, and it was whispered that her friends there had been the models for thenovel’s characters.

James Kaplan, interviewing the Mississippi-born Tartt for Vanity Fair, noted her ability toself-mythologise, but was happy to further the mystique. He labeled her “a precocioussprite… A Wise Child out of Salinger,” and announced that her talent was so great that,“all by herself” she constituted a new wave in Southern writing.

Twenty years later The Secret History is both an international bestseller and cult classic.But despite the novel’s huge success, Kaplan’s predictions for Donna Tartt have notcome true. Since The Secret History, she has written only one novel: The Little Friend,published in 2002. It’s hard to embody a new wave of any kind of writing at a rate ofslightly less than one book a decade.

* * *

I first read The Secret History the autumn before I turned 15. Even then, I understoodthat this was the perfect age for it. Everyone I knew was reading it—first my friends, thenother girls in my year, then what felt like the entire school. At one point, you could barelywalk down the corridor or enter a classroom without catching sight of the familiar jacket,stark and black and unmistakeable. My friends and I talked about our favouritecharacters as much as we talked about the members of our favourite bands.

Doubtless we enjoyed The Secret History more because reading it was a communalactivity. But this logic is circular: we all loved The Secret History because we all lovedThe Secret History. The question remains: of all books, why was this the one thatinspired our collective devotion?

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The novel’s narrator is Richard Papen: 19, gawky, insecure and anxious to fit in. He’s anEveryman, or at least an Everyteenager. Like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited orNick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, both obvious models, Richard is a vessel for thereader.

Arriving at Hampden, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, from his hometown inCalifornia, Richard is overwhelmed by his new surroundings. On his first night there, he“can’t remember… ever feeling farther away from the low-slung lines of dusty Plano.”This is a fantasy of escape with which any reader, teenage or otherwise, can identify: theescape from boredom and familiarity into beauty and the enchantment of the unknown.

It’s a theme that returns throughout The Secret History. “I hope we’re all ready to leavethe phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?” says Julian Morrow, professor ofancient Greek, at the beginning of Richard’s first lesson with him.

Richard’s fellow Greek students hold themselves apart from the rest of Hampden, openlydisdaining its partying, chattering hordes. Theirs is the kind of glamour that works best onteenagers. As an adult, it’s hard to be impressed by a bunch of students who insist onwriting with nib-pens and bottles of ink, and scatter their conversation with phrases inLatin and Greek. But to me, aged 14, as to Richard, these were the characters I hadbeen waiting my whole life to meet.

The Secret History inspires cultish devotion because it depicts a cult the reader herselfcan join. The Greek students—Henry, Francis, Bunny and twins Charles andCamilla—have their own ideals and routines that cut them off from the rest of the world.Their parents are dead or distant; their teacher Julian is the only father figure they have.“So many things remain with me from that time, even now,” says Richard, “thosepreferences in clothes and books and even food – acquired […] largely, I must admit, inadolescent emulation of the rest of the Greek class.” These preferences are cataloguedin The Secret History, so that the adolescent reader can emulate Richard’s adolescentemulation, from Paradise Lost to The Great Gatsby, from Francis’s silk neckties to thecream cheese and marmalade sandwiches favoured by the twins.

As impressed as I was by the Greek students in The Secret History, I would have lostinterest had it not been clear from the first page that they were doomed. The novel’sprologue opens with a dead body at the bottom of a ravine and the narrator’s confessionof murder. It moves back in time to Richard’s hopeful, excited arrival in Hampden, but weknow all along that his involvement with the Greek class will lead him to the ravine,complicit in the murder of one of his friends.

Tartt herself has described The Secret History as “not a whodunit [but a] whydunit.” Butboth murder and motives are explained before the novel is halfway through, and thegreater part of The Secret History concerns the slow slide into regret and recrimination ofa group of twenty-somethings who previously thought themselves invincible. Of course,regret and recrimination need not preclude glamour, and despite everything, Henry,Francis and the twins retain an allure, although of a seedy, troubling variety.

Less enduring, however, are the qualities that lay behind the Greek students’ apparentsophistication: their sweetness and vulnerability, the optimism that led them to believe


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that they could fashion for themselves a new and different existence. Reading TheSecret History is like watching children grow up at quadruple-speed, passing within a fewmonths from idealism and innocence—even the questionable innocence that idealisesglamour—to something between resignation and despair.

* * *

The eight years it took Donna Tartt to write The Secret History prepared fans for alengthy wait for its follow-up. For the most part, they were patient, content to read andreread The Secret History and share their obsession on the Tartt fansites and ‘shrines’that sprang up in the late-1990s. There they alerted one another when a new short storyor essay by Tartt appeared. Most of these essays were memoiristic, and fans used themto piece together Tartt’s early life: the two years of her childhood she spent dosed up oncodeine-based medicine administered by her doting, over-anxious great-grandfather; herspell as a cheerleader in high school; the even more surprising revelation that Tartt hadbeen a sorority girl in her first year at university, albeit one who read Ezra Pound alone inthe rain.

As the years passed and no second novel appeared, rumours began to spread: Tartt hadwriter’s block, Tartt had had a nervous breakdown, Tartt had bought an island and livedthere as a recluse. But in 2001, she announced in a radio interview that her secondnovel, with the working title “Tribulation,” was almost complete. “Tribulation” turned out tobe The Little Friend, a sprawling adventure story set in 1970s Mississippi, about a12-year-old girl determined to avenge the murder of her brother. Its heroine, HarrietCleve Dufresnes, is an answer to those who criticised The Secret History’s characters asone-dimensional. Smart and stubborn, scornful of the trappings of adolescence andentirely without a sense of humour, Harriet is among fiction’s most memorable children.

But though it garnered huge publicity and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Tartt’ssecond novel failed to inspire the same excitement as her first. Baggier and more uneventhan The Secret History, it requires more concentration. The Secret History makes itsreaders, through Richard, participants in the story. In The Little Friend, you remain anobserver.

Since the publication of The Little Friend, Tartt has disappeared from the public eye. Shehas not given an interview about herself or her writing since 2003, though sheoccasionally comes forward to speak on other subjects. Her voice is now most oftenheard on the audiobooks she has recorded: her own two novels, as well as CharlesPortis’s True Grit and the Sherwood Anderson short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio. In thepast decade Tartt has published even less than in the decade between The SecretHistory and The Little Friend. When pressed as to the reason for her slow rate ofproduction, Tartt is unapologetic. She is a perfectionist, she says. Writing takes time.

In 2008, Little, Brown announced that they had acquired the rights to Tartt’s third novel,“a story of loss and obsession about a young man, guilt-stricken and damaged after thedeath of his mother.” In the original press release, the scheduled date for publication was2012, an almost-unheard-of four years away. At the end of August, Little, Brownconfirmed that Tartt’s third novel will not be published this year, and no future date hasbeen set. Still, Tartt-watchers can take comfort: a third novel is out there somewhere.


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Back in 1992, interviewers noted Tartt’s desire for privacy, her unwillingness to talk aboutvarious aspects of her work and personal life. They wondered how long she would beable to preserve such secrecy. “You can’t be Salinger and be represented by ICM,” saidBret Easton Ellis when questioned on the subject, referring to the talent agency that hadsigned both him and Tartt. Several journalists repeated this statement, presenting it aswisdom from one who knows. But Ellis was wrong. Twenty years later, The SecretHistory is one of the best-loved and best-known books of the past two decades—but itsauthor remains as mysterious as ever.


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the cult of donna tartt

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