The Secret History

I’m re-reading the great Bennington novel, “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt.

There is a secret Donna Tartt-Miss H history: She was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, where I worked as a newspaper reporter for one year. She went to Bennington for her undergraduate degree. I got an MFA from Bennington’s writing seminars. After “The Secret History” came out, I went to hear her read at the Brentano’s Bookstore in the Oak Court Mall in Memphis.

My friend Jerome swears and remembers to this day that I described her as a “short bitch in a black dress.” This cannot possibly be true, though, because I remember very clearly that she was wearing a soft pink double-breasted pantsuit with black-and-white men’s style spectator shoes. Her hair was black and cut in a short bob; and she was small and pretty. She was something like the characters in her book, with an affected elegant eccentricity. I envied her, so probably the vitriol in Jerome’s memory was accurate.

I’m still sort of envious, because she writes a novel a decade and maybe one magazine article per year, and she still gets to be a natty dresser. “The Secret History” has a cult following and I’ve heard she sold the movie rights, so I’m sure it still brings in income. But she must have a trust fund or a patron of some sort. The second novel “The Little Friend,” was pretty good (as far as I remember) but not as much of a popular success. It was set in a small town in North Mississippi much like Grenada (where she grew up, just down the road from Greenwood but out of the Delta a bit).

And of course, “The Secret History” is set in a small, expensive and exclusive college in Vermont which is called Hampden in the book but which is Bennington in every detail. I’ve stayed in those dorms and eaten in that cafeteria. The book is about a small group of students who accidentally kill a townie, purposefully kill their friend, and more or less get away with it. To my knowledge, no one I knew at Bennington killed anyone--except themselves. Liam Rector, a poet and the director of the program, killed himself last year. One of my teachers, Lucy Grealy, died of an overdose that might have been intentional. It’s that kind of place, filled with creative and overly sensitive people with little to distract themselves from their own melodrama.

I’m not really of Bennington, but I’m glad I had the chance to spend some time there. It left some subtle but lasting marks. And a big tuition bill. I’m not as brilliant or as elegant as Donna Tartt. Or as mysterious. But the truly brilliant are always unstable wrecks, in my experience. I envy what they can do. But I am stable and well adjusted, relatively speaking, and there’s something to be said for that.