We Need To Talk About Tartt’s Character Descriptions

Today I discovered that a couple of TSH characters were based on actual people Donna Tartt knew at Bennington College- amongst them were students Todd O'Neal and Matt Jacobsen, who were the inspiration for Henry and Bunny respectively.

AND JUST—

There's even their own comments about it and it's so funny wait:

Here's the source

I started rereading The Secret History

Happy Valentine's Day! It's fredmione😘😘

artist：lofter@Yü

Substitute “fanfic” for “good book” and this is my life.

#fanfic

in my richard papen era(failing academics, in need of friends, romantising things i don't even understand)

The Secret History and A Separate Peace Comparisons/Analysis

I've been wanting to make a comparison post between The Secret History and A Separate Peace for almost a decade now, and the time has come. They're two of my favorite books of all time, and the relationship between the two is so delicious to me. (If you're a fan of TSH and haven't read ASP, go read it and then come back. It's short and you'll love it, I promise.)

(We'll skip right over the most trivial similarities, the academic New England settings and the [Article][Descriptor][Abstract Noun] titles.)

The Intros

We open to our narrators, now years removed from their time in academia, returning (either physically or metaphorically) to their youth to revisit the scene of a violent death by falling that shaped their lives forever.

Gene desperately wishes to find peace. In his visit, he finds reassurance - nothing is forever. He too will be able to heal, eventually.

Everything at Devon slowly changed and slowly harmonized with what had gone before. So it was logical to hope that since the buildings and the Deans and the curriculum could achieve this, I could achieve, perhaps unknowingly already had achieved, this growth and harmony myself. [...] The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary from age, enfeebled, dry. I was thankful, very thankful that I had seen it. So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all—plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.

Richard has something of the inverse experience. He had convinced himself by aggressively compartmentalizing that he had left Hampden unaffected by Bunny's death, and is only now coming to terms with the permanent impact it had on him. His conclusion is a lot more pessimistic, too: Richard does not think he'll ever truly be able to move on.

But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. [...] I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

Finny/Bunny

All around, Bunny comes off as a very intentional subversion of Finny, a grittier and perhaps more modern take. In A Separate Peace Finny's naivete verging on social ineptitude, along with his general unawareness of his privilege, comes off as charming to most readers, even as it grates on Gene's nerves. The Secret History is a lot more blunt about the kind of casual bigotry that arises from being raised in the particular bubble that Finny and Bunny were.

John Knowles has stated publicly that Finny was based on a real classmate of his, David Hackett, who was best friends with Robert Kennedy and whose career was very solidly based upon his relationship with the Kennedys. Hackett's enthusiastic welcome was the primary reason for Bobby being socially accepted at their school, which had a "High WASP" culture and was "unwelcoming to Catholic new money". This article about him is really fascinating.

Bunny, on the other hand, fully embodies "High WASP" culture himself and spends much of the novel making fun of Catholics (and new money). It's an eye-opening revelation when, after his death, we learn that his family was obsessed with the Kennedys and that Bunny has on occasion posed as one for preferential treatment.

Although this scene doesn't exist in the novel version, here's Finny's introduction in the short story Phineas (precursor to A Separate Peace).

I had seen him at a distance around the school the previous winter and gotten the impression that he was bigger than I was.  But when he straightened up, our eyes met dead level.  For a second I thought he was going to say, “I bet my old man can lick your old man.”  Then his mouth broke into a grin, and he said, “Where did you get that dizzy shirt?” It was like one of the shifts which made him so good at sports: exactly what the opponent didn’t expect.  I had been prepared to introduce myself, or to waive that and exclaim, “Well, I guess we’re roommates!” or to begin negotiating an immediate, hostile division of the available floor space.  Instead he cut through everything and began criticizing my clothes—my clothes—while he stood there in hacked-off khaki pants and an undershirt.  As a matter of fact, I was wearing a lime-green, short-sleeved sports shirt with the bottom squared and worn outside the pants, much admired in the South.  “At home,” I said.  “Where did you think?” “I don’t know, but I can see that home is way down yonder.”

This should sound eerily familiar. Here's Bunny's first real introduction in The Secret History.

“By the way, love that jacket, old man,” Bunny said to me as we were getting out of the taxi. “Silk, isn’t it?” “Yes. It was my grandfather’s.” Bunny pinched a piece of the rich, yellowy cloth near the cuff and rubbed it back and forth between his fingers. “Lovely piece,” he said importantly. “Not quite the thing for this time of year, though.” “No?” I said. “Naw. This is the East Coast, boy. I know they’re pretty laissez-faire about dress in your neck of the woods, but back here they don’t let you run around in your bathing suit all year long. Blacks and blues, that’s the ticket, blacks and blues.…"

Gene (and John)/Richard (and the twins)

Gene is a scholarship student from down south. He's embarrassed by his background and uses fake pictures to give an impression of a lifestyle that he never had.

Over my cot I had long ago taped pictures which together amounted to a barefaced lie about my background—weepingly romantic views of plantation mansions, moss-hung trees by moonlight, lazy roads winding dustily [...] When asked about them I had acquired an accent appropriate to a town three states south of my own, and I had transmitted the impression, without actually stating it, that this was the old family place.

Meanwhile, here's Richard telling Julian about his own home life in California. Unlike Gene, Richard doesn't have any hold-ups lying explicitly about his background.

Orange groves, failed movie stars, lamplit cocktail hours by the swimming pool, cigarettes, ennui. He listened, his eyes fixed on mine, apparently entranced by these fraudulent recollections.

And then we have this (heartbreaking, to me) scene, where Richard destroys the only real photographic he has of his mother because he's afraid that it will uncover his embarrassing reality.

It was the most gratuitous sort of cruelty. My lies about my family were adequate, I suppose, but they could not stand up under these glaring attacks. Neither of my parents had finished high school; my mother did wear pants suits, which she purchased at a factory outlet. In the only photograph I had of her, a snapshot, she squinted blurrily at the camera, one hand on the Cyclone fence and the other on my father’s new riding lawn mower. This, ostensibly, was the reason that the photo had been sent me, my mother having some notion that I would be interested in the new acquisition; I’d kept it because it was the only picture I had of her, kept it tucked inside a Webster’s dictionary (under M for Mother) on my desk. But one night I rose from my bed, suddenly consumed with fear that Bunny would find it while snooping around my room. No hiding place seemed safe enough. Finally I burned it in an ashtray.

At the same time, Richard has maintained a (probably wrong) impression of the twins' home in Virginia that is eerily reminiscent of the story Gene cooked up: "a childhood I like to think about, with horses and rivers and sweet-gum trees."

Even more than the character Gene though, I think Richard correlates to the author John Knowles himself. Here's an exerpt from an old essay of his about his time at Exeter.

My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education. My brother had, to be sure, gone to Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, but then he dutifully went off to Dartmouth, deep in deepest New Hampshire. I was expected to follow him to Mercersburg, but picking up a catalog one day which was lying around the house, the catalog of Phillips Exeter Academy, I found a preliminary application form on the last page and, just for the hell of it, filled it out and mailed it. Soon, entrance examinations were arranged for me at the local high school, administered by the principal no less. Exeter was clearly an important place. I knew little else about it, knew no one who had ever gone there, and, although my family visited New England most summers, I had never seen the school.

Again, sound... eerily familiar? Moreover, Richard (first name John!) becomes an author himself and the entire framing device of the novel is his attempt to write the story of his personal experience in school, much as John Knowles did (with a much greater degree of fictionalization). The meta-fiction of it all is so satisfyingly multi-layered.

I'll close off with this laughably off-base review I stumbled upon while researching this post.

(Imagine being anti-intellectual enough to complain about the use of the phrase "gravity of the situation" and suggest "how serious it was" would have been a superior substitute, while also being insecure enough to throw words like "gaseous" around. Cracks me up.)

I think one of the slept on things that makes The Secret History feel like a real world is Donna Tartt's willingness to introduce a character that is just never brought up again (or brought up once or twice again.)

Because i'm real life, not every person you meet is going to have significance in your life. Not everyone is going to change that plot. Think about the teacher that takes over when Julian leaves. Or the farmer who claims to have seen Bunny. Or Richard's one night stand. Even the man stalking Henry and Bunny in Italy doesn't show up later.

And not only does this fill the gaps in the world, it absolutely helps build suspense. You never know if a character might have significance later, because there's simply no pattern to follow. It keeps you guessing.

Did I mention I started rereading The Secret History

“every hawkeye needs a black widow”

STEVEN MEEKS and GERARD PITTS in Dead Poets Society

for mittsie may day 4 - memory

So and Cha are so funny man I love their arc of accidentally farming their way to become a good guy like good for them! the younger one is cute he loves being a farmer and his lettuces and randomly agrees to interviews and shenanigans with the other ppl in the village. he has a one-track mind and it's all abt the crops. And the older guy being exasperated 24/7 like yeah that's peak humor. AND SAMSIK OMG I LOVE SAMSIK he was just so funny and so head empty he's the best