Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on The Secret History, the Reverse Murder Mystery, and Dark Academia

The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s first novel, came out in 1992 and became a book people press on their friends. Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett think the obsession is about form as much as atmosphere. She has read it three times. The opening tells you that Bunny is dead and that the narrator helped to kill him. What follows is a Greek story told in a Vermont college: you already know the deed, and you watch the killers live with it. The hosts’ case is that their beauty is a mask. The hosts put the book with The Great Gatsby and The Talented Mr. Ripley, stories of a person who invents a self and of what sits behind the invention. One of them read it in a night on a train and could not put it down. Each gives it nine.

Key ideas

1. The obsession is the book, and the book founded a look. Sandbrook opens on a cult hit of the last forty years. ‘It’s one of the great cult hits of the last 40 years.’ It has sold almost three million copies, been translated widely, and it is a novel people reread and give away. Syrett’s first reply is that this is her third reading. She calls it a mesmeric, brooding murder mystery, sexier, darker, and more morally debased than the university novels it sits beside, and she names Brideshead Revisited. The college town in rural Vermont supplies the gloom: old buildings, parties, and smoke. A later remark adds the wine. The next adds the drugs and the poetry, and it names the look. Dark academia, that remark says, is a literary subgenre this atmosphere has inspired, and it trails off. The next calls the novel the genesis of that, and the touchstone for it. They had the book on the list when they invented the podcast. One of them started it on a four-hour train and sat up all night. One of them first read it at university, while reading classics. The next likes the pretence that classics are dark, mysterious, and slightly superior. The coolness, Sandbrook says, is also the author’s. Tartt gives few interviews and keeps her life back. Syrett has dressed as her for the recording: a collar, a black jumper, red lipstick, and no tie. The facts they treat as the myth are these. She started the novel at nineteen. It took ten years. It was her debut, and there was a bidding war. She is from Mississippi. Her father ran a gas station, as Richard’s father does. She went to Bennington College in Vermont, the model for the college in the book. She studied classics and Greek tragedy there, and she had, they say, the same wild side as the characters: drink, drugs, and sex, allegedly. The image is androgynous, black suits, a bob, and a great deal of poise. At the end of the hour one of them says they had not known, before they made the episode, how large dark academia had become on social media. The reply calls the novel the Bible of dark academia, and where it began. A figure of more than 150 million TikTok views on the hashtag, plus cosplay, recited passages, and annotated copies, sits in the next breaths. They say that much. There has been no film. The reason they give is that the Goldfinch film went badly, and Tartt will not have her picture of this book replaced.

2. You are told the murder, and the tension is that it will happen anyway. They read the opening over the first minute. Snow, mountains, Bunny dead for weeks, and also the line that he had been dead for ten days before they found him, the narrator partially responsible, and the difficulty of walking away. One of them calls it one of the great openings. The biggest secret of a murder mystery, who dies and who did it, is given at once. The hosts set up the Greek pattern. Tartt was reading Greek tragedy as she wrote. Audiences did not come to learn the ending. When Agamemnon walks on, everyone but Agamemnon knows he will die. The Iliad states the wrath of Achilles at the outset. The excitement is the consequence, not the surprise. The hosts’ formulation is that it is a murder mystery in reverse. Uncertainty is spent. What replaces it is inevitability, a fatalism, which ties back to the point about Greek tragedy. The murder sits about halfway. The first half moves towards it. The second half is what it does to Richard Papen and the others. One of them warns that the second half of the episode will contain spoilers, because they are following the book. The craft point, which they both admire, is how the killing itself is done. Bunny arrives in the woods, asks what on earth they are doing, and Henry smiles and says he is looking for new ferns. An Emily Temple piece on Literary Hub, as one of them reports it, takes that line as the whole of Henry: learned, false, menacing, and almost childish. Then the section ends. Blank pages. The next sentence is Richard insisting he does not consider himself an evil person, and hearing how like a killer that sounds. The murder happened in the gap. They notice that the sex and the drunkenness are kept offstage in the same way. The prose stays as cold as Henry. The second half is the part a reader might expect to sag, and they refuse that view. Guilt undoing a killer is Crime and Punishment, and it is Greek, the Furies after Orestes. The difference, for them, is that this aftermath is funny. The college mourns Bunny in phrases about what he would have wanted. The trustees send money to the American Civil Liberties Union, which Richard says Bunny would have abhorred had he known it existed. The funeral at the family house is worse. The friends who killed him are invited as his closest friends, and they despise the family as vulgar. The family are written as grotesques: a chilly mother, a father who sobs on strangers and then is distracted by a grandchild, a nickname, a story told to the wrong man, a child who headbutts Henry. The tone swings on purpose. At the grave Richard remembers the ravine, Camilla and Henry checking the body, and Henry, now a pallbearer, throwing dirt and then smearing it on his suit. The hosts read the smear as miasma, the ritual pollution of a Greek murderer who might mark himself with mud or ash, or as the mark of Cain, and they note that Henry is full of drugs and that Julian sees it.

3. Beauty is the mask, and the narrator is inside the crime. Julian Morrow takes only a handful of students. Richard talks his way in. There are four young men and one young woman, in expensive old clothes, keeping to themselves. The hosts’ term for the spell is kalokagathia, the Greek idea that physical beauty and moral beauty are the same thing. Tartt, they say, sets the idea up and then breaks it: ‘we have a group of perfect beautiful people who must therefore be morally perfect’, and ‘their physical beauty hides a core of deep deep moral ugliness’. Sandbrook has just quoted a New York Times reviewer’s recipe, a cross of Crime and Punishment, Euripides’ Bacchae, Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction, and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Julian is the tutor who makes the ancient world feel dangerous. One of them offers the harsh line that he is a knock-off of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, hoping the class is ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter the sublime. The reply is that this is too harsh, and that Julian is closer to a cult leader. A later remark calls him clever and charming, and the only person in the room. Sandbrook tells Syrett this is her thing, because she did classics at university. Her answer is that she is an all-knowing ancient goddess, and she gives Julian’s obsession with beauty and terror, the violent set pieces, and his dislike of Christianity’s meekness. What follows has the old gods, and blood as what lets them feel. The long speech they read is Julian’s, from the novel. ‘Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.’ The rest is the wish to lose control, to dance in the woods, to let the god consume you. The students believe him. He is, they later decide, a false god. Two of the group feel dead unless something extreme happens to someone else. The bacchanal is the first revelation. Led by Henry, the twins and Francis try to stage the rite from the Bacchae, with fasting, drink, and drugs. Bunny keeps eating cake. Henry’s report is torches, wolves, a bull, a river running white, vines growing like snakes. The reader is left to decide whether that was a god or the drugs. A farmer stumbles on them and they tear him apart. They are not sorry. Camilla’s memory, read out, is the opened stomach, the steam, and an uncle butchering deer. Bunny was not there. He finds out, blackmails them, and then cannot live with it. He talks when he is drunk. He asks Julian strange moral questions. One of them says Bunny is actually the hero, because the murder of the farmer troubles him. The other grants that Bunny is the best of them, because he is the only one deeply troubled by the murder of a person. Francis says it was a terrible thing, that the man they killed was not Voltaire, and that he feels bad. A short reaction calls that snobbery. Henry answers, ‘you don’t feel so bad that you go to jail.’ Francis says, ‘No, not that bad.’ The plan is a ravine above the college. If the fall does not kill Bunny, they will drown him, and Henry thinks that would take a couple of minutes. Charles calls it cold-blooded murder. Henry lights a cigarette. ‘I prefer to think of it as redistribution of matter.’ Henry Winter is the cold centre. Surname, size, and emptiness are all played on. He does not mind the farmer and he does not mind Bunny. He loves Camilla. The hosts treat him as the Dionysus of the book, the one whose disciples do the killing, and the one for whom blood is a way to feel. He may also be lying. Richard only knows that Bunny is dangerous because Henry says so. One likeness they draw is T. S. Eliot: St Louis, dark English suits, an umbrella, a man who looks like Neville Chamberlain while everyone else is dressed as the 1980s. The other is Gatsby, and this one is Sandbrook’s. Henry is from Missouri, an outsider, the son of a construction tycoon, living inside an ideal he built for himself. Sandbrook reminds Syrett that she cast Richard as Nick. She answers, and she sends the listener back to Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on The Great Gatsby, the American Dream, and the Irrecoverable Past: Nick and Gatsby are two halves of one coin, and so are Richard and Henry. They agree there is a Jekyll-and-Hyde note. The hosts say Tartt was reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as she wrote, and called it one of the strongest influences. The scene that follows has Henry telling Richard they are the same, that the world had been empty and the night of the killing changed it, and Richard admitting that Bunny’s murder threw everything into a glaring colour and was not an altogether unpleasant sensation. The hosts add the flatness, the low-level depression, and the gift for fitting in. The Talented Mr. Ripley is the comparison the conversation reaches: a mimic who enters a rich circle. Richard barely thinks about the farmer. He uses the threat of Bunny telling as a way to get closer to the group, and Bunny dies because Richard betrays him. The hosts’ earlier point, from the Gatsby stretch, is the same shape. In Gatsby, in Brideshead, and here, the outsider narrator is also complicit. Syrett’s Nick reading sits beside it. Richard thinks he is Gatsby, the self-made man forcing his way into a richer world. She thinks he is Nick Carraway, watching from the edge and becoming what the others want. In that same stretch she says Tartt has admitted the Gatsby debt. The next adds Charles Ryder, the lack of idealism, and leaving disenchanted.

4. There is a secret history under the novel, and they still think the novel is better than the gossip. The second half of the hour, which she has researched and he introduces as the thing she promised, is Tartt’s own. Born in 1963, daughter of a Mississippi gas-station owner and a local politician, a clever child who wanted to be an archaeologist and was obsessed with Heinrich Schliemann. She hated the University of Mississippi, transferred to Bennington, and found a small, chic, originally women’s college of about five hundred, full of drugs and dandies and also, they insist, genuinely intellectual. About five of her class published books. She was the only woman in the classics group, in boys’ suits, modelling herself, classmates said, on Sebastian Flyte. Brideshead had been a television hit, and that was the look. A long Esquire piece, which they remember as 13,000 words, and a podcast have mythologised the place. One of them reads one classmate on life as performance art and finds it inflated. One of them, who watched an interview, says Tartt is fond of Bennington and that it has changed. Julian’s circle has an original. Claude Fredericks taught Greek there for almost thirty years, kept a diary for 81 years and something like 65,000 pages, taught up a secret staircase, and said Plato’s Symposium was the only holy book he knew. He took a handful of students. Tartt worshipped him. He hated being turned into Julian, and they fell out for years. She dedicated The Goldfinch in part to him, which the hosts read as the spell still working. Ellis, a friend at Bennington, put a group of classics students into The Rules of Attraction, looking like undertakers and sacrificing farmers, before this novel was published. Syrett met him once, in a green room, and liked him. The harder claim, which they report rather than adopt, is that the novel is a roman à clef and, in the cruellest version, a justification for murdering a classmate. Three names are given: Todd O’Neal, Matt Jacobson, and Paul McGloin. Jacobson is the one they linger on, supposedly the model for Bunny, recognised by his mother from the habit of inviting people to lunch and then having no money. He calls himself a horrible bounder and says it was never intentional. One of them thinks unintentional is worse. The other thinks it is fine. Tartt denies that the book was taken from life. One of them compares the denial to Tolkien refusing allegory. The story they then tell, and do not quite endorse, is that she wrote the book to mock those classmates, showed it to Ellis, and his agent sold it. The book, they agree, has outgrown that story. One of them says that the American books about reinventing the self, and about the darkness behind the invention, Gatsby and Ripley, are the league this novel belongs to. The speech begins from a memory of reading it at one sitting. The other says that it remains a favourite book, that the pace never lags, that the second half is not a collapse after Bunny’s death, and that a third reading still left the characters in doubt. Both give it nine, in dead bunnies out of ten. The host who is invited to go first docks a point for the long drug-fugue passages. The one who follows also gives nine, and docks a point for Tartt being mean to Matt Jacobson. The first says the second has no flesh in that game.

Context

The story a stranger needs

Richard Papen leaves Plano, California, which he finds hot, dull, and closed, and where he does not get on with his parents. A brochure in a coat pocket, after a row, is how he arrives at Hampden. He talks his way into Julian’s Greek class and falls for the clique. Francis Abernathy is the Flyte figure: cuffs, coats, a hypochondriac, cutting, more frightened than the others, and the one who cares most about the friendships. He is gay, and in the same breath Tartt is said not to shy away from a stereotype. The next remark is that he is on and off with Charles. Charles and Camilla are twins, beautiful, often in white, compared to Castor and Pollux. Charles comes apart, drinks, and becomes abusive. One of them finds Camilla one of the most interesting characters in the book, and wanted to be her at about eighteen. One of them says she is looked at the way Daisy Buchanan is looked at, that her name is the warrior maiden in the Aeneid, treated with the coldness of the male heroes, and that her part in the killing is the most troubling, because she seems warm and tells nothing. One of them calls her heartless, and the image is Galatea run backwards, flesh and then stone. Bunny Corcoran is the noisy one, old money, Connecticut, a boarding school, Cape Cod. Readers online, they say, find him insufferable. The hosts make a case for him: first to welcome Richard, the least affected, the least mystical, liked, and guilty mostly of ordinary greed, including a cheesecake stolen from a poorer student. The worse traits, which the hosts will not let go, are sexism towards Camilla and homophobia. He is also bad at Greek, two years older than the others thought, and the author of a nonsense essay on John Donne. Bunny will not take the claim that beauty is terror seriously. He is murdered by the group, after the farmer and the blackmail. After his death the group comes apart. Charles’s drinking and the incest become public. Camilla disappears into Henry’s control. Julian finds out. Richard’s verdict on him, which they read, is that the kind parent was a performance, and that what remains is watchful, capricious, and heartless. One of them says that is simply a Greek god, so Julian was always that. The next calls him a coward, because he runs. Henry does not recover from the discovery. There is a last meeting. It has the air of a Greek tragedy. One of them stops short of the outcome, for people who have not read the book, and the question left hanging is what to do with Richard, who has got away with it. Richard leaves Hampden, studies English, and ends up in Jacobean drama. The paragraph they read, about sin unpunished and innocence destroyed and evil dressing itself as good, is his own subject, whether he knows it or not. The hosts agree that he knows. The further point is that the others, Charles perhaps aside, do not think it was evil. They think a dramatic thing happened and that they nearly went to jail. They also cannot bear each other. Each is carrying the same contagion.

How the book sits

Brideshead Revisited for the enchanted clique and the watching narrator. The Great Gatsby for the invented self, which is where they send the listener to their own episode. The Talented Mr. Ripley for the mimic who enters a rich circle. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for the double. Crime and Punishment for the aftermath. The Bacchae for the rite. The Iliad and Agamemnon for a story that tells you the death first. Procopius’s sixth-century Secret History, which Syrett tells properly, is the source of the title: a perfect court, Justinian and Theodora, corrupt underneath. A line about character being fixed in a first term at the college is identified as almost a sentence from Tartt’s own graduation speech. Her later remark, from an interview one of them watched, is that so much of the book was nostalgia for Bennington as the writing moved further from it.

The scores

Nine each, out of ten dead bunnies. The host who is invited to go first docks a point for the drug fugues. The other docks a point for Jacobson. The first says the second has no flesh in that game. Next is Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, then Northern Lights, The Golden Compass in the US.

Related

• Dominic Sandbrook — co-host
• Tabitha Syrett — co-host
• Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on The Great Gatsby, the American Dream, and the Irrecoverable Past — the episode they tell the listener to remember when Richard and Henry are treated as doubles