The Secret History

The Secret History is the first novel by the American author Donna Tartt, published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 1992. Set in New England, the campus novel tells the story of a closely knit group of six classics students at Hampden College, a small, elite liberal arts college located in Vermont based upon Bennington College, where Tartt was a student between 1982 and 1986.

• Those first days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room, in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I'd never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty.
  • Chapter I, p. 13

• In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory; or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party.
  • Chapter I, p. 19

• "But do you really think," he said, concerned, "that one can call psychology a science?"
  "Certainly. What else is it?"
  "But even Plato knew that class and conditioning and so forth have an inalterable effect on the individual. It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate."
  "Psychology is a terrible word."
  • Chapter I, p. 29

• "Are you the new neanias?" he said mockingly.
  The new young man. I said that I was.
  "Cubitum eamus?"
  "What?"
  "Nothing."
  • Chapter I, p. 33

• "Death is the mother of beauty," said Henry.
  "And what is beauty?"
  "Terror."
  [...]
  "And if beauty is terror," said Julian, "then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?"
  "To live," said Camilla.
  "To live forever," said Bunny, chin cupped in his palm.
  • Chapter I, p. 39

• For a warning of what happens in the absence of such a pressure valve, we have the example of the Romans. The emperors. Think, for example, of Tiberius, the ugly stepson, trying to live up to the command of his stepfather Augustus. Think of the tremendous, impossible strain he must have undergone, following in the footsteps of a savior, a god. the people hated him. No matter how hard he tried he was never good enough, could never be rid of the hateful self, and finally the floodgates broke. He was swept away on his perversions and he died, old and mad, lost in the pleasure gardens of the Capri: not even happy there, as one might hope, but miserable. Before he died he wrote a letter home to the Senate. 'May all the Gods and Goddesses visit me with more utter destruction than I feel I am daily suffering.'
  • Chapter I, p. 41
  • Quoting Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars: DII ME DEAEQUE PEIUS PERDANT QUAM COTIDIE PERIRE SENTIO.

• "The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism." He looked at the ceiling for a moment, his face almost troubled. "Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?" he said. "It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, 'more like deer than human being.' To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn."
  • Chapter I, p. 42
  • In reference to Euripedes' The Bacchae.

• "[Henry and Bunny] seem to argue quite a bit."
  "Well, of course," said Camilla, "but that doesn't mean they're not fond of each other all the same."
  • Chapter II, p. 62

• "You had better watch out," she said. "I have heard some weird shit about those people [...] like they worship the fucking Devil."
  "The Greek have no Devil," I said pedantically.
  • Chapter II, p. 74

• Since the two of them had been out of sorts for over a month, Henry in particular. Bunny, I knew, had been hitting him hard for money in the past week,s but though Henry complained about this he seemed oddly incapable of refusing him. I was fairly sure that it wasn't the money per se, but the principle of it; I was also fairly sure that whatever tension existed, Bunny was oblivious of it.
  • Chapter III, p. 105

• If I threw myself off, I thought, who would find me in all that white silence? Might the river beat me downstream over the rocks until it spat me out in the quiet waters, down behind the dye factory, where some lady would catch me in the beam of her headlights when she pulled out of the parking lot at five in the afternoon? Or would I, like the pieces of Leo's mandolin, lodge stubbornly in some quiet place behind a boulder and wait, my clothes washing about me, for spring?
  • Chapter III, p. 119

• "I don't have any friends here for the winter," I said, and I didn't.
  "You shouldn't push your friends away like that. The best friends you'll ever have are the ones you're making right now. I know you don't believe me, but they start to fall away when you get to be my age."
  • Chapter III, p. 120

• When Bunny started in again ("And then there's the one about the Old West—this is when they still hung folks...") camilla edged over on the windowsill and smiled nervously at me.
  I went over and sat between her and Charles. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. "How are you? she said. "Did you wonder where we were?"
  • Chapter IV, p. 153

• "I suppose in that regard my tastes are rather Hellenistic. Landlocked places interest me, remote prospects, wild country. I've never had the slightest bit of interest in the sea. Rather like what Homer says about the Arcadians, you remember? With ships they had nothing to do...."
  "It's because you grew up in the midwest, " Charles said.
  "But if one follows that line of reasoning, then it follows that I would love flat lands, and plains. Which I don't. The descriptions of Troy in the Iliad are horrible to me—all flat land and burning sun. No. I've always been drawn to broken, wild terrain. The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions—Pan himself was born in the mountains, you know. And Zeus. In Parrhasia it was that Rheia bore thee," he said dreamily, lapsing into Greek, "where was a hill sheltered with the thickest brush...."
  • Chapter V, p. 208
  • Quoting Callimachus' "Hymn to Zeus": ἐν δέ σε Παρρασίῃ Ῥείη τέκεν, ἧχι μάλιστα ἔσκεν ὄρος θάμνοισι περισκεπές:

• Someone who didn't know there was such a thing in the world as Death; who couldn't believe it even when he saw it; had never dreamed it would come to him.
  Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness.
  ...I am the Resurrection and the life; he who believeth in Me, even if he die, shall live; and whoseover liveth and believeth in Me shall never die....
  • Chapter VII, p. 420
  • Quoting Gospel of John, 11:25 (KJV)

• Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark — jelly and bloat, the muddy pit.
  • Chapter VIII, p. 488

• Even after all that had happened, the bitterness and disappointment in his voice cut me to the heart.
  "Henry," I said. I wanted to say something profound, that Julian was only human, that he was old, that flesh and blood was frail and weak and that there comes a time when we have to transcend our teachers. But I found myself unable to say anything at all.
  He turned his blind, unseeing eyes upon me.
  "I loved him more than my own father," he said. "I loved him more than anyone in the world."
  • Chapter VIII, p. 519

• "Don't say 'fuck' anymore," said Henry, in a quiet, but ominous voice.
  "Fuck? What's the matter, Henry? You never heard that word before? Isn't that what you do to my sister every night?"
  • Chapter VIII, p. 521

• She really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart.
  • Epilogue, p. 554-555

• There is much to admire in Tartt's novel, but it is especially laudable for how persuasively she chronicles the steps from studying classics to committing murder. This is a difficult transition to relate in a believable manner, and all the more difficult given Tartt's decision to tell the story from the perspective of one of the most genial of the conspirators. Her story could easily come across as implausible—or even risible—in its recreation of Dionysian rites on a Vermont college campus, and its attempt to convince us that a mild-mannered transfer student with a taste for ancient languages can evolve, through a series of almost random events, into a killer. Yet convince us she does, and the intimacy with which Tartt brings her readers into the psychological miasma of the unfolding plot is one of the most compelling features of The Secret History.
  • Ted Gioia, "The Secret History by Donna Tartt" for The New Canon (2019)

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