My thing this week is a podcast, a little over three years old now, that has been my companion on my twice-daily dog walks: Lili Anolik’s “Once Upon a Time … at Bennington College.”
I stumbled across this podcast when I read an essay by Anolik in LitHub about her new book about Joan Didion and Eva Babitz. Didion and Babitz are tangential to my reading, but Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem, the central figures of Anolik’s interrogation of the literary, artistic, and sexual hothouse that was Bennington College in the early ‘80s, are very much in my wheelhouse. I devoured Ellis’s first two books when they first came out — I was in high school at the time, in a town outside Green Bay, Wisconsin, and longed for the kind of intensity and casual insouciance of Ellis’s world (“Bright Lights, Big City,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” and “The Slaves of New York” were on my reading list in those years, too). When I was in graduate school, I read Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” — I was out of the intense atmosphere of my undergrad years (“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” was my touchstone for that period of my life), and “Lucky Jim” was probably more like the life I was leading, but the dark decadence of Hampden College’s classicists was certainly appealing. I came to Lethem in later, more sober years, thoroughly enjoying “The Fortress of Solitude” and “Motherless Brooklyn” but no longer in a stage in life where a book can threaten to upend my sense of reality.
This podcast is a mystery tale of its own, owing in large part to Tartt’s refusal to be a part of it. Anolik shares extensive interviews with Ellis and Lethem, as well as their friends, lovers, and classmates, but the only things we hear in Tartt’s voice are passages of “The Secret History” from an audiobook recording and Anolik’s readings of a few of her letters to Lethem. A fractured and shadowy portrait of Tartt emerges, contradictory and incomplete, tantalizing in the hints of an interior life we never experience directly.
It’s a bit gossipy, and maybe a little mean, as literary podcasts go; I don’t know if we get a whole lot of insight into what makes “The Secret History” such a great book by way of stories of Tartt’s undergraduate romances. But it’s a very interesting period piece, chock-a-block with name dropping and cultural references, and has made me keen to reread some of these books.
In a completely different vein, I’d like to point you to the Weird Studies podcast episode on “The Secret History.” This is a sharp and insightful discussion of the themes of the novel — the hosts call it a “fate machine,” animated by the spirit of Greek tragedy. The discussion engages the novel in fascinating (and entirely non-biographical) ways, and is well worth a listen.
