The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word “postmodernist.” “That swine,” I said. “You know him?” She looked at me with a glitter of antagonism. “Seth Gartrell is my good friend.”

giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory

a gift to the river-god, maybe, for safe crossing, or perhaps some attempt to prove to it that I, though invisible, did exist.

Argentina. The word itself had lost little of its power to startle and had, due to my ignorance of the physical place it occupied on the globe, assumed a peculiar life of its own. There was the harsh Ar at the beginning, which called up gold, idols, lost cities in the jungle, which in turn led to the hushed and sinister chamber of Gen, with the bright interrogative Tina at the end—all nonsense, of course, but then it seemed in some muddled way that the name itself, one of the few concrete facts available to me, might itself be a cryptogram or clue.

Should I go to the library? Take Henry’s car, which I still had, and go for a drive, maybe see if there was a matinee at the movie house in town? Should I go ask Judy Poovey for a Valium? I decided, finally, that the last of these would be a prerequisite for any other plan.

Artaud,

“To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one’s moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.”

one day, I was struck by something rather obvious—namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.” He paused. “Do you know,” he said, “what Julian says about the Divine Comedy?” “No, Henry, I don’t.” “That it’s incomprehensible to someone who isn’t a Christian? That if one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours? It was the same with this. It had to be approached on its own terms, not in a voyeuristic light or even a scholarly one. At the first, I suppose, it was impossible to see it any other way, looking at it as we did in fragments, through centuries. The vitality of the act was entirely obsfucated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.” He took one last drag of his cigarette and put it out. “Quite simply,” he said, “we didn’t believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.”

I was in fact incredibly self-conscious about these virtually imperceptible differences of dress and of the rather less imperceptible differences of manner and bearing between myself and the rest of them. I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu—you’ve never seen such a typical California teenager as I was, nor such a dissolute and callous pre-med student—but somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of the particular shade.

The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one’s head, it taught one to think in Greek. One’s thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos. Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I ...

“I don’t see why you’re so excited,” Henry said crossly. He had a pragmatic, farmer-like knowledge of how weather conditions affected growth, germination, blooming times, et cetera. “It’s just going to kill all the flowers.”

Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

“how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?” Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”

Henry gave him a fishy look. “Calm down,” he said. “I don’t know where you get all these Dostoyevsky sorts of ideas.”

There was a tradition among the ancients that things were very cheap in Hell.

His pen hovered over the paper. Then he folded the sheet and pushed it aside. “What,” I said, “aren’t you going to write anything?” Henry took a sip of his tea. “How,” he said, “can I possibly make the Dean of Studies understand that there is a divinity in our midst?”

He was looking over the hills, at all that grand cinematic expanse of men and wilderness and snow that lay beneath us; and though his voice was anxious there was a strange dreamy look on his face. The business had upset him, that I knew, but I also knew that there was something about the operatic sweep of the search which could not fail to appeal to him and that he was pleased, however obscurely, with the aesthetics of the thing. Henry saw it, too. “Like something from Tolstoy, isn’t it?” he remarked. Julian looked over his shoulder, and I was startled to see that there was real delight on his face. “Yes,” he said. “Isn’t it, though?”

As soon as she sauntered back to the kitchen to turn in our order (“Bill!” we heard her saying, behind the swinging doors. “Hey, Bill! Listen to this!”), the smile faded from Charles’s face. He reached for his drink and offered a humorless shrug when I tried to catch his eye.

Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion.

I went downstairs, the right-hand pocket of my jacket full of ups and the left full of downs.

“I hope I die in the night.

But even morphia could not fully dull the horror of this event.

and in the dream he knew I knew.

Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

here his voice changed slightly, in imitation of Charles, a stranger might assume; but it was really Julian’s own voice, cultured and purring, only raised slightly in tone, as if he could not bear, even in mimicry, to substantively alter its own melodious cadence)—“he said, in the most melancholy voice, ‘She’s hiding from me.’

But the twinkle in Julian’s eye, as I looked at him now, was mechanical and dead. It was as if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.

George Orwell—a keen observer of what lay behind the glitter of constructed facades, social and otherwise—had met Julian on several occasions, and had not liked him. To a friend he wrote: “Upon meeting Julian Morrow, one has the impression that he is a man of extraordinary sympathy and warmth. But what you call his ‘Asiatic serenity’ is, I think, a mask for great coldness. The face one shows him he invariably reflects back at one, creating the illusion of warmth and depth when in fact he is brittle and shallow as a mirror. Acton”—this, apparently, Harold Acton, who was also in Paris then and a friend to both Orwell and Julian—“disagrees. But I think he is not a man to be trusted.” I have thought a great deal about this passage, also about a particularly shrewd remark once made by, of all people, Bunny. “Y’know,” he said, “Julian is like one of those people that’ll pick all his favorite chocolates out of the box and leave the rest.” This seems rather enigmatic on the face of it, but actually I cannot think of a better metaphor for Julian’s personality. It is similar to another remark made to me once by Georges Laforgue, on an occasion when I had been extolling Julian to the skies. “Julian,” he said curtly, “will never be a scholar of the very first rate, and that is because he is only capable of seeing things on a selective basis.”

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.”

Bleeding richly.

I spent all my time in the library, reading the Jacobean dramatists. Webster and Middleton, Tourneur and Ford. It was an obscure specialization, but the candlelit and treacherous universe in which they moved—of sin unpunished, of innocence destroyed—was one I found appealing. Even the titles of their plays were strangely seductive, trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickled beneath the surface of mortality: The Malcontent. The White Devil. The Broken Heart. I pored over them, made notes in the margins. The Jacobeans had a sure grasp of catastrophe. They understood not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good. I felt they cut right to the heart of the matter, to the essential rottenness of the world.

“Well, you know what Julian would say,” said Francis. “There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”

her gaze hit me hard and sweet as a shot of morphine.

hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.