Trivia / The Secret History

• Referenced by...:
  • In The Rules of Attraction (1987), Bret Easton Ellis mentions his friend's not-yet-published book, saying:
    That weird Classics group... probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals.
  • There is an entire story arc in Riverdale that is a Whole-Plot Reference to the novel, with one of the main antagonists explicitly named after its author.
• Similarly Named Works: As noted on the main page, the novel shares a name with a number of other works, including several other novels, a French comic book, and the Secret History by Procopius, a highly slanderous account of the reign of Byzantine emperor Justinian I. That last one has caused quite a bit of confusion on sites like Tumblr; Procopius's Secret History is notoriously NSFW and bizarre, and fans of the novel are occasionally surprised when they search the book's name only to find stories about demonic possession and outlandish sexual depravity in Justinian's court.
• Trope Codifier: The novel has become one of the flagship media references for a visual style known as "Dark Academia", which glamorizes traditional academic pursuits in the Humanities—particularly at American and European universities with a gothic, old-world flair (and, in some cases, an implicitly high price tag on tuition). It's an Unbuilt Trope, as many of the critiques of genre that can now be found in online think pieces are present in the book too. The whole thing is inherently elitist. Being a poor student faking a Dark Academia look with stuff from the thrift-store is pretty doable, and it can be fun and exciting. Spending years in higher education encourage students to obsess on a small niche topic, to the exclusion of the bigger world around you.
• Working Title: Discussed in an interview here. During the writing process, Tartt had a few different titles for the book but wasn't married to any of them. She originally submitted the book under the title The God of Illusions, which was chosen by polling a few friends and asking which of the potential titles they liked best. The publishers then changed it to The Secret History.
• Write Who You Know and Write What You Know: It's long been known that Hampden College is based on Donna Tartt's own school, Bennington College, and that Bunny Corcoran is based on Donna Tartt's college friend Bret Easton Ellis (who she dedicated the book to). In recent years, journalist Lili Anolik has looked extensively into the topic. For a condensed version of her findings see her 2019 article The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980's most Decadent College and for a more extensive version, see her 2021, 14-part podcast Once Upon A Time… at Bennington College. The short version, though, is that The Secret History is far more extensively based on real life than previously known.
  Todd O'Neal: The Secret History isn't so much a work of fiction. It's a work of thinly veiled reality—a Roman à Clef.
  • Setting: Hampden is based on Bennington, Donna Tartt's own Vermont liberal arts college. Details include
    • Hampden is closed during January and February because the buildings were old and expensive to heat. Bennington did that too. They called it "NRT, Non-Resident Term."
    • The admissions process. In the book, Henry is a tenth-grade dropout who refused to take the SATs. Bennington, likewise, did not require SAT scores or even a high school diploma. It was effectively self-selecting, and they ended up with oddly gifted students who had done poorly in other schools.
  • Characters
    • Julian is based on Claude Fredericks, the professor who taught Classics at Bennington. A Gentleman and a Scholar. He taught a few classes which were open, such as the Homer class Donna took with him, but his Greek classes were limited—in Donna's time, there were only 3 boys in that class. He had a hard-to-find office that felt like the inner sanctum. He was rumored to accept only $1 a year in payment. His accepting only pretty students was a real pattern observed in Claude.
    • In 1982 at Bennington, Claude Fredericks's Greek class consisted of Matt Jacobson, Todd O'Neal, and Paul McGloin. Todd is Henry; Matt is Bunny; Paul McGloin was Donna's boyfriend at the time, and one of the people she dedicates the book to.
    • Henry and Todd O'Neal.
      Todd O'Neal: Henry's apartment was like my apartment. His eye problems, the chip in his tooth. I smoked Lucky Strikes. I wore suspenders and glasses. I'd gone to a Benedictine monastery for high school, where I learned Latin, and I taught myself Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Sanskrit. I was very deep into the study of Plato and Plotinus, as Henry is described as being. I did go on a trip with Matt, and I did end up having to pay for it because his father didn't give him much money and he was a bit of a sponge, though he and I always had fun together. And what Henry said about Julian—"I loved him more than anyone in the world"—was true of how I felt about Claude. He was the single greatest influence on my life.
    • Bunny and his way of (likely intentionally) being a conversational bull in a porcelain shop has long been attributed to Donna's school friend Bret Easton Ellis. However, Anolik's work has found that another model for the character—probably a stronger one—was Matt Jacobsen.
      Matt Jacobsen: I called my mother and said, "I've been caricatured in a book, and my character gets killed." And she said, "No, no. No one would ever kill you, not even in print, no." Then she read the book and said, "That's you all right." I wore wire-rimmed glasses like Bunny. I had dyslexia—that's what they called it in the 70s, anyway—like Bunny. And, like Bunny, I was an extremely affected young man. I'd make broad, questionable statements. One day in the dining hall I was gawking at some girl and said, "Reminds me of the way Diana's painted on the ceiling of my father's club," and that line found its way into Donna's book. And I'd invite people to lunch and then realize I didn't have any money, something dear old Bunny does.
    • When Donna and Paul McGloin got together, he has a serious girlfriend who he ended up leaving for her. The girlfriend's real name was Margret and nickname was Bunny.
    • Richard is an Author Avatar of Donna, although far more obliquely so than Henry and Bunny. Coming to the school as a transfer student (Richard did 2 years back home; Donna did 1) from a home they view as bleak and banal. where they never felt at home, trying to reinvent themself at college. A total makeover of clothing style, to match how the Classics boys drsss.
    • Charles, Camilla, and Francis seem to be more or less original creations.
    • Judy Poovy is thought to be based on Michelle Matland — who's now the costume designer on Succession.
  • Themes
    • The Brideshead Revisited aesthetic — and specifically that of the 1981 Jeremy Irons miniseries — is reportedly something that students at Bennington really did play at.
    • Author Appeal Guy on Guy Is Hot: There are reports from peers that Donna and her college boyfriend Paul McGloin sort of played by being gay men together, what she referred to in letters to a friend as the "Burning Boy" thing. After getting together, she started dressing like Paul and cut her hair short. She referred to him as "The Man" and he called her "my boy". She reports to a friend, with some relish, an incident where they were mistaken for a gay couple by a security guard and were the target of a homophobic slur. A friend of Paul, after a conversation with Paul about his relationship with Donna, wrote a diary entry describing Donna as "girl who looks like a little boy, whose sexuality seems to be that she wants to be treated like a homosexual man." This is associated with how Brideshead Revisited and Ancient Greece (particularly as taught by the openly gay Claude Fredericks) both aesthetically prize homosexual male relationships.
    • Charles and Camilla's incestuous relationship is theorized to derive from an incident where Tartt and her at-the-time boyfriend Paul McGloin were Mistaken for Incest by their landlords, which she recounted to her friend Jonathan Lethem in a letter.
      The letter: Paul & I were almost kicked out of our lodgings last Tuesday. The charges? Incest. That's really rather impressive, isn't it? Fortunately we are not brother and sister, or else we would have been quite guilty.

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