Kill Your Darling (or We need to adress Donna Tartt and the Dark Academia community)
It's been some years since I realised how popular Tartt is in the Dark Academia community and how highly praised she is. At first, I thought I'd give in. I thought it'd be safe, everyone praised it, couldn't be too harmful. But after my own personal experience reading The Secret History and being met with her ever so casual racism, without ever seeing a single complaint or comment on it on the platform, I was shocked. Sure. I knew this community was extremely white and american/european centric, but I always found myself on the side trying to force more representation, to the point I haven't seen elitist, white american/european blogs in ages. I myself have worked hard on posts to help, including the Brazilian Literature Masterpost and some others still under works.
But today, after someone on the Discord server I'm a mod on not only doubted me and other's claims of Tartt's racism, they excused it under the pretense of it being "the character" and not her. Under these circumstances and others not being aware of it, I decided to make this post going on an elaborate rant and demonstrating proof via Donna Tartt's own books, interviews, analysis on her and her fanbase. All with direct quotes and resources to be read more on. If you decide to read this – and accept it or excuse it –, it's up to you. The source is now with you, do as you decide.
I asked the owners of the blogs of the posts I tag at the end and I highly recommend you check out their posts on the matter. Some of these scenes speak for itself, others I'll put in bold what I'm trying to point out since some have read this and glossed over this. I will be cynical and sarcastic about a lot of this, because I had to read through every single one of this to the point I was physically sick, so allow me to use humour to cope with this clusterfuck. So, grab a glass of water and get comfy cause this is a long one.
Trigger Warnings for racism, unnecessary use of slurs, homophobia, fetishization of people of asian descent, mentions of rape/main character wanting to rape someone, abuse, antisemitism, ableism, harmful stereotypes about people of colour, Tartt's description of people of colour (and those of south european descent)
Let's go chronologically with books before tackling interviews, thesis papers and the overall analysis, shall we?
1. The Secret History (1992)
The following quotes are not in book chronological order and instead on the order I found them.
Bunny took a jaded bite of the cheesecake. “He say why he left?”
“No.” Then, when Bunny didn’t respond, I added: “It had something to do with money, didn’t it?”
“Is that what he told you?”
“No.” And then, since he had gone mute again: “But he did say you were short on cash, that he had to pay the rent and stuff. Is that right?”
Bunny, his mouth full, made a brushing, dismissive motion with one hand.
“That Henry,” he said. “I love him, and you love him, but just between the two of us I think he’s got a little bit of Jew blood.”
“What?” I said, startled.
He had just taken another big bite of cheesecake, and it took him a moment to answer me.
“I never heard anybody complain so much about helping out a pal,” he finally said. “I tell you what it is. He’s afraid of people taking advantage of him.”
We do love the implication that jut because your friend is rich and doesn't want to pay for your every single expense, they are Jewish. Just... The casual antisemitism, fucking lovely. /s
I sat up in bed and switched on the light.
“You don’t care about a goddamn thing, do you?” I heard Bunny scream; this was followed by a crash, as if of books being swept from desk to floor. “Not a thing but your own fucking self, you and all the rest of them—I’d like to know just what Julian would think, you bastard, if I told him a couple of—Don’t touch me,” he shrieked, “get away—!”
More crashing, as of furniture overturned, and Henry’s voice, quick and angry. Bunny’s rose above it. “Go ahead!” he shouted, so loudly I’m sure he woke the house. “Try and stop me. I’m not scared of you. You make me sick, you fag, you Nazi, you dirty lousy cheapskate Jew—”
Yet another crash, this time of splintering wood. A door slammed. There were rapid footsteps down the hall. Then the muffled noise of sobs—gasping, terrible sobs which went on for a long while.
I have a lot to say about this whole scene, but I'm fairly sure it speaks for itself. I don't even have anything to add, honestly. I just want to forget I ever read that.
She was pretty and Jewish, with a dazzling smile and a penchant for Mary Tyler Moore mannerisms like hugging herself or twirling around with her arms outstretched. The three of them smoked a lot, told long boring stories (“So, like, our plane just sat on the runway for five hours”) and talked about people I didn’t know. I, the absent-minded bereaved, was free to stare peacefully out the window.
This is more of a personal one, I guess. I just love the misogyny having a dash of antisemitism /s. The implications that it's rare to be pretty and Jewish are just baffling.
She rattled on. I stared at her, lost in my own awful thoughts. Suddenly I realized she’d stopped talking. She was looking at me expectantly, waiting for a reply.
“What?” I said.
“I said, isn’t that the most retarded thing you ever heard?”
“Ummmm.”
“Her parents just must not give a shit.” She closed the makeup drawer and turned to face me. “Anyway. You want to come to this party?”
“Whose is it?”
Well, uh... That's some hot ableism, innit? We love the implication that someone is the r-slur. I understand this is from the 90's and DiFfErEnT tImEs or whatever but... As a neurodivergent person, I will be taking great offense especially with the context of it.
He’d actually enjoyed talking to them, he told me. Davenport was a Philistine, not worth mentioning but the Italian was somber and polite, quite charming. (“Like one of those old Florentines Dante meets in Purgatory.”) His name was Sciola. He was very interested in the trip to Rome, asked a lot of questions about it, not so much as investigator as fellow tourist. (“Did you boys happen to go out to the, what do you call it, San Prassede, out there around the train station? With that little chapel out on the side?”) He spoke Italian, too, and he and Henry had a brief and happy conversation which was cut short by the irritated Davenport, who didn’t understand a word and wanted to get down to business.
This is about four or five pages (if not more) after being introduced to the detectives. Until this, he was only referenced as the Italian. There's also slight implications of Italian stereotypes which could be me just pushing it until you see uh... The following:
Sciola made a weary, Italianate gesture of resignation. “Even if he wasn’t,” he said. “The ground was muddy. It was raining. It could’ve been dark for all we know.”
Nobody said anything for several long moments.
“Look, son,” said Sciola, not unkindly. “It’s just my opinion, but if you ask me, your friend didn’t kill himself. I saw the place he went over. The brush at the edge was all, you know—” he made a feeble, flicking gesture at the air.
Now, I think it's safe to move on towards the misogyny, male gaze and incest. I'll make it short since we've all seen it.
Camilla looked enchanting. She wore a narrow sleeveless dress, salmon-colored, which exposed a pair of pretty collarbones and the sweet frail vertebrae at the base of her neck—lovely kneecaps, lovely ankles, lovely bare, strong-muscled legs. The dress exaggerated her spareness of body, her unconscious and slightly masculine grace of posture; I loved her, loved the luscious, stuttering way she would blink while telling a story, or the way (faint echo of Charles) that she held a cigarette, caught in the knuckles of her bitten-nailed fingers.
Alright, that wasn't creepy at fucking all, Richard /s. I've considered throwing this in r/menwritingwomen about 200 times and see if anyone would guess this isn't written by a man.
Also, I just adore how being Charles' twin is literally ¾ of her personality /s.
“She’d behave a lot more like Charles if she were allowed to; he’s so possessive, though, he keeps her reeled in pretty tight.Can you imagine a worse situation? He watches her like a hawk. And he’s also rather poor—not that it matters much,” he said hastily, realizing to whom he was speaking, “but he’s quite self-conscious about it. Very proud of his family, you know, very well aware that he himself is a sot. There’s something kind of Roman about it, all this regard he puts in his sister’s honor. Bunny wouldn’t go near Camilla, you know, he would hardly even look at her. He used to say that she wasn’t his type but I think the old Dutchman in him just knew she was bad medicine. My God …
Are we ready to talk about how toxic this is? About how Donna used another character to romanticize the already romanticized relationship between two twins? About her calling Camilla "bad medicine", the only female main character of her book that gets half an ounce of respect, is like a "bad fruit"? "No proper man would want her"?
I'm not therapist or psychology student but I'm pretty sure Donna is either projecting her misogyny onto Camilla or the hate for herself onto her, especially considering the whole uh... Well, how Camilla and Charles seem to be based of Donna herself and Paul McGloin. [ See lower in this post for a deeper look onto Donna Tartt and Paul McGloin ]
I'll break down the following scene into different moments so we can fully grasp it.
“How’s my brother?”
“Why don’t you go see him yourself?”
She put down the book—ah, lovely, I thought helplessly, I loved her, I loved the very sight of her: she was wearing a cashmere sweater, soft gray-green, and her gray eyes had a luminous celadon tint.
“You think you have to take sides,” she said. “But you don’t.”
Richard seeing Camilla, who came to (allegedly) talk about the whole situation with her brother and be clear about it, as solely the object of his desire and not as a proper human being really boils my blood here. She's not an object.
“I’m not taking sides. I just think whatever you’re doing, you picked a bad time to do it.”
“And what would be a good time?” she said. “I want you to see something. Look.”
She held up a piece of the light hair near her temples. Underneath was a scabbed spot about the size of a quarter where someone had, apparently, pulled a handful of hair out by the roots. I was too startled to say anything.
“And this.” She pushed up the sleeve of her sweater. The wrist was swollen and a bit discolored, but what horrified me was a tiny, evil burn on the underside of the forearm: a cigarette burn, gouged deep and ugly in the flesh.
It was a moment before I found my voice. “Good God, Camilla! Charles did this?”
She pulled the sleeve down. “See what I mean?” she said. Her voice was unemotional; her expression watchful, almost wry.
“How long has this been going on?”
She ignored my question. “I know Charles,” she said. “Better than you do. Staying away, just now, is much wiser.”
Now... This is where I'm reluctant to say that Camilla came to actually be clear about the situation. I understand her coming out about the physical violence her brother put her through during their uh, assumed-to-be-consensual relationship (Richard is already an unreliable narrator because he's never told the full story, doesn't fully know the others and, in this case, because he's obsessed with Camilla and being with Camilla). But Camilla refuses to carry on explaining the abuse, which is absolutely valid. I, myself, would never just go and talk about all of the abuse I've been through with anyone. My problem here is her directing it right back to the issue of the group, which is Richard (and Francis) not trusting Henry and considering Charles' side.
The sun came suddenly from behind a rain cloud, flooding the room with glorious light that wavered on the walls like water. Camilla’s face burst into glowing bloom. A terrible sweetness boiled up in me.
Everything, for a moment—mirror, ceiling, floor—was unstable and radiant as a dream. I felt a fierce, nearly irresistible desire to seize Camilla by her bruised wrist, twist her arm behind her back until she cried out, throw her on my bed: strangle her, rape her, I don’t know what. And then the cloud passed over the sun again, and the life went out of everything.
“Why did you come here?” I said.
“Because I wanted to see you.”
“I don’t know if you care what I think—” I hated the sound of my voice, was unable to control it, everything I said was coming out in the same haughty, injured tone—“I don’t know if you care what I think, but I think you’re making things worse by staying at the Albemarle.”
I'm gonna claim my right not to say what I'm thinking cause that just triggers me in 20 different ways. I could be wrong but that's not what a decent person thinks of their friend. I'm- I'm gonna move on before I start crying. That just- I can't talk about that. I'm also gonna stop analyzing this scene here because, yeah. Feel free to read and analyse that yourself.
“Caspar’s a super guy,” Bunny said as we followed the waiter to the table. “Maître d’. Big old fellow with moustaches, Austrian or something. And not—” he lowered his voice to a loud whisper—“not a fag, either, if you can believe that. Queers love to work in restaurants, have you ever noticed that? I mean, every single fag—”
I saw the back of our waiter’s neck stiffen slightly.
“—I have ever known has been obsessed with food. I wonder, why is that? Something psychological? It seems to me that—”
Do I need to say why a cisgender heterosexual white american woman saying these slurs is bad? Using queer people's trauma and pain is not ever valid or okay. It's not their narrative to use and no one has the right to use and explore a minority's struggles and trauma to get shock points or impact. Our realities are not fucking plot points.
“Thanks,” I said weakly, looking away from his lingering, hateful smile until I was sure he had gone.
“You know, there’s nothing I hate like I hate an officious fag,” said Bunny pleasantly. “You ask me, I think they ought to round them all up and burn them at the stake.”
I’ve known men who run down homosexuality because they are uncomfortable with it, perhaps harbor inclinations in that area; and I’ve known men who run down homosexuality and mean it. At first I had placed Bunny in the first category. His glad-handing, varsity chumminess was totally alien and therefore suspect; then, too, he studied the classics, which are certainly harmless enough but which still provoke the raised eyebrow in some circles. (“You want to know what Classics are?” said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. “I’ll tell you what Classics are. Wars and homos.” A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth.)
The more I listened to Bunny, however, the more apparent it became that there was no affected laughter, no anxiety to please. Instead, there was the blithe unselfconciousness of some crotchety old Veteran of Foreign Wars—married for years, father of multitudes— who finds the topic infinitely repugnant and amusing.
“But your friend Francis?” I said.
I was being snide, I suppose, or maybe I just wanted to see how he would wriggle out of that one. Though Francis might or might not have been homosexual—and could just as easily have been a really dangerous type of ladies’ man—he was certainly of that vulpine, well- dressed, unflappable sort who, to someone with Bunny’s alleged nose for such things, would rouse a certain suspicion.
Bunny raised an eyebrow. “That’s nonsense,” he said curtly. “Who told you that?”
“Nobody. Just Judy Poovey,” I said, when I saw he wasn’t going to take nobody for an answer.
“Well, I can see why she’d say it but nowadays everybody’s gay this and gay that. There’s still such a thing as an old-fashioned mama’s boy. All Francis needs is a girlfriend.” He squinted at me through the tiny, crazed glasses. “And what about you?” he said, a trifle belligerently.
“What?”
“You a single man? Got some little cheerleader waiting back home for you at Hollywood High?”
I-I fucking can't. She did just need to add the fucking "He just needs the right girl", didn't she /s? For fuck's sake. i'm sorry I'm getting heated but you can't expect me not to.
Not that Francis, in normal circumstances, wasn’t perfectly able to take care of himself. He had a quick temper, and a sharp tongue, and though he could’ve put Bunny in his place pretty much any time he chose, he was understandably apprehensive about doing so. We were all of us painfully aware of that metaphoric vial of nitroglycerine which Bunny carried around with him day and night, and which, from time to time, he allowed us a glimpse of, unless anyone forget it was always with him, and he had the power to dash it to the floor whenever he pleased.
I don’t really have the heart to recount all the vile things he said and did to Francis, the practical jokes, the remarks about faggots and queers, the public, humiliating stream of questions about his preference and practices: clinical and incredibly detailed ones, having to do with such things as enemas, and gerbils, and incandescent light bulbs.
You can see how she's using as a plot device and to show Bunny's bigotry but the fact is: you can show bigotry and prejudice without utilizing slurs used to attack those minorities. It's not her place to use them, at all.
A small, dark man in shirtsleeves, who had been waving his hand in the air for some time, was finally called upon by Liz and stood up.
“My name is Adnan Nassar and I am Palestinian-American,” he said in a rush. “I came to this country from Syria nine years ago and have since then earned American citizenship and am assistant manager of the Pizza Pad on Highway 6.”
Mr. Hundy put his head to the side. “Well, Adnan,” he said cordially, “I expect that story would be pretty unusual in your own country. But here, that’s the way the system works. For everybody. And that’s regardless of your race or the color of your skin.” Applause.
Liz, microphone in hand, made her way down the aisle and pointed at a lady with a bouffant hairdo, but the Palestinian angrily waved his arms and the camera shifted back to him.
“That is not the point,” he said. “I am an Arab and I resent the racial slurs you make against my people.”
Liz walked back to the Palestinian and put her hand on his arm, Oprah-style, to comfort him. William Hundy, sitting in his mock-Shaker chair on the podium, shifted slightly as he leaned forward.
“You like it here?” he said shortly.
“Yes.”
“You want to go back?”
“Now,” Liz said loudly. “Nobody is trying to say that—”
“Because the boats,” said Mr. Hundy, even louder, “run both ways.”
Dotty, the barmaid, laughed admiringly and took a drag off her cigarette. “That’s telling him,” she said.“Where your family comes from?” said the Arab sarcastically. “You American Indian or what?”
Mr. Hundy did not appear to have heard this. “I’ll pay for you to go back,” he said. “How much is a one-way ticket to Baghdad going for these days? If you want me to, I’ll—”
“I think,” Liz said hastily, “that you’ve misunderstood what this gentleman is trying to say. He’s just trying to make the point that—” She put her arm around the Palestinian’s shoulders and he threw it off in a rage.
“All night long you say offensive things about Arabs,” he screamed.
“You don’t know what Arab is.” He beat on his chest with his fist. “I know it, in my heart.”
“You and your buddy Saddam Hussein.”
“How dare you say we are all greedy, driving big cars? This is very offensive to me. I am Arabic and I conserve the natural resource—”
“By setting fire to all them oil wells, eh?”
“—by driving a Toyota Corolla.”
“I wasn’t talking about you in particular,” said Hundy. “I was talking about them OPEC creepos and them sick people kidnapped that boy. You think they’re driving around in Toyota Corollas? You think we condone terrorism here? Is that what they do in your country?”
“You lie,” shouted the Arab.
For a moment, in confusion, the camera went to Liz Ocavello; she was staring, without seeing, right out of the screen and I knew she was thinking exactly what I was thinking, oh, boy, oh, boy, here it comes ...
“It ain’t a lie,” said Hundy hotly. “I know. I been in the service station business for thirty years. You think I don’t remember, when Carter was President, you had us over such a barrel, back in nineteen and seventy-five? And now all you people coming over here, acting like you own the place, with all your chick peas and your filthy little pocket breads?”
Liz was looking to the side, trying to mouth instructions.
The Arab screamed out a frightful obscenity.
“Hold it! Stop!” shouted Liz Ocavello in despair.
Mr. Hundy leapt to his feet, eyes blazing, pointing a trembling forefinger into the audience. “Sand niggers!” he shouted bitterly. “Sand niggers! Sand—”
The camera jerked away and panned wildly to the side of the set, a tangle of black cables, hooded lights.
I'm not even going to say anything besides that if you listen to the audiobook, narrated by Donna herself, she says it all. She says that slur three times. And it might be just me but you can hear the smile on her face as she says it. Almost like she has some sort of pleasure in saying them. She does also smile in many other scenes where there's bigotry involved.
2. The Little Friend (2002)
Let's just get on with this starting with the fact that I'm not saying that white authors can't write about black narratives, it's not my place to say that. We all want diversity in books, sometimes the books are written by white people.
The problem here as I see it, is how she narrates this and how her prejudice is palpable.
She was not looking at Mrs. Fountain—not even looking at the tree, where her dead son’s tree house rotted forlornly in a decayed fork. She was looking across the street, past the empty lot where the ragged robin and witch grass grew tall, to where the train tracks threaded bleakly past the rusted roofs of Niggertown, far away.
I could stop it here. I should stop here. That's more than enough, but unfortunately, the name of the town is the least of my concerns. I wonder if she has an n-word limit per book, since she wants to say it so fucking badly.
So the big house, which had been in the Cleve family ever since it was built, in 1809, had to be sold in a hurry to pay o the Judge’s debts. The sisters still mourned this. They had grown up there, as had the Judge himself, and the Judge’s mother and grandparents. Worse: the person they had sold it to turned right around and sold it to someone else who turned it into a retirement home and then, when the retirement home lost its license, into welfare apartments. Three years after Robin’s death, it had burned to the ground. “It survived the Civil War,” said Edie bitterly, “but the niggers still got it in the end.”
Actually, it was Judge Cleve who had destroyed the house, not “the niggers”; he had had no repairs done on it for nearly seventy years, nor had his mother for forty years before.
Let's play a game! A shot for everytime she says the N-word in her book. That's bound to land us all in the hospital for alcohol poisoning, so please don't play this drinking game.
“I threw some rocks at them,” he said bravely. “I yelled at them, too. Then they ran off.”
“What were they shooting with?” said Harriet. “A BB gun or something?”
“No,” said Hely after a slight, shocked pause; how could he make her grasp the urgency of this, the danger?
“It was a real gun, Harriet. Real bullets. Niggers running everywhere—” He flung out an arm, overwhelmed with the difficulty of making her see it all, the hot sun, the echoes of the bluff, the laughter and the panic....
“Why didn’t you come with me?” he wailed. “I begged you to come—”
“If it was a real gun they were shooting, I think you were stupid to stand around throwing rocks.”
I- I'll remain silent. I'll let Donna do the talking.
“What I want to know about is the Ratliffs. What can you—”
“Well, I can tell you they chunked bricks at my sister’s grand-baby while she’s walking to school in the rst grade,” said Ida curtly. “How about that? Big old grown men. Chunking bricks and hollering out nigger and get back to the jungle at that poor child.”
Harriet, appalled, said nothing. Without looking up, she continued to fiddle with the strap of her sandal. The word nigger—especially from Ida—made her red in the face.
No, really. She's great at exposing her own bigotry. Better than Bunny Corcoran, even /hj.
I wouldn’t want any food she put on the table, thought Hely.
“Younguns today all think they have to have,” Farish said flatly. “They would do just as well to be like yourn and go without.”
“When me and my brothers and sisters were coming up, we didn’t even have us an icebox,” said Odum in a quaver. He was getting good and wound-up. “All the summer long I had to chop cotton out in the fields—”
“I’ve chopped my share of cotton, too.”
“—and my mama, I’m telling you, she worked those fields like a nigger man. Me—I couldn’t go to school! Mama and Daddy, they needed me at home! Naw, we never had a thing but if I had the money it’s nothin in the world I wouldn’t buy those little ones over there. They know old Diddy’d rather give it to them than have it himself. Hmm? Don’t yall know that?”
His unfocused eyes wavered from Lasharon and the baby to Hely himself. “I said, Don’t Yall Know That,” he repeated, in an amplified and less pleasant tone.
He was staring straight at Hely. Hely was shocked: Geez, he thought, is the old coot so drunk he don’t know I’m not his kid? He stared back with his mouth open.
“Yes, Diddy,” Lasharon whispered, just audible.
Now, using a child for this whole plot really says a lot considering how many interviews Donna has said (unprompted) about how the book totally doesn't relate to her family [ I'll go in depth when I approach interviews and articles ] and how the book starts in her birth year, in an atmosphere she's very used to (the area surrounding her hometown).
“Relax,” said Catfish, sliding up behind Odum and laying a hand upon his shoulder. Catfish’s high spirits were inexhaustible; he was cheerful no matter what happened, and he was unable to understand that not everyone was so resilient.
With a feeble, half-crazed bluster—more pitiable than threatening —Odum swaggered back weakly and cried: “Get your hand off me, nigger.”
Cafish was unperturbed. “Anybody can play like you, brother, not going to have trouble winning that money back. Later on, if you feel like it, come and me over at the Esquire Lounge and maybe we can work out a little something.”
Odum stumbled back against the cinder-block wall. “My car,” he said. His eye was swollen and his mouth was bloody.
Fucking hell, it just keeps on going.
Gum said, in a whisper: “Well, I’ll tell you the truth, what worries me is this nausea I’ve got from the other medicine I’m taking.”
“I hope you told them that this is like to put you in the hospital again. Dragging a poor old crippled lady out of her house—”
Diplomatically, Loyal interrupted: “What kindly trial are you on, maam?”
Gum sopped her bread in the syrup. “Nigger stoled a tractor.”
Farish said: “They’re going to make you go all the way down there? Just for that?"
Does it ever stop? (Yes, when the book ends.)
You never knew where Catfish might pop up: in Niggertown, collecting his uncle’s rents; on a ladder at the courthouse, washing windows; behind the wheel of a taxicab or a hearse.
...
So that was the old lady. E. Cleve. He had not seen her or thought of her in years. When Tribulation caught fire—a fire that lit up the night sky for miles around—Danny’s father and grandmother shook their heads with sly, amused gravity, as if they had known all along that such a house must burn. They could not help but relish the spectacle of “the high and mighty” brought down a notch or two, and Gum resented Tribulation in particular, since as a girl she’d picked cotton in its fields. There was a certain snooty class of white —traitors to their race, said Danny’s father—who regarded white folks down on their luck as no better than the common yard nigger.
. . .
Again he kicked Danny. Danny rolled over on his side in a ball, clutching his knees.
“Is Catfish in on this with you?”
Danny shook his head. He tasted blood in his mouth.
“Because I will. I’ll kill that nigger. I’m on kill the both of you.” Farish opened the passenger door of the Trans Am and slung Danny in by the scruff of his neck.
. . . This is, in fact, written by white southern american woman. Writing about black violence in the american south... Using all the slurs and all that.
“All right,” said Hely, and swung without thinking, and hit the ball crack without even looking at it, hit it so far that even Pem’s jaw dropped as it ew overhead and sailed far far far, straight and undeviating on its path until it crashed, bang: right through the sun-porch window and practically into the lap of his grandmother, who was talking on the telephone—to Hely’s dad, as it turned out. It was a million-to-one shot, impossible: Hely was no good at baseball; he was always the last non-gay or -retarded kid to get picked for a team; never had he hit any ball so high and hard and sure, and the bat had clunked to the ground as he stared in wonder at its clean, pure arc, curving straight for the center panel of his grandma’s glassed-in porch.…
. . . This is starting to get old. And more and more offensive.
The grandsons—startled—gazed at him suspiciously, while the retarded-looking child waved at Dr. Breedlove with enthusiasm. “Hi!” he said.
I'm sorry, I swear I'm trying to let Donna's words speak for her but I just want to kill her.
“I thought you were interested in that, Harriet,” said Adelaide, holding the card out at arm’s length and surveying it with her head to one side. “All those old mummies and cats and things.”
Harriet blurted: “Are you and Mr. Sumner going to be engaged?”
Adelaide—with a distracted air—touched an earring. “Did your grandmother tell you to ask me that?”
Does she think I’m retarded? “No, maam.”
Is this you guys' favourite writer? The "iconic queen of Dark Academia" or whatever the fuck?
The cop was still looking at Eugene as if expecting him to say something.
“My little brother,” he said, wiping a hand over his face. “He’s retarded. I can’t just leave him here by himself.”
“Well, bring him along,” said the cop. “I’ll bet we can find a candy bar for him.”
Does she know a single adjective that isn't offensive?
“I’m going over to the club now,” she said, standing up. “Dad said he’d drop you o at band this morning, Hely. But don’t you go around telling people at school about this. And don’t worry about Harriet. She’s going to be fine. I promise.”
After their mother left, and they heard her car pulling out of the driveway, Pemberton got up and went to the refrigerator and began to grapple around on the top shelf. Eventually he found what he was looking for—a can of Sprite.
“You are so retarded,” he said, leaning back against the refrigerator, pushing the hair out of his eyes. “It’s a miracle they don’t have you in Special Ed.”
...
Silence. Mr. Dial’s appraising, salesman’s gaze roved over the small group of uninterested faces. The church—not knowing what to do with the new school bus—had begun an outreach program, picking up underprivileged white children from out in the country and hauling them in to the prosperous cool halls of First Baptist for Sunday school. Dirty-faced, furtive, in clothing inappropriate for church, their downcast gazes strayed across the door. Only gigantic Curtis Ratliff, who was retarded, and several years older than the rest of the children, goggled at Mr. Dial with open-mouthed appreciation.
...
“Knife fight or something. Can’t remember. Every single one of the Ratliffs has been in the penitentiary for armed robbery or killing somebody except the baby, the little retarded guy.And Hely told me he beat the shit out of Mr. Dial the other day.”
I just sit back and observe.
Harriet (staring bleakly at the sidewalk) was distracted from these thoughts by a gargling noise. Poor retarded Curtis Ratliff—who roamed the streets of Alexandria ceaselessly in the summertime squirting cats and cars with his water pistol—was lumbering across the road towards her. When he saw her looking at him, a wide smile broke across his smashed face.
. . . y i k e s
He was running a nervous hand over his hair (which he wore greased back, in the vanished hoodlum style of his teen years) and gazing out the window at his retarded baby brother, who had just left the apartment and was pestering some black-headed child out on the street. On the door behind him were a dozen dynamite boxes filled with poisonous snakes: timber rattlers, canebrake rattlers, Eastern diamondbacks; cottonmouths and copperheads and—in a box by itself—a single king cobra, all the way from India.
We get it Donna, you're ableist. We got that. Can we move on?
She’d been only fourteen when he was born; she was (he’d said) “the prettiest little coon-ass gal you ever saw.” By coon-ass he meant Cajun, but when Danny was small he’d had a vague idea that Gum was part raccoon—an animal which, with her sunken dark eyes, her sharp face and snaggled teeth and small, dark, wrinkled hands, she indeed resembled.
I can't even say that I think she'd call me a slur cause she already did use a shit ton of them. She just... She could just shut up. Or hire someone to edit the slurs out. i'm just saying, it's pretty easy not to be this bigoted.
“Very good!” said Mr. Dial. Annabel came from a fine family—a fine Christian family, unlike such cocktail-drinking country-club families as the Hulls. Annabel, a champion baton twirler, had been instrumental in leading a little Jewish schoolmate to Christ.
. . . And now forcing religions too.
Beneath this was a decal of an American flag, and the following:
The Jews and its municipalities, which are the Antichrist, have stolen our oil and our Properties. Revelations 18:3. Rev. 18:11–15. Jesus will Unite. Rev. 19:17.
If only I had time to unpack all of that.
3. The Goldfinch (2013)
Let's get this shit over with. I'm sick of these quotes.
“Over and over, I caught myself in mean-spirited thoughts like this, which I did my best to shake. What did I care? Yes, Kotku was a bitch; yes, she was too dumb to pass regular Civics and wore cheap hoop earrings from the drugstore that were always getting caught in things, and yes, even though she was only eighty-one pounds or whatever she still scared the hell out of me, like she might kick me to death with her pointy-toed boots if she got mad enough. (“She a little fighta nigga,” Boris himself had said boastfully at one point as he hopped around throwing out gang signs, or what he thought were gang signs, and regaling me with a story of how Kotku had pulled out a bloody chunk of some girl’s hair—this was another thing about Kotku, she was always getting in scary girl fights, mostly with other white trash girls like herself but occasionally with the real gangsta girls, who were Latina and black.) But who cared what crappy girl Boris liked? Weren’t we still friends? Best friends? Brothers practically?”
“Boris laughed, and threw out some fake-looking gang sign. “Suit yourself, yo,” he said, in his “gangsta” voice (discernible from his regular voice only by the hand gesture and the “yo”)as he got up and roll-walked out. “Nigga gotz to eat.”
WHEN BORIS SHOWED UP at the door around half an hour later, I tried to tell him about the visit from Mr. Silver, but though he listened, a little, mainly he was furious at Kotku for flirting with some other boy, this Tyler Olowska or whatever, a rich stoner kid a year older than us who was on the golf team.
“Fuck her,” he said throatily while we were sitting on the floor downstairs at my house smoking Kotku’s pot. “She’s not answering her phone. I know she’s with him now, I know it.”
“Come on.” As worried as I was about Mr. Silver, I was even more sick of talking about Kotku. “He was probably just buying some weed.”
“Yah, but is more to it, I know. She never wants me to stay over with her any more, have you noticed that? Always has stuff to do now. She’s not even wearing the necklace I bought her.”
My glasses were lopsided and I pushed them back up on the bridge of my nose. Boris hadn’t even bought the stupid necklace but shoplifted it at the mall, snatching it and running out while I (upstanding citizen, in school blazer) occupied the salesgirl’s attention with dumb but polite questions about what Dad and I ought to get Mom for her birthday. “Huh,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic.
Boris scowled, his brow like a thundercloud. “She’s a whore. Other day? Was pretending to cry in class—trying to make this Olowska bastard feel sorry for her. What a cunt.”
I shrugged—no argument from me on that point—and passed him the reefer.
“She only likes him because he has money. His family has two Mercedes. E class.”
“That’s an old lady car.”
“Nonsense. In Russia, is what mobsters drive. And—” he took a deep hit, holding it in, waving his hands, eyes watering, wait, wait, this is the best part, hold on, get this, would you?—“you know what he calls her?”
“Kotku?” Boris was so insistent about calling her Kotku that people at school—teachers, even—had begun calling her Kotku as well.
“That’s right!” said Boris, outraged, smoke erupting from his mouth. “My name! The kliytchka I gave her. And, other day in the hallway? I saw him ruffle her on the head.””
I refuse to say anything. If you can't see the problem with that...
“The taunting edge in his voice annoyed me. “Honestly? Because—” I started to say Because Kotku is a ho which was only the obvious truth but instead I said: “Look, Hadley’s on Honor Roll and stuff. She’s not going to want to go hang out at Kotku’s.”
“What?” said Boris—spinning back, outraged. “That whore. What’d she say?”
“Nothing. It’s just—”
“Yes she did!” He was charging back to the pool now. “You’d better tell me.”
“Come on. It’s nothing. Chill out, Boris,” I said, when I saw how angry he was. “Kotku’s tons older. They’re not even in the same grade.”
“That snub-nosed bitch. What did Kotku ever do to her?”
“Chill out.” My eye landed on the vodka bottle, illumined by a clean white sunbeam like a light saber. He’d had way too much to drink, and the last thing I wanted was a fight. But I was too drunk myself to think of any funny or easy way to get him off the subject.”
You are listening to: Tastes Like Internalized Misogyny by Donna Tartt
“In the end, it was she who spoke first. “At any rate.” Resolutely she dashed a tear from her eye while I flailed about for something to say. “He had mentioned you not three days before he died. He was engaged to be married. To a Japanese girl.”
“No kidding. Really?” Sad as I was, I couldn’t help smiling, a little: Andy had chosen Japanese as his second language precisely because he had such a thing for fanservice miko and slutty manga girls in sailor uniform. “Japanese from Japan?”
“Indeed. Tiny little thing with a squeaky voice and a pocketbook shapedlike a stuffed animal. Oh yes, I met her,” she said with a raised eyebrow.
“Andy translating over tea sandwiches at the Pierre. She was at the funeral, of course—the girl—her name was Miyako—well. Different cultures and all that, but it’s true what they say about the Japanese being undemonstrative.”
... Fetishization of people of Asian descent. How original. /s
HADLEY, THE TALKATIVE LETTER-JACKET girl who sat by me in American history, wrinkled her nose when I asked about Boris’s older woman. “Her?” she said. “Total slut.” Hadley’s big sister, Jan, was in the same grade with Kyla or Kayleigh or whatever her name was. “And her mother, I heard, is a straight-up hooker. Your friend better be careful he doesn’t get some disease.”
“Well,” I said, surprised at her vehemence, though maybe I shouldn’t have been. Hadley, an army brat, was on the swim team and sang in the school choir; she had a normal family with three siblings, a Weimaraner named Gretchen that she’d brought over from Germany, and a dad who yelled if she was out past her curfew.
“I’m not kidding,” said Hadley. “She’ll make out with other girls’ boyfriends—she’ll make out with other girls—she’ll make out with anybody. Also I think she does pot.”
“Oh,” I said. None of these factors, in my view, were necessarily reasons to dislike Kylie or whatever, especially since Boris and I had wholeheartedly taken to smoking pot ourselves in the past months. But what did bother me— a lot—was how Kotku (I’ll continue to call her by the name Boris gave her, since I can’t now remember her real name) had stepped in overnight and virtually assumed ownership of Boris.”
B I P H O B I A
Andy and I, in elementary school, had become friends under more or less traumatic circumstances: after we’d been skipped ahead a grade because of high test scores. Everyone now appeared to agree that this had been a mistake for both of us, though for different reasons. That year—bumbling around among boys all older and bigger than us, boys who tripped us and shoved us and slammed locker doors on our hands, who tore up our homework and spat in our milk, who called us maggot and faggot and dickhead (sadly, a natural for me, with a last name like Decker)—during that whole year (our Babylonian Captivity, Andy called it, in his faint glum voice) we’d struggled along side by side like a pair of weakling ants under a magnifying glass: shin-kicked, sucker-punched, ostracized, eating lunch huddled in the most out-of-the-way corner we could find in order to keep from getting ketchup packets and chicken nuggets thrown at us.
Oh, sweet /s
“Hey, manito, you taking off?” he said, leaning down and sticking his head in the window of the cab. “You gotta send us a picture for downstairs!” Down in the basement, where the doormen changed into their uniforms, there was a wall papered with postcards and Polaroids from Miami and Cancun, Puerto Rico and Portugal, which tenants and doormen had sent home to East Fifty- Seventh Street over the years.
“That’s right!” said Goldie. “Send us a picture! Don’t forget!”
“I—” I was going to miss them, but it seemed gay to come out and say so. So all I said was: “Okay. Take it easy.”
“You too,” said Jose, backing away with his hand up. “Stay away from them blackjack tables.”
I swear this was published in 2013.
Instead I’d spent a lot of time wishing he was a cooler dog, a border collie or a Lab or a rescue maybe, some smart and haunted pit mix from the shelter, a scrappy little mutt that chased balls and bit people—in fact almost anything but what he actually was: a girl’s dog, a toy, completely gay, a dog I felt embarrassed to walk on the street. Not that Popper wasn’t cute; in fact, he was exactly the kind of tiny, prancing fluffball that a lot of people liked—maybe not me but surely some little girl like the one across the aisle would find him by the road and take him home and tie ribbons in his hair?
I- Apparently, it's gay to have a dog.
“Maybe they did think of it. Why else have the gun back there?”
“I think we had a narrow miss, is what I think—”
“There was one car pulled up front, scared Shirley and me,” said Gyuri, “while you were all in there, two guys, we thought we were in the shit but was only two gays, French guys, looking for restaurant—”
“—but no one in the back, thank God, I got Grozdan on the floor and cuffed him to radiator,” Cherry was saying. “Ah, but—!” he held up the felt- wrapped package—“first. This. For you.”
Let's just...
Platt winced. “I’ve seen cats that swam better than Andy. I mean, quite frankly, Andy was just about the clumsiest kid I ever saw that wasn’t out-and- out spastic or retarded... good God, you ought to have seen him on the tennis court, we used to joke about entering him in the Special Olympics, he would have swept every event.
Y'know, everytime I think it can't get worse, it fucking does.
“Mister!” He laughed fondly. “I love a polite kid. They don’t make many like you any more. You Jewish, Theodore?”
“No, sir,” I said, and then wished I’d said yes.
“Well, tell you what. Anybody from New York, in my book they’re an honorary Jew. That’s how I look at it. You ever been to Canarsie?”
“No, sir.”
...
I was on good terms with all Hobie’s moving-and-storage guys. Most of them were New York City Irish, lumbering, good-natured guys who hadn’t quite made it into the police force or the fire department—Mike, Sean, Patrick, Little Frank (who was not little at all, the size of a refrigerator)—but there were also a couple of Israeli guys named Raviv and Avi, and—my favorite—a Russian Jew named Grisha. (“ ‘Russian Jew’ contradiction in terms,” he explained, in a lavish plume of menthol smoke. “To Russian mind anyway. Since ‘Jew’ to antisemite mind is not the same as true Russian—Russia is notorious of this fact.”)
. . .
“Why what?”
“Why the hell did you take it?”
Boris blinked, a bit self-righteously. “Because you have Jewish Mafiya coming to your house, is why!”
“No, that’s not why.”
... Okay...
“Right.” It being my business to notice such things, I’d already noticed Boris’s wristwatch—Swiss, retailing for maybe fifty thousand, a European playboy’s watch—too flashy for my taste but extremely restrained compared to the jewel-set hunks of gold and platinum I’d seen at his club. There was, I saw, a blue Star of David tattooed on the inside of his forearm.
“What’s that?” I said.
He held up his wrist for me to inspect. “IWC. A good watch is like cash in the bank. You can always pawn it or put it up in emergency. This is white gold but looks like stainless. Better to have watch that looks less expensive than it really is.”
“No, the tattoo.”
“Ah.” He pushed up his sleeve and looked at his arm regretfully—but I wasn’t looking at the tattoo any more. The light wasn’t great in the car but I knew needle marks when I saw them. “The star you mean? Is long story.”
“But—” I knew better than to ask about the marks. “You’re not Jewish.”
“No!” said Boris indignantly, pushing his sleeve back down. “Of course not!”
“Well then, I guess the question would be why...”
“Because I told Bobo Silver I was Jewish.”
“What?”
“Because I wanted him to hire me! So I lied.”
“No shit.”
“Yes! I did! He came by Xandra’s house a lot—snooping up and down the street, smelling for something rotten, like maybe your dad wasn’t dead—and one day I made up my nerve to talk to him. Offered myself to work. Things were getting out of hand—at school there was trouble, some people had to go to rehab, others got expelled—I needed to cut ties with Jimmy, see, do something else for a while. And yes, my surname is all wrong but Boris, in Russia, is the first name of many Jews so I thought, why not? How will he know? I thought the tattoo would be a good thing—to convince him, you know, I was ok. Had a guy do it who owed me a hundred bucks. Made up big sad story, my mother Polish Jew, her family in concentration camp, boo hoo hoo—stupid me, I did not realize that tattoos were against the Jewish law. Why are you laughing?” he said defensively. “Someone like me—useful to him, you know? I speak English, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian. I am educated. Anyhow, he knew damn well I wasn’t Jew, he laughed in my face, but he took me on anyway and that was very kind of him.”
I'm just gonna end the quotes with that one above.
4. Interviews, Posts, Articles and the Southern Gothic essay
Now that we're done with that, whatever in the Bunny Corcoran that was... Let's get to the fun parts. Just kidding, the fun part will be when I finish this post and stop having to read things Donna said.
Interview 1. Donna Tartt for The John Adams Institute in 1993
Around 1:05:50 is when she starts talking about how racism is gone in the American South, and its only the American North dealing with it. She talks about segregation while growing up and how it doesn't exist anymore in the South. That interviews happened just a year after 1992 Los Angeles Riots. And considering the existence Sundown Towns... And last year protests (2020)... And quite literally the number of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people who get murdered daily, not only in the US but all over the fucking world... Yeah, Donna doesn't seem to know jack shit.
Interview 2. A Talent to Tantalise
Can we all praise Katharine Viner for not getting as angry as I did? And also for a great article/interview. It's a great glimpse into Donna and how her real life gets mixed into her books (and her reluctance to see it).
Interview 3. The Esquire's The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s' Most Decadent College
I've been waiting for this one. Remember above when I said I'd go more in depth on why I have a lot of opinions on Donna and her relationships in Bennington? Here's why. And oh boy (genderneutral) does The Esquire provides us with info. Going into Donna's friends, past letters and their memories, we get a greater glimpse of the so-called "pure fiction" and "made up" by Tartt herself. It's like eavesdropping on their past.
Let's start.
DONNA TARTT, CLASS OF ’86; WRITER; INTERVIEWED IN THE BENNINGTON VOICE, OCTOBER 28, 1992: Tell me something, I heard that Bennington requires SAT scores now, is that true? . . . Because I wouldn’t have been there if they had required them when I applied. I think I got in on a short story I sent in. Nobody I know would have been there if they had required SAT scores. That was part of the reason I went to Bennington. . . . [E]verybody there was like the oddly gifted person who made bad grades and hung out in the parking lot.
Sounds familiar? Richard's view of Hampden was pretty similar, almost identical. I'll carry on with it though, let's not get hung up here.
AMY HERSKOVITZ: In hindsight, we were a cold group of people, though in my head we were just terrified. There were a lot of references to Get the Guests from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We’d go after people.
BRET EASTON ELLIS: Looking back, I realize I was popular. At eighteen, I had a handsomeness, and I was kind of groomed, and I was kind of sexy, and I was inundated with date requests and people wanting to take my picture. But inside I was a wreck. And I was alienated because I was a writer, because I was gay. And then there was my crystal--meth addiction. In retrospect, it’s like, Why were you so fucking depressed? It was awesome! Still, people were throwing themselves at me. I had girlfriends, I had boyfriends. I really got around.
NICHOLAS DELBANCO, LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE FACULTY, 1966–85: Back then, God help us, it was a badge of dishonor not to have slept with your professor.
Not comparing this with TSH, it's just bloody questionable if you ask me. Well, also, Julian and Henry.
JONATHAN LETHEM: There was the sense that people were playing dress-up, faking it until it became real. I saw the classics clique crossing Commons dressed up like they were at Oxford and I thought, Oh, that’s what you’re making yourself into.
Reminds you of any fictional classics clique?
BRET EASTON ELLIS: Donna and I were set up on a blind date that fall by our roommates, who hated us and thought we were uptight enough to hang out with each other. So we’d have something to talk about, I put in her mailbox a couple of stories I’d written that Less than Zero would be based on. And she put in mine a story that wasn’t The Secret History but was something in that vein. There was no murder, but it was the world of The Secret History, that milieu, those characters—Claude Fredericks and his classics students.
Just saying...
NICHOLAS DELBANCO: A strange fellow, Claude Fredericks. He dropped out of Harvard because he refused to take the swim test or something like that, but he was a genuinely learned person, an autodidact. Knew Latin, Greek, Japanese. Punctilious in his self--presentation. And he had an avant-garde printing press, quite famous at the time, called Banyan Press. It published people like Gertrude Stein and the poet Jimmy Merrill, who’d been Claude’s lover early on.
Julian, anyone? Cause it gets more uncanny
MAURA SPIEGEL: Claude was my advisor when I was a student at Bennington. I had an appointment with him, and I was waiting outside his office. The door opened and out stepped this beautiful young man with curly blond hair. And the first thing I heard Claude say was “Not, do only what is necessary. Only do what is necessary.” And I just thought, What is going on? As my advisor, he had to write these little comments to me, and he said I was a very intelligent girl. I remember that the word intelligent somehow had this negative quality coming from it.
Compare that with the following scene from The Secret History:
I suppose I’d gone to see Julian in order to revive my flagging assurance, in hopes he would make me feel as certain as I had that first day. And I am fairly sure he would have done just that if only I had made it in to see him. But as it happened, I didn’t get to talk to him at all. Stepping onto the landing outside his office, I heard voices in the hall and stopped.
It was Julian and Henry. Neither of them had heard me come up the stairs. Henry was leaving; Julian was standing in the open door. His brow was furrowed and he looked very somber, as if he were saying something of the gravest importance. Making the vain, or rather paranoid, assumption that they might be talking about me, I took a step closer and peered as far as I could risk around the corner.
Julian finished speaking. He looked away for a moment, then bit his lower lip and looked up at Henry.
Then Henry spoke. His words were low but deliberate and distinct. “Should I do what is necessary?”
To my surprise, Julian took both Henry’s hands in his own. “You should only, ever, do what is necessary,” he said.
What, I thought, the hell is going on? I stood at the top of the stairs, trying not to make a sound, wanting to leave before they saw me but afraid to move.
To my utter, utter surprise Henry leaned over and gave Julian a quick little businesslike kiss on the cheek. Then he turned to leave, but fortunately for me he looked over his shoulder to say one last thing; I crept down the stairs as quietly as I could, breaking into a run when I was at the second landing and out of earshot.
And this, from the interview:
MILES BELLAMY: Has anyone described Claude’s office? No? Oh my God. Well, first of all, it was hard to find. It was in Commons, at the top of this sort of secret staircase that was outside the building and led only to his office. So you’d climb this tall flight of stairs, and walk in, and there’d be these exquisite flowers, Japanese flowers—I don’t know how or where he got them—in a vase, and everything was polished, beautiful. You’d sit across from him, and he’d serve you tea, and you really felt like you were in the inner sanctum.
Now, I'm fairly aware that most of us were already (I think?) aware that Julian was based off Claude. It's been debated, possibly fully proved by this whole thing by The Esquire and also dedications on Donna's books. It's known to some degree, as well, that Claude and Donna did not talk for a while after TSH was published for the very (suspected) reason that Julian was Claude. But I just wanted to draw the similarities once more.
PAULA POWERS: All I knew about Claude Fredericks was that he was having an affair with his student, this good-looking older guy, very serious, very passionate about classics.
I think this is when I should make the point that it was heavily implied in the book that Julian was grooming Henry. It was quite explicit in the hints.
TODD O’NEAL: Donna was not part of our Greek tutorials. The courses she took with Claude anyone who signed up could take. Claude adored certain women, but he was also homosexual and had a very, let’s say, classical aesthetic or hierarchy, which prizes maleness and male beauty. So Donna only knew him in a limited way. She did, how-ever, know Paul McGloin, because they were lovers. Now, Paul was a bit eccentric, not a bad thing at Bennington—a virtue, in fact. He wasn’t precisely a scholar, but he was drawn to a scholarly way of life. And Claude, I think, embodied for him an image of what college should be—Balliol or All Souls in 1843. Paul often used Victorianisms when he spoke or wrote. I remember when he first mentioned Donna. He said, “Who was that charming southern girl in the Homer class?” And Claude said, “You mean Donna Tartt? She’s the only tart I have with three t’s.”
And here we have my last point on Claude and my first on Donna and Paul. Claude and Julian's lack of women in class (yes, I'm aware of Camilla being in the class but it's also never said that no woman ever took Claude's class) is the very last thing to make it so clear of how obvious the similarities were.
Now, onto Donna and Paul McGloin. Up above, I made a comment about how there is actual real life basis for Camilla and Charles' relationship. I'm not saying either of them is the character, like I did with Claude, because I think Tartt spread herself through multiple characters in the TSH Classics Clique.
PAULA POWERS: Speculating on Donna and Paul’s relationship was a Bennington pastime for years. Every Bennington person knows every intimate detail about every other Bennington person, so to be a sexual enigma was an accomplishment unique to her. As Ian Gittler said, “If flaunting your sexuality is cheap, this school is in a constant closing sale.”
As Richard did with Charles and Camilla's for months.
TODD O’NEAL: Paul and Donna weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. They were boyfriend and boy. She had a uniform. Black loafers, khaki pants—boys’ pants, not girls’—J. Press–type button-down, necktie, blue blazer with brass buttons, and hair in this funky little asexual bob. She looked like she came straight out of an English university. She and Paul were like Oxonian homosexuals or something. I once asked him, “What kind of relationship do you have?” And he said, “Well, that’s very funny, because she wants me to call her ‘my lad.’ ”
Donna's liking to the now called DA aesthetic can be referenced here and also how she described TSH Classics Clique's style many times.
DONNA TARTT, LETTER TO JONATHAN LETHEM, DATED JANUARY 24, 1983 (DURING WINTER BREAK): I am now in Washington with The Man [Paul McGloin]. We have a nice little apartment in an old townhouse near Capitol Hill and all is well. . . . The raciest thing that’s happened to us was when we overheard a museum guard in the National Gallery mutter, “More faggots” as we walked into the room. (I was wearing a baggy sweater and trousers, no makeup, and my customary shapeless gray tweed coat. Perhaps I did look like a boy. . . .) It pleased Paul no end.
No comments.
TODD O’NEAL: Matt didn’t like Donna. I liked her to the degree that I knew her, but I found her evasive, a bit impenetrable. And, of course, Matt and Paul and I were all seniors. The truth is, I didn’t think too deeply about her until her book came out years later.
Also reminds me of Richard's relationship with the TSH Clique for most of the book.
LISA FEDER: Bennington had something called NRT, Non-Resident Term. The school couldn’t afford to heat itself during the winter and so it shut down. You went out into the world and got an internship or job. I spent my freshman NRT at the switchboard at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. That’s where all the Bennington punk rockers worked.
Reminds anyone of Richard halfway freezing to death?
BRET EASTON ELLIS: The book was perfectly formed. The writing was perfect. The only note I ever gave Donna was “You have a college-age male protagonist who’s not noticing women or men or anything. That’s unrealistic.” I will never forget her expression. Donna has a stare, okay? She stared at me. Silent, staring daggers.
Funny how the book ended up quite creepy with the male gaze and obsession.
LAWRENCE “LARRY” DAVID: I have to say, Bret was very good at getting straight guys to sleep with him. They all wanted to be writers, and he was very charming. So he could convince them to, like, give it a try.
Oh. Not gonna say anything about Bret cause it's not about him, but seems like this does remind Francis in away.
JONATHAN LETHEM, FROM “ZELIG OF NOTORIETY”: Every person I recalled from our time at Bennington seemed reworked in [Donna’s] pages, except I saw no spot for myself—unless, as I joked to my girlfriend, it was as the murdered Vermont farmer, a character so beneath the regard of the book’s characters that he barely registers as human.
But, y'know... Donna says she made it all up. Even though everyone who knew her denies.
SARI RUBINSTEIN: I cherish The Secret History because it saves that time of my life. I’ll have it forever because of that book.
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. When it came out, Claude and Matt and I got endless calls. Everybody was saying, “Oh, did you know Donna just wrote a book about Claude and you all? And Claude is Julian and Matt is Bunny and you’re Henry.”
I rest my case on whether it's fiction or not.
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. I was kind of a horrible bounder, though in my case it was never intentional. A funny thing. Bunny was actually what everyone called Margaret, Paul’s first girlfriend—the girlfriend before Donna, a cranberry heiress. Some folks thought it odd that my character’s name should’ve been taken from Paul’s old flame. But I always thought the name came from the critic Edmund Wilson. Bunny was his nickname, too.
There's no way to even question it. Which, yeah. Not the main point of this post but still.
MATT JACOBSEN: I was living in California in 1985. And lo and behold, Donna calls me in my little slum apartment. I immediately ask, “How did you get my number?” She says, “Your mother gave it to me.” And then she starts asking me questions. I realized later it was her wanting to know, How would Bunny answer this? I just said, “Donna, I’ve got to go,” and hung up.
. . .
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.
I seriously need to shut up and get to the Charles and Camilla point, but I'm getting there, promise.
TODD O’NEAL: No, the Montblancs were true. But it was a piece of accidentalia that Donna seized on and used in a pointed way. The only time I heard Claude’s voice in the entire novel was when Julian said, “I hope you’re ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime.” That’s something Claude did say. But Donna’s Julian is Claude through a glass darkly. Claude considered it a betrayal—not a personal betrayal so much as a betrayal of his teachings. He wouldn’t talk to Donna for years.
As I mentioned, Claude not talking to Donna for years.
DONNA TARTT, INTERVIEWED IN THE BENNINGTON VOICE, OCTOBER 28, 1992: Richard is actually a very skewed character. . . . His sexuality is kind of weird. He’s so paranoid about where he comes from, and that’s a large part of the paranoia of the book, his fear of being found out.
That reminds me of Bret never coming out and also Bret and his father.
TODD O’NEAL: The incestuous twins, though, I don’t know where Donna got them.
DONNA TARTT, LETTER TO JONATHAN LETHEM, DATED FEBRUARY 25, 1983: 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. Our landlords are minor and despicable Nazis, and even though we were as pure of incest as babes in arms, by proving ourselves innocent of that we proved ourselves guilty (in their eyes) of Immoral Conduct… [Paul] hit upon the very excellent plan of offering… extra money for rent. Worked like a charm.
I wish I was kidding about this. This is where the Charles and Camilla incest came from. Also, Donna comparing some very random stuff "Nazism" is really not it. It's nothing compared to Nazism, she's just an over the top drama queen.
MATT JACOBSEN: Ten years after Bennington, not long after The Secret History came out, I met Paul at his office in New York. He said that Donna had lived with him while he was at Harvard Law and she was writing, and then dumped him like a hot potato when the book was accepted. He was very wounded talking about her. I long felt that Donna was the Yoko Ono of the Greek class. If she couldn’t be part of our tight group, she would destroy it. And that’s what happened. Our friendships fell apart.
Essay. Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine by Donna Tartt
I believe the essay speaks for itself on who Donna was as a child, how she remembers it, how she was raised and it's also easy to draw similarities between her family and Harriet's in The Little Friend as mentioned in Katharine Viner's Interview.
Article 1. Salon's Article on The Goldfinch and it's disgraceful racial politics
In the Pulitzer-winning novel, people of color read like wishful caricatures. Why isn't anyone talking about it?
Joy Castro put it in better words than I ever could, considering how I'm unable to talk about this without getting riled up.
Article 2. The secret herstory: what happened to Donna Tartt’s women?
Goes through most of the female characters in Tartt's novels
Post 1. Pauline's (antigonick) on Donna's racism from an ask
I agree entirely with what has been said on this answer. Although, I am not white nor european, I do must add that I have always seen the possibility of (and that's just me speculating and analyzing) Richard being a POC, who was initially going to be framed by the Classics Clique. That's how it sounds like to me in the book. I just wanted to make that small addendum.
Post 2. Pauline (antigonick) on Judy Poovey and how she was underused
I again, agree entirely. Highly suggest a read.
Post 3. Will's (swordatsunset) essay on Dark Academia
This sums up the final point I wanted to make. It's not enough that we gloss over Donna's bigotry like it's nothing, the Dark Academia community is also extremely bigoted and white. I mentioned this before on my Brazilian Literature Masterpost, which I make to motivate people to diversify their readings and so people would stop using the useless, bullshit excuse of not knowing what to read or that there isn't any books from outside the US/Europe they ever heard of. And yet, the reluctance people had to see it, how took ages for it to gain the slightest of attention (I'm extremely grateful for all the help from my friends for the constant support with it). It's because the community doesn't give a fuck. Me and so many other POC blogs are trying so fucking hard to speak up and let our cultures bleed into the Dark Academia aesthetic, and yet some people are so reluctant to accept it outside of our little circle.
4. Final Words & Tags:
So, I'm not sorry for exposing the obvious about little miss perfect, "goddess of Dark Academia", the DA prissy princess or whatever the fuck you'd rather call Donna Tartt. The time for someone to fully write on it, providing quotes and interviews has long passed and I only did it cause I'm extremely fucking pissed about it. i'm not saying cancel Donna Tartt or anything but know who you praise. You can read her books if you want, you can stan her if you want. No one is stopping you. I'm just laying the cards on the table and interpreting them for you. Do with the information what you will. But just know... Fuck your white, north american and european centric fucking academia. I'm not going to tolerate being pushed aside and ignored, I'm tired of it. So, if you're mad at this whole post, good. I'm here to do my best to tear your stupid white washed academia, and I like to think this was a damn good first blow.
I'm sorry about my extreme cursing, though. Can't really help it.
With that said, thank you for reading and thank you for the following people for helping me in this journey:
@antigonick (thank you for letting me use your answers to those asks, i highly appreciate it)
@swordatsunset (also thank you for letting me use your essay, and thank you for making it in the first place)
@darkravenclaw (thanks for supporting me with the Brazilian Lit Masterpost and this one, I appreciate your support and you so fucking much. love you <3)
@blurryghostt @millestudies (i love you two <3 and i hope you don't mind the tag and all)
