Less Than the Secret History of the Fortress of Zero Solitude

June 26, 2019 11:05 AM

Fall, 1982. A new freshman class arrives at arty, louche, and expensive Bennington College. Among the druggies, rebels, heirs, and posers: future Gen X literary stars Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem.
posted by vunder (44 comments total)

This GenXer is going to send them back to the Boomers, where they belong (all having been born in 1963 or 1964).
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:13 AM on June 26, 2019 [8 favorites]

I went to college that same fall and always thought of myself as a boomer.
posted by octothorpe at 11:21 AM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I went to college in fall of 1983 and am definitely culturally a GenXer. My spouse was born on 12/31/64, so technically the last Boomer, but culturally a hardcore GenXer. We have First Wave playing in our cars all the time.

On-topic for the post, I also think of those writers as definitive GenX writers, even though they annoy me a lot of the time.
posted by matildaben at 11:26 AM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Perhaps by releasing American Psycho in 1991 and The Secret History in 1992, meant for early-mid-20-year-olds of the time, it got more tied to Gen X. That's the impression this old-millenial always had anyway.
posted by supercres at 11:26 AM on June 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

Yeah, they're all almost 60!

But supercres is right that Secret History was released right in the middle of Gen X college-and-early-adulthood and was clearly aimed at that audience. (I have a lot of residual fondness for Secret History in particular and am not ashamed to admit I reread it recently, but, my god, it would be embarrassing for someone who first came to it in their thirties to find it "deep." It is a tremendously adolescent/early 20s book.)
posted by praemunire at 11:34 AM on June 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

(One of the things that seemed "off" to me about SH when I read it for the first time was all the hippies on campus. That signals "boomer" more than anything. Where there were and presumably always will be various countercultural groups, there weren't a recognizable contingent of "hippies" on most American campuses in 1992.)
posted by praemunire at 11:35 AM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Perhaps by releasing American Psycho in 1991 and The Secret History in 1992, meant for early-mid-20-year-olds of the time, it got more tied to Gen X

Something like that, I think, since the book the generation was named for was published in 1991.

(Also, Coupland later wrote a piece clarifying he meant the term as more descriptive of an attitude toward society and culture, and not merely an age marker.)
posted by dnash at 11:36 AM on June 26, 2019

I went to college that same fall and never thought of myself as a boomer. Technically schmecknically. Of course generation X's real meaning is cultural not some stupid marketing straight jacket age cohort.
posted by Pembquist at 11:36 AM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

First of all, everyone knows that Generation X doesn't exist, you are either a Boomer or a Millennial. It's like astrology, you can pick which one represents you.

What we should be talking about is how many farmers were sacrificed so that we would still be talking about Bret Easton Ellis In 2019.
posted by betweenthebars at 11:40 AM on June 26, 2019 [9 favorites]

Where there were and presumably always will be various countercultural groups, there weren't a recognizable contingent of "hippies" on most American campuses in 1992.)

I took the novel to be set in the 80's, when there was, at least, a Grateful Dead renaissance on at least some campuses.

This is consistent with The Secret History :

"Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn't know the words to "Sugar Magnolia.” "
posted by thelonius at 11:42 AM on June 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

there weren't a recognizable contingent of "hippies" on most American campuses in 1992. ...In my experience, New England in the 80s and 90s was absolutely filled with what you can credibly think of as hippies (and I presume that Donna Tartt, transfer student from Ole Miss, and her affected Classics friends would think of them that way). Young people with tie-dyed clothing, long hair and or dreadlocks, using exotic psychedelics, wearing food not bombs t-shirts, playing hackey sack and ultimate frisbee, joining unitarian churches, going to/working at Quaker summer camps, eating carob from the food coop.
posted by vunder at 11:43 AM on June 26, 2019 [31 favorites]

This is a good gossipy read, half-sordid and half-fascinating. It comes off as a bunch of people who never quite got over college times and all enjoy talking to others about their connections to Donna Tartt (and who wouldn’t!).
posted by sallybrown at 11:44 AM on June 26, 2019 [8 favorites]

I remember Bennington was the #1 most expensive school in the country in the mid-'80s -- when you're a high school senior, you've got Fiske's College Guide memorized -- and I never could figure out what made it so special. Thanks to this FPP, I've now got a good idea. It was for kids who wanted to be somewhere where the entire universe would be cool, talented people their own age, separated from the rest of the world. It's probably no surprise it attracted so many big-city students, whereas I was from Podunk Nowhere and couldn't wait to go somewhere bigger.

There's a good article about the dB's, an R.E.M.-era southern post-punk/power-pop band, written by Jonathan Lethem in the latest Oxford American magazine. He has one reminiscence about life at Bennington:

I remember like it was yesterday the day in the sun on the lawn outside the off-campus house where I sat with my roommate Mark and smoked pot and sprawled on the grass listening to that dB’s tape, jangly worldly punky teenage pop, on a paint-spattered boom box running off D batteries.

I remember that one of the coolest, most seemingly indifferent and unattainably stylishly punked-out girls, who lived in that off-campus house, wandered over and saw us and said, “Oh, I get it, you’re those kind of brainy boys who listen to bands like the dB’s.”

P.S. There were tons of latter-day hippies on college campuses in the mid-to-late 1980s. Thank Atari-Wave Generation X, not Nintendo-Wave.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 11:44 AM on June 26, 2019 [9 favorites]

My aunt (who owned a bookstore) gave me a copy of "The Secret History" when it came out. I was sixteen. It was, unabashedly, my favorite book in high school. Even then I knew it was a guilty pleasure.

When I went to apply to colleges, I determined I would only go to a weird, small northern liberal arts college. I actually toured and interviewed at Bennington (with an actual copy of The Secret History in my backpack at the time, for, like, the fourth reread), which I found anticlimactic. They let me in, too, but evidently I did not glean the important details from all of those novels about rich kids in weird colleges, because of course, I could not go to any of them, because of course, there was not enough financial aid in the world to cover me, and, I ended up at a state university, bitter that I never got to live out my Tartt-ish collegiate fantasy.

This would, incidentally, end way more embarrassing than the realization of how silly The Secret History actually was (upon rereads).
posted by thivaia at 11:52 AM on June 26, 2019 [7 favorites]

an R.E.M.-era southern post-punk/power-pop band,

Peter Holsapple from The dBs wound up as a touring member of Hootie And The Blowfish
/gotta eat
posted by thelonius at 11:53 AM on June 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

NANCY DOHERTY, WIDOW OF JOE MCGINNISS: I remember Joe reading Bret’s work and being like, “Holy shit, this is incredible.”

Ah, finally, someone to blame.
posted by supercres at 11:56 AM on June 26, 2019 [5 favorites]

The Secret History was a book that my husband and I shared very early on in our relationship (it may have been something I gifted to him in the first care package I sent him...) and for decades we've debated the casting in the movie. *sidenote* I've always argued for a young Fred Gwynne as Henry *end* However, GOOD GOD DAMN is Matt Jacobson everything I ever envisioned Bunny to be. I kind of feel like the curtain has been pulled away and I'm seeing the wizard.
posted by librarianamy at 12:02 PM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

For the record: I love The Secret History, and I don't care if it's a guilty pleasure or sophomoric or kind of ridiculous on a later re-read, or what have you. But I was in my early 20's when it came out and I read it, I admit.
posted by thelonius at 12:05 PM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

I was in (expensive) college in New England in the year SH was published. Can hardly remember seeing a tie-dyed shirt the whole time, though I can't believe there were none. Hackey-sack and ultimate were just random entertainment, not associated with any particular political or cultural positions (if anything, they would tend towards what they were calling "normcore" a few years ago). Psychedelic music? Yeah, no. The few protesting, proto-food-security types were called "crunchy" or "granola," primarily noted for wearing Birks. Given the speed at which youth culture changes, I can readily believe it was different ten years earlier (*), but you would not have a large, recognizable subculture of long-haired people in tie-dye drumming and weaving mandalas, as described in the book.

(*) I'm not saying this is an inaccuracy, based on when the book seems to be set, but it gives it more of a boomer feel.
posted by praemunire at 12:10 PM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

However, GOOD GOD DAMN is Matt Jacobson everything I ever envisioned Bunny to be. I kind of feel like the curtain has been pulled away and I'm seeing the wizard

Excuse me, the ghost of Philip Seymour Hoffman wants to have a fist-fight with you.
posted by praemunire at 12:12 PM on June 26, 2019 [7 favorites]

Everyone I've ever met who went to Bennington had an acute superiority complex, and zero self-awareness about it. In nearly all cases, there was no basis for it.
posted by sensate at 12:16 PM on June 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

This whole thing ends up making me kind of sad, especially the Lethem/dBs anecdote - it gives a sense of people for whom college (or at least one's late teens/early twenties) was the only meaningful time and the rest of life has been spent marketing it.

Siegfried Sassoon's writing about WWI is a bit similar - he seemed to have thought of his life as relatively vacant before and relatively difficult to direct after, with the war itself as a time of moral and aesthetic clarity and self-formation - but at least that was war, not Bennington.

Sorta-autobiographical literary fiction seems like the most cursed form - eat yourself and go back for seconds and thirds.
posted by Frowner at 12:35 PM on June 26, 2019 [9 favorites]

Young people with tie-dyed clothing, long hair and or dreadlocks, using exotic psychedelics, wearing food not bombs t-shirts, playing hackey sack and ultimate frisbee, joining unitarian churches, going to/working at Quaker summer camps, eating carob from the food coop.

Born 1971, went to college 1989-1993, and um, well, I resemble that remark. We were legion. Where did you think all those Phish fans came from? Also I loved reading The Secret History. As to generations, I think that the writers are late Boomers who are GenX cultural touchstones, the way that many Boomer cultural touchstones (e.g. the Beatles) were themselves Silent Generation.
posted by Daily Alice at 1:09 PM on June 26, 2019 [13 favorites]

It is a tremendously adolescent/early 20s book.

so it is. this is like saying Madame Bovary is a tremendously French book. absolutely true, but if you think it is also bad, or bad for adults to read, or bad for adults to read without issuing a shame status warning, it will have to be for other reasons than this. any reasons, really.

not ashamed to admit I reread it recently, but, my god, it would be embarrassing for someone who first came to it in their thirties to find it "deep." It is a tremendously adolescent/early 20s book.

So much of TSH is about embarrassment and shame and derivative inauthenticity that it's probably inevitable to bring that vocabulary in when talking about it, whatever you mean by it and however serious you are. but embarrassment is maybe the defining adolescent emotion, so it's strange to use that connection in a derogatory way, considering. both embarrassment and adolescence (and pretension) are rich subjects for any number of good and great novels. it's next to impossible to write a really intensely adolescent book for adolescents, and I don't know that anybody should try; nobody with any self-awareness wants to know what they look like in a mirror held that close. they don't like book-length jokes told on them either, usually.

I agree that "deep" is a pretty stupid thing to say about a book, whatever age you are.
posted by queenofbithynia at 1:12 PM on June 26, 2019 [12 favorites]

But what's weird is that because we as a society are fixated on adolescence/college, books that are perfectly good explorations of those times are held up as big symbols by much older people, people who have presumably done some living and thinking in the intervening years.

My feeling is that a lot of those "capture the very feeling of youth" books aren't always especially good as retrospective reads, or at least don't have nearly as much to say to you. There are books about being young that have a great deal to say to people over the long haul and there are books about being young that have a great deal to say in the moment, and it seems to me that as a culture we don't always have a lot of space for long-haul books.
posted by Frowner at 1:22 PM on June 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

Among the druggies, rebels, heirs, and posers: future Gen X literary stars Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem

I'm pleased they were able to live up to the rest of the class.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 1:27 PM on June 26, 2019

Metafilter: It comes off as a bunch of people who never quite got over college times
posted by lalochezia at 1:28 PM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Wait, we don't like Lethem now either?
posted by hototogisu at 1:47 PM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

I was born in 63 and have always considered myself an X-er. Billy Idol's band was the first I'd heard the term and always associated the reference to be at least that early (late 70's).

Of the authors mentioned Lethem is the one whom i've enjoyed.
posted by OHenryPacey at 2:22 PM on June 26, 2019

A close friend from high school went to Bennington, and I used to drive up and visit her a lot. This was in the mid-2000s, so 20 years later than this period, but everything these famous people say about Bennington was still apparently true when I was bumming around there. I remember the End of the World. I remember the druggy-ass kids with rich-ass parents. That's where I was first exposed to cocaine and heroin and chemical compounds that didn't have names, although I just stuck to smoking weed. I was an outsider, but people could be welcoming; I DJd a party once, and the house shook from people jumping to the beat. They could also be infuriatingly unaware of who they were in the world, like when we went to the Friendly's in town and those same rich-ass kids with Coexist bumper stickers kept snickering about people wearing beat-up Patriots jackets, "the latest in townie fashion." There was the son of a famous actor, who seemed to hook up with a different girl every night; he liked to shake your hand and then tell you to smell your fingers.

I applied to get in, twice, and was rejected both times. I couldn't have paid for it anyway, but I remember wishing I'd had access to the kind of social life that everyone got there. It seemed like everything was right there for you, whether it was drugs or a writing professor you call by their first name. It seemed so gratifying.

I was aware of some of their bullshit at the time, but as I get older, it only feels weirder. Reading this article (which I haven't finished yet, because it's long), is frustrating. Rich kids doing rich-kid things and becoming important. They live in such a different world, one where 19 year olds can gently slide into their Upper East Side apartments, playacting at class they know they'll inherit no matter what. I don't want to deny that these are talented writers and artists, because they are, it just feels so excessive, so generous, and so out of touch. I guess that's kind of the point, but Jesus. I hadn't thought about Bennington in a while.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 2:28 PM on June 26, 2019 [15 favorites]

I still like Lethem just fine. I've never read Tartt's book. BEE, and everyone else quoted, at least as far as I got into the piece (not very), could have gone down on a latter-day Titanic and the world would be scarcely the poorer. sensate's line above, "Everyone I've ever met who went to Bennington had an acute superiority complex, and zero self-awareness about it. In nearly all cases, there was no basis for it" sums it up perfectly.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:29 PM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Ohio U still had hippies when I was there 1992-96 and probably still does. I was down there last spring for a quick daytrip visit, walked into a coffeehouse that didn’t even exist when I went there and they were playing the Dead. GET A NEW ALBUM, HIPPIES.

Anyway, I have long been fond of The Secret History and someday they’ll make a movie I can’t stand and I’ll be very sad.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 3:05 PM on June 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

As a Marlboro grad let me be the first to say, fuck Bennington

Practically New Yorkers
posted by French Fry at 3:28 PM on June 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

They live in such a different world, one where 19 year olds can gently slide into their Upper East Side apartments, playacting at class they know they'll inherit no matter what. Yes, though I suppose it's worth noting that Tartt and Lethem at least were not coming from that level of moneyed access (though Lethem certainly had access to plenty of cultural capital).

As you get farther into the piece, you also learn what you might have already surmised about the effect that BEE's rich and disgusting father had on him. I also feel like it's asserting that BEE and Tartt had almost fully formed ideas about how their craft should work at an early age and wanted to express them and influence others, and were willing to do the work. Lethem comes across as an actual adolescent (not in a bad way), self-conscious and still forming his ambitions and processing his experiences and influences then and even still doing so in the present.

TBH, I just really enjoyed the starstudded, name-droppy, sometimes actually funny anecdotes.
posted by vunder at 3:31 PM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Another data point from the west coast of America: not only do we still have hippies, we have multiple generations of post-hippies, escaping not-unscathed from their various communes and urban homesteads. Many of them are very nice people, with access to amazing artisanal agricultural products (and, back in the day, weed).
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 3:50 PM on June 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

Knowing the RoA was basically a narrative of life at Bennington makes the whole novel all the more harrowing and depressing for me. I mean I know BEE loves to splash around in the mud sty of moral bereftness but jfc I still get nightmares about that book and American Psycho.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:52 PM on June 26, 2019

>>there weren't a recognizable contingent of "hippies" on most American campuses in 1992.

>I took the novel to be set in the 80's, when there was, at least, a Grateful Dead renaissance on at least some campuses.

If anything, that's an understatement. The Dead were the top-grossing concert act in 1991, (a snapshot of how many tickets sold and money made is here.) Five years prior, I knew many deadheads in my NE high school.
(and may have even been *cough* mistaken for one.)

The hippy thing is a bit of a derail though, the larger point is being a "hippy" was just a new costume one could try on. Per the article:

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.

Just sub out "classics clique" for "hippies" and "Oxford" for "Berkeley" and you've got the idea.
posted by jeremias at 5:50 PM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

Someday we will realize that, since every discussion about “generations” is like 90% arguing about how everyone is wrong about their definition of what a specific defines a specific “generation”, the concept that cohorts born during the same time in history act a certain way is total horseshit.
posted by sideshow at 5:58 PM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

at now defunct Bradford College in MA 86-9 those who looked and acted like hippies called themselves deadheads.
posted by brujita at 6:04 PM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

the larger point is being a "hippy" was just a new costume one could try on

In the mid-90's, high school kids in Chapel Hill used to hang out at the plaza by the post office downtown. Half of them in hippie drag, half of them in punk drag. It was amusing - 1968 or 1977, 20 to 30 years later. Then, right on goddamn schedule, bell-bottoms came back.
posted by thelonius at 6:07 PM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I don't think that there was an awful lot of sunlight between kids cosplaying as hippies in the eighties and their successors coming in as full-blown trustafarians in the nineties.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:11 PM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I read 'The Secret History' this year, and I got a kick out of it. The characters were often pretentious & annoying, but I could relate to that feeling from back when I was young.

(There's a crossover phase from the end of the boomers born in the early 60's, when the 50's boomers have already taken all the jobs, & then new employment opportunities start to slump in the 80's. Gen X isn't set to a specific start date, it's about a new attitude where getting a steady lifetime job isn't taken for granted).
posted by ovvl at 5:53 PM on June 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

Late to this but: my partner was at Bennington (as a scholarship kid) at exactly the time outlined in the article. She confirmed that Bret Easton Ellis spent the majority of his time doing coke and hanging out in the cafeteria, while Donna Tartt stayed in her room working furiously. That's all.
posted by jokeefe at 10:03 PM on June 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

And, having read through the rest of this thread, I am so so very tired of this Boomer/Gen X/Gen Y/Millennial mongering, which promotes imaginary divisions between people who have never fallen into tidy demographic cultural niches, and who are all pressured by the same social-wide political and economic forces. It always just feels like a marketing stunt taken far too seriously.
posted by jokeefe at 10:08 PM on June 30, 2019