Here he falls under the spell of the charismatic Julian Morrow and his tiny coterie of exquisite upper-class epigones: Henry Winter, a T.S. Tartt's narrator, Richard Papen, is a working class boy from California - not the California of orange groves and swimming pools but a flat, dusty anyplace of tract houses and shopping malls - who manages to procure a scholarship at a progressive Vermont college with more than a passing resemblance to Bennington, the author's alma mater. As one of her characters, the magus-like Greek professor, Julian Morrow (a friend of - predictably - Pound and Eliot, as well as Orwell and Harold Acton), puts it, 'The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to kill.' And that, simply put, is the thesis of The Secret History. These allusions are not only meant to signal Tartt's own seriousness of purpose, her sense of writing in a tradition that extends from classical to modern literature they are also a way of indicating the bonds of a civilization from which her young heroes try to break free, with disastrous results. And Eliot himself even turns up in the form of a lengthy quotation from 'The Waste Land.'.

Also in the cast is a French professor named Laforgue Jules Laforgue, the French Symbolist poet, was one of the most important influences on the early work of (here he is again) T.S. Eliot dedicated 'The Waste Land' to Ezra Pound, 'the better craftsman.' This is pretty heady stuff, and it doesn't stop there.Īmong the collegiate heroes of The Secret History is a young man named Edmund Corcoran, whose nickname, Bunny, inevitably recalls that celebrated man of letters, Edmund 'Bunny' Wilson Wilson's Axel's Castle contains one of the definitive critical appraisals of Eliot. $25ĭONNA TARTT's mellifluous, ambitious first novel, The Secret History, arrives trailing clouds of glorious associations: its dedication is to her 'muse and Maecenas' (the latter was the patron of Horace and Virgil) its acknowledgements thank among others the author's editor, 'il miglior fabbro' - which any English major can tell you is how T.

Julian morrow the secret history