Bennington Revisited

Hey, it's Jen Hatmaker. Here's what I've learned in midlife. Joy isn't the reward you earn after all the work is done. Joy is the work. That's what this new series on For the Love is all about. The sacred, yes. It's choosing delight, rest, and pleasure on purpose. Because saying yes to yourself, that's the thing that finally lets you fill your table with everybody else. Come find your sacred, yes, with me. Follow and listen to For the Love wherever you get your podcasts. See 13 Originals. Okay listeners, our focus, ever agile, ever nimble, is shifting this episode from Brett Eastern Ellis to Donna Tarte, from the origins of Lesson Zero to the origins of the secret history. It's a far more radical shift than might be supposed, so get ready to turn and face the strange. I'm Lily Annelick, and this is once upon a time at Bennington College. Now the Bennington of Donna Tarte, who you should know declined to be interviewed for this podcast, is so unlike the Bennington of Brett Eastern Ellis, it's almost as if she's at a different school altogether, which is why I want you to see Bennington again for the first time. Tarte O'Neill, class of 83 had he graduated, will prove a key figure in both Donna's life and work. Here's Tarte on arriving at Bennington. I landed at the Albany Airport late at night and it was a pitch black moonless night, and I got picked up by a van that had been sent from Bennington. What we started driving through was Troy, New York. Well, Troy, New York at that time looked like Libya after we destroyed it. All I saw was this hideous landscape that seemed like something out of dystopian normal. What I ended up doing was in desperation. I just closed my eyes, so I didn't see anything. I thought, well, I don't have a choice. I'm just going to have to call my parents in the morning and be frank with them until this was a terrible mistake and fly back. Come again and come up with a plan beat. When we got to the campus, the campus was mostly dark. I went into a little office in the barn where some woman checked me in and gave me a key, and I went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, you know, we didn't have curtains on the, I had shutters, which seemed charming and exotic to make. And I threw back the shutters and looked out and the campus was before me. The green was before me. All of a sudden I realized that I got not all wrong. I was here I was in the echoing green of Blake, you know, so I never wanted to leave again. Tonto Niel looks at Bennington with enchanted eyes. Donna Tartz eyes are, I'm Benning, just as bewitched. Here's Richard Paypin, the protagonist of the Secret History, on arriving at the ultra-Beddington-esque Hamden College. So listeners, I'm going to play a snippet from the audiobook of the Secret History, read by Donna, and pay attention to the shadings and nuances and inflections of her line readings. They're revealing in this instance and they'll be revealing throughout the podcast. After all, the Secret History is written in the first person, and Richard is, or such as my intention, a kind of stand-in for Donna herself. When I stepped off the bus after a long anxious night that had begun somewhere in Illinois, it was six o'clock in the morning and the sun was rising over mountains and birches and impossibly green meadows. And to me, daysed with night and no sleep and three days on the highway, it was like a country from a dream. The dormitories weren't even dorms, but white-collabored houses with green shutters, set back from the commons and groves of maple and ash. Those first days before classes started, I spent alone in my whitewashed room in the bright meadows of Hamden. And I was happy in those first days as really I'd never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty. Donna, like Richard, comes to college from college. Richard attended his school in his home state, California, for two years. Donna attended his school in her home state, Mississippi, for one, and from the other side of the country. Richard moves west to east, Donna south to north. And no sooner does she set foot on Bennington's campus than by some curious neatness of fate, she runs into Jonathan Leatham in his street hip, Kangle Cap. In episode one, I had Jonathan read from his nonfiction piece about going to college with Breton Donna, Zellig of notoriety. The bit where he recounts his and his roommate, Mark Norris' first meeting with Donna, the two of them helping her lug her trunk to her dorm. He struck most forcefully by her anachronistic quality. Her frame of reference seems to be from another period, one in which Jay Embarry, the creator of Peter Pan, looms large. He struck with equal force, though, by her southernness, as exaggerated to him as the southernness of the Loonitune's character, Foghorn Leghorn. Jonathan and I discuss. I sort of joke in that Zellig piece about Donna being the first southern accent I've heard after Foghorn Leghorn. I say, I say, boy, so I'm teasing about my own naive "tay" and about, you know, but it's a very real thing because the regionalism was so real and we were hugely conscious of these things and fascinated. Listeners, as you're already aware, Donna and Mark Norris will begin seeing each other. And then Mark Morris will also begin seeing Brick Smith. I took care to establish Donna and Mark as a couple in earlier episodes because I like the idea of Donna and Bricks in a folly attoah. Bricks is a Bennington personage and one with erotic charisma running in every direction and with a famous campus band, Bonda Trotsing, to boot. But the truth is, the romance between Donna and Mark never really catches fire. The romance between Bricks and Mark, on the other hand, does. And will influence Brut unless it's zero, which we'll get into in a later episode. When I interviewed Mark Norris for my Esquire piece, he said this, "I could quote T.S. Eliot and so could Donna. I think that's why we started up. We were a very brief thing. It was finished the first month of school. I wouldn't even call us boyfriend and girlfriend because we didn't sleep together. We fondled around in bed. It was just, it was a little weird." So the Donna Mark liaison is something of a red herring. There's is not a consequential connection. A consequential connection, however, is forged that day. A friendship between Donna and Jonathan. Within weeks, maybe days of being at Bennington, I was in an uneasy but really brilliant and exciting formation of four people. It was me and Donna and Kaelin and Reggie. And there was a little period where that was who I saw and talked with and thought about all the time. In college, those social moments, sometimes you find out if you do the math that it was just months, but it was an overwhelmingly intense one. Katelyn is Katelyn McCaffrey from San Francisco, a photographer. Katelyn will take the author photo of Donna for the Secret History. And Reggie is Reginald Shepard. Black Gay from the Bronx. Here's Jonathan on Reggie. Reggie was not very forthcoming, but I sensed he'd come from a pretty hard background. His journey to Bennington, whatever it was, was going to make, you know, any street cred or, or, or, you know, disadvantage I claimed, look pretty silly. Reggie is also already a serious poet. Reggie wrote deeply esoteric poems full of classical illusions, mythological illusions, but which revealed enormous emotional urgency. He was not just in the, you know, a student body. He was like, oh, that's Reginald Shepard. The way he danced at a party, the way he would spontaneously lecture you about poetry and who among the other students was a real poet or not. He was another Bennington famous person at the time. What really characterized my arrival at that place was that I managed to become like a sidekick to so many of the Bennington famous, so rapidly, you know, like I was like kind of just able to be around the Reggie's and the breads and the Bricks's and Donna. Donna and Katelyn are both Class of '86. Donna and Reggie are both Class of '85, though Donna will graduate with the Class of '86. Reggie was a sophomore as was Donna because of her transfer. I remember this because I was in my own kind of penny-antey way. I was aware that I was gaining the attention of, you know, not other freshmen. Katelyn and I had been taken up. That's what it felt like to me. Paula Powers recalls an encounter with Donna early on that term. The first time I met her is. It was one of the anti-social dining rooms where shy people went. And because I knew Jonathan, I sat down and she was sitting with him. Her hair was sort of down to her shoulders. And I feel like it was sort of feathered a little bit maybe, not in a ferrofossil way, but just very minimal. I think she was wearing like a buttoned-down shirt and she knows her something, like very preppy. Paula's memory of Donna's appearance is confirmed by Photos Mark Norris took of Donna that fall. You can see these photos if you go to my webpage and click on the Esquire Bennington piece. In them, Donna has shoulder-length hair, which is to say, "No-length hair. Hair somewhere in between long and short." Horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and is wearing clothing of the type that Paula just described, basic preppy. She's perhaps a bit on the androgynous side, though only a bit. There's something undecided about her look, non-committal, like she's in a transitional phase, like she shed one guy's but hasn't quite embraced the next. Brett has come to Bennington with his wayfairs, both literal and metaphorical, on. Donna has not. I said at the top of the episode that Donna would be our focus, but it isn't possible to focus on Donna at this stage because she isn't yet in focus. There's a blurriness to her, a fuzziness, a greeniness. She's illegible, if not to herself, to those around her, and maybe to herself too. In short, 18-year-old Donna is as unlike the Donna of today as can be imagined. That Donna, published writer Donna, public figure Donna, has a distinct and assured personal style. The sleek bomb, the Natalie cut suits, the Edwardian dandy shirts and ties, and the most vivid of personas. In fact, so distinct, assured and vivid is this personal style, is this persona, that it's as if she's turned herself into a billboard. Donna Tart, writ large. That's how effectively she projects her sense of self, makes that self visible to others. It is, though, a learned rather than a Nate skill. Unfortunately for us, Donna is a quick study. And her face-formant personality will emerge from the fog with the clarity of detail, an richness of color and texture that'll shock and amaze. Time and effort, though, not just on her part, but on ours as well, is required. The mystery of Donna Tart is a deep one, solving it, that is, making narrative sense of her life and her art, is a process as perilous as it is pleasurable, as intuitive as it is rational. So listeners, I'm preaching patience. Now back to Paula's story about first meeting Donna. We've covered costume. Let's move on to setting. Paula described it as "one of the anti-social dining rooms where shy people went." This means that, A, Donna is a shy person, and B, there's a non-anti-social dining room where the unshied people go. That would be the main dining hall, dominated as we know from the previous episode by Brett and the Brett Ellis Show. Brett, though, has a rival. Again, Paula powers. There was this other guy, Mark Shaw, who was also kind of charismatic and gay, and so he had his own following. So Brett dubbed their table and seen the Mark Shaw show. So there's sort of like two competing committees or shows. Mark Shaw, as you might recall, is the Mark who is not Mark Norris. Mark Shaw is the Mark who, at the Halloween party, dressed as a vampire and fucked up on punch spiked with homemade MDMA. But it's Brick Smith on the neck. That includes his incident in "Walking Across the Lone," his piece for Joe McGinnis' non-fiction workshop. Walking across the lawn becomes a school-wide sensation and has a lot of people seeing red. Mark Shaw seeing red as of all. Now for an aside, that's really to the point. Bride Ted revisited. Not the great young snob novel and definitive campus novel by Evelyn Wall, published in 1945 at the end of "Wallward II," but set largely at Oxford University in the early to mid-1920s during the "Right Young Things" era. No, I'm talking about the 11th episode British television serial based on the great young snob novel and definitive campus novel by Evelyn Wall. It starred Jeremy Irons and Lawrence Olivier and premiered in the UK in October of 1981 in the US in January of 1982. Here's Nancy Morowitz, class of '86 on Bride Ted revisited the TV show. It aired a year or so before I entered college, but the thing really took hold. Part of it was the Britishness of it. Part of it was the aesthetic of that time period, how beautiful it was, the wealth, and the notion that it was really desirable to be an astute. And then of course the clothes, the white flannels, the eaten crock, haircuts, you really couldn't escape it. And you'd arrive on campus and people had already adopted that aesthetic. And so there was a huge pleasure in seeing people dress that way and recognizing it and also the huge pleasure in getting the references and even slightly disdaining them for being so obvious in their adoration of that series and that time period. This Bride's head devotees, hopelessly nostalgic for a past they're far too young to have experienced themselves, are in stark contrast to Brett's crowd, which is relentlessly, remorselously modern, hot-wired and cocaine and didian novels, the latest Elvis Costello album on constant rotation in their brains. Mark Shaw, a close friend of Donas, he's mentioned in the acknowledgments of the secret history, goes further than most in expressing his adoration of Bride's head. Again, Nancy Marowitz. Mark, I remember him all in sort of off-white or ivory, kind of white flannel trousers and a certain kind of sweater, sort of tennis sweater. And he also had this bright gold curly hair and he was carrying a teddy bear. And I thought, ah, he's Sebastian. Sebastian, as in Sebastian's flight, the first great doomed passion of Charles Ryder, the narrator protagonist of Bride's head, whose second great doomed passion will be Julia Flight. Sebastian's look-alike sister. All right, listeners, here's Richard Paypin, the narrator protagonist of the secret history, describing the book's beauties and love objects. The brother and sister twins, Charles and Camilla McCulley. Anna Reads. And then there were a pair, boy and girl. I saw them together a great deal, and at first I thought they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Until one day I saw them up close and realized they had to be siblings. Later I learned they were twins. It looked very much alike, with heavy dark blonde hair and Episcine faces as clear, as cheerful and grave, as a couple of flimish angels. And perhaps most unusual in the context of Hampton, where pseudo intellects and teenage decadence abounded, and where black clothing was daily goo, they liked to wear pale clothes, particularly white. In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication, they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory, or long dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party. By the way, Mark Shaw and I briefly corresponded over Twitter and email. I agreed to an interview, but then abruptly became unavailable. Before he became unavailable though, he said this. At the time we were there, we lived in a referential universe, or at least I did, involving the Eiffel Tower restaurant in London, which was the clubhouse of Ronald Furbank, Nancy Cunard, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Evelyn Waw. We were consciously emulating the 1920s bright young things, which you can easily smell in secret history. But Mark Shaw is so deep in a brideshead reverie he's made himself into a living breathing quotation from it, should be strange, or at least unusual. But it isn't. Not at Bennington, where fantasy leads reality, rather than the other way around. Nancy Morowitz There was a sense that we are all our own creations, but you had to work at it then. Looking for the clothes, looking for the books. Obviously, there was no Amazon, there was no eBay. You thrifted. But it was also very much a sense that you felt very, felt a lot of ownership in what you knew and how you looked a lot of ownership and even authorship, I would say. So at Bennington, the self is a creation. The life, a kind of performance art. That's how Jonathan remembers it. And say the classics click, cross commons, dressed up like they were at Oxford. You kind of got it. Like, that's what you're making yourself into. So the challenge. was what are you going to be? Everyone had to produce some remarkable self to really qualify at that place. It's Sophia with Enough, Franklin with the Y, and if you're looking for some bubble gum, dumb dumb podcast, then you are in the wrong place, baby. Whether I'm reminiscing on the trials and tribulations of working in the corporate world to recapping today's latest reality TV show, you're going to want to pull up a chair and stick around. It's a good time and always 100% unfiltered. Follow and listen to Sophia with an F wherever you get your podcasts. There is another sense in which Donna and Jonathan are avoiding the main dining hall. Neither is in, and neither applied to be in, Joe McGinnis' nonfiction workshop, the high profile writing workshop for that semester, the one that Brett is using to make his reputation. Instead, they're in Stephen Sandee's poetry workshop. Here's Jonathan. Stephen's was a well-established poetry workshop, but it was poetry. That's the thing. There were the pros writers and the poets, and it was very genre divided, as though never the train should meet. It's in this workshop that Jonathan and Donna's intimacy grows. We'd already begun to make friends, and it was there that we cemented it by passing notes to one another. Stephen, he was a formal, you know, hard-ass. He wanted things to be traditional in certain ways, and he also saved really incredibly useful things that I more or less say to my students to this day, like just because a thing really happened doesn't mean it's going to be either persuasive or interesting when you put it on the page. But he wouldn't say it like that. He would say, and I memorized this sentence, and I think Donna and I would walk on the comments lawn saying it allowed in a stentorian imitation of Stephen Sandee. "Histuricity does not ensure relevance, and even that you would have a sentence like that that you would say with a straight face to a room full of 18-year-olds was really exactly ridiculous to me." Jonathan has an excuse for decking the prose workshops. Officially, he's an aspiring artist. It's only unofficially that he's an aspiring writer, though he's been one ever since his mother gave him a typewriter at age 14 just before she died. From that point on, I knew I was a writer. My father's a painter, though, and I'd gotten all my pets on the head for being a little art prodigy. It was a very gratifying way to grow up with everyone telling me how good I was at that. And when I got to Benny's and everything was so intimidating, I didn't want to surrender this identity. It was like a suit of armor. I was a beginner in prose, compared to someone like Brett, the writing workshops. I could feel how competitive those rooms were. I wanted to work the margins and play and stay free and in my own self-affirming, self-immused space. I held this in a half-conscious place, but I know that I really knew what was up. That was, I wanted to play the role of a writing student. Steven's class was a chance for that. But Donna, who's only ever wanted to be a writer, who's come to Bennington with the express purpose of developing as a writer, as a novelist specifically, as we'll discover in a subsequent episode, doesn't have that excuse, though her reason for ducking could be the same. Minimalism was totally dominant and, quote unquote, realism. My idea of the literary had to do with Italo, Calvino, and Franz Kafka, and how those connected to what I was interested in. And the whole idea of this Raymond Carver, I just was completely confused and alienated by the vibe of that, the ethos. And I sensed that it wasn't going to work out for me. That's certainly how Brett, whose taste and sensibility couldn't be more inline with the early 80s moment, sees Donna's situation. He and I discuss. When I look at what was going on in fiction in that time, it was minimalism. Ray Carver was a guy. And it really was for a lot of us when short story collections would be published that would be talked about a lot. We'd all read them, we'd buy them. Donna was not into that at all. No, Donna is not at all into minimalist short stories. Her preference, often stated, is for 19th century novels. The kind Henry James described as large loose, baggy monsters. Dickens is the writer she elevates above the rest. And her 20th century favorites include Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and of course, Evelyn Waugh, about as far from Raymond Carver as you can get. Suffice to say, Donna won't be studying at the feet of Joe McGinnis. But there is a teacher at Bennington at whose feet she will fall. In fact, she's fallen already. Oh, and teachers as objects of idolatry, another Bennington phenomenon. Here is Morris Beagle, who taught at Bennington from 1984 to 1992, and now teaches at Columbia. At Bennington, something attached to the faculty. I use this word, you know, with some confusion, glamour. And there's nothing remotely like it at Columbia, even amongst the most celebrated superstar professors. That makes me feel like I know what the experience of being famous is. That I know what it feels like to cause a stir when you enter a room. And to feel eyes following you with excitement and curiosity. You know, you would have a certain hour where you went to your office to sign people's cards to register them for your course. And the first time it happened, there were students all down the hall and down the stairs. And some of them had been there overnight. You know, I was just kind of like a bloodscore on, but it was really, it gave you a wonderful feeling. The glamour that Morris is talking about, Joe McGinnis, the kind of writer who appears on firing line and the Murf Griffins show definitely has it. As does Nick Dombanco, who will run the big writing workshop in the spring, and who is, as we'll learn later on, an inspiration for one of the most famous pop songs of the 1970s. But no teacher at Bennington has it more than Claude Fredericks, a member of the literature and language department and Bennington's sole teacher of classics. Now, Claude, a year shy of 60 in 1982, is an elusive and but giling figure. He's a poet, a playwright, and above all, a memoirist. He started keeping a journal at the age of eight and has never stopped. Yet he defies easier complacent categorization. And my sense is that the prismatic approach might, in his case, be the most effective. So instead of trying to take him in head on and all at once, we'll look at him from different angles and viewpoints, which is to say I'm going to let several people take a shot at describing him. Here's Nick Dombanco, on Claude. Claude, who was one of the revered teachers, I don't think ever had a college degree. And he didn't get his college degree because he dropped out of Harvard having refused to take the swimming test, which was at that point a requirement. Nonetheless, he was one of the most formidable, if peculiarly learned people I've ever known. He taught himself Japanese. He taught himself Latin and Greek. He was a serious student of Buddhism. And he played Chakohatchi flute and he was his terrific cook. I mean, he was an extremely elegant, if particular sort of character. Now, he was quite something. Perhaps Claude's greatest claim on the attention of the world outside Bennington is Banyan Press, which he founded in 1946. Here's Tato Niel, a student of Quads, on Banyan. Claude was living in the village and had made friends with a nice nin and her then lover. And she had a press. At a certain point, she didn't want to press anymore and she said, "Here boy, you can have it." So he started the Banyan Press. He printed blood on the dining room floor, which was the story of Gertrude Stein. And frankly, that was directly responsible for the revival of Gertrude Stein's reputation because she had been kind of forgotten. Benning specializes in poets. John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, Edith Sitwell, and James Merrill, a long-term lover of Claude's. Claude's social circle, though, includes more than just poets. He knows and is known by many of the most famous cultural person. personalities of his day. Not that you ever catch Claude, whose manners are as refined and willful as his taste, name-dropping. Morris Beagle. - He was very cordial, had really old world manners, and was very gracious. There was no self-promotion. He really was so opposed to any kind of self-advertising. Claude wrote thousands and thousands of pages, but I believe he would have considered it crass to publish them. (laughs) But he did occasionally tell little stories about his past. Little things would come out. I remember a story about him knowing Marlon Brando in New York. Taronio. - He was very good friends with Yasmin Agacan, the daughter of the Agacan, and Neshaveiran's daughter studied with Claude. He would call her the princess, because Claude did have a certain attraction for princesses. He liked to collect them. I remember his telling me that she had written a story that he found very touching and beautiful because he thought that it was very autobiographical and descriptive of her own situation. Of a bird that is someone's beloved pet, but in a cage and not free, and the bird really just wants to be free. - The reason I'm going into such exhaustive detail on Claude, his early life and career, interest in inclinations, is because Claude will serve as the basis for the secret histories Julian Moro, a classics professor and a darkly romantic and mysterious figure who attracts a band of equally darkly romantic and mysterious student accolades. No sooner does Richard Paypin, the secret histories protagonist, start classes at Hamden than he finds himself in Julian's thrall. Donna reads. Among the few people I had met who had been at Hamden a while, I asked what the story was with Julian Moro. Nearly everyone had heard of him and I was given all sorts of contradictory but fascinating information. That he was a brilliant man, that he was a fraud, that he had no college degree, that he had been a great intellectual in the forties and a friend to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, that he had dodged the draft in some war, though chronologically this was difficult to compute, that he had ties with the Vatican, a deposed royal family in the Middle East, Franco's Spain. - Moro's beagle relays a rimmer she heard about Claude. - There was the mythology that Claude was a dollar a year man. You know, it was just understood that Claude received only a dollar a year because he was independently wealthy. - Richard Paypin hears this rumor about Julian Moro from a colleague of Julian's, a French teacher named Georges La Forge. He has taught here for many years and even refused his payment for his work. He is a wealthy man. He donates his salary to the college, though he accepts, I think, one dollar a year for tax purposes. Now, before Moro's beagle was a teacher at Bennington and Claude's peer, she was a student at Bennington and Claude's advisor. Here she is on finding his office for the first time. I'll mention that Claude always had offices far away from everybody else. The commons building was where the snack bar was and the dining halls and the laundry and the cigarette machines and those kinds of things. But there were these back offices. There was this one long hallway. You wouldn't stumble upon it. There's no way you would have passed through it. You know, you had to know where you were going and there was a back stairway to get there and going down this hall and then, you know, the door would open. (laughs) So there was the magician quality, for sure. And here's Richard Paypin on finding Julian's office for the first time. Finding the Lycium wasn't easy at all. It was a small building on the edge of campus, old and covered with ivy in such a manner as to be almost indistinguishable from its landscape. Downstairs were lecture halls and classrooms. All of them empty with clean black boards and freshly waxed floors. I wandered around helplessly until I finally noticed the staircase, small and badly lit in the far corner of the building. Once at the top, I found myself in a long, deserted hallway. Enjoying the noise of my shoes on the linoleum, I walked along briskly, looking at the closed doors for numbers or names until I came to one that had a brass card holder and, within it, an engraved card that read Julian Warro. I stood there for a moment and then I knocked three short reps. A minute or so passed and then another and then the white door opened just to crack. Claude, like Julian, is a kind of sorcerer, a necromancer, a prosporow. And to gain entry into his office is to gain entry into his world. One of magic and excitement. And yet, there are hints of sinister goings on. Though those hints are, too, part of the excitement. The reason Warro was looking for Claude's office that day was because she was a freshman and all freshmen were expected to meet with their advisors at the start of the academic year. - So I was waiting in an unlikely place, for a meeting with him and Claude came to the door with a student and he had this beautiful halo of blonde curls. Claude was correcting and he said, "No, no, no, not only do what is necessary, do only what is necessary." And I was, "Uh-oh." What's happening here? - In the secret history, Richard is about to drop by Julian's office unannounced when he stopped short. Exiting Julian's office is Julian and a character named Henry Winter, about whom more very soon. Donna reads, - Neither of them had heard me come up to stairs. And he was leaving. Julian was standing in the open door, making a vein 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 out 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, you say? What I thought the hell is going on. (gentle music) - All three books that are concerned with Achilles are each very different ones from the other. They have many points of unity and I think one should much more. - Donna in the fall of '82 is taking a class with Claude on a Homer. - Homer though is a literature class and opened to all students. Claude's Greek classes on the other hand are open only to a select few. Nancy Morowitz. - There was all sorts of mystery around the Greek literature class studying in this very sort of privileged, almost intimate setting, or at least that was the impression. And it was a very exclusive group around Claude. You know, it was sort of no admittance. You know, you had to be a member of the inner circle to get the privilege of studying classical literature with him. - The same is true of Julian Moro's Greek classes. Richard Paypin is told again by the loose-lipped Georges La Forge about Julian's idiosyncratic method of choosing students. Donna reads, "I don't know why they continue to list his courses in the general catalog. It's misleading every year there's confusion about it. Because, practically speaking, the classes are closed. I'm told that to study with him one must have led the white things hold similar views. He accepts only a limited number of students, a very limited number. Besides, in my opinion, he conducts the selection on a personal rather than academic basis. And those who make Julian's cut tend to stick together. Richard observes from afar. I began to watch for his little group of pupils around campus. Four boys and a girl, they were nothing so unusual at a distance. At close range, though, they were an arresting party, at least to me, who had never seen anything like them, and to whom they suggested a variety of picturesque and fictive qualities. Two of the boys wore glasses, curiously enough, the same kind. Tiny, old-fashioned, with round steel rounds. The smaller of the two, but not by much, was a sloppy blonde boy, rosy-cheeked and gum-tuing, with a relentlessly cheery demeanor, and his fists thrust deep in the pockets of his knee-sprung trousers. He wore the same jacket every day, a shapeless brown tweed that was frayed at the elbows and short in the sleeves, and his sandy hair was parted on the left, so a long forelock fell over one perspective. die. Bonnie Corcoran was his name. Bonnie being somehow short for Edmund. His voice was nasal, garrulous, WC fields with a bad case of Long Island Lockjaw. Claude's little group of pupils is three boys, no girls. Here's one of the three, Matt Jacobson, class of 83. It housed the swankiest of the swank and uh. Matt's going to tell us how he came to study at Bennington and with Claude. Listen to him talk. You've heard him talk before actually, in episode one. It was he who told Bennington's origin story. Bennington College came into this world in the form of a lecture given. And if you don't think that WC fields with a bad case of Long Island Lockjaw captures it perfectly, well, I'll eat my microphone. It was the only college that really been recommended to me. And uh. I had Lousy SATs, so like any character from John Hill Jr. drawing, I showed up the flask in my pocket and off to Bennington I went. I studied Latin in high school and I was pretty Lousy at that too, but I enjoyed it. I got it into my head that that was class thing to do, or have a classic college experience. Well, Latin was an offer. I'd gone to Claude having been told that he's the only guy that deals with the classics and maybe you can convince him. And I got in the chat with him about Latin and he says, "No, I'm offering Greek." And so he was such a fascinating man if he had offered anti-deluvian basket weaving classes. That's what I would have studied. A fast side note. It was from Lisa Fader that I picked up Matt Jacobson's scent. Back in 2018, at the end of our first interview, conducted in a coffee shop in the silver-like neighborhood of LA. Well, Lisa was fishing at her car keys and I was ordering my uber. She mentioned, offhandedly, a guy she'd recently met at a Bennington Alon party. When she described him, I knew immediately, instinctively, that it was the real bunny. Though at that point I didn't know there was a real bunny. Bunny, incidentally, is the secret history's murdery. Donna reads the book's famous opening passage. Prologue. The snow in the mountains was melting and bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He'd been dead for 10 days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history. State troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter. The college closed, the die factory in Hampton shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston. It is difficult to believe that Henry's modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events. We hadn't intended to hide the body where it couldn't be found. I tracked down Matt, very much not dead, and he agreed to meet for a drink at the Sunset Tower Hotel on the Thursday night in August, the last night of that L.A. trip. When I saw him, striding into the bar, enormously tall, and in a bespoke 1930 style suit, cream colored, and two-tone brown and white shoes, a full head of graying blonde hair and a cut both old-fashioned and ocaran, a single-airant lock falling over his glasses into his eyes. And when I heard him, she was lily, hot enough out there for ya, I flashed to an early scene in the secret history. Richard Paypin, not yet part of the classics group, spies its members in the school library. Bunny is having difficulty with one of Julian's assignments. Donner reads, "Suddenly something occurred to me. I closed the book and put it on the shelf and turned around. "Excuse me?" I said. Immediately they stopped talking, startled, and turned to look at me. "I'm sorry, but would the lockative case do?" And Bunny reared back in his chair and looked up at me. "I'd like to shake your hand, stranger." I offered it to him. He clasped and shook it firmly, almost knocking an ink bottle over with his elbow as he did so. "Glad to meet you. Yes, yes," he said, reaching up with the other hand to brush the hair from his eyes. I was confused by this sudden glare of attention. It was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked out of the canvas and spoken to me. That's precisely what it felt like for me that night in LA more than three years ago, when Matt asked me how I was holding up in the heat. Only instead of a character in a favorite painting, he was a character in a favorite novel. One I'd first read as a freshman in high school back in 1992, and at least a dozen times since, end of side note. So Richard said there were two boys and glasses. The larger of the two was dark haired, with a square jaw and coarse pale skin. He might have been handsome, had his features been less set, or his eyes behind the glasses, less expressionless and blank. Henry Winter said my friends when I pointed him out at a distance, making a wide circle to avoid a group of bongo players on the lawn. Henry was said to be wealthy. What's more, he was a linguistic genius. He spoke a number of languages, ancient and modern, and had published a translation of a NACRION with commentary when he was only 18. Here's Henry Winter, pardon me, Tato Niel. On how he wound up at Bennington and with Claude. I went to a Benedictine monastery in Colorado to go to boarding school for high school. Quick interjection. The school is, or rather was, since it no longer exists, called the Abbey School, run out of the Holy Cross Abbey in Canon City. There he was taught Latin, taught himself Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, and Sanskrit. I did not systematically translate an NACRION, but I translated theocritus into English. But anyway, there was a man who was teaching there. When I was time for me to go to college, I had no clue where to go. I just didn't know what to do. I didn't really want to go to a conventional university, nor did he think that it would be appropriate. And then he said, "I know exactly where he should go to college." He said, "I have a childhood friend who went to Bennington College, and I can guarantee that it would be made for you." And he said, "The real reason that you should go there is there's someone there that you would love to be with, and it's Claude Fredericks." And that immediately struck me because I, by coincidence, happened to be reading Alice Tockless' letters. And two days before we had this conversation, I had read a letter from Alice Tockless to Claude thanking him for the gift of an umbrella. From Alice Tockless, lover of cartridge-stine, to Claude Fredericks, dated 30th December 1951. Dear Claude, the umbrella is indescribably distinguished, mysterious, evocative. It should belong to some great heroine of the past, a tragic one whose umbrella couldn't console or save her from her inevitable doom. Anna Karenina or Christina Light, someone in the grand manner. But though you have chosen to give such an umbrella to the plaintiff of old women, it is not wasted upon her. For the new year, all my fondest good wishes for the realization of all yours. Always affectionately, Alice. Listeners in case you're wondering, meeting Todd, which I did a month and a half after I met Matt, it would have been sooner only Todd spends much of his time in France, was no less uncanny and experience. I was prepared this time, except as it turns out, I wasn't prepared at all, because I wasn't expecting to meet the real Henry Winter that fall day in the West Village. I was expecting to meet the real Francis Abernathy. Donna Reads. Francis, he had gone to several schools in Europe and spoke excellent French, though he pronounced it with the same lazy snob accent as his English. Sometimes I got him to help me with my own lessons in first year French, tedious little stories about Marie and Jean-Claude going to the tabac, which he read aloud in a languishing hilarious draw. But Todd was as unmistakably Henry Winter as Matt was as unmistakably bunny Corcoran. And I knew he was Henry Winter as soon as I spotted him walking towards me on 7th Avenue. Henry Winter, he wore dark English suits and carried an umbrella, a bizarre sight in Hampton, and he walked stiffly through the throngs of hippies and beatnicks and preppies and punks with self-conscious formality of an old ballerina. That really is how Todd moves. At once, Richard and fluid, his posture erect, alert. And now, for the third member of Clawed's Greek group, the one I had assumed was the real Henry Winter, for reasons that will become clear in a later episode. Paul McLoyne. Paul is Class of '83, a Bennington senior, same as Matt and Todd. The trio makes a visual impression on everyone. Makes an impression on Brett. I knew who they were. They all dressed alike and they all had glasses. I mean, they were definitely a crew. They were at dining hall together. They would walk places in a group together. You know, you couldn't miss them. an impression on Lisa Fader too. We called them the new Princetonians. And makes an impression on Jonathan Latham, though Princetonian isn't the half of it according to him. The idea that there would be an equivalent right over in New Jersey. To me, New Jersey was just a swamp of mobsters and factories. I just couldn't have conceived it. I was a big reader of English novels and I probably didn't even understand how preppy you could be in the United States. In order to find a point of reference for what they were playing at, I had to imagine that they wanted to be in like a wall novel. In a wall novel or in a British TV series based on a wall novel, is exactly how Nancy Morrow would seize them. You know, it's funny when I think about my initial memories of them, it's looking at the group of three guys across the commons lawn and someone pointing them out and saying, "Oh, that's, you know, in one way or another, they're famous." They were very striking looking, particularly then when we were also conscious of wanting to look like a figure out of Bride's head or like someone who might have been in the eating class of, you know, 1919. The little eyeglasses, the sort of wire-wimmed eyeglasses, wool overcoat, sort of charcoal gray, long scarves wrapped around the neck, you know, many times. I can remember thinking, "Oh, are those real English public school? Is that the real deal, you know, did they actually buy those, you know, in Oxford, Cambridge, or did their mother pick them up at the sex of Avenue?" It was very alluring and very attractive, particularly when swirling them around, the were kids wearing Indian cotton and smelling like clothes cigarettes and they just, they seemed so impeccable as the word. I could think of because they seemed to have this, they just radiated a certain aesthetic and that certain intellectual capability and kind of just real glamour. I realize all this talk of clothing and accessories can sound absurdly light-minded. It isn't. I'm going to invoke Mary Gade's kill here. Costuming is a romantic way of giving shape to something previously in co-ate inside you, of trying to discover, to become. Now what could be deeper than that? Matt Jacobson on his style and the style of the group at large. The t-shirts was making its assentancy and, uh, but, you know, someone had to put their foot down. My daddy always wore a tie by Galle, I was good enough for me and I'm apparently I was the only one. I mean, Paul also was attracted to that. Todd. We wore jackets, not all of us wore ties. We all had khakis, but we also had basic wool grey stuff that I'd be ironed. Always wore wire-rimmed glasses from the '40s. And the footwear was, uh, I wore grey bucks with red soles and, uh, Todd wore ten bucks and I think Paul wore loafers. Are you going to start a catalog, this is like, Matt #307. That sounds good. In a large. And here's Tato Niel on why the classics boys might have held such fascination for their classmates. Hint, it's not the clothes, or at least it's not only the clothes. I suppose when you first go off to college, you're looking to establish your own independent identity. And so that's why students tend to dress in certain ways. We'd all wanted yes to establish our identity as not Greek students, but that we were there to pursue a certain type of education or in search of a certain ideal that we wanted. So, you know, me, I devoted my entire time at Bennington to pursuing, I suppose, what a modern person would think of as a 19th century or a 17th century education. And then what happened was we created a mistake because we were studying things that were intriguing and alien to the other students. Donna catches the discerning eye of Paul McGloin, which catches the discerning eye of Matt Jacobson. Paul will get up from the table sometimes at lunch and say, "I'm going to look for a room with a more southern view." Tato Niel. Paul was attracted to her. He went to Clawed and he said, "Oh, there's a young woman in your class who's very, you know, Paul had this very pretentious 19th century or 18th century way of talking." He said, "This is a young woman that I'm very attracted, very charmed by in your class." And he said, "I think her name is Donna." And Clawed said, "Oh, yes, she's the only tart I have with three teas." Paul is clearly sold on Donna. Like any small school, you've seen everyone before you meet them and Paul was really obsessed with her long before they met. And long behold, Paul met her. Next time, on "Once Upon a Time" at Bennington College. It was a little surreal because all of a sudden Donna became like a small version of Paul. I can remember very clearly sitting with Paul and Donna. And Donna was there dressed very similar to Paul, a blue blazer, a club tie, and a white shirt and khakis or whatever. The boys pants, not girls, and hair and this funky little asexual bob. And it was as if we were three boys sitting there. You know, I never really thought of her as too much of as a girl." This has been a presentation and production of C-13 originals, a cadence 13 studio. "Once Upon a Time" at Bennington College is executive produced by me and Chris Corcoran, directed and written by me, directed by Zach Leavitt, edited by Perry Crowell, script edited by Bruce Handy, production support and additional editing by Ian Mont, mixed and mastered by Bill Schultz, production coordination by Terence Malangone, studio coordination by Sean Cherry, artwork and design by Kurt Courtney, marketing by Brian Swarth, Josephina Francis, Moira Curran, and Melissa Wester. The original music is by Joel Goodman. C-13 is an Odyssey company.