THE SECRET HISTORY PLAYLIST
You wanted the movie, you got the playlist
Few books have held such steady sway over me as The Secret History. It was a “right time” book for me, and it keeps company there with The Great Gatsby and Bridsehead Revisited. That right time was for me mid to late adolescence, and while I don’t think you can’t love those books if you’re not 16 or 18 years old, I do think that there’s some sort of magic at work when you get the right book at the right time, like a doubling of its power. Never again have ideas around taste and belonging been quite as alive to me as they were then, and those ideas are, to my mind, the spindly fingers of these books that wrap themselves around your imagination.
The Secret History is a book in which things matter. Tartt has filled the “strange cold breath of the ancient world” with little totems of wealth and intelligence. Francis wears suits from Aquascutum, Gieves and Hawkes and Sulka. The porcelain on the mantelpiece is Meissen, the pens are Montblanc, the ties are Charvet and they don’t just read Dantè’s Inferno, they read the Dorothy Sawyer translation. One of the appeals of The Secret History is the dangerously alluring idea that the trappings of things are more important than the substance of them. Early in the book, Richard Papen - the outsider — buys a couple of shirts, a Harris Tweed overcoat, a pair of brown wingtips, a funny old tie and some cufflinks. He recreates himself, he lies about his family, about where he went to school, about what he does over his holidays. He understands the value of appearances; he knows that in the creation of “the right” self, having the right things is powerful.
For a book so populated by things and by ideas about beauty, music doesn’t get that much of a look in. Henry plays a few bars of Träumerei on the piano, there are Art Pepper and Josephine Baker records lying around, but the sound that sticks with me from this book isn’t music at all; it’s the wind. “There was no noise, but the wind” Donna Tartt writes about the the landscape around the fictional college loosely based on Bennington College where she famously studied, and which has been mythologized as one of the few places on Earth where all four winds meet…
The Secret History is full of myth, beauty, darkness and destruction, a powerful combo and one I hope is captured by this playlist! As always there are a few things for living your very own anachronistic life / hosting a murder-free bacchanal, most of which are straight from the book. Now as their Classics professor, Julian Morrow, would say, “are you ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime?”
Apparently Meissen porcelain is called “white gold” because of its high price, rarity and desirability. Here are some very expensive Meissen vases that would look very good full of powerful roses on the table of a bacchanalian feast or just on the mantelpiece of your study. Or what about an urn? I also love this.
If only Henry hadn’t kept a diary things might have turned out very differently! I love these Ravello ones, and actually everything from Scriptum is pretty fantastic.
While both Paradise Lost and The Oresteia are books straight from our protagonists classroom, Tartt says that anybody wanting to know more about the ideas behind the book should read Bacchae by Euripedes (try the Richmond Lattimore translation) and Phaedrus and the Apology by Plato—which she refers to as “life-changing.” Also on her reading list as touch points for The Secret History are: Le Grand Meulnes by Alain Fournier, The Great Gatsby, Cold Heaven by Brian Moore, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, The Talented Mr Ripley (the book not the film!!), and the novels of Evelyn Waugh, Nabokov and George Orwell.
Everyone in this book loves smoking. People are constantly leaving half-finished cigarettes in ashtrays as they light another, or looking ashen as they grip one between their fingers. I love this ashtray, perfect for the Ancient Greece loving smoker in your life.
Personally I could not use a fountain pen without wandering around all day with ink all over my hands and probably face, but they make these beautiful Montblanc Meisterstücks, the pen of choice of their Classics professor, Julian Morrow, who keeps at least a dozen of them in a cup on his desk, in a ballpoint for people like me.
This book is so full of clothes. Charles and Camilla are fans of tennis shoes (I imagine them more like white plimsolls than Adidas! ), tennis sweaters (also this) and straw hats. Camilla is a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, a nymph in a sailor collar dress, sleek and boyish in an Astrakhan coat and Francis walks around in a swish of black cashmere and cigarette smoke wearing ties from Charvet. For the bacchanal they wear chitons, which is kind of like a toga. If you are over the age of I don’t know, 23, I really hope your toga days are behind you, especially when you could spend a staggering amount on a Fortuny dress instead. (I once enquired about one and the man just wrote back to me that unfortunately he couldn’t tell me the price!) This sinister Fendi dress would also be very good for a bacchanal. More practically what about this or this !
A menu, like this one, that has an “Augustan wholesomeness and luxuriance” is ideal for a bacchanal inspired dinner party, or just a normal dinner party! You should buy lots of red wine and there should be an abundance of grapes on silver trays. The only toast fitting for such a meal? “Live forever.”
this is the playlist I didn’t know I needed. LOVE this book. thank you!!