The Most Ambitious Diary in History – The New Yorker

In 1980, one of Frederickss closest colleagues at Bennington, Bernard Malamud, offers to act as an intermediary with F.S.G., which publishes Malamuds novels. This time, Fredericks sends journals from 1966 and 1967, which chronicle his time at the Buddhist monastery in Kyoto and a failed relationship with a Japanese man who joins him back in Vermont. Months go by without word from Giroux. But in January of 1981 Fredericks visits New York, where he stays in an Upper East Side apartment belonging to Merrill. He has an appointment to meet Giroux for lunch at the Players club: Monday a little after eleven, the 19th. It could be one of the more important days in my life. Certainly whatever I have been moving towards finds its happy fulfilment.

The happy fulfilment is not just about Giroux and the journal: Fredericks has met an attractive waiter at a French restaurant, and he has bought tickets for them to attend a new production of Un Ballo in Maschera, at the Met. For once, the haste of a journal entry makes perfect dramatic sense.

When Fredericks sits down to write again the following day, his mood has changed drastically:

Whatever little order I had has swiftly crumbled, and a random paragraph or two here is all I can manage. Im not really sure what happened yesterday. How can I? And how could I possibly have thought there would be any simple and clearcut gesture? I hardly expected to come home with a contract under either armand yet... what did happen?

The lunch with Giroux has been amiable enough, but his message about the journal and its prospects is confusing. He began first by saying it really couldnt be published until after I was dead, Fredericks reports, because passages concerning the lives and the intimacies of others pose legal difficulties. There is also the problem of some anti-Semitic remarkseveryone has thoughts that other people would find offensive, Giroux explains, but you simply cant say those things in print and get away with it. But these arent the only issues: It was too long as it was. It repeated many thingseven the obsessively constant concern with sexual adventuretoo often.... There were too many names and incidents that everywhere needed... footnoting and the knowledge of other volumes of the journal.

Most bewildering, Fredericks writes, is the fact that Girouxeven as he offers no compliments on the writingspeaks as if it were inevitable that the journal will eventually be published and admired, as if he himself took its importance and value as something so obvious one did not even mention it. Any book fashioned from the journal should be marketed as fiction, Giroux advises. Fredericks writes:

Puzzled by how specific he was and yet how entirely lacking in praise or enthusiasm, I askedin saying I trusted his judgment more than anyonesIs it really worth doing, reducing these pages to a novel. Yes, he said quite briskly and then almost tenderly, of course its worth doing.

This is one of the few passages I have found in the archive where Fredericks actually fulfills his stated ideals about the journal as a living thing. We eagerly follow the protagonist into a series of dramatic events that he cant foresee, and feel that we have been granted privileged access to a life as it unfolds. The author is both narrator and protagonist of a story so palpableso true, to use one of Frederickss favored wordsthat it feels like were there. And we sympathize with him as both a literary figure and a human being.

At Christmastime, 1983, Donna Tartt was home from Bennington with her family, in Mississippi, working on her fiction and studying Latin and French. In one of several letters to Fredericks archived at the Getty, she describes a household aflutter with telegrams and phone calls and parties and presents and flowersher sister is about to have her dbutante ball, and seamstresses are going in and out. Tartt tells Fredericks that she has insulated herself from the excitement by moving into a playhouse in the back yard where she spent time as a little girl; its quite small, she writes, but so is she. Tartt finds it comforting to live amidst all the tea sets and stuffed animals and rag rugs she grew up with. Her family, however, is upset. Each night, her mother comes out to the playhouse, dressed elegantly for a party, and offers her extra blankets, begging her to come home. Its a potent image: the young writer, marooned with her family for the holidays, taking refuge where she first learned to invent. Its a boon to Tartts future biographers, especially as it brings to mind a line of Julian Morrows in The Secret History which was almost surely uttered first by Fredericks. When Richard Papen, the student narrator, makes the mistake of referring to classroom assignments in Greek as work, Julian issues a grandiloquent correction: I should call it the most glorious kind of play.

In response to fact-checking inquiries, Tartt replied, In public, and whenever I have been asked about it through my career, I have denied that the character of Julian Morrow is based on the Claude Fredericks I knew and lovedexcept in the most superficial respects. To me, this confusion is both tragic and unfair to the memory of Claude. As a student at Bennington, I was struck by how students and literature faculty alike loved to gossip and spin tales and embroider anecdotes and invent rumors about Claude that invariably cast him as a sinister, ridiculously wealthy, and larger-than-life personage that he was not, a tradition that unfortunately, and insidiously, persists. It was these erroneous and larger-than-life fictions that caught my imagination as a young writer and went into the formation of the fictional character of Julian Morrow rather than the kind and generous person of Claude himself, and when the novel was published, in 1992, I was horrified when journalists in Europe and America presumed to state flatly that the character of Julian Morrow was Claude, treating their surmise as established truth, a problem that continues to this day. But unfortunately, now as then, people prefer to see fiction as fact.

Tartt and Fredericks were close. In letters that she sent to him while still his studentshe calls him magister, a Latin form of address to scholarsshe clearly craves his respect and tries to meet him as an equal. But Tartt is already the superior writer. The letter about the playhouse shows a precocious gift for characterization, and she nimbly conveys her familys bustle in a single atmospheric paragraph. (In fact, the Salingeresque glamour may be confected: a new podcast, Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College, suggests that Tartts family origins are humbler than she depicts.)

She exerts similar skill in transforming Fredericks into a fictional character: to heighten the sense that Julian is a figure of mysterious allure, Tartt initially gives the reader only tantalizing glimpses of him, as when he is seen peeking through a cracked door, as if there were something wonderful in his office that needed guarding. When one of the student characters has to complete an evaluation form about Julians teaching, he leaves the comments section blank, asking how he can possibly make the Dean of Studies understand that there is a divinity in our midst?

If Julian is a divinity in The Secret History, he is a deeply ambiguous one. By the end of the novel, his aestheticism and his cheery, Socratic indifference to matters of life and death have come to appear disquieting to Richard: His voice chilled me to the bone.... The twinkle in Julians eye, as I looked at him now, was mechanical and dead. It was as if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.

This dramatic reappraisal of Julian may have occurred entirely in the playhouse of Tartts imagination. Or perhaps she just looked with a merciless eye at the professor who inspired her charactera man whose dark complexities served her pursuit of art.

In January of 1973, Fredericks writes, I awoke this morning thinking perhaps that I had after all squandered my lifepursuing dreams that could not be realised, pursuing one infatuation after another. Others were famous or rich. Others had families. Had I not squandered all those extraordinary talents I had as a writer? Self-recrimination is a familiar trope in Frederickss journal, but the sombre tone is new. He is middle-aged and beset by bills and debts; the seemingly effortless life of sensual indulgence that he has shared so freely with others has not come cheap. His closest friend, the wealthy and well-travelled Merrill, has been publishing steadily, with increasing recognition that he is a great poet. In earlier entries, Fredericks has remarked how strange it was to have his two closest friends, Merrill and Malamud, each win a National Book Award in 1967. He feels left behind, and a bit bored, and the journal reflects his enervation.

Meanwhile, Bennington, originally a school for women, has turned coed. Before long, almost half the students signed up for Frederickss Religious Experience class are male. His journal is reshaped by this change: the diaristic entries of past years start being replaced by copies of notes or letters written to students. It isnt clear if the versions recorded in the journal are first drafts or later transcriptions. Sometimes he is pursuing four or five young men simultaneously, and for months at a stretch the letters supplant any other kind of entry. Reading the pages from this period, at the Getty, I began to wonder if they constituted a journal at all.

Robert Sternau was one of Frederickss students in the seventies, at the time when Peter Golub was an undergraduate at Bennington, and he has similar memories of tutorials at the Pawlet farmhousein his case, on Dantes Commedia. Once a week, Fredericks would read a canto aloud in Dantes Italian, and Sternau would read it aloud in English translation. Then we would discuss it, he recalled. It was just an unbelievable opportunity to have someone who knew the material that well, and who devoted that kind of one-on-one time to me. Sternau helped out in the yard and went for walks with Fredericks along the wooded edges of the property to post no trespassing signs. They cooked with vegetables from the garden; Fredericks showed Sternau how the letterpress worked, and they collaborated on some printing projects. He tutored me on shakuhachi flute, Sternau recalled. Claude was quite adept. He did everything with perfection. Sternau sensed from the start that Fredericks was attracted to him, but, he said, I think I was a bit naveat that point in his life, he told me, he was trying to be chaste.

The turn in their relationship came when they reached the end of the Dante tutorial, with a joint reading of Purgatorio. Sternau said, of Fredericks, He was like my Virgilhe took me as far as Paradise. Claude could be quite dramatic. Sternau realized that Fredericks, despite his talk of chastity, had developed an abiding sexual interest in him. He asked me if I would be the executor of his journal, Sternau recalled. Being eighteen or nineteen at the time, it was somewhat frightening. I think it was his way of trying to commit to me. Id been shown about thirty-five thousand pages of it, and I knew it was a massive opus. Not something that I wanted to commit to. Fredericks, he said, accepted his demurral. (You assured me so stubbornly that it was my friendship and not my love you wanted, Fredericks complains to Sternau, in a letter preserved in the journal. But when indeed I did just that, offering you friendship instead of love, you seemed somehow disappointed and distant.)

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The Most Ambitious Diary in History - The New Yorker