Because its author can reflect solely on what’s already happened, the narrative is perpetually in medias res-a “peculiar quality” in a literary work. (The narrator of “The Secret History” notes Julian’s belief that “pupils learned better in a pleasant, non-scholastic atmosphere.”) In the lecture, Fredericks extolls the journal as a special form. It was in such living rooms, which often had working fireplaces, that Fredericks liked to hold his classes: on Pindar and Aeschylus, on Japanese literature of the Heian period, on Augustine’s “ Confessions” and other religious texts. The talk was held in the communal living room of one of the white clapboard student houses built in 1932, when the college was founded. By that time, he had taught at Bennington for twenty-seven years, and was the longest-standing member of its Literature and Languages faculty, which over the decades had included Bernard Malamud, Howard Nemerov, and Camille Paglia. His chapbook is titled “How to Read a Journal,” and the main text is adapted from a talk that he delivered on campus in 1988. I learned about the real Fredericks only after joining Bennington’s faculty, in 2012. But readers of Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel, “ The Secret History,” will have a sense of Fredericks through his fictionalized alter ego, Julian Morrow, a magnetic classics professor whose tutelage in ancient Dionysiac rites so enthralls his students that they commit-or are complicit in-two murders. He is largely unknown outside a small circle of former students and colleagues at Bennington College-unknown, at least, by his own name. The author is Claude Fredericks, a printer, playwright, amateur poet, and classics professor, who died in 2013.
The most prophetic literary criticism that I’ve read in recent years is a twenty-four-page chapbook published by an obscure private foundation in Vermont.
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