‘…what Café du Dôme was to the Lost Generation, the dining hall at Bennington College was to the lost generation revisited, otherwise known as Generation X. … And while, of course, southwestern Vermont wasn’t Paris, somehow, in the early-to-mid eighties, it was just as sly, louche, low-down, and darkly perdu… Seated around the table, berets swapped for Wayfarers and ready to gorge on the conversation if not the food (cocaine, the Pernod of its era, is a notorious appetite suppressant), were Bret Easton Ellis, future writer of American Psycho and co-leader of the literary Brat Pack, Jonathan Lethem, future writer of Fortress of Solitude and MacArthur genius, and Donna Tartt, future writer of The Secret History and Pulitzer Prize winner. All three were in Bennington’s class of 1986. …  All three were, at various times, infatuated and disappointed with one another. Their friendships stimulated and fueled by rivalry, as much as affection. And all three would mythologize Bennington in their fiction…’

I first listened to Lili Anolik’s podcast, Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, years ago. I was obsessed. I planned a ‘Bennington’ project, and although I started it (by re-reading Less Than Zero and The Secret History), I never got any further than going down Bennington rabbit holes (of which there are lots).

But new year, renewed effort. There are 14 episodes. I’ll post about each one – not a review as such, but rather highlighting the bits that stood out, interesting quotes, and links to relevant articles or other bits along the way. I’ll also re-read the books by the key Bennington authors.

Episode one, Dis-Orientation, sets the scene – Anolik is a terrific writer, and her description of Bennington life in the mid-eighties (at the top), is complemented by Jonathan Lethem’s account –

Inside that trimmed green sanctuary was a sort of collective solipsistic laboratory where high-strung urban children were allowed to play however they liked. One part experimental arts college founded in the 1920s by passionate red-leaning patrons and one part lunatic preserve for wayward children of privilege. Those too familiar with psych counseling and rehab, and which recapitulated in junior form the tribal rituals of Mediterranean resorts and East Hampton summers and the VIP room of Studio 54.

Actually, that was Lethem’s sketch of the fictional small liberal arts college attended by the Brooklyn-born protagonist of his sixth novel, The Fortress of Solitude. It was called Camden and was located in Vermont, although the similarity to Bennington is unmistakable. Lethem says of Bennington –

It was like we’d been sent to go to college at Andy Warhol’s factory…
I mean, the cynical view would be it was like a holding area for students whose families wouldn’t have them not go to college, but were basically not going to go to college. I used to joke that it was like we were the druggy sibling of the, you know, legacy Harvard or Yale family, it was like a place to hide them, as opposed to just letting them loose on the streets of New York City. In another sense, it was almost designed very generously as a place to be in ‘not college college’.

Lethem goes on to describe the ‘pockets of indulgence’ and lax curriculum –

…Gunnar Schoenbeck‘s music class where you played his invented instruments. So everyone was a permanent beginner because you were taking a class in objects that the professor had invented. And everyone knew you passed the course, whether you ever showed up a single day or not. 

Graduating was optional. Lethem said –

‘…you’re not a real Bennington student unless you drop out.’ It’s like, if you graduated, you missed the point.

Bennington was a place of creative freedom and creative competition, ‘…an academic institution that scorned both academics and institutions.‘ Many of the students were from extremely wealthy families, others (like Lethem), the opposite. Keg parties were funded by the college every Friday night and, given the isolation of the campus, there was not much to do other than join in.

In episode one, Anolik introduces Bret Easton Ellis –

He had a lot of talent. He had a lot of problems. He also had a suitcase full of drugs. And Bret had a second suitcase. That one full of the pages of a novel. 

Laid out plainly, the publication of Less Than Zero was astonishing. The first draft was completed in Easton Ellis’s first year at Bennington in 1982-83 (although he has said that he started writing it when he was 15-years-old). In his sophomore year, 1984, the manuscript was bought by Simon & Schuster. It was published in 1985, while Easton Ellis was a junior, and he became instantly famous. By the time he graduated, the novel had been adapted into a movie, starring ‘Brat-Packers‘ Andrew McCarthy, Jamie Gertz and Robert Downey Jr.

Anolik describes it as a ‘seminal novel of the 1980s’, but adds that she was never a huge fan of Easton Ellis, until she read his piece in The Daily Beast, titled Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire. In this article, Anolik states that Easton Ellis identified –

‘…the great cultural shift of the 21st century began with the one-two punch of those hijacked planes crashing into the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. An event so cataclysmic, it changed everything, including our perception of what the world was like before it happened. And then the replacement of mass media by digital and social media. A non-event event, yet viewed retrospectively, every bit as traumatic and transformative. In the Charlie Sheen piece, Bret gave this shift a name, empire to post-empire. Another way of saying, he gave it a lens, a perspective, and in so doing, made incoherent times cohere, or start to at least. America, as an empire, is finished, washed up, over, kaput. And post-empire artists make their art out of empire detritus, by cultural dumpster diving, basically.’

Others, including David Lipsky, who would have been class of 87 had he lasted at Bennington for more than a year, admired Easton Ellis’s Sheen piece – “It’s a brilliant, brilliant portrait of how our political life and our cultural life changed…”. Anolik concludes that Easton Ellis is ‘…the signal artist of the present day’ –

He’s the genius or outlaw we don’t want to claim or own up to. Maybe even wish didn’t exist. But whatever your view of him is, major novelist, minor fool, virtuoso, villain, prodigy, provocateur, pissant, he must be recognized as the key to cracking the code of American pop culture for the last 40 years.

Anolik goes on to say that although Douglas Copeland named Gen X, it was Easton Ellis who ‘…charted the course for Gen X writers period. No, for Gen X period’ and explained ‘…how it thought, dressed, behaved, what its values were, its aspirations.’

The episode finishes with a brief introduction to Donna Tartt, who was welcomed to Bennington by Lethem and his roommate, Mark Norris (the character, Bunny Corcoran, in The Secret History was based on Norris). Lethem said –

Mark and I helped her move an ancient and gigantic trunk from the maintenance building to her room, as if she’d arrived in Vermont on a steamship. She and I spoke across a temporal gap. None of her cultural references newer than JM. Barrie. None of mine older than Foghorn Leghorn, the only Southern accent I knew.

But more on Tartt in later episodes…

People referred to in episode one:

Lili Anolik (author)
Bret Easton Ellis (author)
Donna Tartt (author)
Jonathan Lethem (author)
Gunnar Schoenbeck (musician)
David Lipsky
Andrew McCarthy (actor and author)
Jamie Gertz (actor)
Robert Downey Jr. (actor)
Mark Norris (class of 86 and photographer)
Lisa Fader (class of 85)
Brix Smith (musician)
Douglas Copeland (artist and author)
Charlie Sheen (actor)
Paula Powers (class of 86)
Matt Jacobson (class of 83)
WH. Auden (poet)
Kenneth Burke (poet and author)
Howard Nemerov (poet)
Stanley Edgar Hyman (literary critic)
Shirley Jackson (author)
Jules Olitsky (artist)
Paul Feely (artist)
Anthony Caro (sculptor)
Clement Greenberg (essayist and art critic)
Erich Fromm (psychologist and philosopher)
Martha Graham (dancer)
Ariadne Getty (philanthropist and film producer)
Jessica Blau (author)
Christian Bale (actor)
Todd O’Neill (class of 83)
Princess Farahnaz Pahlavi, Shah of Iran’s daughter
Beth Greenberg-Jones (class of 85)
Nancy Morowitz (class of 86)
Nora Ephron (author)

Books and films referred to:

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Animal House (film)
Less Than Zero (film)
White by Bret Easton Ellis
The Ecstasy of Influence (specifically the essay Zelig of Notoriety) by Jonathan Lethem