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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. The author is Claude Fredericks, a printer, playwright, amateur poet, and classics professor, who died in 2013. He is largely unknown outside a small circle of former students and colleagues at Bennington College—unknown, at least, by his own name. 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. I learned about the real Fredericks only after joining Bennington’s faculty, in 2012. 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. 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.
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. 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 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. 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. Moreover, because the author doesn’t know while writing how his dilemmas will be resolved, the resulting narrative captures better than a novel “how complex experience actually is.” Fredericks goes on, “What I’d like to propose is that . . . we now are no longer content with the conventions of fiction, that the whole idea of character and plot . . . no longer seems to be true.” Three decades before the rise of autofiction—novels that appear to hew to an author’s lived experience, largely dispensing with the artifices of fiction—Fredericks is calling for something similar.
Fredericks’s lecture, in fact, proposes dropping the illusions of fiction altogether. He makes a case for immersing readers in a subjective record of an individual’s experience, in “real time,” complete with all the errors, vagueness, lies, and mystifications that we engage in when we try to justify ourselves to ourselves. A journal is a “living thing,” he says; a novel is a “taxidermist’s replica.”
Fredericks, as he points out in his lecture, was uniquely qualified to explore the formal virtues of the journal. Beginning at the age of eight, in 1932, and lasting until a few weeks before his death, at eighty-nine, Fredericks was producing what he liked to call “one of the longest books about a single hero ever written.” All told, his journal stretches past sixty-five thousand pages. (This is an estimate made by the Claude Fredericks Foundation, a not-for-profit entity that Fredericks incorporated, in 1978, to preserve and eventually publish his journal in its entirety.) In 1990, when this epic narrative experiment was still under way, the Getty Research Institute acquired Fredericks’s papers, for an undisclosed sum. The purchase included the first part of the journal, documenting the years from 1932 to 1988.
Fredericks might seem an unlikely candidate to have his archive preserved at an institution as prominent as the Getty, which is best known for collecting the papers of such avant-garde artists as Man Ray and Robert Mapplethorpe. Fredericks had published almost none of his writing when the Getty made its acquisition: six poems, in 1944; one play, in a “New American Plays” anthology from 1965; two pieces in the Times Book Review; a small excerpt of his notebooks in Parenthèse, a literary journal, in 1979. “Is there not achievement in remaining so completely unpublished?” he wrote, with a touch of self-loathing, as he was nearing forty. Small theatre companies in New York produced his plays—among them a pacifist political allegory called “The Idiot King”—but they received poor reviews and had brief runs. More significant is Fredericks’s work for the Banyan Press, a small letterpress publisher that he operated, with interruptions, from 1946 until the late seventies. Banyan published writing by Gertrude Stein, André Gide, Stephen Spender, James Merrill, and others, in limited-run editions that were made with an almost spiritual sense of precision and care. Fredericks, who dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year, wasn’t a scholar in any professional sense; he published no academic papers on the Greek, Italian, and Japanese literature that he taught for thirty years. He dedicated himself instead to a life of self-directed study, and to a relentless pursuit of love and beauty—an ambition that he connected to ideas espoused in Plato’s Symposium, which, Fredericks wrote in the early eighties, was “the only holy book I truly know.”
The Getty catalogue estimates that the portion of the journal ending in 1988 runs to fifty thousand pages. This manuscript and Fredericks’s personal letters—some twenty thousand pages—fill twenty-seven archival boxes. The rest of the journal, covering 1989 to 2012, was acquired by the Getty in 2018, and has yet to be processed. On an inventory sheet, this section of the manuscript is described as being “many 1000s of pages.” If and when Fredericks’s journal is precisely catalogued, it may well prove to be the longest continuous record of an American life on paper—in any case, it’s certainly among the longest. Other hypertrophied diaries exist, but those have generally gained renown as works of outsider art. Robert Shields, a minister, a high-school teacher, and a hobby poet in Dayton, Washington, documented his every activity, at five-minute intervals, for twenty-five years, leaving behind a diary estimated to contain some thirty-seven million words. Another Sunday poet, Arthur Crew Inman—a wealthy eccentric who lived as a shut-in in Boston’s Back Bay, and hired working-class “talkers” to sit for interviews in his bedroom, so that he could subject them to analysis—compiled a diary of seventeen million words.
In the final years of Fredericks’s life, he and a former student, Marc Harrington, began transcribing his journal and printing serial volumes of it. They made it only to 1943, using the print-on-demand platform Xlibris to self-publish the first four thousand pages in six uniform, blue-sleeved volumes. These begin with Claude’s childhood, in Springfield, Missouri, where his doting mother nourishes his desire to see Tallulah Bankhead movies and listen on the Victrola to Toscanini conducting Brahms; Claude comes to loathe his father, a regional manager at an oil-and-gas company, calling him neglectful and a “vulgar drunk.” When he is sixteen, his parents separate. He muses, “It was Mother’s babying and . . . Daddy’s not being a father that made me a homosexual, je pense.” The volumes go on to chronicle his year and a half at Harvard, where he studies Greek, and end as he prepares to depart for wartime Manhattan—a new life of concerts, galleries, and cruising for sailors in Central Park.
In 1972, Fredericks writes, “I know that this journal is a work of permanent importance if anything in this world endures long enough to be called permanent or important.” During the past two years, I have been reading as much of the journal as I can manageably digest, from the original manuscript stored at the Getty Center, in Los Angeles, and from photocopies lent to me by the estate. At once more addictively engrossing and fatally tedious than anything else I have read, it is the strange chronicle of a “great” man whose genius is recognized almost exclusively by the chronicler himself. It is Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” but set in Vermont, with Fredericks playing the roles both of Charles Kinbote, the fawning critic on the edge of mania, and of John Shade, the eminent but mediocre poet. “I accept no authorities,” Fredericks writes, in the fifties. “And I . . . never met my equal, at least among my contemporaries.”
The journal is also a candid record of the homosexual underground in mid-century New York City, and the memoirs of a young gadfly’s encounters with such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Alice B. Toklas, and Gore Vidal. (“False values, pomposities, vanities,” Fredericks spews after one encounter with Vidal.) It ripens into a portrait of a worldly man’s deepening solitude as he ages.
The journal sometimes overwhelms Fredericks with its outlandish scale: he expresses frustration with the responsibility of writing future entries, and he can seem demoralized by sitting down every day to confront the same life. At one point in 1982, Fredericks writes, “I’ve lost the thread again. This page, these pages, these volumes are a labyrinth I cannot find my way out of. I have wasted a life in writing them. They are without value. And yet they’ve helped keep me sane.”
Langdon Hammer, a biographer and an English professor at Yale, told me, “I think Claude very honorably had an idea about the journal, related to his homosexuality and to his early reading of Freud. He wanted to privilege exactly what we edit out and compress and shape as writers—the self’s own repetitiveness and falsifications.” Toward the end of Fredericks’s life, Hammer said, he came to know Fredericks well, and received a “guided tour” of the journal while conducting research for a 2015 biography of Merrill, who was a significant lover of Fredericks’s. “Claude wanted to honor the original, imperfect form,” Hammer said. “The text at its moment of creation.” Fredericks, who resigned from Bennington in 1993, after a male student accused him of sexual harassment, wasn’t concerned that there might be ugliness in his diary. According to his theory of the journal as a “total” work of literature, a diaristic account should be proudly unsanitized, including the prejudices and delusions that may reveal us to be monsters in our hearts. Indeed, when Fredericks gave his chapbook lecture, he told the audience that such an exposure is inevitable, “if we are honest.”
The earliest published mention of Fredericks’s journal that I’ve found is from 1948. Appropriately enough, the citation comes from one of the most famous journals of the twentieth century: the diaries of the Cuban-French-American writer Anaïs Nin. She notes, of Fredericks, “He was a friend with whom one could exchange confidences. He writes a diary. I read some pages of it. His descriptions of sexuality are very specific and he may not be able to publish it.”
Fredericks was drawn into Nin’s bohemian circle in New York in 1945, when he was in his early twenties and she was in her early forties. Nin had just published a collection of short stories, “Under a Glass Bell,” and crossed paths with Fredericks when they were both pursuing Marshall Barer, an illustrator at Esquire who went on to become a success on Broadway. (He wrote the lyrics for “Once Upon a Mattress.”) Fredericks had a preternatural gift for placing himself alongside people destined for acclaim. When he was at Harvard, Fredericks had grown close to the poet May Sarton, whose father was on the faculty, and he joined the Cambridge literary set that orbited Delmore Schwartz (“very ugly but the most sensitive looking person I know”) and John Berryman (“so advanced and yet so retarded that I got a terrific despair for poetry”). Later, in New York, at a restaurant in Greenwich Village, Fredericks picked up a pretty young painter who was reading Lorca—her name was Frances Brando—and soon found himself at a party, deep in drunken conversation with her younger brother, a brooding, charismatic actor. Fredericks writes, “Marlin and I sat on the couch, and I was tempted to take advantage of his drunkenness, but did not.” When the two met again, months later, following the actor’s Broadway début, in “I Remember Mama,” Fredericks still referred to Marlon Brando as Marlin.
During this New York period, Fredericks portrays himself as a figure of fierce but thwarted ambition: “I thrive on praise, I thrive on solitude, I thrive on love; I have none now. I need love badly.” Living on an allowance from his mother—who had parlayed her ownership of a Missouri service station into a small-business empire—he was working on poetry, fiction, and plays, and trying without success to publish something. He was also living as much of an openly gay life as he could under the law. “No homosexual can be alive,” Fredericks observes during this period. “Half-alive in art—but more? In our culture, not more I think. If he is ‘himself’ he is destroyed.”
Nin, who had bought a letterpress machine and founded the Gemor Press with one of her lovers, Gonzalo More, advised Fredericks to learn the printing trade. He apprenticed with the couple for a few months before buying his own letterpress—he nicknamed it Dorothea, meaning “God’s gift” in Greek—and starting the Banyan Press with Milton Saul, an aspiring fiction writer who had recently become his lover.
In Nin’s diary, Fredericks is introduced almost as an afterthought: “Claude Fredericks I never had time to describe. He was the born confidant, the shadowy friend, the evasive supporter. What you assert he does not deny. . . . He is the felt in the bedroom slipper, the storm strips on the wintry windows . . . the interlining in conversations, the shock absorber on the springs of cars, the lightning conductor. He is the invisible man.”
It’s difficult to imagine Fredericks being flattered by Nin’s portrayal of him, with its tinge of condescension about his sexuality—the felt in a bedroom slipper is a passive receiver of the foot, after all. And what artist wants to be the “shock absorber”? Nonetheless, they clearly shared a devotion to the diary form, and, like Fredericks, Nin was determined to chronicle her “reality and truth” with unflinching honesty. Her diaries documented not only her volatile affairs with Henry Miller and Antonin Artaud but also her incestuous relationship, as an adult, with her father.
Crucially, it was Nin who first suggested to Fredericks that the diary had a special literary status. She also made him aware of the perils of editing such texts. During the same period in which Fredericks makes his appearance in Nin’s diary as “the invisible man,” she recounts an episode from Paris in the thirties: the famed editor Maxwell Perkins suggested that she stitch selections from her diary into a manuscript, but when she did so Perkins was “disturbed” by the results, and declared that her diary “should be published in its entirety or not at all.” Nin concludes that, if her “novels are symbolic and composites, the diary must at least be intact.”
Nin helped Fredericks feel that his ritualistic approach to life-writing had great promise. His journal records an exchange they had in 1946, at a birthday party that she threw for him. He describes her turning to him suddenly and saying, “You will be a very great and famous writer, Claude. . . . You are the only one of all the group that I am absolutely sure of.” As a present, Nin tells him, she is chronicling her thoughts about some diary pages of his: a journal of reading his journal. The notion, he writes, “enchants me.” (If Nin did compose such a document, it appears not to have survived.)
In 1954, while the two writers were living in the Village, Nin reconsidered the idea of editing her journal. She proposed publishing selections from her and Fredericks’s diaries in the same volume. Both would use pseudonyms, given that many of the entries would be considered scandalous. Her agent was on board, she reported. But Fredericks—not one to share the stage—resisted, and the idea languished. “I felt very defensive with her, and I did not want to see her again,” he writes, comparing her to a clinging vine.
Nin began publishing her diary, to acclaim and condemnation, in 1966. Not long after the volume with the description of Fredericks was published, in 1974, he extracted a small measure of revenge in his journal. He describes spending a rainy day in bed with a Bennington student; after making love, the student turns to him and jokes, “Anaïs didn’t know everything about you, did she?”
Fredericks makes a more extended appearance in James Merrill’s 1993 memoir, “A Different Person.” Merrill’s elegantly structured book uses a trip to Europe in 1950 to mark the beginning of his transformation from a novitiate author into a poet. That January, Merrill writes, he and Fredericks—by then an accomplished printer—had “caught sight of each other” at a book party for a mutual friend and felt a magnetic attraction. Fredericks, at the top of the first journal page describing their meeting, scrawled, “Here commences the vita nuova of C.F.” They made plans to meet in the South of France that summer; Merrill would sail for Europe first, and Fredericks would follow once he had extracted himself from his relationship with Milton Saul, and after he and Saul had finished printing the first edition of Gertrude Stein’s lesbian-themed novella “Q.E.D.,” under the title “Things as They Are.”
“How had Claude learned to love?” Merrill asks in wonder. By this, he means loving another man so intensely and unapologetically. As he describes it, Fredericks’s emotional capacities were strengthened by a daily regimen of self-education—Plato, Augustine, St. Francis, Freud. Merrill then writes:
More to the point, Claude had learned how to live. He rose impatiently above boredom and unhappiness, the better to grasp what the world offered. . . . The journal he’d been keeping almost since mastering the alphabet served him as both judge and guardian angel, for even the wasted day bore fruit, once confessed to at due analytical length. During seasons of solitude and introspection Claude thought nothing of leaving a party early or a concert at the intermission; by staying on he would merely have encountered more raw experience than his journal could process without fudging.
Fredericks’s journal, in turn, marvels at Merrill’s discipline as a poet: “He works, without stopping, for hours, writing hundreds of phrases in his notebook, reading the dictionary hour after hour, dragging each word out of his unconscious.” Over time, their affair curdles, in part because Merrill makes Fredericks insecure. “You make me feel I am worthless,” Fredericks writes to him.
When Fredericks made his initial sale to the Getty, in 1990, Merrill was still alive. (He died five years later.) From the start, access to Fredericks’s journal has been highly restricted—a condition that he imposed and that extended to most of the archive until recently. Periods of limited access are standard practice with archival materials that likely contain sensitive information about living people. Select portions of Susan Sontag’s journal, housed at U.C.L.A., were published a decade ago; the rest will be off limits to researchers until 2029, twenty-five years after her death. With Fredericks’s journal, the restrictions are scheduled to be lifted in 2028. There is an obvious difference, though: Sontag is a venerated critic, novelist, philosopher, and cultural celebrity, and her journal has intrinsic value for scholars of her work. With Fredericks, the journal is the work, and the other materials at the Getty, including the Banyan Press archive, are the supporting documents.
Today, a visitor to the Getty can examine virtually all of Fredericks’s unpublished poems and the drafts of his plays, along with thirty years’ worth of his teaching notes and syllabi. This material—filling eighty-five boxes—includes everything from his juvenilia (Boxes 1 and 2) to the alternate versions of his “Complete Poems” (Boxes 10 and 11) and cassette recordings that he secretly made of his classes between 1981 and 1988. Fredericks took candid snapshots at elaborate dinners that he prepared at the Vermont farmhouse where he lived as a member of the Bennington faculty, and at drinking parties that he hosted for his students. All these images are available for perusal. Fredericks’s written evaluations of his students’ work have also been housed at the Getty (Boxes 26 to 32). They are sealed until 2063, yet I wondered: Had he received permission from his students to place these evaluations in the archive? I felt a bit like Richard Papen, the narrator of “The Secret History,” who, on accidentally seeing Julian Morrow grasping a student’s hands, asks himself, “What the hell is going on?”
I had a similar reaction whenever I left the reading room of the Special Collections library after spending a day immersed in Fredericks’s obsessively documented world. There was a journal inside that almost nobody had ever read or even seen, yet was being preserved, under ideal conditions of humidity and temperature, in the expectation that readers would one day come. And, like the map the size of an empire in Jorge Luis Borges’s paragraph-long story “On Exactitude in Science,” Fredericks’s archive seemed to contain an artifact—a printed program, a receipt, a collection notice—from virtually everything he had ever done. Hallmark cards from his mother, newspaper clippings on the health benefits of eating fibre: it was an archive nearly as long, and as excruciating, as a human life.
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas coined a phrase that captures Fredericks to the core: “the cultivated personality.” It is introduced in Habermas’s 1962 book, “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” which describes the advent of the European bourgeois, and the invention of modern subjectivity, in eighteenth-century Europe. During this period, the journal and the personal letter exploded in popularity, as individuals increasingly decided that their intimate thoughts were worth memorializing. “The first-person narrative became a conversation with one’s self,” Habermas wrote. As the spread of capitalism created wealth outside the aristocracy, and print culture made reading a common leisure activity, many middle-class homes held salons for discussing books, playing music, and displaying art. The family room “became a reception room in which private people gather to become a public.”
By all accounts, Fredericks turned his farmhouse, in the village of Pawlet, into a dazzling reception room. He oversaw the slow transformation of the property from an unheated ruin without indoor plumbing into something out of a shelter magazine. The interior had the immaculate, minimalist aesthetic of a monk’s retreat, albeit with modern conveniences like a Xerox machine, for copying diary pages as soon as they emerged from his typewriter. Lavish multicourse dinners were regularly served, and Fredericks had a select library of fine editions. Merrill, in his memoir, praises the collection for its “breathtaking high-mindedness,” and he writes with equal admiration of the old letterpress, which was painted dark red and “stood five feet high, a presence challenging and inscrutable as any samurai in full armor.” But the house’s most dramatic element was Fredericks’s diary: he stored the original journal volumes in the basement, in an enormous Mosler bank safe.
Katharine Holabird, the author of the children’s-book series “Angelina Ballerina” and a student of Fredericks’s in the sixties, remembers being awestruck by the farmhouse: “I had never seen anything like it. Everything was arranged so sparely and intentionally. Each object in the house had meaning.” Fredericks had a garden where he grew a dizzying variety of vegetables; he nicknamed a towering pine tree on the property Zeus. For many of his students, Fredericks’s gatherings were not unlike the symposiums of Plato’s time: the farmhouse is where they first learned about gourmet cooking, the right wine to drink, which composers to worship. Todd O’Neal, a former student, told me that to be in Fredericks’s presence was “almost like Gestalt therapy,” adding, “It would shake something loose in your soul.”
I heard similar refrains from other former students who fell under Fredericks’s spell. He was not an inherently charismatic man. Although Merrill portrays Fredericks as one of his main creative catalysts in “A Different Person,” he gives only a vague physical description: “a round, fair-skinned face, by turns elfin and exalted, under thinning brown-gold hair.” In the recorded lectures that I have heard, Fredericks’s voice is archly theatrical; he sounds like an impish wizard who is equally fond of casting spells and telling dirty jokes. On campus, he dressed impeccably, in clothes from Brooks Brothers and J. Press. At home, he wore a fraying yukata, or unlined kimono, while doing daily meditation or playing the shakuhachi—a Japanese flute.
The diary was a central part of Fredericks’s mystique. His student Ann Goldstein, the translator of Elena Ferrante, Primo Levi, and other Italian writers, and a former head of the copy department at this magazine, told me, “We all knew about the journal.” She studied Dante with Fredericks, taking the same class twice because the subject—and his emphasis on close reading—so appealed to her. For a while, she said, “Claude was my obsession.” Goldstein kept a diary, too: “Claude talked about the diary as a work of literature, a form that gives the writer permission to take herself seriously.”
Peter Golub, a composer who is the longtime director of the Sundance Institute’s film-music program, and a lecturer at U.C.L.A., was a student of Fredericks’s in the seventies, studying Greek for two years and poring over each line of the Iliad and the Odyssey with him. “Claude made the Greek world tangible,” Golub told me, in a conversation at his studio, not far from the Getty. “It wasn’t a distant theoretical thing when we read the Odyssey together. The characters were real to me.”
Fredericks’s journal contains many dilations on classical texts, but it is animated almost from the start by his search for love. Once he enters his fifties, he gives this quest a peculiar philosophical cast. He writes that he is trying to find “the solution of a problem—to that central problem, to how I can find my being always, how I can find eternal life.” He increasingly surrounds himself with young men—many of whom, like Golub, are heterosexual. In the archive, I had come across a series of snapshots of Golub: he is standing outside Fredericks’s farmhouse in a scarf and a winter coat, snowflakes collecting in his hair. I showed Golub these images on my phone, and he swiped through them with a grin. “Claude was a dear friend,” he told me. “I was not one of his followers. There were students who adopted his manners and imitated his penmanship. They became Claude, in a way. But that wasn’t for me.”
Golub was one of the few male students of Fredericks’s who talked with me on the record. His warmth for Fredericks didn’t surprise me. In the early nineties, Golub returned to Bennington to teach, and he acted as Fredericks’s faculty advocate during a hearing about the sexual-harassment accusation. Fredericks denied any impropriety, but, according to the Rutland Herald, Bennington administrators informed him that, if he wanted to continue teaching and attain emeritus status, he had to move his office—which was in a secluded warren of the Commons building—closer to those of other faculty, and he could no longer lead private tutorials. Unwilling to accept such constraints, Fredericks resigned. “It devastated him,” Golub recalled. “I don’t think Claude ever got over it.”
When I informed Golub that Fredericks’s journal contains graphic depictions of his sexual relationships, including those with students, he was unsurprised. After all, during his own years as an undergraduate, male professors often slept with female students. “That was more accepted then,” he said, adding, “We were all supposed to be open-minded.” That is true, but, given the obvious power imbalances, Fredericks’s depictions can make for discomfiting reading today. (His accuser made his complaint anonymously, and I was not able to identify him.)
In his studio, Golub showed me a pair of bound scores—for Alban Berg’s operas, “Wozzeck” and “Lulu”—that Fredericks had bought and inscribed for him, in the mid-nineties. At a memorial service for Fredericks, in 2013, Golub told mourners that his former professor had a “deep spiritual and intellectual connection” to music, and recalled spending long hours with him in the farmhouse listening to the Bach cantatas. “Claude was truly an aesthete,” he added. Fredericks had “created himself, and his life, as an act of beauty.”
As an outsider to the Fredericks cult, I sometimes took a skeptical view of his strenuously constructed persona. Mastering Dante doesn’t require a bottle of wine and Palestrina on the stereo—and such atmospherics have too often served as a way to seduce students. Yet, from the start, I took the diary project seriously. It wasn’t just that eminent writers as various as Merrill and Nin had read passages from the diary and admired them: there was something thrilling about a document whose life span was longer than that of most humans. The very idea of the journal was a titanic act of imagination.
And so I committed myself to exploring its pages. I read most of the passages in the self-published volumes, which chronicle Fredericks’s youth until 1943, and then continued with decades-old photocopies from Fredericks’s estate, which included a set of bleaker entries from the early eighties. All told, I’ve read more than five thousand pages closely, and a few thousand more have passed under my eyes.
This experience generated a profound dissonance. For all the effort that Fredericks put into completing his journal project—and promoting it to others—an essential element is missing: he was not a good writer. He did not instinctively make judicious choices on the page, whether recounting a dramatic episode or offering a lengthy evocation of the pleasures of gardening in Vermont at the height of summer. His prose rarely displays the ingrained sense of control that true writers have even when jotting off a postcard. (I am not alone in feeling this way. In 1943, Fredericks laments, “Berryman said my poetry had no technique behind it.”)
With Fredericks, it appears that the practice of keeping a journal was less about cataloguing acute observations, or about capturing a milieu, or about imposing a literary sensibility on quotidian moments, than it was about the fact of having written. For such a grand and self-serious project, it is curiously slapdash. Even though Fredericks came to view the journal as “unwittingly the masterpiece I’ve been longing . . . to write,” a reader develops the sense that many of its pages came clattering out of his typewriter in a hurry.
In the Harvard years of the journal, the young Fredericks is confronting a profound dilemma: with America at war and the draft universal, he will face conscription if he proceeds with his plan to drop out and “escape from the tight chain of social obligation Cambridge is.” In April of 1943—six days away from his induction appointment—he writes, “I am filled with real terror right now.” But, in the frenetic tumble of events that follow, each of which is given equal weight, this terror is simply dropped. Instead, we get tedious descriptions of Fredericks’s dreams, and dreary recitations of meals he cooks with a lover.
Later in 1943, after he has left Harvard and is spending the summer in Maine, teaching himself Greek, writing poetry, and falling hard for the teen-age son of his neighbors, he interrupts a breathless, scattered passage with an aside: “I can’t write English, I really don’t give a damn, do try to understand, I have to write this, I don’t care how—it must be gotten out, and quickly, and then I will do something else.” In another entry from that year, he resolves to streamline his effort on the journal: “I want to write each day in telegraphic fashion, 150 words say, and then amplify various points in paragraphs below until I am tired, thus eliminating daily detail.” At such moments, Fredericks’s theories about the narrative complexity of the journal run aground: if a diarist skims over the details of his life for the sake of efficiency, how can the resulting depiction be more truthful or meaningful than fiction?
Even stranger, as the years pass the journal increasingly adopts a tone of stiff indifference. After Fredericks spends time at a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, Japan, in 1966, his exploration of Buddhism deepens, and his daily entries harden to the world, growing formalized and solipsistic. A passage from 1982: “I feel that perfect equilibrium that comes after sitting deeply. I will say here what I have to say, neither more nor less. There is all the time I need to say it. What remains unsaid poses no problem. It is simple.” More than once, the journal devolves into a pornography of isolation:
Last night it suddenly turned cool and cleared, and I felt today would be beautiful. It is. Just now I walked out into the day, looking at morning glories, at vegetables, at the beautiful Japanese gourds in delicate flower, at the ripening tomatoes, the crisp beans, the stiff onions . . . and walked softly back here to the house. Suddenly I was overcome and sank into a chair first and then onto the marble—yes, the marble slab—that lies on the coffee table there now. Opening my kimono I pleasured myself, melting into sun and day beyond thought—needing suddenly just that melting into being I had not known now in so long.
Langdon Hammer, the Yale professor, made significant use of the journal pages about the months that Fredericks and Merrill spent together in Europe for “James Merrill: Life and Art.” He told me that he’d expected one kind of resource—“a diary that’s going to tell me what Merrill did on specific days”—and discovered something very different. “I got a whole lot of Claude,” he said. “More than I needed. There’s a prevalence of logorrheic, unfashioned writing. It was often confusing to wade through.” There are regular periods when Fredericks didn’t write entries every day, yet he still felt the need to account for the missing time: “Maybe he hasn’t written in the journal since Wednesday afternoon, and now it’s Sunday. So he skims through the calendar and mentions what’s important to him, summarizes events without any description. That’s not so convenient for the biographer.”
Or for the reader, I said.
To Hammer, it’s not just sloppiness that accounts for the journal’s unwieldy nature. “His grandiose ambition for the journal and his immediate need to produce its pages were related,” he said. “The journal was part of producing himself.”
This performance was strong enough to bewitch some formidable minds, at least temporarily. In 1971, Fredericks delivered the first twenty-two volumes of his journal to Robert Giroux, the editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in a panier, a large French basket. “It is really amazing that anyone can have so fully documented a record of his life,” Giroux wrote to Fredericks that March. “It’s even physically interesting to read such a record—for example, the change of handwriting, all of a sudden, is phenomenal.” He compliments Fredericks on his “decidedly sophisticate” taste in classical music as a teen-ager. Giroux signs off by noting, “I can see that your journals will present a fantastic editing job, in sheer bulk alone.” A week later, he follows up with another letter, suggesting a date for lunch so that they can confer, and he can be given another batch of volumes:
There’s no question but that the diary gets better as your life gets more interesting. Yet I’m continually amazed at its catching such evanescent and changeable moods, things that would never have been caught on paper if you had not reached the status of veteran diarist in your early teens.
Giroux didn’t end up offering Fredericks a book deal. But they kept in touch. In 1973, Fredericks writes that he has proposed to Giroux a new publishing scheme: documenting a single year of his life, in three parts. The first would be a selection of the most interesting letters he had received that year; the second would be a selection of the letters he had written; the third would be “the most subjective part, the journal itself.” Giroux is cool on the idea. “Tricks aren’t necessary,” he says.
In 1980, one of Fredericks’s closest colleagues at Bennington, Bernard Malamud, offers to act as an intermediary with F.S.G., which publishes Malamud’s 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. I’m 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 arm—and 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 couldn’t 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 remarks—everyone has thoughts that other people would find offensive, Giroux explains, but you “simply can’t say those things in print and get away with it.” But these aren’t the only issues: “It was too long as it was. It repeated many things—even the obsessively constant concern with sexual adventure—too 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 Giroux—even as he offers no compliments on the writing—speaks “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 asked—in saying I trusted his judgment more than anyone’s—Is it really worth doing, reducing these pages to a novel. Yes, he said quite briskly and then almost tenderly, of course it’s 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 can’t 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 palpable—so “true,” to use one of Fredericks’s favored words—that it feels like we’re 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 flowers”—her sister is about to have her débutante 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; it’s 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. It’s a potent image: the young writer, marooned with her family for the holidays, taking refuge where she first learned to invent. It’s a boon to Tartt’s future biographers, especially as it brings to mind a line of Julian Morrow’s 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 loved—except 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 student—she calls him magister, a Latin form of address to scholars—she 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 family’s 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 Tartt’s 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 Julian’s 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 Julian’s 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 Tartt’s imagination. Or perhaps she just looked with a merciless eye at the professor who inspired her character—a 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 life—pursuing 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 Fredericks’s 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 Fredericks’s 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 isn’t 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 Fredericks’s 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 farmhouse—in his case, on Dante’s Commedia. Once a week, Fredericks would read a canto aloud in Dante’s 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 naïve—at 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 Virgil—he 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. I’d 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.”)
I spoke to another student of Fredericks’s from this period, who didn’t want to be identified. In the journal pages that I read, this person, whom I will call Will, is portrayed not as a student but as a resistant lover—at least, at the outset. Fredericks, in his first note to Will, informs him that, since his assigned counsellor—the equivalent of an academic adviser—has too many obligations, he will be taking over. “I’ll be in my office at seven if you’d like to stop by,” he writes. “We might then, if you’d like to see me regularly, find a time that suits us both.”
Within a few months, the notes to Will become plaintive, lofty, and strikingly unguarded: “Must the cost of intimacy be distance? We’d never been so close to each other as we were on Sunday, nor, I think, so far from one another—and for no reason I can understand—as last night. Even distance, though, is a kind of intimacy, too, and has, having to do with you, something sweet about it as well as something bitter and painful.”
At its height, the relationship sends Fredericks—who remains Will’s adviser—into florid spirals:
Dearest, what rapturous moments those were, the macrocosm of any given moment with you, the microcosm of a lifetime, or of several, with you—separated & together & at the very last moment unexpectedly separated only to be united again, entering our destination—heaven, of course, in the allegorical reading, love, and a life together.
When I came to this passage, I had the eerie sense, and not for the first time, that Fredericks had entered uncharted literary terrain: a journal with a narrator who is unreliable, and quite possibly a fantasist. He is no longer confessing his experience “at due analytical length,” as Merrill had observed in his memoir. Fredericks is writing sentimental fiction.
“Claude was very romantic,” Todd O’Neal, the former student, told me. “That’s why he always used to teach ‘Madame Bovary.’ He was Emma.”
In these sections of the journal from the seventies, Fredericks, following the classical Greek tradition as described by Plato in the Symposium, places himself in the role of the Lover: a citizen of high birth who abases himself after becoming infatuated with a boy whose beauty is an earthly reflection of the divine. As the Lover woos the Beloved, he educates him in philosophy, in the law, in the arts, and in public speaking, thus preparing the student to further the ideals of the city-state. Fredericks, throughout the journal, celebrates the Symposium as a literary masterpiece, but by this stage his alliance with Plato has become fundamentalist. It’s a depressingly literal—and superficial—way to approach the ideas in Plato’s dialogue, akin to a college student who joins the Libertarian Club immediately after reading “The Fountainhead.”
I asked Will for his version of these events. He said that when Fredericks took over as his adviser he initially felt flattered and fortunate: “I mean, this guy was why I was here. I wanted to learn about Japanese literature, about Buddhism, about meditation, and all the classics.” He’d heard rumors about Fredericks’s interest in male students, but he was overwhelmed by the intensity of their entanglement. He was soon taking all his classes with Fredericks except for one—a schedule similar to Richard Papen’s in “The Secret History.” Will recalled to me that he even began meditating in Fredericks’s office every morning. It was as if Fredericks were not just his professor but also his “spiritual adviser.” Finally, after months of fending off advances from Fredericks, Will slept with him. He was twenty-one. He felt liberated afterward, he told me, and ended the relationship, switching to another counsellor.
Years later, at a psychologist’s suggestion, Will contacted Fredericks and asked if he would join him in some therapy sessions, so that they could talk through their time together. “He kind of bowed out,” Will told me. “He really took no responsibility.” Will, who is now a professor himself, told Fredericks that he had come to view the older man’s behavior toward him as a form of abuse. Fredericks’s reply, he said, was eerily detached: “Don’t you do that to your own students?”
In the diaries documenting the period after Will breaks off the relationship, Fredericks stews in his loneliness, and for comfort he turns back to his “holy” books. The solipsism of these entries is astonishing. Will, he writes, “sought in a way no one ever ever dared to become me. That was his complaint on the phone. But that is the very thing he wished and I wished. We each wished . . . a true other—as Augustine calls his friend, as Montaigne calls his friend . . . and we wished true parentage & progeny.” He goes on, “Is it possible that all these years, in some deep biological need, I have indeed sought a son? I wanted to reproduce myself in something that lived even more than my books, than the pages of this journal, does, I wanted someone to live in my house and to use the things I have gathered about me but even more I wished someone to think the thoughts I think and live the life I’ve so slowly worked for. This is the true transmission of the lamp.”
In a rousing scene in “The Secret History,” the debauched students in Julian Morrow’s Greek class retreat to a country house and invite their teacher to dinner. A multicourse meal is prepared. There’s a fire in the fireplace, and, Tartt writes, “the whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling.” Julian makes a toast: “Live forever.” The students repeat the phrase and clink their glasses across the table “like an army regiment crossing sabres.”
Claude Fredericks has achieved a startling measure of the immortality he sought for his journal—his mammoth manuscript will presumably be housed at the Getty in perpetuity. Yet it remains to be seen how many people will ever read any of it. As Fredericks asked, in an entry from 1951, “Who will ever wade through these million pages? How will the jewels (and there ARE jewels) be found? What pig will truffle my woods?” Yet even if no further volumes are published, by the estate or by another publisher, many readers will discover Fredericks—in reimagined form—as Julian Morrow, an indelible character in a novel that, three decades after its publication, continues to attract avid new readers.
For all the insights in Fredericks’s lecture “How to Read a Journal,” there is a troubling omission. Calling the journal a “private” form, he notes that his first diary had a lock, and that he carried the key with him. Even after his journal became a known part of his life—when he sometimes performed in front of others the ritual of copying fresh pages and carrying the originals down the basement stairs to his bank safe—the entries themselves were full of private details: conversations with colleagues and students, phone calls with his mother, personal notes that he sent to friends and lovers, accounts of sexual encounters that he had with live-in partners and with relative strangers. In the lecture, he doesn’t acknowledge a diarist’s responsibility to the people he is writing about; in the journal, he almost always uses actual names. Nor does he address the ethics of writing about intimate experiences with other people and making it your “work”—and your claim on literary immortality.
James Merrill, despite his praise of Fredericks’s journal, had reservations about its contents. Fredericks, in a passage from July of 1975, recalls a night on an East Hampton beach more than twenty years earlier, when the two were still involved. Merrill had stripped off his clothing, and Fredericks, feeling “wild with desire,” dropped to his knees before Merrill in the sand. Merrill knew that a record of this moment would wind up in the journal, so he waited for Fredericks to write an account—and then he stole the pages. In 1975, Fredericks wonders ruefully, “Does he have them still—like some fading photograph an aging beauty keeps?”
As usual, Fredericks is flattering his older self by missing the point. It’s likely that Merrill stole the pages about the night on the beach to protect himself: it was the nineteen-fifties, and sex between men was then illegal. Merrill could have been blackmailed by an opportunist—his father was one of the founders of the investment firm Merrill Lynch—or even prosecuted. Fredericks understood this danger, too. He stored his manuscript in a bank safe in the basement, after all. And, as the Mosler filled up with journal pages, he installed another one.
Having spent so many frustrated hours with Fredericks’s journal, I sometimes wonder if it would have been better had the vaults never been opened. He is right that some stray “jewels” were hidden inside them, but in the main his millions of words are a monumental disappointment. Even so, I still find it captivating to think of the pages slowly piling up—a tomb of paper. It may be Fredericks’s most successful act of beauty. ♦
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