In Bennington it was a badge of dishonour not to have slept with your professor

It is incredibly hard to convey the fleeting invincibility and passionate self-significance that we feel on the cusp of adulthood. Youth goes: the skin fades, the face slackens, the lower back begins to groan in protest. The world dims and we dim with it. Yet generally speaking, we’re as personally winded by that realisation as we are indifferent to it in others. When everyone suffers, no one cares. Why should I bother with someone else’s wasted youth? I’ve got one of my own right here.

Still, I was intrigued by the appearance of Once Upon a Time at… Bennington College, an eight-part oral history of three literary superstars’ time at university together. It’s a behind-the-wizard’s-curtain retelling of the time when Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem were all members of Bennington College’s Class of ’86: the secret history of The Secret History.

The star is Ellis, a precocious, privileged writer who turns up with the face of a wounded teddy bear and a suitcase full of class-A drugs. His opposite number is Donna Tartt, a contained southerner who talks in wistful epigrams and appears ‘looking as if she’d arrived in Vermont on a steamship… none of her cultural references newer than J.M. Barrie’. Lethem (who provides the previous description of Tartt) occupies a more low-key position. Lethem is a fine writer, but even on campus Brett and Donna were the stars.

Bennington is a liberal college founded on loose anti-establishment principles in the middle of nowhere. It didn’t ask for SAT scores, charged the highest tuition in the country and attracted trust-fund artists and ambitious writers. Those not paying through their noses were let in on full scholarship. The drop-out rate was high, the professional standards liberal.