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| Cormac McCarthy |
Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century: “I Loved Him. He Was My Safety.”
Vincenzo Barney
NOVEMBER 20, 2024
I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the 47-year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the forged birth certificate and clandestine love letters. But above all, they lack the leading lady: the secret muse.
This love story may come as a shock, for Cormac McCarthy is one of the most famous American novelists we know the least about. In June 2023, when he died of complications from prostate cancer at the age of 89 surrounded by Cadillacs and Ferraris at his compound in Santa Fe, McCarthy’s hold on literary awareness was at a stage of maximum receptivity. (So was his bank account; sources say he died with tens of millions in assets.) He had just released a dyad of final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, turning his death half a year later into an eerie consonance. And yet, despite hours of posthumously released interviews with the likes of Werner Herzog and David Krakauer, we still know so little about the man behind the famous Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter.There are the known years of drinking immortalized in his fourth novel, Suttree, and his efforts to reintroduce wolves into southern Arizona in the ’80s. In 1996, a neighbor pored through his trash in El Paso and found junk mail from the Republican National Committee. For most of his writing career, he was mythically poor, according to several accounts, on purpose. Then there was the light bulb for writing he supposedly carried as he traveled from motel to motel, a detail gleaned from the lone interview he granted in the ’90s, to Richard B. Woodward. In the 2000s he became a trustee and beloved fixture at the Santa Fe Institute, a renowned multidisciplinary research center. “I don’t pretend to understand women,” McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey in 2007, commenting on the lack of them in his novels—despite the fact that he was married three times. And for decades, readers took him at his word.
Upon McCarthy’s death, however, the mystery of his personal life has drawn close enough for us to unravel assumptions into their opposites: Cormac McCarthy did not shirk womenkind in his novels. On the contrary, it turns out that many of his famous leading men were inspired by a single woman, a single secret muse revealed here for the first time: a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl named Augusta Britt. A cowgirl whose reality, McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he had “trouble coming to grips with.”
***
“I met Cormac in 1976, when I was 16,” Britt, now 64, tells me. “He was 42. I was in and out of foster care at the time, and I used to go to the pool at this motel off the freeway in the south side of Tucson called the Desert Inn. It was near an area of town called the Miracle Mile. It wasn’t very safe in the foster homes. They weren’t allowed to have locks on bedroom or bathroom doors, so the men would just follow me into all the rooms. But at the Desert Inn, I could use the showers by the pool to shower. Hey, ‘Use the shower to shower,’ that’s a great line, put that in the profile!” she laughs.
This is the Augustal style: equipoise between the love of laughing at oneself and soliloquy. In fact, she’s been promising for days to recite the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, except she can’t recall where she left it in her memory palace. Though this morning she did stumble across King Henry’s tennis ball speech in a vestibule in the entry room and recited it to me, word for word: “We are glad the dauphin is so pleasant with us…”
It’s August 2023, and Britt and I are driving in her Escalade—a gift from McCarthy, she tells me—from the Arizona horse barn, where she stables her two horses, to her home near Tucson, where she’s lived nearly her whole life.
It’s monsoon season, and lightning bobs and weaves in the corner of your eyes all day like floaters. There are three separate storms to the south, delicately wind-tilted on the horizon. Lightning races them in a stitchless thread, and to the north rain shimmers through the sheerest rainbow, stamped perfectly horizontal against the mountains like the execution line on a document.
“One day I was at the motel pool, and I saw Cormac, and I thought he looked familiar but couldn’t quite place him. So I went back to the home I was staying in and realized that the man at the swimming pool was the man in the author photo on the back of the book I was reading, The Orchard Keeper.” (McCarthy’s little-read debut, published in 1965 but already out of print along with the rest of his three-novel body of work.) “It was this beat-up old paperback. I think I paid a nickel for it in a bin outside a bookstore. So the next day I brought it to the motel, and he was still there.
“I was wearing jeans and a work shirt and I had a holster with a Colt revolver in it, which I had taken to wearing. I had stolen it from the man who ran the foster home that I was in. And Cormac looked at me and he said, ‘Little lady, are you going to shoot me?’ And I said, ‘No,’ ” her voice sparkles in remembered laughter, “ ‘I was wondering if you would sign my book.’
“He was so shocked. He said he was surprised that anyone had read that book, let alone a 16-year-old girl. But he said he would be delighted to sign it.
“Then he asked me why I carried a gun.”
So she told him.
Britt says she lived a normal life until the age of 11. That year, and for reasons she never quite understood, her family moved from the snowy plains of North Dakota to the border town desert of Tucson. This is where the muse’s novelistic question mark emerges. An origin story beginning on an ellipse. Something hideous happened to her in the desert. Something traumatically violent. Something that destroyed her family.
Though the event—which she still can’t bear to talk about publicly—wasn’t perpetrated by anyone in her family, it set her father to violent alcoholism. In the ’70s, child services was more prone to split up families than keep them together. For five years, Britt says, she ping-ponged back and forth between foster care homes, brimming with wards and violent “parents,” and her real family, where her presence would inevitably send her father into binges, followed by beatings, sometimes hospitalizations.
“I would not have been able to articulate it at the time,” she says now, “but it just seemed like I was the problem, because if I wasn’t around, then my parents didn’t have to be reminded of what had happened to us all. And I very much internalized everything because that’s what kids do. In the absence of an explanation, you look for an answer to why things happened. And the answer I kept coming up with was, I must have been bad. And if I could just find a way to be good again, then everything would be okay.
“I never blamed him,” she says of her now deceased father. “He did the best he could. How are you supposed to know what to do in those situations?”
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| Cormac McCarthy |
Every time she was hit, whether by her father or a foster parent, she would disappear inside herself. It could take weeks, months to reemerge. It got to the point where if it happened again, she didn’t know if she’d ever come out. And she could no longer live like that.
“So I’ve decided I’m not going to be hit anymore,” she told McCarthy at that motel pool. Here she pauses, and you must imagine the sweetest voice you’ve ever heard—a sweetness that isn’t afraid to pull triggers first and ask questions later. “I’m just going to shoot anyone who tries.”
“ ‘Well,’ ” McCarthy said, “ ‘That would explain the gun.’ ”
“And that was so Cormac,” Britt laughs. “And I thought, Thank God this man gets it.”
But McCarthy’s interest persisted beyond stolen revolvers, whose ownership readers will at once recognize as being transferred to Blevins from All the Pretty Horses. And how could it not?
Just imagine for a moment: You’re an unappreciated literary genius who has not even hit your stride before going out of print. Your novels so far have circled around dark Southern characters who do dark Southern things. You’re stalled on the draft of a fourth novel, called Suttree, which features an indeterminately young side character named Harrogate, not yet written as a runaway. You’re sitting by a pool at a cheap motel when a beautiful 16-year-old runaway sidles up to you with a stolen gun in one hand and your debut novel in the other. She reads in her closet to stay out of violence’s earshot. To survive her lonely anguish, the wound she’s been carrying since age 11, this girl has only literature to turn to: Hemingway, Faulkner, you. She flickers with comic innocence yet tragic experience beyond her years and an atavistic insistence on survival on her own terms. She has suffered more childhood violence than you can imagine, and she holds your own prose up to you for autograph, dedication, proof of provenance.
And just like that, with the impatient grandeur below accident, coincidence, you’re introduced to your muse, a moral hero, a girl with a stuffed kitten named John Grady Cole.
But this was 1976. The era of McCarthy’s handlebar mustache. Years before he would name the hero of his first commercial breakthrough after Britt’s kitten. And years before he’d name the novel after the lullaby, “All the Pretty Little Horses,” she’d sing to John Grady before bed. McCarthy was then rewriting Suttree, researching Blood Meridian, and about to begin living All the Pretty Horses, a novel that follows three young runaways down to Mexico with a stolen Colt revolver. Having just sunk into Britt’s opening pages and their hypnotic intimations of scope, he insisted on staying in touch.
“He wanted to hear more about my life.” Which was a relief to Britt. “It was the first time someone cared what I thought, asked me my opinions about things. And to have this adult man that actually seemed interested in talking to me, it was intensely soothing. For the first time in my life, I felt just a little spark of hope. That things might be okay.”
Because McCarthy would be moving westward through motels with no consistent phone number, Britt says he arranged for her to ride her bike and wait at the phone booth at the Desert Inn for his first call later that week. And because he was worried about her physical safety, he gave her his legendary editor Albert Erskine’s number for emergencies. He began to send her letters and books as well (Sister Carrie, Jung’s Dreams, and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: “ ‘Might be hard going,’ ” Britt recalls him saying, “ ‘But if you push through, I think you’ll find it rewarding’ ”) and started rewriting Suttree with an infatuate intensity, rejiggering the character of Harrogate, the slapstick young runaway sidekick of Cornelius Suttree, McCarthy’s own doppelgänger. In McCarthy’s body of work, Suttree marks the introduction of light comedy, most evident in Harrogate. It wasn’t until I met Britt in the flesh that I recognized her comic influence on the character. Within the span of 24 hours of my arrival in Tucson, Britt climbed onto the stove to get to a cabinet, accidentally turning the burner on and scorching her knees; a long hard sneeze nearly sent her airborne with flapping arms; and I walked in on her making my bed by lying on top of it and breaststroking the fitted sheet into the corner. Readers of Suttree will recognize the hapless young Harrogate flying down the Knoxville river on a skiff he made of two car hoods welded together or straggling through the woods with a pot of tar tied to his ankle.
After learning Britt wanted to be a nurse, McCarthy also introduced a character named Wanda to Suttree, an underage love interest Suttree meets in the month of August. Wanda reads stories about nurses and steals away to Suttree’s tent in the small hours of the night. She is also Britt’s debut death, crushed under a rockslide.
Whenever McCarthy was back in town, he’d see Britt, leaving cab or phone money for her between the third and fourth Wall Street Journal in the Denny’s on Miracle Mile, she says. For safekeeping, he sent some of his letters to a friend named Jimmy Anderson, the eccentric owner of the legendary Tucson bar Someplace Else, famous for branding patrons with his own likeness and owning a license plate that read “God.” He is in The Passenger, and you may hazard a guess who his young female bartender was in real life. In The Passenger, she goes by the name Alicia.
Britt shows the Denny’s to me outside the Escalade window. “It always had to be the fourth Wall Street Journal. He loved the intrigue of it. For all I know, he was laughing behind some mailbox watching me go in,” she grins.
This arrangement went on well into 1977, she says. Until one night Britt missed his call. She had been living at home and it happened: She’d been hit again. Worse, she’d been put in the hospital. By the time she finally emerged and managed to reconnect with McCarthy at the Desert Inn, he was in anguish.
“ ‘I was worried sick about you,’ ” she recalls him saying. “ ‘If you stay here, they’re going to kill you. I’m going to Mexico, and I want you to come with me. At least then you’ll be safe. I want you to know I don’t want anything from you. If you want to come home at any point, I’ll put you right on a bus.’ ”
“Okay,” she said.
“ ‘But if you do come with me, you’ve got to say goodbye to this place. Even if you come back a week or a month from now, it will never be the same. You need to understand your life will change the minute you leave with me.’ ”
“Okay,” she said again. “I’ll come.”
***
“Horses are herd animals,” Britt tells me now back in Tucson, patting Scout, her gelding paint horse. Behind her is Jake, her brown reining quarter horse. In a barn of some 20 steeds, she quite rightly has all the pretty horses. So pretty, in fact, McCarthy made sure identical breeds appear in The Counselor, a 2013 film that sees Penélope Cruz play Britt for the second time in as many decades. “That’s why it’s not really right to own just one horse. They get real lonely all by themselves.” She pauses. “Cormac always wanted me to tell my story. He always encouraged me to write a book. He’d say, ‘Someone will do it eventually, and it might as well be you.’ But I just never could bring myself to.”
Though if she ever does bring herself to write, it would be something. Considering the comment she left on my Substack review of McCarthy’s The Passenger a few months before he died, she’s already well on her way:
***
“‘Well, you pretty much laid it all out, didn’t you?’ ” Britt recalls McCarthy saying when she read him her comment over the phone. The two had not lived together full-time for many decades, and McCarthy had become too frail to make his regular trips out to Tucson. Though as was their habit throughout life, they still spoke on the phone multiple times a week and exchanged letters, 47 of which Britt shared with me. In McCarthy’s final years, he lived in near isolation at his compound in Santa Fe, with luxury cars, spare seats, and car parts smattered across its acreage, like “a rich hillbilly,” Britt fondly recalls. The parts weren’t for nothing—McCarthy was an excellent mechanic. But in those last years, worth millions of dollars, the great American novelist had taken to comparing himself unfavorably to the principal in the proverb, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“I’m going to delete it,” Britt told him of her comment.
“ ‘Let’s see what happens,’ ” she remembers him counseling. “ ‘Maybe something good will come of it.’ ”
And something good did come of it. I found her—or rather, she found me, and invited me out to Tucson to tell her story. And I’ve quickly learned she’s not a recluse so much as a closed book, her pages opening now with mesmerizing candor. Over the course of nine months, we will end up spending thousands of hours together. She’ll teach me to take care of horses, to shoot, to read McCarthy’s Cyrillic cursive. Others have not been so lucky. Two hopeful McCarthy biographers have been racing each other to get to her but she has decided to speak only to me. “It feels like fate, meeting each other,” she says. “When I read what you wrote, I knew I liked you. And Cormac liked your essay too, because you weren’t fawning over him. He couldn’t stand that. ‘That’s a fine turn of phrase, Baba, read it to me again,’ he kept saying.”
I feel as though I’m going to throw up when she tells me this. Posting an essay on my favorite writer to Substack on April Fool’s Day, receiving a cryptic comment from his secret muse, and now driving with her to see her horses feels more miraculous than fate. And yet there is something so natural about spending time with Britt. There is a shimmer of recognition with her, an intimate equidistance. After all, I’ve been reading about her for half my life. And now here she is, in the flesh.
Britt is a small woman but in no way slight. Her arms are thin yet taut, muscular, with large, defined hands, dignified by a lifetime of living by them: holding reins as a cowgirl, setting IVs as a trauma nurse, pulling triggers in self-defense, grappling with McCarthy’s painful, mirrory prose. When she blinks, her large blue eyes seem to tinkle in crystal delicacy. And her blond Finnish hair frames a youthful face that has slipped into a barely discernible older age. One sees her effortlessly—when she laughs, when she contemplates—in all her unvanished youth and beauty.
The first thing you notice about her, leading Scout and Jake up a dormant streambed to their stalls, is how novelistic she is. She is a woman of compelling themes, tragic patterns, hooks, plot, question marks. She says things like “Cormac warned me I couldn’t hide forever” and “That was back when we had one eye out for the law.”
Things happen to her that happen to characters in literature—McCarthyan things. For instance, a month ago, when a stream was carving itself out of an epic flash flood, Britt was saddling up at midnight to rescue more horses from the desert than her barn had even lost. Setting out for three runaways, she returned at daybreak flush with 12 horses and three spooked cows. “But,” she laughs, “they just wouldn’t stop joining up.” That evening after the flood, she says, she came home to a burglar shuffling through her house while McCarthy’s love letters lay strewn about her kitchen table, and she kneecapped him with the nonlethal bullet of a Byrna pistol she keeps in her purse for just such occasions.
If, one morning, Britt woke up between the covers of a Cormac McCarthy novel, she’d find herself right at home: facing insurmountable odds with sustained courage. As previously mentioned, she has woken up between the covers of a Cormac McCarthy book—10 by my count, sometimes in two or three characters at once—and represented on the covers of two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, in Ophelial repose. She’s had the sustained courage to live each one of them down, no matter how many times McCarthy killed her off, no matter how many times the blindsiding novelizations of her life sent her spiraling. As McCarthy put it in his private dedication to Britt in her copy of The Passenger:
***
The second thing you notice about Britt is how much her voice sounds like Cormac McCarthy. Particularly when she says the words “drinker” (“Cormac was a heavy drinker at the end. You could always tell when he was loaded because he’d be blasting Rahsaan Roland Kirk”), “shiner” (as in the one her farrier gave her over the left eye last week, unloading his anvil), and “statutory rape and the Mann Act” (the crimes they feared had the FBI hot on McCarthy’s tail at the start of their relationship, she says).
And the last thing you notice—and this might really be the first thing—is how damn hot it is where she boards her horses. It’s high noon at the Catalina Foothills barn, and our shadows are hidden under our feet. Soon they will begin slipping out headfirst from the barn’s shade into the menacing 116-degree sun. It’s August in Tucson, the last month of the hottest summer on Arizonan record, and the daylight waits for us on the other side of the shadowline with the inevitability of a slow-rising tide.
“There’s a rule in horsemanship,” Britt says, untying Scout’s purple halter hitch, “that if you control the feet, you control the horse. Horses are animals of prey, and prey animals tend to hang out in herds. The way horses establish social status in a herd is by moving each other’s feet. In the wild, the stallion and mare are responsible for moving the herd, and they do it by controlling the others’ feet. You can’t control a horse any other way. A human just isn’t strong enough.”
That’s the muse for you, full of equine wisdom, horse sense. And while she certainly has a way with words, words also have a way with her, as McCarthy found out in 1976. As do landscapes. Behind her, framed between the posts of Scout’s stall, the Catalina Mountains loom burnt green, brushed upward with the impressionistic confidence of a child’s paint stroke. Britt stands poised at the picture’s edge like a foreground that has leaked out of its frame, at play between painting and outer world, portrait and subject.
“Did Cormac ever ride?” I ask.
“No, he never did,” she grins. She thinks awhile. Old memories, border imageries. The wind plays long, warped chords out of the sheet metal roof above her head. “But he liked to watch me.”
“Down in Mexico.”
“Down in Mexico.”
***
Hightailing it down to Mexico in 1977 with a 17-year-old runaway wasn’t, apparently, as easy as it sounds. There was the matter of getting a Mexican travel visa and not being apprehended by authorities, which required leaving Arizona in McCarthy’s beat-up Chevy and tweaking Britt’s birth certificate. They were aided by one of McCarthy’s closest friends, Michael Cameron. Typical for the unconventional morals of McCarthy’s most trusted confidants, Cameron once broke his girlfriend out of jail—so helping the pair flee the Wild West was no problem. “I helped them blow town,” Cameron recalls when we speak this past September, referring to phone calls he took from friends of Britt’s mother and, he amusedly hints, “very possibly police.” He did what he could to obfuscate and delay—not knowing, in fairness, what exactly he was aiding and abetting until after the fact. “That was a harrowing escape. I remember Cormac being very nervous, looking over his shoulder.”
But if McCarthy was nervous, he hid it from Britt. After driving to Lordsburg, New Mexico, with McCarthy silently reciting to himself the lines of Suttree he was to write and flourishing his hand like a herald (one of Britt’s favorite affectations to imitate), he booked adjoining rooms at the Hotel Hidalgo and wrote to the town of Virginia, Minnesota, requesting Britt’s birth certificate. When it came, she claims, he threw it into his typewriter and made his amendments. (“There’s nothing more romantic than watching a man forge your birth certificate,” she laughs.)
Britt had packed all she had, her stolen Colt revolver, John Grady Cole (“was a very merry soul, and a very merry soul was he,” she would sing), the shirt on her back, and pot shards McCarthy had pocketed for her from Canyon de Chelly National Monument, ancient Anasazi lands—pot shards Judge Holden crushes underfoot in Blood Meridian.
There’s a sensation in which someone tells you something for the first time and yet it feels like you already knew it, like you are remembering it instead of hearing it. This is what it feels like to hear Britt talk: a priori. After all, her story’s always been there, below the surface, between the lines in the novels’ coy subconscious. For instance, that’s how it might feel reading this, with All the Pretty Horses open on your lap:
“By the way, can you shoot that thing?” McCarthy asked, meaning her gun.
“Yeah, a little.”
“Let’s see it.”
The two went out onto the playa behind the hotel in Lordsburg, Britt says, and McCarthy arranged bottles for target practice. Britt nailed them all. “Mother of God,” McCarthy said. Then he threw up a leather strop he carried. Britt shot it straight through the center. He stood in silent amazement, which Britt immediately mistook. She feared she’d done something wrong and panicked, thinking he was about to send her back to Tucson. “I’m very clean, you know.”
“Oh?”
“And I cook. And…” she thought deep, “and I know how to change the ribbon on a typewriter.”
“Oh, well,” McCarthy laughed, “that settles it then.”
And that afternoon, returning to their hotel room, she says, they made love for the first time.
He was 43, she was 17. The image is startling, possibly illegal. At the very least, it raises questions about inappropriate power dynamics and the specter of premeditated grooming. But not to Britt—who had suffered unspeakable violence at the hands of many men in her young life—then or now.
“I can’t imagine, after the childhood I had, making love for the first time with anyone but a man, anyone but Cormac. It all felt right. It felt good,” she tells me. “I loved him. He was my safety. I really feel that if I had not met him, I would have died young. What I had trouble with came later. When he started writing about me.”
Though trouble also came immediately, according to Britt, in the form of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Nobody fucked with Cormac. He just gave off an aura that he was not to be fucked with. The only person I ever saw him be so deferential to was Albert [Erskine]. The day before we left for Mexico, I remember him making a call to Albert. And then Cormac’s whole demeanor changed. [He] got very serious and quiet and said, ‘I appreciate you telling me that. I guess it’s good we’re going to Mexico.’ They hung up and Cormac said, ‘Well, the FBI has paid a visit to Albert. The state of Arizona is looking for you.’
“Apparently the way they connected Cormac with me is my mom found the letters from Cormac in my room and gave them to the police. And then the police started questioning people at the motel. So they had his license plate, make of his car. And at that point he was wanted for statutory rape and the Mann Act. But he was undaunted. I think he kind of liked it, actually,” she grins.
“I was terrified that they’d find us. I didn’t want to go back to Tucson. I didn’t want to go back to foster homes. I didn’t want to go back to that life. Nobody likes to get hit. Nobody. Every time somebody hit me, it made me feel like a wild animal. I can’t articulate it except to say that it made me feel so wild inside, like a wolf with its leg caught in a trap. If I could have chewed off my leg to escape the feelings, I would have, I would’ve done anything to make it stop. And so when I found out that the police were looking for us, I was pretty frantic. I asked Cormac what we’d do if they found us and he looked at me, and he said in this funny Southern drawl, sorta like Billy Bob Thornton’s future character in Sling Blade, ‘I will shoot them.’
“ ‘Well, what if there’s a lot of them?’ ”
“ ‘I will kill them.’ ”
“That calmed me down. And for as long as I knew him, 47 years, if I was having a bad day or I was really sad, he would try and cheer me up by telling me all the ways he would kill people.”
“That’s so sweet,” I wryly offer.
“I know,” she grins. “It’s so romantic.”
The next day, she says, McCarthy and Britt traveled from El Paso to Juarez.
***
One measure of fame is how suddenly cognizant one becomes of the looming biographer, archivist, or graduate student peering over posterity’s shoulder at your personal correspondence. But McCarthy began writing his love letters to Britt when he was out of print, and they brim with an unusual voice—that of Cormac McCarthy in true love’s perfect candor. They’re less like sketches for a painting and more like confessionals. They are written by a man infatuate.
For the first few days of my stay in Tucson, the letters sit in the same Converse shoebox they’ve been stored in since the ’70s. I’ve been giving them a wide berth. To a McCarthy fan, they’re like the Holy Grail. It somehow doesn’t feel right reading the blue ink meant for her blue eyes. What will they be like? Joyce’s encrusted epistles to Nora? Nabokov’s letters to Véra? Or more like letters to a Lolita?
“Well, just walk it off,” Britt says, “and get reading! That’s what you’re here to do. If the FBI can read them, why can’t you?” (“Walk it off,” or “Walk on,” was one of McCarthy’s private catchphrases: “The world’s a dark place, and there’s a cold wind blowing. So you’ve got to turn up your collar and walk on.”)
Britt bids me goodnight, and I sit at the kitchen table under a gentle spotlight and begin to read McCarthy’s offstage soliloquies, billet-doux meant for an audience of one. There’s 47 of them—that Britt can find. With a tendency to stuff letters (and hundred-dollar bills) between the leaves of her books, she often comes across loose letters. Though McCarthy sent fewer and fewer letters to family, friends, and Britt when he felt the future presence of a biographer, she says he often implored her not to burn them and convinced her to get a shared safety deposit box to store them. He hoped one day that she’d use them to write her own story, which presents a poignant contrast to McCarthy’s own emphatic desire not to have a biography written about himself. Most of them are kept in their original envelopes, though they’re not arranged in any chronology. There’s loose-leaf notebook pages, blank sheets otherwise destined for a typewriter, napkins—tapestries really, of rugged thread and delicate weave, in which the words all shine through, don’t quite stick to the stitches. Other pages are equally thin to translucence. In fact, there are so many napkin letters, McCarthy begins one that reads, held up to the light:
Just back from my stationers—he recommends this new lightweight textural finish very highly. I suppose you might have reckoned by now that there is some mysterious connection between you and food—so that every time I get in a restaurant I start thinking about you and reach for a napkin upon which to scribble you a message of undying devotion. Well, something like that.
Undying devotion? This is an emotive Cormac McCarthy, a McCarthy who uses quotation marks when people speak and capitalizes words he otherwise leaves in his trademark lowercase. He even says, at one point, “humongously,” as in “I love you humongously.” The datable letters begin in 1977, when Britt was 17. They span 47 years. But as McCarthy says in one, when he has had too much of his own buildup, “Enough!” Let us begin:
Thinking of Britt in the Grand Canyon:
On the road researching Blood Meridian:
Withdrawal continues unto dream:
Which is best paired with this Wanda scene from Suttree:
She was naked under her blanket. It fell in a dark pool about her feet. In which he knelt, rain dripping from her nipples, runneling thinly on her pale belly. With his ear to the womb of this child he could hear the hiss of meteorites through the blind stellar depths. She moaned and stood tiptoe, her hands holding his head to her.
Here, McCarthy scholars are advised to open Suttree to its ninth section to spot similarities:
And lastly:
***
I’ve been asking myself if I am reading this right for most of my efforts with McCarthy’s penmanship. But at these passages—and many others—the question takes on a whole other meaning. For many of these letters were written to a teenage girl—before they had run off together, before they had consummated. McCarthy admits in one that these amorous spiralings (in which he begins to iridesce into a Suttree-esque breathlessness) are just, for the time being, “fantasies.”
I ask Britt about it during a round of target practice. She’s insisted on getting me up to speed on the Byrna, a nonlethal self-defense firearm legal in every state without a permit. We’ve driven to a quiet park right off a bike trail, and Britt’s picked out a nice big sign across the trail above a wash, one of the many dried, ancient riverbeds in town that carry the runoff of rainstorms. She walks to the sign, checks for oncoming cyclists, and I aim for “Tucson.”
“Dang, you’re a good shot!”
“Hey, thanks. Did Cormac ever shoot?”
“No, not that I ever saw. But he loved to buy them for me.” Which is true. Her gun safe includes a long-barreled Taurus Judge revolver (“Every girl should have one!”) and a 12-gauge shotgun (“The perfect gift for the suicidal girlfriend!”), to name just a few of his affectionate purchases.
“So, those letters.”
“Oh, yes, what did you make of them?”
“Well, he writes of you so…erotically. But you hadn’t actually become intimate yet, right?”
“Yeah, so…that’s hard to explain.”
But before she can finish, we hear a booming voice. We look at each other quizzically, not sure where it’s coming from or what it’s saying.
“Stand up and fucking show yourselves! Fuckin’ shootin’ at us! Show yourselves!”
It’s coming from down in the wash. Our mouths drop into gaping, shocked smiles, and we hightail it to Britt’s Escalade.
***
Mexico remains the romance’s period of paradise. As Michael Cameron describes it, “The two disappeared into love land.” In May 1977, she and McCarthy traveled along the path of Blood Meridian, the novel he was researching at the time and which, though it was published largely to silence in 1985, is now considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. They began in Juarez and made deep inroads into Chihuahua, Mexico City, Los Mochis, Baja. As they left each town, Britt sent her mother reassuring postcards. Realizing her daughter was okay, Britt claims, her mother stopped cooperating with the state police and FBI, which did not have enough conclusive evidence, let alone jurisdiction, to continue an investigation. (Beyond the recollection of a handful of sources, VF could find no evidence of any police or federal investigation, though there is no doubt that laws were broken.)
McCarthy would work in the mornings while Britt attended a traditional Catholic Mass, replete with mantilla headdress, earning the affectionate nicknames “Babushka” and “Baba” from McCarthy. (Many post-Mexico letters open with “Dearest Baba.”) The country was idyllic and paradisiacally cheap, cheap enough for the self-impoverished McCarthy to live like a king and Britt, whose blond hair and pigtails some mesmerized Mexican children had never seen before, like a teenage queen.
The two even tried peyote together in Baja, which sent McCarthy on a riff about time and the universe. As a raving McCarthyite with his own quantum thesis about Blood Meridian to corroborate, I asked Britt what he had said. “Well, we had been tripping for hours and the sun had started coming up and he kept going, ‘Time this…’ and ‘Time that…’ and I just turned to him and said, ‘I think it’s time to be quiet.’ And he just about died laughing. He would laugh like this, ‘Oh hoh hoh!’ ”
But all trips must end and all paradises must be lost, and when Britt turned 18 that September 13—the same date on which the calendar stands still in the opening pages of All the Pretty Horses—they spent her birthday in Mexico City and in full legality flew the next day to El Paso. McCarthy would later write, in periods of heartbreak, “Remember that rainy day in Los Mochis?” or of her birthday in Mexico City. They will spend two more of her birthdays together in Los Alamos and Nashville before she will break his heart.
***
“So, about those letters,” she says, running her hand along her necklace. “I haven’t read them in decades. They’re really hard for me. I have such a block about them. They did make me feel uncomfortable at the time. Because they were so different from how he talked on the phone, or in person. After living with these creepy men in foster homes, it was such a relief to be with Cormac. I felt safe and secure because he didn’t want anything. He was genuinely interested in me. But then he’d send these letters. And it would be very confusing.”
We can expect a writer to be different in person than on the page, but Cormac was very different on the page to Augusta. He was clearly in love, clearly “gone on the subject” of her, from the start. He ends each letter with an “I love you” or something synonymous. (He ends the ones after their romance cooled the same way.) But what we appear to have with lines about pressing “my face between your thighs” is a writer with his nose pressed into the pure perfume between the open thighs of a book.
When I ask Britt how she feels about the parental-age gap between them, if the relationship felt in any way like grooming, she acknowledges the age difference will probably come as a shock to many readers, but she never felt that there was anything inappropriate about their relationship. In fact, part of her 47-year reluctance to tell her story is a fear that her relationship with McCarthy, the most important in her life, will be misunderstood by the wider public. “One thing I’m scared about is that he’s not around to defend himself. He saved my life.”
By the time they ran away, by the time they consummated, all traces of Britt’s discomfiture with the letters were gone. It was the later years, seeing herself in The Border Trilogy, seeing her depression in The Passenger, that made her half wish she’d cut herself off from him. But neither of them could.
We’re outside, trying to puzzle the Catalina Mountains out from the sky. They pitch the lights down here in Tucson at night because of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, but there’s a full moon outfoxing the astronomers tonight, giving the Catalinas so much light to darkle under.
“But the letters make me sad too,” she says between drags of the Camel Wides cigarettes we just impulsively bought, “because I have so much regret. Such wasted time when we could have been together. When we got back from Mexico in late ’77, when I was 18 and we were living in El Paso, that’s when I found out he was still married to Annie. And then about a year later, on a trip to Las Vegas, when I found out he had a son my age. It just shattered me. What I needed then, so badly, was security and safety and trust. Cormac was my life, my pattern. He was on a pedestal for me. And finding out he lied about those things, they became chinks in the trust.”
The child Britt refers to is named Chase, originally Cullen, the son from McCarthy’s first marriage, in 1961, to Lee Holleman. McCarthy never spoke publicly about Chase, but Britt says he confided to her (and fictionalized in Suttree) that Holleman’s family detested McCarthy and actually forbade their being together after her pregnancy.
Then, in 1966, McCarthy married an English singer named Annie De Lisle. The two never had children, and for the years in which they remained married, De Lisle reportedly referred to Britt as “the other woman.” His second son, John, the inspiration for The Road, would be born to his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, in 1998.
“And then, when we were in Franklin, Tennessee, with the Kidwells.” This would have been around ’79 or ’80. Britt and McCarthy were much on the move in those post-Mexico years, moving to friend Bill Kidwell’s house in Tennessee when they couldn’t pay rent in El Paso anymore. “Cormac was out pouring concrete with Kidwell and some friends and was supposed to pick me up at a certain time. And when he didn’t show up, I was convinced that he was dead. And I froze. I shut down. And I realized if something ever happened to him, I could survive physically, but I wouldn’t be able to survive emotionally. I wouldn’t be able to survive on my own without him. And that’s not love. That’s not healthy, at least.
“So when he won the MacArthur grant and had enough money for me to go home and see my family, I just never came back.” McCarthy won the grant, largely due to the patronage of Robert Coles, in 1981. In those pre-digital days, she says, McCarthy’s usual course of action had been to open up bank accounts and blow town when he and Britt had used up all their credit. In fact, a bank statement for “Augusta McCarthy” from 1980 shows a whopping $15 balance. (“That’s the kind of tall cotton we were in,” Britt jokes.) “It wasn’t a choice. I always wanted to be with him. But I had to learn to live by myself before I could be with him again.”
So the heaps of money won by McCarthy set in motion a train of events that forever parted him romantically from Britt. McCarthy made several trips to Tucson to convince her to come back to El Paso, she says—but she couldn’t bring herself to. Though they would continue to stay in close touch—to varying degrees of intimacy—for the remainder of McCarthy’s life, and McCarthy would later propose marriage twice, according to Britt, they never came back together in full. If one wants to extend the influence of McCarthy’s relationship with Britt onto his fiction, look no further than No Country for Old Men, in which Llewelyn Moss chances upon a satchel full of money, setting in motion a train of events that forever parts him from Carla Jean, who is 16 at the time she marries Llewelyn—the same age as Britt when she met McCarthy—and 19 at the time of the novel. Starting with John Grady Cole and Alejandra in All the Pretty Horses, a love that is a few tragic degrees out of true, McCarthy would spend the last half of his career in equal intimacy with Britt on the page as in life.
The letters during this period in the early ’80s are buoyant with pain and, McCarthy admits, resentment. “I have to confess that in a way I was hoping that I wouldn’t hear from you anymore,” one begins. “I have to confess too that there are times when I feel enormous resentment toward you […] Baby, there was nothing wrong with our love. You just threw it away […] I never hear that song I don’t start crying, ‘I never got over those blue eyes.’ I make lists of places in the world to go and things to do now that I have no responsibilities, but everything is just empty.”
We head back into the house. The windows wear the translucent paint of our reflections.
“Can I see some of the letters?” She reads through a few, twisting her necklace. “I hate to say it, but…I think Cormac really did love me.” We laugh.
“I had no family stability, I was homeless, I was vulnerable, I was young. I mean,” she pauses and screws up her face, “who could blame him?”
I know the muse well enough to identify one of her shock jokes.
“What a groomer!” she says, thrusting her hand up into the air, and busts out laughing.
***
There is a sense of heat ripple to the horizons of Britt’s life after the split, the kind of interstitial oblivions between novels in, say, a trilogy. In conversation we pass through gaps of haze and shimmer: She attends the University of Arizona. Plagued by her childhood trauma, she is interred in a psych ward where her uncle gifts her a Catholic medal of Stella Maris, a title for the Virgin Mary referring to her guidance and protection of seafarers. She works at bars, including Someplace Else. She becomes a nurse. She trains horses. She has a short marriage but never a love again like Cormac McCarthy. She deals, for the rest of her life, with severe depression and low self-esteem. She is, in her own words, “a lost soul.”
Throughout, she speaks to McCarthy multiple times a week and is visited by him regularly. Then, sometime in the ’80s, McCarthy sends her the manuscript for All the Pretty Horses. “The first thing I see, obviously, is the title. And I thought, Oh my gosh. I started reading it, and it’s just so full of me, and yet isn’t me. It was so confusing. Reading about Blevins getting killed was so sad. I cried for days. And I remember thinking to myself that being such a lover of books, I was surprised it didn’t feel romantic to be written about. I felt kind of violated. All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction. I didn’t know how to talk to Cormac about it because Cormac was the most important person in my life. I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about?
“I was trying so hard to grow up and to fix what was broken about me. I still thought I could be fixed. And this felt the opposite of fixing me.
“Cormac called me and said, ‘What did you think about it?’ And I said, ‘Well, I really liked the book. It’s beautiful. But my kitten, John Grady and everything. It feels weird.’ And he just laughed and said, ‘Well, baby, that’s what I do. I’m a writer.’ ”
When she broached Blevins’s death and how it made her cry for days, he said, “ ‘I knew you would. And I’m sorry.’ And I said, ‘Well, you could have let him live.’ And he said, ‘No, I really couldn’t.’ And I felt like I was about two years old for asking him this, but I said, ‘Well, you’ll still kill people for me though, right?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And that was enough.”
***
For the rest of his life, McCarthy would make visits every few months to Tucson and stay at the Arizona Inn. While the visits were made out of love and longing, they were always entangled with what felt to Britt like research. Like an artist visiting his subject for an extended portraiture.
One year when she was depressed, McCarthy came out and taught her stonemasonry in northern Arizona. Later that year, he sent her a draft of his new play called The Stonemason. When Britt was taming a crazed purebred Babson Arabian at Bazy Tankersley’s horse farm in the ’80s, McCarthy visited to watch her tame it and called her each night on the phone after he’d left to ask her about the horse. McCarthy himself may never have ridden, but the novels of The Border Trilogy teem with intimate knowledge about horses. They teem, too, with other impossible-to-realize 16-year-old love interests, such as Magdalena, the beautiful Mexican prostitute who steals John Grady Cole’s heart in Cities of the Plain. The list goes on, most painfully culminating in her portrayal as Alicia Western in The Passenger, though Britt never suffered from her doppelgänger’s hallucinations.
Sources close to McCarthy confirmed Britt’s role as his muse and love of his life. Michael Cameron is emphatic about Britt’s inspiration. “She was his muse, throughout. Throughout. She’s Alicia Western! There’s no doubt she was the love of his life and his muse. I mean, when you saw them together, they were so in love, just so in love with each other. Their time in Mexico was absolutely the inspiration for All the Pretty Horses, that impossible-to-realize love. I read one of the first typescripts of it, and I told Cormac it made me cry. There is no doubt about it. Cormac loved her and she was his muse. She was the truest witness of his life.”
These fictional uses of her life, however, often led her into deeper depressions, punctuated, she says, by two marriage proposals by McCarthy. The first, at the Gardner Hotel in El Paso, was made several years before McCarthy’s marriage to Jennifer Winkley in 1998. The second, at the Arizona Inn, at the time of McCarthy’s work on the Counselor screenplay. Both times McCarthy got cold feet. The second time he reneged after finding out Britt’s Catholic church in Tucson would not permit a marriage unless McCarthy made a Catholic confession, which he refused to do. The dialogue of his proposal to Britt in the Arizona Inn, she says, is exactly recited by Michael Fassbender and Penélope Cruz in The Counselor, to her shock.
“I intend to love you until I die,” Fassbender says. “Me first,” Cruz replies.
Outside of her time with McCarthy, it is difficult for Britt to give her life artistic resolution. Starting with All the Pretty Horses, she would look to McCarthy for that. “I always looked to Cormac’s books to see how I was doing.” She takes a comedic beat. “Which was usually dead.” In chronological order we have, at the very least: Harrogate, Wanda, John Grady Cole, Blevins, Alejandra, Magdalena, Carla Jean, Laura, and Alicia—who is dead of suicide in the opening italics of The Passenger. Only Harrogate seemingly makes it out alive, with his face averted into his own pale reflection in the train window taking him out of the novel. That sheer, ghostly reflection—in a sense, it’s how Britt sees herself in McCarthy’s mirrory prose, a ghost rising from the characters, the situations, the deaths, a ghost gaining some momentary purchase on herself. Her mission from the age of 11 was to be good, to survive, and yet McCarthy kept killing her. “I thought he must not believe in me,” she says. “It’s taken me decades to realize that maybe what he was doing was killing off what had happened to me. Killing off the darkness.”***
Astrange thing happens in McCarthy’s body of work after meeting Britt. It is visible at the tail end of Blood Meridian. Morality, not to mention commercial success, starts coming into focus. His worlds are still cruel and full of evil, but he begins writing about characters who display courage in the face of it, who, like Britt “try to be good.” Emulous characters, heroes even, who, beginning with the Kid in Blood Meridian, “had got onto terms with life beyond what his years could account for.” The person, the spirit he’s writing about, is Augusta Britt. Like Britt, his characters are “placed under an obligation. To survive and bear these trials with grace and dignity.” McCarthy would often tell his son John, when speaking of his own cold family and violently abusive father who would savagely beat him as a child, “ ‘The difference between you and me is that you were born a good person,’ ” John recounts to me. “ ‘I had to work hard to become one.’ ” If we take McCarthy’s fiction as a measure, being a good person seems much on his mind starting with All the Pretty Horses, the first of his works brimming in Augustal colors, created in that artistic wiggle room between frisson and fission. Being a good person seemed to be on his mind, too, when he took Britt, a victim of worse male violence than he was, away from the streets of Tucson.
But as his characters started becoming better humans, in Britt’s view, McCarthy, whom she always thought of as a great man, did not. As he dined with celebrities and reinvented himself in Santa Fe as a formidable intellectual—and a very rare intellectual: one who can learnedly contemplate quantum physics and work it into art, with mixed success—Britt thought he turned his back on his oldest friends.
“He felt he’d wasted the last years of his life,” Britt says. We’re up early enough to watch the sun unbraid the first permissive stars. Right before dawn the mountains look soft as dressfolds, and Britt is playing with the hem of her denim shirt. “He felt slightly exploited by the Institute crowd, and I never saw him cry, but we spent a few nights up in Globe together, right before he got really sick, and it was snowing and he started to get teary-eyed, and he told me he regretted all the years not being together.” McCarthy would go on to name Britt in his will, along with ex-wives Jennifer Winkley and Annie De Lisle, youngest son John McCarthy, and Chase McCarthy, whom he managed to fully reconcile with in his last years. John and his mother, Jennifer, cared for McCarthy in his final years and were there with Chase the day McCarthy died. The last words on his Olivetti Lettera typewriter read, “I don’t know, Frank, I say we just leave him hangin’ there.”
***
There is no gentle summer rain in Arizona. No poised and delicate thunderheads. Storms come with the shock and awe of violent reprisals. By the time you hear the dramatic throat clear of thunder, hail the size of baseballs is upon you. Seeing as it’s supposed to rain later in the day, Britt and I are heading over to the stalls to do as much as we can.
“All horses have two sides. Well, that’s a smart thing to say, of course they do,” she laughs, throwing her hands up in playful self-mockery. “But they have two sides to their brains, and they think and react differently on each side. The right side can spook at something that the left side walks by calmly every day. So that’s to say, you want to put the halter on on their left side. Here, you try.”
Unless I’m unusually timid, waltzing up to a horse I’ve never met before with daring nonchalance strikes me as a great way to get my head stove in, so I’ve been giving Scout a courteous distance. But Britt holds the looped purple halter out to me, inviting me closer.
“Oh, and don’t ever put your head above a horse’s. Horses have the quickest reaction time of any animal, faster than cats. They won’t ever mean to, but they can startle and raise their head so fast, it can knock you out or even kill you. So, no pressure.”
To tie a halter hitch, you’ve got to hug a horse. So I do, standing in the same direction as Scout and pulling the halter over his Roman nose until my right arm is gently wrapped under his neck. Lightly flicking the rope over the top of his head, our eyes are momentarily twinned in the same direction. There is an immaculate, glistening precision in the reflection of a horse’s eye. The level of detail is startling and strikes one at first, brimming over the pupils, of artistic imprecision, creative license. I can see the muse in it—the woman who taught Cormac McCarthy everything he knew about horses—smiling at me with a child’s wise innocence, and I shyly try the hitch, looping and cinching the purple.“I’ve been so afraid to tell my story,” Britt tells me. “It feels like I’m being disloyal to Cormac. I’ve always wondered, too, who would believe me. I guess I’m just more private than him. But he would always warn me that at some point his archives would open up and people would find out about me.”
Britt is correct; in the fall of 2025, the second half of McCarthy’s archives, likely containing her letters to him, will become public at Texas State University.
“I know we joke around, calling Cormac a groomer,” she can’t help but crack a quick smile here before turning serious, “but that’s a defense mechanism of mine. I loved him more than anything. He kept me safe, gave me protection. He was everything to me. Everything. He was my anchor. He was my world. He was my home, even when we didn’t live together anymore. Those things that happen to you, that young and that awful, you don’t really heal. You just patch yourself up the best you can and move on. And Cormac gave me protection and safety when I had none. I would be dead if I didn’t meet him. He was the most important person in my life, the person I love the most. He was my anchor. And now that he’s gone,” she pauses, “I’m shiftless.”
Two eyes are not sufficient for a sunset in the West. That’s because there is more than one sunset, more than can be seen in a single field of vision. After a monsoon, the sky is Sistine. To the west, lightning races the tousled embroidery of clouds in pink gilt. Turning on my heels, there are Iliads and Edens of violet cloudwork parted by the slimmest blue streamlets of sky. Soon the mountains will be darkened and skimmed of all their reddened lilac, and they will stand like glowing geometry against the sunset’s final yellow. It is all daubed in a nimbus around the muse, like a painting that is still wet, still open to being blended.
I keep touching the Stella Maris medal in my pocket, which Augusta gave me earlier this morning, trying to keep track of all that loosened paint. She sidles up to me.
“You know, I had a dream about Cormac last night.”
“Tell me about it.”
“So, the town I grew up in, in North Dakota, had these big dikes by the Red River. We used to play there as kids. Back in the late ’90s, the whole town flooded. A biblical kind of flood. The flood set off electrical fires, so whatever wasn’t underwater caught on fire. I was at those dikes in my dream. And it was right before dawn. And it was so dark, and it was so hard to keep going. I felt that the bad men were coming. I didn’t want to keep going anymore. And I decided I was just gonna sit down and die.” She laughs at herself. “It couldn’t be more simple, you just sit down and die! Isn’t that how everyone does it?
“But anyways, as soon as I sat down, I noticed someone else was there. I looked up and it was Cormac. And he said, ‘What’re you doin’ over there, Baba?’ ”
“And I told him. ‘I’m sitting down.’ ”
“ ‘Why are you sitting down?’ ”
“ ‘So I can die.’ ”
“ ‘Well, don’t do that.’ ”
“ ‘Why not?’ ”
“And there were all these sections of color in the sky. Like stained glass. Dawn was coming. And he was standing on the other side of the dikes, under the color.”
“ ‘Why don’t you come over here, where I am?’ ” he said.
“And I didn’t know what to do. And then I woke up.”
“Well, I think you do know what you have to do,” I said, turning up my collar.
She took a moment, looking at me under that stained glass Western sky. “That’s right,” she smiled. And she thrust her hand out before her, the way McCarthy would have. “Walk on.”
Vincenzo Barney
Vincenzo Barney is an East Coast based writer. He got his professional start as an international reporter in Bethlehem after graduating from Bennington College in 2018, where he worked successfully with the school to reintroduce student governance. While attending college he worked for Archipelago Books and Edwin Frank of New York Review Books Classics. He is currently at work on a book about Augusta Britt and Cormac McCarthy, and a novel set at Bennington College. Barney’s other writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, AirMail, Los Angeles Review of Books and his Substack, Barney’s Rubble. He can also be found on X and his website.
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