Cormac McCarthy's teenage muse breaks the silence

Cormac McCarthy’s teenage muse breaks the silence

The great American novelist Cormac McCarthy was defensive in private and did not reveal much about the inspiration behind his books – or about himself. However, the author, who died in 2023, apparently lived much of his bestseller “All the Pretty Horses” with a woman named Augusta Britt.

She was 16 when she met the then 42-year-old writer in 1976.

Britt, now 64, guarded her identity and her story for nearly five decades, publicly revealing herself as the author’s “one secret muse” in a Vanity Fair profile published this week. Writer Vincenzo Barney argues that many of the Pulitzer Prize-winning leading men were inspired by Britt, a “six-foot-tall tough Finnish-American cowgirl… whose reality, McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he “struggled to had to get a grip on reality’. of.'”

Britt’s story has “always been there, beneath the surface, between the lines in the reserved subconscious of the novels,” Barney writes. She had a strong presence in the critically acclaimed ‘Border Trilogy’ from the author of ‘The Road’, inspired Carla Jean in ‘No Country for Old Men’, was Alicia in ‘The Passenger’ and a nurse named Wanda in ‘Suttree’. Horses identical to her breed appeared in the 2013 film “The Counselor,” in which Penélope Cruz plays a character based on her.

“Cormac always wanted me to tell my story,” says Britt. “He always encouraged me to write a book. He said, “Somebody will eventually do it, and maybe it will be you.” But I just couldn’t ever bring myself to do it.”

Barney said he connected with Britt after she left him a pointed comment about his Substack review of McCarthy’s 2022 novel “The Passenger” — a review that McCarthy told her “something good will come from it.” She then sought out Barney and insisted on speaking to him alone, rather than to two other McCarthy biographers who were vying for her attention.

She invited Barney to Tucson, Arizona, to hear her story, and they spent nine months together. McCarthy, she said, had warned her that she “couldn’t hide forever,” and she happily shared 47 (some erotic) love letters the “Blood Meridian” writer wrote her, which highlighted their relationship and, in McCarthy’s own words , his love letters. “undying devotion.”

Britt said she was “so scared” to tell her story – after all, who would believe her? But he had warned her that one day his archives would open and people would learn about her.

Britt also inspired the slapstick sidekick Harrogate in “Suttree,” which McCarthy was writing when they first met at a motel pool in Tucson, where she took a shower safely away from her foster family.

She was in a foster home in Arizona after experiencing “a traumatically violent” event that devastated her family and returned to the hotel to ask McCarthy to sign a copy of his 1965 debut novel, “The Orchard Keeper.” McCarthy, she said, wanted to know why she was wearing a holster with a Colt revolver in it. It turns out she stole it from the man who ran the foster home. She also had a stuffed kitten named John Grady Cole, the name of the hero in McCarthy’s “The Border Trilogy,” which follows three runaways who have a stolen Colt revolver.

“It was the first time someone cared what I thought and asked me my opinion on things,” she said. “And to have this grown man who seemed genuinely interested in talking to me, it was intensely soothing. For the first time in my life I felt a small glimmer of hope.”

Frustrated by problems in Britt’s personal life, McCarthy edited her birth certificate on his typewriter so she could flee to Mexico with him. It worked, but caused problems for both of them.

The optics of their thirty year age difference were not ideal for them either. Despite characterizations of premeditated grooming, Britt claimed she felt safer with him than with any of the many men in her young life at whose hands she had, in Barney’s words, “suffered unspeakable violence.” McCarthy – who was married to the second of his three wives, singer Annie De Lisle, when he met Britt – was still concerned about statutory rape allegations and the Mann Act in the early days of their relationship.

She said he was 43 and she was 17 when they first had sex.

‘I can’t imagine that, after my youth, I would make love for the first time with anyone other than a man, with anyone other than Cormac. It all felt good. It felt good,” she said. ‘I loved him. He was my safety. I really feel that if I hadn’t met him, I would have died young. What I had trouble with came later. When he started writing about me.”

She said McCarthy’s letters, many of which she received before they consummated their relationship, made her feel uncomfortable at the time because they were so different from the way he spoke on the phone or in person. But she insisted she never felt anything inappropriate in their relationship and was more concerned that McCarthy would be misunderstood by the general public if she came forward.

“One thing I’m afraid of is that he’s not there to defend himself,” she said.

About two years into their relationship, she learned he was married. About a year later, she learned that McCarthy had a son who was about her age.

“It just devastated me. What I needed so desperately then was security and safety and trust. Cormac was my life, my patron. He stood on a pedestal before me. And when they found out he had lied about those things, it became gaps in trust.”

Britt left him about three years into their relationship. They stayed in touch, spoke regularly for years and saw each other when he visited Tucson. When McCarthy sent her the manuscript for “All the Pretty Horses” in the 1980s, she was confused by the extent to which the novel was “full of me, and yet not of me.”

“I was surprised that it didn’t feel romantic to be written about. “I felt a little violated,” she said. “All these painful experiences broke out and were recast as fiction. …I wondered: Is that all I was to him, a train wreck to write about?

Britt said she turned down two of McCarthy’s marriage proposals and lamented that almost all the characters she inspired him to write died. But, she said, after decades she realized he was “killing the darkness” of what happened to her.

‘The things that happen to you, so young and so terrible, you don’t really heal. You pick yourself up as best you can and move on.

Originally published: November 24, 2024 at 4:34 PM EST