Lots of chatter in literary circles about a story by Vincenzo Barney in Vanity Fair. The story is about Augusta Britt, who was novelist Cormac McCarthy's lover when she was 17 to 18 and his friend for years afterward. According to her story, they met at a hotel pool because Britt was using the shower; she felt unsafe showering in the foster home where she was living at the time. They liked each other immediately and soon McCarthy was having one of his low-life friends doctor Britt's birth certificate so she could get a visa and they could run off to Mexico together:
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.”
Not only does Britt come across as mature in her recollection, she actually had the sense to break off the sexual part of her relationships with McCarthy a few years later, showing that she was much wiser than the two grown women who married him. I mean, for anyone who knows anything about McCarthy, hearing that he once ran off to Mexico with an underage girl will elicit only a shrug.
Even before this supposed bombshell landed, McCarthy's known catalog of issues includes years lost to heavy drinking, extended periods of extreme, intentional poverty, carrying his favorite light bulb around with him from motel to motel because he couldn't write without it, giving money to Republicans and lying about it to his liberal friends, forging documents, buying stolen property, two brief marriages to women who later hated him, estrangement from his son, and writing Blood Meridien, described by the NY Times as "the most violent book since the Iliad."
Count me unsurprised about the 17-year-old lover.
More interesting is Barney's claim that Britt was McCarthy's "muse" and the inspiration for numerous characters in his novels. She certainly thought so; she told Barney that she drew back from her relationship with McCarthy because he kept putting characters based on her into his books and then killing them off. The NY Times put this question to several self-proclaimed experts on McCarthy's work, and they were unimpressed. One said,
From my standpoint, there are some real stretchers in there, It doesn't really sound true to the way that an artist’s imagination works. More than likely, a major character is a pastiche of people.
Which is certainly true for me, but, with a madman like McCarthy you can never tell.
What I want to say is this: McCarthy was a deeply troubled, dubiously sane person whose books are fascinating partly because they are written from a point of view outside normal bourgeois existence. If you value work like that, you need to overlook a lot of sins, because all the writers I can think of who fit that description had overflowing closets of them.
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