This week, Vanity Fair published a bombshell article revealing that Cormac McCarthy, one of the country’s most celebrated and enigmatic novelists, had a relationship with a girl he met when he was 42 and she was 16, a foster child who felt so unsafe at home she often carried a gun and used the pool area at the motel where he was staying to shower.
The revelations in the article stunned many fans of the famously inscrutable author, but did not come as a surprise to close friends of McCarthy’s or the tight-knit community of scholars who have studied his life and work. McCarthy’s relationship with Augusta Britt lasted nearly until his death in 2023, and came up in his letters over the years.
What left many scholars surprised, and unconvinced, was the notion asserted in Vanity Fair that Britt was the key inspiration for some of McCarthy’s most memorable characters — and that she profoundly shaped other aspects of his work, including recurring themes and motifs, even his obsession with horses, firearms and the vulnerable young women who suffer violence and heartbreak in his books.
Dianne C. Luce, who has written several books about McCarthy, said she and another McCarthy scholar, Edwin T. Arnold, learned about McCarthy’s relationship with Britt around 40 years ago, during an interview with a friend of McCarthy’s. Over the years, she saw the relationship come up in the author’s letters to his literary friends, among them Robert Coles, Guy Davenport and Mark Morrow.
Their connection was long-lasting, but Luce said she believes that many of the Vanity Fair article’s claims about Britt’s singular influence on McCarthy’s work were overblown. In the story, the author, Vincenzo Barney, depicts Britt as a model for characters in 10 of his books, including Wanda and Harrogate in “Suttree,” Carla Jean in “No Country for Old Men,” Alejandra in “All the Pretty Horses” and Alicia Western in “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” among other characters.
“I’m deeply skeptical of most of these assertions about how she shows up in his work,” Luce said.
In particular, Luce said she questioned the claim that McCarthy had based the characters of Wanda and Harrogate in “Suttree” on Britt, because McCarthy wrote a drafts of the novel with those characters years before meeting her.
Several other McCarthy experts, including his authorized biographer, Laurence Gonzales, and three other scholars who have closely studied his work and life, shared that skepticism.
Bryan Giemza, a professor at Texas Tech University who has written about McCarthy’s fascination with science, said he found some of the claims about Britt’s influence on the novelist to be exaggerated, including the notion that she was the primary model for Alicia Western.
“From my standpoint, there are some real stretchers in there,” Giemza said of the article’s claims. “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.”
Vanity Fair declined to discuss its editorial and fact-checking procedures with The Times. But Daniel Kile, the magazine’s deputy editor, downplayed criticism from scholars who said that the article overstates Britt’s influence on McCarthy’s work.
“It’s subjective,” Kile said. “Augusta Britt is our focus, and we are reporting that Augusta believes she inspired these characters. Other sources close to McCarthy, including scholars we spoke with, believe that she influenced these characters. And in many instances, McCarthy’s letters, which we’ve read, corroborate that she inspired many of the characters.”
Britt, who in her comments to Vanity Fair described her romantic relationship with McCarthy as consensual, did not respond to a request for comment from The New York Times. The author of the Vanity Fair article, Barney, was not able to offer a timely comment. Knopf, McCarthy’s publisher, declined to comment.
Several scholars also raised questions about the extensive excerpts from McCarthy’s letters to Britt, and noted that while Britt owns the physical letters, McCarthy’s words, even in letters to others, are the intellectual property of his literary estate. Attempts to reach a representative of McCarthy’s literary estate were not successful, but a person with knowledge of the estate’s practices who was not authorized to speak on the record said that the estate did not grant permission for McCarthy’s letters to be reproduced.
During his lifetime, McCarthy was notoriously guarded, and a code of silence extended to those in his inner circle. Britt’s detailed account of their relationship in Vanity Fair offers a rare window into McCarthy’s private thoughts and into an inner life that has long been shielded from the public.
Gonzales, McCarthy’s biographer and longtime friend, said he and others who knew of the relationship kept quiet in deference to the author’s desire for privacy, and to protect his reputation.
“Everybody knew about Augusta, but they all knew her as a secret,” he said. “Because they met when she was so young, she was an abused child, she was a runaway, and Cormac was in his 40s, it was a situation that in many ways would look bad.”
Gonzales attempted to interview Britt for his forthcoming biography, he said, but she did not respond.
While scholars and readers are debating the merits and significance of the claims in the Vanity Fair article, there’s no question that it marks a major shift in McCarthy’s public profile.
In the Vanity Fair article, Britt described how the two began a sexual relationship when she was still a minor, but she said she was in love with him and found in him the sense of safety that was lacking in her life. She also said McCarthy doctored her birth certificate to smuggle her into Mexico.
Britt shared with Vanity Fair a trove of letters from McCarthy, including romantic overtures written when she was a teenager, before they absconded across the border. A few years later, she ended their sexual relationship, Britt said, but the pair continued to exchange letters, talk on the phone and visit each other for decades.
Britt told the magazine that she was unaware that McCarthy was still married to his second wife, Annie DeLisle, when the two were living together in El Paso, Texas, in 1977. A year later, on a trip to Las Vegas, she learned that McCarthy had a son her age from his first marriage, to Lee Holleman.
She said what really left her feeling betrayed, though, was his tendency to repurpose her life in his fiction, and to kill off characters she believed to be based on her.
When Britt’s story was published this week, there was a flurry of correspondence among McCarthy scholars, who debated the article’s claims and discussed whether the revelations might prompt a backlash, discouraging readers from picking up his books, or leading literature professors to stop assigning his novels.
“There’s a good bit of concern about how this might, in a kneejerk way, affect his overall reputation,” Luce said. “There’s a strong hope that the quality of his work will keep that from happening.”
Some McCarthy readers have already disavowed the author. In a post on X, Aaron Gwyn, an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who has written and lectured about McCarthy, called McCarthy’s behavior “indefensible,” and said he would no longer feature new content about the author on his YouTube channel or Substack.
Tracy Daugherty, an acclaimed literary biographer who is working on a book about McCarthy, said it would take time for researchers and scholars to verify Britt’s claims, determine the extent of her impact on his work and see whether his literary reputation suffers.
“It’s far too early to assess what the long-term effect of this story will be on McCarthy’s literary legacy,” said Daugherty, who has written biographies of Larry McMurtry, Joan Didion, Joseph Heller and Donald Barthelme.
Daugherty learned about Britt’s connection to McCarthy during his research and attempted to interview her, but never heard back, he said.
More information about McCarthy’s relationship with Britt, along with other aspects of his private life, will likely come to light when a large trove of his personal archives, held at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, opens next fall.
The archives contain personal material that McCarthy guarded closely, including his private journals, early writings, photographs, family memorabilia and correspondence with close friends. The collection contains some of Britt’s letters to McCarthy, said Katie Salzmann, lead archivist for the Wittliff. No agreement has been made with Britt to add her McCarthy letters to the archives.
Some scholars predicted that these revelations could prompt other close associates of McCarthy’s to speak publicly about him, and that more details about the enigmatic author will likely now come into public view.
“Cormac curated his public reputation pretty carefully, a lot of his friends fell in line with that, and that’s changing now,” said Giemza. “For better or worse, the article is going to allow for some freer conversations.”
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