absorbing the damage

Cormac McCarthy and the strange acts devotion inspires

Listen, I love a good takedown as much as anyone. Especially for a figure I revere myself. I seek, perhaps more than I should, to take down the heroes I place upon my own personal pedestals. Devotion all but invites betrayal, I’ve found. Maybe that’s not the lesson I was taught from my churchgoing childhood, but it is the lesson I learned.

So when the article about Cormac McCarthy came out in Vanity Fair, detailing his lifelong (and for a period, illegal) relationship with a woman a good two decades younger than him, I was ready to take the old master down a peg. Fire my imagination and I will, sooner or later, burn you at the stake. That’s a promise. And as I read the tea leaves on Bluesky, where I’ve been receiving regular injections of social media methadone following the deletion of my Twitter account, I was appraised of the author of article, along with his many sins. He possessed the ridiculous name of Vincenzo Barney. He wrote the whole article, apparently, in some pale imitation of McCarthy’s cosmic Faulknerian tone. When he was interviewed in Slate, he committed grave the sin of jokeyness, answering serious questions with off the cuff bon mots.

Dan Kois, author of the Slate article, summed up the brouhaha thus:

Because, when the greatest literary scoop he was likely to get in his lifetime landed in his lap, Vincenzo Barney did not phone it in. He spent nearly a year living in Arizona, talking to Britt basically every day, and when he filed to Vanity Fair, he did not file a careful, journalistic report. No, he really went for it, delivering the weirdest, most frequently nonsensical, most floridly overwritten story to appear in a legitimate magazine since … maybe since the heights of New Journalism in the 1970s.

Hubris for me to cackle over soberly? Sign me up!

So I read the actual article, and I was…surprised, to say the least. It was, I had to admit to myself, quite good? Compelling? Generally well-written, with the flights of fancy coming off as mostly earned? It was a pleasantly strange feeling, one I’m still puzzling over. Which is why I’m newslettering about it for the edification of you, my dear readers. Fear not: I may betray my idols, but I will never betray you.

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The basics: when Cormac McCarthy was 42 years old, he met a young woman at a motel pool.¹ Her name was Augusta Britt, and she was 16 at the time. Britt was reading one of McCarthy’s novels, and they struck up first a conversation, then a friendship. Britt had a difficult home life, marked by violence from various males that passed through her home. McCarthy struck her as a respite from that.

After carrying on a correspondence via phone and mail (the letters often containing money, which Britt sorely needed, and which McCarthy could hardly afford, being deliberately poor), various parties, from Britt’s family to the actual FBI, became concerned. McCarthy was suspected of statutory rape. (Which he would commit, eventually.) McCarthy made plans to head to Mexico to evade the authorities, and asked Britt if she would come along. She said yes.

Perhaps this sounds pedantic, but Britt, and Barney, make clear that the relationship did not become sexual (and adulterous too—McCarthy was still married to a woman named Anne DeLisle) until after they fled to Mexico. The two of remained there until Britt turned 18, at which point they separately returned to the US. They remained very close for the rest of McCarthy’s life, though the relationship lost the sexual component, while remaining affectionate, and arguably romantic.

McCarthy’s actions are clearly illegal and immoral. Like, obviously. I have no interest arguing otherwise.

But Britt herself does not want to portray McCarthy as, or at not only as, “a groomer,” to use contemporary parlance, a kind of southwest Humbert Humbert. She sees him as ultimately a positive influence on her life, first for how their flight to Mexico extricated her from a dangerous home life, and second for the way her subsequent life benefited from the lifelong association with him. Financially, yes, as McCarthy bequeathed money to her throughout his life, but also experientially, one could say. Britt’s life was changed as a result, and by her judgment, it was changed for the better.

Now, the author of this piece, Vincenzo Barney, had a difficult task for himself. Although, before I get to that, an aside: Barney met Britt through an improbably internetty means: Barney wrote a review of The Passenger and Stella Maris, McCarthy’s final novels, on his own Substack. Britt herself read it—as did McCarthy himself—and liked it so much that she reached out to Barney, striking up the relationship that would lead to the VF profile. This is, if nothing else, a huge get for Substack. Part of Substack’s problem is that they’re proven adept at luring stars into their own ecosystem, while struggling to develop their own talent that go out and make their mark in the wider world. Yet Barney did exactly that, landing the literary story of the year simply by hitting publish.

Back to the task: as Barney got to know Britt, spending nine months with her at her ranch, and began working on the profile he would eventually write, he had to make a choice. Would he follow Britt’s lead and view McCarthy’s actions as, while certainly illegal, less harmful than one might think from such a characterization? Or would he argue, more prosecutorially, for McCarthy’s guilt above all else?

Barney, it’s clear, chose the former. While he certainly delves into the illegality and immorality of McCarthy’s actions, he does not, ultimately, try to ‘cancel’ him. His stated task is to portray Britt and her experiences, and to portray them so the reader can get a full sense of this woman. And I have to say, I think he succeeds on that front. Augusta Britt comes off as a fascinating, compelling, sympathetic character in the piece. If I were in Barney’s position, I absolutely would have done the same.

Yet Barney has drawn vocal criticism for his approach. And some of it I get: placing Britt’s personality front and center does take away from looking at the ‘evidence’ of McCarthy’s actions on their own, without further prejudice. Yet the criticism of Barney’s writing, that it is purple and florid, strike me as simply incorrect. At a craft level, this is what magazine looks like at its best: engaging, personal, with a penchant for the zany aside.

Yet the criticism has produced a strangely protective effect that I doubt anyone could have anticipated. Were this story told another way, it would have been very easy to frame Britt herself as deluded, as minimizing the harm done by a predator, and thus failing other young girls out in the world, doubly unlucky for being harmed by less famous perpetrators. Chrissie Hynde faced these kind of attacks, when he spoke about navigating potential male mistreatment in the punk rock 70s, and how she considered it partly her own responsibility not to put herself in harm’s way, lest she get taken advantage of.

But as far as I can tell, Britt has met with no such attacks. Publicly, at least—her private life is another matter, one I’m not privy to. All the hate seems to be directed at Barney, he of the immaculate coif and purple prose. A man, failing a woman yet again! But he seems to be taking it in stride, and if anything, understands that the hate directed at him means that it is not directed at Britt. That his pen, rather than a sword, acts as a shield, absorbing blows before they can reach the subject of his essay.²

It’s weirdly—chivalrous? Unintentionally so? The kind of action one might see in McCarthy’s own work.

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The last point I want to consider is the question of McCarthy’s reputation, and how this revelation might affect it.

It is obvious, and justified, that McCarthy’s reputation as one of the country’s great literary figures will be diminished for some time. How long exactly, I don’t know. But there will be fewer rapturous odes to his work making the rounds for a while. Ultimately, though, I think that will benefit McCarthy’s reputation, precisely to the extent that it delivers him out of the image that’s been constructed.

Since the publication of The Road, McCarthy has become a beloved figure, revered for his hard-earned wisdom, and how he passes it onto the next generation. I have no choice but to declare that he is Marilynne Robinson For Dudes. And those dudes are severely disappointed in the actions of their hero.

This will be, in the long run, beneficial for McCarthy’s reputation. These bowtie boys have neutered McCarthy, the violence and the outrageousness of his work, by turning him into a doting grandpa figure. The fewer of their paeans that exist, the better.³

Along with reckoning with his actions, future critics will have to contest with the weirdly interpersonal nature of McCarthy’s achievement. As Barney demonstrates, once you know the role Britt played in his life, it is impossible not to see the effect it had on his work. Characters inspired by her are everywhere, in male and female form, culminating in the character of Alicia Western from his final pair of novels. Indeed, Britt reserves her feelings of hurt for how McCarthy had a compulsion to kill off her many avatars flitting throughout the books, finding it ungentlemanly.

A lifelong relationship resulting in works of art. It is—deeply, profoundly, unmistakably—literary.

1. This recalls the scene in No Country for Old Men where Llewellyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin in the movie, meets a young woman, also at a motel pool. The resonance with real life feels deliberate—indeed, one major takeaway from the article is that McCarthy consistently drew on Britt’s personality as inspiration for his own work. One crazy example: the teenage Britt had a cat she gave the improbable name of John Grady Cole. McCarthy give that very name to the protagonist of All the Pretty Horses.

2. Cassie Mannes Murray of the vital Pine State Publicity newsletter gets at this in her post on the literary phonemenon.

3. This has already begun to happen: Aaron Gwyn, the most vocal McCarthyite on here, has declared that he will no longer write about his idol. Good riddance. His slavering grew embarrassing.