American novelist Cormac McCarthy’s secret minor muse has been revealed, more than a year after his death from prostate cancer.
The writer, whose novels include The Passenger and Stella Maris, was not known for female characters in his westerns.
But many of his leading men were inspired by a single woman, Augusta Britt, whom the author first met in 1976 when she was just 16 years old and he was 42 years old. Vanity Fair reports.
She explained that she had been in and out of foster care at the time and had used the pool at the Desert Inn motel in Tucson.
“It wasn’t very safe in the foster homes,” Britt, now 64, explained. ‘They weren’t allowed to have locks on the bedroom or bathroom doors, so the men just followed me into the rooms.
“But at the Desert Inn I was able to use the pool showers to shower.”
It was there, she said, that she first saw McCarthy.
“I thought he looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him,” Britt said.
American novelist Cormac McCarthy’s secret minor muse has been revealed, more than a year after his death from prostate cancer
“So I went back to the house I was staying at and realized that the man by the pool was the man in the author’s photo on the back of the book I was reading, The Orchard Keeper,” she said, referring to McCarthy’s little book. -well-known debut novel from 1965.
The next day, she said, she brought the paperback to the motel so he could sign it.
“I was wearing jeans and a work shirt, and I had a holster with a Colt revolver in it, which I was used to carrying. I stole it from the man who ran the foster home I was in.
“And Cormac looked at me and said, ‘Little lady, are you going to shoot me?’ And I said, “No, I was wondering if you would sign my book,” Britt said.
“He was so shocked,” she said. He said he was surprised that anyone had read that book, let alone a 16-year-old girl. But he said he would like to sign it.
“Then he asked me why I was carrying a gun,” and the then-teenager told the author about her past.
She told Vanity Fair that she lived a normal life until age 11, when her family abruptly moved from North Dakota to the border city of Tucson, Arizona, where a tragedy occurred that drove her father to violent alcoholism.
Five years later, Britt said she was shuttled between foster homes and her real family, where her presence would inevitably send her father into binge eating episodes, followed by abuse and sometimes hospitalizations.
Augusta Britt told Vanity Fair that she first met the author in 1976, when she was just 16 years old and he was 42 years old.
‘I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words at the time, but it seemed like I was the problem because if I wasn’t there, my parents didn’t need to be reminded of what had happened to all of us.
‘And I really internalized everything, because that’s what children do. When there’s no 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 be fine. OK.”
“I never blamed him,” she said of her now-deceased father. “He did his best.”
“So I’ve decided I’m not going to get hit anymore,” she recalled telling McCarthy.
“I’m going to shoot anyone who tries.”
Britt said she remembers the author responding, “Well, that would explain the gun.”
“And that was so Cormac,” she said. ‘And I thought, ‘Thank God this man understands. He wanted to hear about my life.’
‘It was the first time someone cared what I thought and asked me my opinion on things. And the fact that this grown man seemed genuinely interested in talking to me was intensely soothing.
‘For the first time in my life I felt a glimmer of hope that everything would be okay.’
From there, Britt said, McCarthy gave her his editor’s phone number in case of emergency and began sending her letters and books.
Whenever he returned to Tucson, the author also made it a point to see Britt and leave taxi or phone money for her.
That arrangement lasted until 1977, when Britt once missed a call after returning to live with her family and being hit again.
She ended up back in the hospital, and when she finally managed to reconnect with McCarthy at the Desert Inn, he was upset.
“I was worried about you,” she remembered him telling her. ‘If you stay here, they will 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 that I don’t want anything from you. If you want to come home at any time, I’ll put you on a bus right away.
“But if you come with me, you’ll have to say goodbye to this place. Even if you come back in a week or a month, it will never be the same. You have to understand that your life will change once you leave with me.”
Still, she agreed to go, and McCarthy amended her birth certificate to smuggle her into Mexico.
The novel All the Pretty Horses is largely based on Britt’s life
They first made love when he was 43 and she was 17, but Britt insists she did not find their relationship predatory.
‘I can’t imagine that after this childhood 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.
‘I loved him. He was my safety. I really feel like if I hadn’t met him, I would have died young.”
But after spending time in Mexico, McCarthy received a call from his publisher, saying that the FBI had visited him and that the state of Arizona was looking for Britt.
Her mother apparently found letters from McCarthy in her room and turned them over to police, who issued an arrest warrant for the author on charges of statutory rape and the Mann Act, which bans the transportation of people for sex crimes.
“But he wasn’t deterred,” Britt said. “I think he actually liked it.
“I was terrified they would find us,” she said. “I didn’t want to go back to Tucson. I didn’t want to go back to foster care. I didn’t want to go back to that life.’
She said she asked McCarthy what they would do if authorities ever caught up with them, “and he looked at me and said in a funny Southern accent… ‘I’ll shoot them… I’ll kill them.’
“That calmed me down,” Britt said. “And for as long as I knew him, 47 years, when I was having a bad day or really sad, he would try to cheer me up by telling me all the ways he would kill people.”
The couple then stayed in Mexico, traveling from city to city, with Britt sending her mother comforting postcards.
When her mother realized that her daughter was okay, she stopped cooperating with the authorities, who did not have enough conclusive evidence (or jurisdiction) to continue their investigation.
Eventually, Britt and McCarthy formed a routine, in which he would work while she attended Catholic mass.
When Britt turned 18 on September 13 — the same date the calendar freezes in All the Pretty Horses — the couple spent the day in Mexico City and then flew to El Paso, Texas, the next day.
But once they got back to the U.S., “I discovered he was still married to Annie,” Britt said of Annie, referring to English singer Annie De Lisle.
“And when I found out about a year later, on a trip to Las Vegas, that he had a son my age, I was just devastated.
“What I needed so desperately at that time was security and trust,” she explained. ‘Cormac was my life, my patron.
‘He was on a pedestal for me. And when they found out he had lied about those things, it became holes in the trust.”
The final straw came one day when McCormick didn’t show up for her and she feared he was dead.
‘And I froze. I closed. And I realized that if anything ever happened to him, I could survive physically, but not emotionally. Without him I couldn’t survive on my own.
‘And that’s not love. At least that’s not healthy.
“So when he won the MacArthur grant and had enough money to go home and see my family, I never came back.
“It wasn’t a choice,” she admitted. ‘I always wanted to be with him. But I had to learn to live alone before I could be with him again.”
Yet McCarthy never forgot Britt; he used her story as inspiration for his novel All The Pretty Horses and based the characters Harrogate and Wanda in Suttreee on her.
The novel-turned-film, No Country for Old Men, was also based on his experiences with Britt.
In the book, Llewelyn Moss has a chance to win a bag full of money, which sets him on a path that takes him away forever from Carla Jean, who is 16 at the time she marries Llewelyn and 19 in the novel.
McCarthy would also continue to visit Tucson every few months and stay at the Arizona Inn, and even attempted to propose to Britt several times.
“I mean, when you saw them together, they were so in love, just so in love with each other,” Michael Cameron told Vanity Fair.
“Their house in Mexico was definitely the inspiration for All the Pretty Horses, that impossible love.
‘Cormac loved her and she was his muse. She was the truest witness of his life.”
Britt said McCarthy had long told her to tell her story, but she was too afraid.
“I feel like I’m being unfaithful to Cormac,” she said of her story. ‘I’ve always wondered: who would believe me?
‘He kept me safe, gave me protection, he was everything to me. Everything,” she said of the author.
“He was my anchor. He was my world. He was my home when we stopped living together.
‘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, I’m immobile.’