On Augusta Britt

The emails started on November 20, 2024. First from Dianne Luce, because she’s a person who is always on top of everything. Then from other old friends in the Cormac McCarthy Society. Later that day, and over the next two weeks, I heard from possibly everyone I have ever known in any capacity. (That’s hyperbole, but only by a little.) My favorite was a grad school friend I hadn’t heard from in years who sent me a Facebook message with a link and one word: “Thoughts?”This was all to do with the Vanity Fair article by Vincenzo Barney about Augusta Britt, whom the article’s title called Cormac McCarthy’s “secret muse.” Barney, whom Britt had contacted on Substack, writes that Britt met McCarthy in Tucson in 1976, when she was 16 and he was 42, and that in 1977 he began a relationship with her and took her to Mexico so that she could escape the abuse both of her family and of the foster homes she rotated through. They returned to the States in late 1977, when she was 18. Only then, Barney says, did Britt discover that McCarthy was married to Anne DeLisle and had a son with his first wife, Lee Holleman. They broke up after he won the MacArthur in 1981, Britt reveals, because he then had enough money to pay for her to return to Tucson and see her family, “and I just never came back,” she says. But Barney emphasizes that the two stayed in love and in touch through the ensuing decades—so much so that Barney calls this a love story on par with Dante and Beatrice or F. Scott and Zelda, and claims that Britt was the inspiration for many of McCarthy’s fictional characters: Gene Harrogate and Wanda in Suttree, the kid in Blood Meridian, John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses, Jimmy Blevins, Alejandra, and Magdalena in the Border Trilogy, Carla Jean Moss in No Country for Old Men, Laura in The Counselor, and Alicia Western in The Passenger and Stella Maris.So: thoughts?I did have thoughts, and so did a lot of other people, as it turned out. The story made both national and international news, and there was almost as much commentary online about Barney’s journalism as there was about the relationship itself. At issue were, in no particular order, the time and place of McCarthy and Britt’s meeting, whether or not the authorities were actually pursuing them when they went to Mexico, Vanity Fair’s decision to allow extensive quotation from McCarthy’s letters without permission, Barney’s interpretive claims about McCarthy’s works, Britt’s decision to talk to Barney at that point in time, the broader implications of her doing so, and the effect of the story on McCarthy’s legacy and literary standing.Here, I’d like to briefly address what this means for McCarthy studies, a question that takes in all of those issues and others. And while I certainly don’t speak for the McCarthy Society in the sense of offering some kind of consensus opinion or an official statement, I do want to think about this specifically from an academic standpoint, with the Society and the field in mind.Writing in the New York Times, Alexandra Alter noted that though the story was received as a bombshell revelation, it was not a total surprise to the “tight-knit community of scholars” who study McCarthy’s work. References to Augusta Britt do appear in the archival materials that had already been available, and there are more artifacts from their relationship in the new additions to the Cormac McCarthy Papers that opened at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University on October 27, 2025. I don’t currently know what will happen to the letters from McCarthy to Britt that Barney quotes from, of which he says he read forty-seven out of an unknown total.Britt is mentioned in McCarthy’s correspondence with Guy Davenport and with Robert Coles—the Davenport papers are at the University of Texas, and Coles has archives at both UNC–Chapel Hill and Michigan State University. In January 1980, for instance, McCarthy wrote to Davenport and mentioned that “Augusta and I” wanted to invite him and “Miss Bonny” (Davenport’s companion, Bonnie Jean Cox) to dinner, indicating that he and Britt were very much socializing as a couple. In 1985, he wrote to Coles about Britt, whom he names, describing her as the “young lady in Tucson” that Coles had referred to John Racy. Racy was a psychiatrist who continued to treat Britt for depression. McCarthy notes that she was working and attending classes, doing well, and conveyed her thanks to Coles.In Richard Woodward’s famous 1992 New York Times interview with McCarthy, he writes that “McCarthy doesn’t drink anymore—he quit sixteen-years ago that would be 1976 in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends.” Were there others? Likely, yes. Davenport wrote in a 1974 letter to Hugh Kenner, published in the collection Questioning Minds, that “Cormac McCarthy has just run off to Mexico with a teenage popsy, abandoning a beautiful British ballerina of a wife” (1508). This was not Augusta, but likely Eve Vanderweit, the ex-wife of McCarthy’s friend Bill Kidwell. Vanderweit was younger, and young in appearance, though not a teenager at the time.After Woodward’s interview with McCarthy was published in 1992, Woodward continued to have phone conversations with him on occasion, taking notes as he did, which are now part of the Woodward Collection of Cormac McCarthy at the Wittliff. In a conversation that took place in February 1994, McCarthy said of Augusta that “she’s more beautiful than ever” but that she has “so many problems,” and that he wasn’t sure he wanted to be with someone with that many problems. Britt is also mentioned by name in interviews Woodward conducted with Richard Pearce and Leslie Garrett, whom Woodward spoke with about McCarthy. And many people have noticed the handwritten comment on a page of his “old Road notes,” or notes and draft fragments related to the composition of his novel The Road, dated August 10, 2005: “Deep misery. A is gone . . . I have no one.” The new additions to the archive at the Wittliff include a great deal of material: six folders, in which there are eighty-six letters from Britt to McCarthy and a number of photographs, as well as two photocopies of letters from McCarthy to Britt.Though the Vanity Fair story and the subsequent opening of the new Wittliff materials provide a wealth of details about McCarthy’s relationship with Britt, as well as widespread attention, a basic sketch of that relationship was possible to outline previously: addresses and dates, when they seemed to be together and where, the fact that some of McCarthy’s friends knew about the relationship and interacted with them as a couple, that she struggled with depression, that their relationship was intense, and that they stayed in touch for decades. In Alter’s New York Times article, Dianne Luce recalls a conversation that she and Edwin Arnold had with Bill Kidwell some forty years ago, when Kidwell mentioned Britt and the fact that she and McCarthy were together. Dianne and I first spoke about Britt in 2009, when we were both doing work with the newly opened McCarthy Papers at the Wittliff, and then Dianne, Lydia Cooper, and I had another conversation about her in 2018, after Lydia had done work at the University of Texas with the Guy Davenport letters. Given the relatively scant information to be had at that time and the fact that Britt had never spoken publicly about McCarthy, the relationship was not something that any of us had plans to write about.But with the Vanity Fair article, that landscape changed. Suddenly everyone had something to say, and there was as much talk about the McCarthy-Britt relationship as there was about the piece itself. As Dan Kois wrote in an interview with Barney about the article:Kois also says that it would take an excellent writer to grapple with all of the weighty issues that this story entails, and that Barney was not that writer. I am probably not that writer either, but I do think that considering the story appropriately requires holding a number of things in tension. To wit:That McCarthy was clearly a bad actor here, as Britt was young, a minor, and vulnerable; because he was married and had a child; and because he apparently waited a rather long time to tell her that.That despite those things, Britt doesn’t tell her story as a trauma story, a story of abuse, or as an accusation.That the article has several immediately identifiable factual errors. McCarthy didn’t die at a Santa Fe compound surrounded by Cadillacs and Ferraris, for instance, and the paperback of The Orchard Keeper didn’t have McCarthy’s author photo on the back of it. Because of errors like those, it’s hard to know what other details, whether as related by Britt or as reported by Barney, to give full credence to.That McCarthy is dead and Britt is alive. McCarthy does not have to offer a response, but the story very much affects others, including his brother Dennis, his sons Chase and John, and his ex-wife Anne DeLisle.That all this happened after the cultural reckoning of the #MeToo movement but also in the impending throes of the second Trump administration and thus a wildly vacillating discourse about gender, sexuality, and sexual assault.And finally, that Barney insists—and others have too in different ways—that this should affect how you read McCarthy’s work. Barney says that you can see Britt everywhere in his fiction, and it’s wonderful. Others say you should never read McCarthy’s work again.How to account for all these things, make appropriate decisions about how to address them, and move forward with the field? Saying that something is complicated and requires nuance may sound like a very academic response, and that’s because it is—professors are in the business of addressing difficult and sometimes outright nuclear topics in a way that allows a classroom of people to have a productive conversation.I would argue five points: that you can condemn McCarthy’s actions here, respect Augusta Britt’s story, and recognize that there are problems with Barney’s reporting of that story. You can still read McCarthy’s books, and scholars will be able to deduce more about Britt’s influence on his creative life without seeing her as a ubiquitous and/or literal presence in his fictional worlds.First: you can condemn McCarthy’s actions here. Some have pointed out that this was 1970s Tucson and that it was common, particularly among those who frequented Someplace Else, the Tucson bar mentioned in the story, for older men to date younger women, even minors, who also worked at the bar, or that McCarthy’s motivations were protective. But—as Robert McEvoy says in The Gardener’s Son—it don’t seem to cut no ice, does it? She was still young, and he was still married.Second: you can respect Britt’s story. Some have condemned both McCarthy and Britt, like Moira Donegan, writing in The Guardian, who expresses frustration that Britt doesn’t call the relationship abusive or say that McCarthy was grooming her—in fact, in the article, Britt laughs at that idea. “What to do with such women,” Donegan asks, “the ones who do not mature beyond the infatuated credulity of youth, the ones who continue, long after their girlhood is over, to mistake grooming for concern, or to find the fact that they were selected for abuse flattering? . . . It is impolite, and not a little bit arrogant, for feminists to tell such women that we know more about their lives than they do. But perhaps such arrogance is what is called for, especially amid the backdrop of a media world that is loudly announcing its intention to launder abuse.”No—this is, in fact, uncalled for. You don’t get to criticize denying a woman agency by denying her agency. Especially when the woman in question has had almost fifty years to think about it. Yes, that is arrogant. In my other field of research I study veterans and war stories, and one thing I’ve learned is that you can’t call someone traumatized if they don’t claim that for themselves. Not all veterans are traumatized by war—that doesn’t mean, however, that war is no big deal.Third: you can recognize that there are problems with Barney’s reporting. I won’t rehearse the phraseology and the style that mimics McCarthy’s, but I will point out that indeed the extensive quotations from McCarthy’s letters were used without permission—since Britt owns the letters but, as with all correspondence, the copyright stays with the writer or with his estate—and I question Vanity Fair’s journalistic ethics in allowing those to run.Four: you can still read McCarthy’s books. I’ve heard some people say they won’t teach him again, though those voices have been in the minority. I think that if you’re choosing your literature based on the infallibility of the writers’ lives, you’re likely to have a short reading list. But I also acknowledge that context and details and degree matter here, too. A few months before the Vanity Fair piece came out, five women publicly accused Neil Gaiman of sexual assault and abuse, including charges of rape, and by January 2025 the total was nine. Gaiman has denied the charges and the various claims are in litigation. Reading some of the details of those accusations, I realize that I might feel differently and make a different argument if I were a Gaiman scholar.And five: scholars will be able to deduce more about Britt’s influence on his creative life without seeing her as a ubiquitous presence in his fictional worlds. Now that Britt’s story and the fact of her relationship with McCarthy is public, and made public by her, I think that allows critics to address it in a way that I would not have done before, although because there are family members who are affected by this story, it’s incumbent upon us to be judicious and appropriately academic in the way that we do that. Like we say to our students, what’s your claim here? How does what you’re saying help support your argument?And of course I think the idea that Augusta Britt is every character in every book is too much. Another comparison is helpful for me here, and that’s to a different literary scandal that also broke at roughly the same time, the revelations about Alice Munro. Munro died in May 2024, and in July, her youngest daughter Andrea Skinner published an essay about the longtime sexual abuse that she suffered at the hands of her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, and more to the point, that her mother had known about the abuse but chosen not to act on or to acknowledge it.In a New York Times Magazine article titled “What Alice Munro Knew,” Giles Harvey wrote that “Munro’s stories—particularly those from the years after she learned of the abuse—are full of violated children, negligent mothers and marriages founded on secrets and lies . . . Munro seems to have spent much of her career absorbed by the same questions that readers have asked since Andrea published her essay. Why did she not protect her daughter? What led her to take Fremlin back? How could a writer who was capable of such power on the page prove so feeble in real life?”Rachel Aviv, writing in the New Yorker and also considering Munro’s career in light of Andrea Skinner’s essay, assessed it like this:In that sense, I think it would be hard to be a Munro scholar and not make the evidence of this abuse and Munro’s reactions to it central, not necessarily because of the nature of the abuse but because of the nature of the work. Again, like we tell our students, we start with the work. McCarthy’s work is, I’m sure, influenced by his intense and problematic and long relationship with Augusta Britt, but in his case there are any number of other factors at play as well. I don’t see it as absolutely central in the way that Harvey and Aviv and others have argued that Munro’s knowledge of her daughter’s abuse is to Munro’s work. Once you’ve read what Andrea Skinner has to say, you can’t not see Munro’s obsessive focus on family and secrets and abuse and memory, her primary subject matter.When McCarthy died in June 2023, many people commented on how the field of McCarthy studies would change. The life was now complete—a truly retrospective view was now possible. There’s a feeling that the scholarship would now be dealing with a finite set of elements. As a family member said to Lydia Cooper after McCarthy’s death was announced, “Which author are you going to study now?” Of course that’s not how it works, and I know that, but even I am astonished at how different things are, about two and a half years past his death. And not because McCarthy studies are over, shot by a scandal in the street. This new turn can and should have an effect and a place in the conversation, but it shouldn’t eclipse other topics or other findings, whether those findings are good, bad, or indifferent.The new addition to the McCarthy Papers, for instance, include far more than Britt’s correspondence with McCarthy—the acquisition has more than doubled the collection’s size and contains other personal and professional correspondence, notes, and notebooks that span his whole life, materials related to his childhood and family, and unpublished creative works. I’m in the process of preparing the catalog of McCarthy’s enormous personal library for Open Access online publication, and the hope is for that information to enable scholars to discover far more about the nooks and crannies of McCarthy’s intellectual interests than has ever been possible in the past.I often tell the story of when I was in my first years as editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, which was self-published when I took over in 2010. I wanted to bring it to an academic press (for lots of reasons but not least because I hated stuffing the and so I was in conversation with a few different to find us a turned out to be State University which was and to be an excellent and as I was to the about how this would all he asked do you think your field has enough to it going for another it then, I was a little but I in the I feel that at least a of work to years and we can say it worked out. more won’t be enough for all the and the writing and the together that’s to