Cormac McCarthy’s teenage muse breaks the silence

The great American writer Cormac McCarthy remained defensively private and didn’t share much about the inspiration behind his books – or himself. However, the author, who died in 2023, apparently lived most of his bestseller All the Beautiful Horses with a woman named Augusta Britt.

She was 16 years old when in 1976 she met the then 42-year-old writer.

Britt, now 64, hid her identity and her story for nearly five decades, publicly revealing herself as the author’s “one secret muse” in a Vanity Fair profile published this week. Writer Vincenzo Barney claims that many of the Pulitzer Prize-winning leading men were inspired by Britt, “a five-foot-five tough Finnish American cowgirl…whose reality, as McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he ‘had a hard time coming to terms with.’ . With.'”

Britt’s story “was always there, beneath the surface, between the lines of the novel’s shy subconscious,” Barney writes. She was a strong presence in the acclaimed “Border Trilogy” by the author of “The Road”, inspired Carla Jean in “No Country for Old Men”, played Alicia in “The Passenger” and nurse Wanda in “Suttree”. Horses identical to her breed appeared in the 2013 film “The Counselor,” in which Penélope Cruz plays a character based on her.

“Cormac always wanted me to tell my story,” Britt said. “He always encouraged me to write a book. He said, “Someone’s going to do it eventually, and it might as well be you.” But I could never bring myself to do it.

Barney said he reached out to Britt after she left him a harsh comment about his review of McCarthy’s 2022 novel “The Passenger” on Substack – a review that McCarthy told her “some good would come out of.” . She then sought out Barney, insisting that she speak only to him and not to two other McCarthy biographers vying for her attention.

She invited Barney to Tucson, Arizona, to hear her story, and they spent nine months together. McCarthy, she said, warned her that she “couldn’t hide forever,” and she eagerly shared the 47 (sometimes erotic) love letters the “Blood Meridian” scribe wrote to her that illuminated their relationship and, in McCarthy’s words, his “undying devotion.”

Britt said she was “so scared” to tell her story – after all, who would believe her? However, he warned her that one day his archives would be opened and people would find out about her.

Britt also inspired Harrogate’s slapstick sidekick in “Suttree,” which McCarthy was writing when they first met at a Tucson motel pool, where she went to shower safely away from her foster home.

She entered foster care in Arizona after experiencing a “traumatically brutal” event that devastated her family, and returned to the hotel to ask McCarthy to sign a copy of his 1965 debut novel, “The Orchard Keeper.” McCarthy, she said, wanted to know why he was wearing a holster that held a Colt revolver. It turns out that she stole it from a man who runs a foster home. She also had a stuffed cat named John Grady Cole, the hero of McCarthy’s “The Border Trilogy,” about three fugitives who have a stolen Colt revolver.

“It was the first time someone cared about what I thought and asked my opinion on various topics,” she said. “And having a grown man who actually seemed interested in talking to me was incredibly soothing. For the first time in my life I felt a small glimmer of hope.

Increasingly frustrated by the problems in Britt’s personal life, McCarthy corrected her birth certificate on his typewriter so that he could escape with it to Mexico. It worked, but it left trouble for both of them.

The appearance of their thirty-year age difference was also not ideal for them. Despite his hallmarks of premeditated seduction, Britt asserted that she felt safer with him than with any of the many men in her young life at whose hands, in Barney’s words, she “suffered unspeakable violence”. McCarthy – who was married to the second of his three wives, singer Annie De Lisle, when he met Britt – was still worried about statutory rape charges and the Mann Act early in their relationship.

She said that when they first had sex, he was 43 and she was 17.

“I can’t imagine, after my childhood, making love for the first time with anyone other than a man, anyone other than Cormac. Everything seemed fine. It was a good feeling,” she said. “I loved him. He was my safety. I really feel like if I hadn’t met him, I would have died young. What I had trouble with came later. When he started writing about me.

She said McCarthy’s letters, many of which she received before consummating their relationship, made her feel uncomfortable at the time because they were so different from how he spoke on the phone or in person. But she insisted she never felt anything inappropriate about their relationship and was more concerned that McCarthy would be misunderstood by the wider public if he came forward.

“The one thing I’m afraid of is that he’s not around to defend myself,” she said.

About two years into their relationship, she found out he was married. About a year later, she learned that McCarthy had a son about her age.

“It just blew me away. What I needed so much back then was safety, security and trust. Cormac was my life, my role model. For me he was on a pedestal. And when it turned out he lied about it, they became cracks in trust.”

Britt left him after about three years of their relationship. They kept in touch, talked regularly over the years, and saw each other when he visited Tucson. When McCarthy sent her the manuscript of “All the Beautiful Horses” in the 1980s, she was confused by how much the novel was “full of me and yet not me.”

“I was surprised that writing about it didn’t seem romantic. I felt violated in a way,” she said. “All these painful experiences were regurgitated and turned into fiction. (…) I wondered: was that all I was to him, a train wreck worth writing about?”

Britt said she rejected two marriage proposals from McCarthy and lamented that almost all of the characters she inspired him to write had died. But decades later, she said, she realized he was “shattering the darkness” of what had happened to her.

“What happens to you, so young and so terrible, doesn’t really heal. Just patch yourself up as best you can and move on.