Augusta Britt has had, by any reasonable accounting, an extraordinarily rich and interesting life, and seems like a vivid and fascinating person. By her mid-teens in the mid-1970s, she was a pistol-packing Arizona refugee from her own abusive family and any number of atrocious foster homes. She met the novelist Cormac McCarthy by a motel pool in 1976 when she was 16 (and he 42) and became, for the next few years, his secret lover as well as, for the next four decades, the pretty direct inspiration for many of his stories and characters.
When she was 17—and McCarthy, Britt would find out later, was still married to Annie DeLisle—the two ran off to Mexico believing (or fantasizing) that the FBI was after McCarthy on statutory rape and human trafficking charges; they returned to the U.S. shortly after her 18th birthday. In 1981, when she would have been 21 or thereabouts, she left McCarthy in Tennessee and returned to Arizona. They saw each other many times over the following decades and kept up a deep correspondence for the rest of his life, but never lived together again; he asked her to marry him two separate times but backed out of both proposals. Britt has spent time as a patient in a mental hospital; she has worked as a trauma nurse; she is richly thoughtful about her unique life; now, at 64, she still trains horses and shoots guns, and evidently taught McCarthy much of what he learned about both hobbies.
Along the way, she showed up in a hell of a lot of McCarthy's fiction. As recounted—eventually—in a long Vanity Fair profile written by Vincenzo Barney and edited by his worst enemy in the world, Britt is the direct inspiration for such McCarthy creations as:
- Wayward teen doofus Gene Harrogate in Suttree; and also doomed (teen) love interest Wanda from that same novel
- Both damaged, doomed teen runaway Blevins in All the Pretty Horses as well as Alejandra, the (also teen) love interest of that same novel's protagonist
- The doomed (teen) prostitute, Magdalena, loved doomedly by that same protagonist in Cities of the Plain
- Both Carla Jean, the doomed (teen) wife of protagonist Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men and also, presumably, the feisty, flirtatious (teen) girl Moss meets by a motel pool shortly before (spoiler alert) being murdered
- Alicia Western, the doomed, mentally ill (age unknown, I didn't read this book) sister of the protagonist in The Passenger and the main character of its companion novel Stella Maris (which I also have not read)
There's more: John Grady Cole, the protagonist of All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain, is named after the stuffed kitten Britt had during the early part of their relationship. The title of All the Pretty Horses itself comes from a lullaby she used to sing to the stuffed kitten. Wedding proposal dialog in the 2013 film The Counselor, written by McCarthy, repeats verbatim an exchange he shared with Britt. And so on. It's a lot. The man simply loved writing about Augusta Britt, the wayward teenager whose birth certificate McCarthy doctored with a typewriter when they fled together to Mexico in the 1970s so that he would not go to prison for having sex with her.
(For whatever it's worth, and as the Vanity Fair piece makes clear, Britt herself does not consider McCarthy to have been a creep for having pursued a sexual and romantic relationship with a semi-homeless teenager 26 years his junior, and indeed says so several times in the story.)
I gather Britt's importance to his life and fiction has been a somewhat known thing in McCarthy circles, literary circles, and, uh, Texas culture journalism circles(?) for years upon years, but no one had previously been able to get her to participate in an interview. Barney, a big-time McCarthy fan, apparently beat some number of McCarthy biographers to this white whale after Britt left a comment under a review of The Passenger he posted on his Substack. She was ready to talk, and only to him.
From a certain angle, or perhaps several, there's a sort of tragedy in a fascinating individual and her life being portrayed only in fictionalized snippets, indirectly, over the course of decades, by an acclaimed novelist famous at least in part for the dense stylization of his prose. There's a sort of next-level tragedy in that individual, depicted in so incredibly many (doomed) forms in somebody else's words, finally deciding to share her story with the world, in her own words, and choosing as custodians of those words a writing and editing team that will send those words out into the world hideously adorned with clauses and sentences like this:
In June 2023, when he died of complications from prostate cancer at the age of 89 surrounded by Cadillacs and Ferraris at his compound in Santa Fe, McCarthy’s hold on literary awareness was at a stage of maximum receptivity.
"McCarthy's hold on literary awareness was at a stage of maximum receptivity." Dude. What. This is Shamsese. Sources say the public's receptivity is ramping up to a stage of maximum in terms of the hold on literary awareness of Cormac McCarthy. Maybe you could just tell me whether the hell he will be available to play tonight.
And this:
Upon McCarthy’s death, however, the mystery of his personal life has drawn close enough for us to unravel assumptions into their opposites: Cormac McCarthy did not shirk womenkind in his novels.
Simply do not do this. Do not make this sentence; if you have made this sentence, do not ever publish it. What in the hell is the relationship between the various nouns of this sentence? I feel like I am having a stroke.
And this, about Britt's manner of speaking:
This is the Augustal style: equipoise between the love of laughing at oneself and soliloquy.
Relatedly:
And while she certainly has a way with words, words also have a way with her, as McCarthy found out in 1976. As do landscapes. Behind her, framed between the posts of Scout’s stall, the Catalina Mountains loom burnt green, brushed upward with the impressionistic confidence of a child’s paint stroke. Britt stands poised at the picture’s edge like a foreground that has leaked out of its frame, at play between painting and outer world, portrait and subject.
Vanity Fair, my friend, what you are telling me here is that the surface of the planet Earth is visible behind Augusta Britt when she stands outdoors, and that for this her relationship to it is special.
While we are on the subject of nature, here is an entire paragraph, one of two about lightning in the story:
It’s monsoon season, and lightning bobs and weaves in the corner of your eyes all day like floaters. There are three separate storms to the south, delicately wind-tilted on the horizon. Lightning races them in a stitchless thread, and to the north rain shimmers through the sheerest rainbow, stamped perfectly horizontal against the mountains like the execution line on a document.
This is a 172-car pileup of mixed visual metaphors. What is the damn lightning (which bobs and weaves like a ... a floater) doing, racing the storms? Are you sure that it is racing them? It is racing them ... in a thread? A thread without stitches? Buddy, what the fuck is happening in the sky right now.
Well, see, over here, to the south, you got a thread. It lacks stitches. And boy, that thread is really hauling ass. In this sense, it will remind you of a floater. And then if you'll turn around and look over there to the north, you got your classic execution line on a document, the only way that the concept of straightness could be represented for the reader.
Hey man, I'm having a hard time picturing this "rainbow" thing you mentioned seeing. Oh, well, just picture the black line where you sign your name on a DMV form, that's basically it. OK, got it.
This manages to be simultaneously deranged and also not visually evocative in the least. It's like somebody sniffed glue and hallucinated the normal contents of a desk drawer.
Here is the other paragraph about lightning, which has left me devastated:
Two eyes are not sufficient for a sunset in the West. That’s because there is more than one sunset, more than can be seen in a single field of vision. After a monsoon, the sky is Sistine. To the west, lightning races the tousled embroidery of clouds in pink gilt. Turning on my heels, there are Iliads and Edens of violet cloudwork parted by the slimmest blue streamlets of sky. Soon the mountains will be darkened and skimmed of all their reddened lilac, and they will stand like glowing geometry against the sunset’s final yellow. It is all daubed in a nimbus around the muse, like a painting that is still wet, still open to being blended.
Simply never say to me that the mountains will be "like glowing geometry." You are saying that, soon, the mountains will be shapes, and visible. All of it looks wet. OK, man.
On imagining that you are Cormac McCarthy, and have just met Augusta Britt, the six-shootin' teenage sorta-runaway who maybe is flirting with you by the side of this motel pool in Tucson:
And just like that, with the impatient grandeur below accident, coincidence, you’re introduced to your muse, a moral hero, a girl with a stuffed kitten named John Grady Cole.
What ... what is this? Why is the impatient grandeur below accident and coincidence? And where? Is it below them on, like ... a scale? A ladder? One of those glowing geometry heaps up there?
You do not have to do this! Look at this sentence: "And just like that, you're introduced to your muse, a moral hero, a girl with a stuffed kitten named John Grady Cole." Print this sentence out and wander the Earth with it, showing it to every single human you find. I promise you that none of them—not one, not ever—will read this sentence and think to themselves, Hm, I wonder what type of grandeur this happened with, and where the grandeur was on some type of plot or spectrum type of deal, relative to such things as accident and coincidence. That will not ever happen. That is because "the impatient grandeur below accident, coincidence" does not actually mean or describe anything. It is just some bullshit. It's not even pure filigree, because it is annoying and distracting.
One more: When Augusta Britt was 11 years old, her family moved from North Dakota to Tucson, and then experienced some kind of terrible unspecified event that shattered it permanently. About that:
This is where the muse’s novelistic question mark emerges. An origin story beginning on an ellipse.
Go to hell. Go absolutely to fricking hell!
Do not judge a writer too harshly for letting his hands go. Reach for the stars! I myself have created many painful and embarrassing sentences over the years, many of which never advanced past the scrutiny and backspace key of a caring and merciful editor; trust in my editor to catch my self-indulgences and protect me from them, in fact, is what gives me confidence to write. If I had editors who would let "like the execution line on a document" slip into publication as the description of a goddamn rainbow, I would stuff my hands down a blender.
I am begging someone, anyone, to publish a normal narrative of Augusta Britt's life. Simply write and edit a story about her, in a normal fashion, and publish it. Do not make her into a doomed teen cowpoke, or a doomed adult cowpoke's doomed teen mate; do not refract her through your own thoughts about the nature of evil or whatever; do not make her perfectly sufficient life story alternate paragraphs with your efforts to conjure a description of weather that will cause a reader to wonder whether you have ever seen any. Do not add to the story any mentions—not even one! I'm watching your ass!—of "that artistic wiggle room between frisson and fission," which is gibberish.
Just publish a story about her! And her life! And what she thinks about it! It seems like a pretty good story! This blog is over!
