Literary world shocked to learn of Cormac McCarthy’s secret affair with teen

Augusta Britt would prove to be one of the most important influences on McCarthy’s creative life. Photo / Getty Images
Warning: Some content may disturb.
News broke this week that famed US author Cormac McCarthy, who died in 2023, had a relationship with a teenage girl who had an enormous impact on his work. The Telegraph’s Jake Kerridge explains how learning of the author’s illicit affair changes everything we knew about his fiction.
In 1976 a 16-year-old girl had a chance encounter with a 42-year-old novelist by a motel swimming pool in Arizona, in what proved to be a game-changing moment in the history of modern American literature. The novelist was Cormac McCarthy and the girl, Augusta Britt, would prove to be one of the most important influences on McCarthy’s creative life.
And yet, although McCarthy, author of The Road and No Country For Old Men, is one of the most scrutinised and analysed of modern writers, not even his most ardent fans had any idea of the existence of Augusta Britt until a few days ago. Britt has revealed, in a profile for Vanity Fair, that she and McCarthy became lovers in 1977, and continued to meet regularly until his death last year.
McCarthy’s lifelong friend Michael Cameron has confirmed the influence of Britt on the author’s major works over several decades: “She was his muse, throughout. Throughout … There’s no doubt she was the love of his life and his muse.”
The revelations will fundamentally change how we read McCarthy’s novels. McCarthy, in his years of fame, guarded his privacy so fearlessly as to make JD Salinger look like a reality TV contestant. But in his occasional public utterances, he dropped hints that his fiction contained autobiographical elements. His devotees have felt over the years that much of the strength of his work derives from its basis in some kind of deeply felt personal mythology, and yet we have known practically nothing about who or what inspired that mythology. The sudden emergence of Augusta Britt is like the flicking on of a light switch.
According to 64-year-old Britt – described by Vincenzo Barney, the journalist who tracked her down, as a “badass Finnish-American cowgirl” – she taught the greatest modern writer of Westerns everything he knew about horses and guns. Moreover, Barney has identified at least nine major characters in McCarthy’s works who are based on Britt, and truffled out dozens of coded references to their relationship. Her influence is clearly stamped on almost all of his major books, from (1979), the novel he was working on when he met her, to his final linked pair of novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris (2022).
Exclusive: Augusta Britt is one of the most significant—and secret—inspirations in literary history, giving life to dozens of Cormac McCarthy’s characters across his celebrated novels and Hollywood films. For 47 years, Britt closely guarded her identity and her story—until now.… pic.twitter.com/yj69iYGJRy
It seems likely that in the future somebody will write a biography of Britt as extensive as, say, Brenda Maddox’s book on Nora Barnacle, with its tracing of the ways in which Barnacle was transmuted into different characters in the works of James Joyce. It would be a disturbing book, however. Although Britt adamantly denies it, it seems clear from what she has said that McCarthy groomed her in the first months after their meeting, before they fled to Mexico and embarked on a sexual relationship.
Moreover, he clearly manipulated her for the rest of his life, developing an obsession with telling and retelling her life experiences in fictional form. It is a story that reminds us how parasitic the relationship between a writer and his muse can be, though the result may be magical.
Now that this relationship has come to light, one starts to read McCarthy’s novels with a fresh eye. Consider, for example, All the Pretty Horses (1992), his first great success. One of the most memorable scenes sees the 16-year-old hero John Grady Cole making a precipitous journey across the Mexican border with his pal Lacey, pursued by people from the town where the two lads have been accused of horse-rustling. (The pair exchange typically McCarthyite dialogue: “It’ll be daylight soon.” “Then we can get shot.”)
It seems clear now that McCarthy was drawing on the memories of 15 years earlier, when he and the 17-year-old Britt fled from Arizona to Mexico, aware that he was laying himself open to charges of statutory rape. Cameron, who helped the lovers “blow town”, recalls in the Vanity Fair article: “That was a harrowing escape. I remember Cormac being very nervous, looking over his shoulder.”
According to Britt, they had gotten as far as New Mexico when McCarthy received a tip-off that the FBI was looking for them: her mother had found a stack of love letters from McCarthy to Britt and realised what was happening. We can see now why McCarthy has captured so well with so many of his characters the terror of being pursued – and how it is mixed with a kind of exhilaration. Of their flit, Britt recalls: “He was wanted for statutory rape and the Mann Act. But he was undaunted. I think he kind of liked it, actually.”
McCarthy’s silence about his private life has famously been so extensive that some devotees have been caught rifling through his garbage for hints that might unlock his novels. The little we do know has suggested that the books took their tenor from whatever was going on in his private life. When McCarthy died last year, John Banville noted in the Telegraph that his fiction became “soft at the centre” in the 1990s after he met the woman who would become his third wife, Jennifer Winkley (32 years his junior). But the marriage failed and McCarthy returned to characteristically dark form, with the “bleak and terrifying” No Country For Old Men (2005).
McCarthy did admit that the wanderings of the father and son in his post-apocalyptic masterpiece The Road (2009) drew heavily on his relationship with his son John, born in 1999. “A lot of the lines are verbatim conversations my son John and I had,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “John said, ‘Papa, what would you do if I died?’ I said, ‘I’d want to die, too’ and he said, ‘So you could be with me?’ I said, ‘Yes, so I could be with you.’ Just a conversation that two guys would have.”
Although some of Augusta Britt’s account of her relationship with McCarthy has been called into question, it seems indisputable that she was a similarly potent presence in his work, and over a much longer period. When they met in 1976, McCarthy – at that time sporting a handlebar moustache – could reasonably have been described as a washed-up novelist: he had published three books to some critical acclaim but hardly any public interest, and they were all out of print. His second marriage, to Anne DeLisle, was on the rocks, and he was travelling around the US-Mexican borderlands gathering material for what would eventually become his first Western, Blood Meridian (1985).
At that point the 16-year-old Augusta was living in one of the several foster homes in Arizona that she stayed in over the years, the authorities deeming it unsafe for her to live with her mother and violent, alcoholic father. As the foster homes tended not to have locks on the bathroom doors, with the result that she was constantly bothered by men, she liked to shower in privacy at the swimming pool at a local motel – where, on one occasion, McCarthy happened to be staying.
Britt claims to have been reading a paperback of McCarthy’s novel The Orchard Keeper at the time, and recognised him from the author photo on the back cover. Already, social media sleuths have pointed out that there was no paperback edition of the book bearing a photo of the author at that time, but if Britt has romanticised some of the details of their “meet cute”, it is clear that they hit it off. “He wanted to hear more about my life,” she told Vanity Fair. “It was the first time someone cared what I thought, asked me my opinions about things. And to have this adult man that actually seemed interested in talking to me, it was intensely soothing.”
McCarthy kept in touch with her during his wanderings, sending her money and numerous letters. Britt insists she was not being groomed; in her view, McCarthy was the saviour who rescued her from a life of being constantly maltreated and often abused. In 1977, having returned to live at home, she was hit by her father and hospitalised. This was the point when McCarthy declared: “If you stay here, they’re going to kill you. I’m going to Mexico, and I want you to come with me. At least then you’ll be safe.”
Towards the end of his life, McCarthy estimated he had written some five million words of fiction on the trusty portable Olivetti typewriter he had bought in a pawnshop in the early 1960s. Among those words of fiction were the amendments he made to Augusta’s birth certificate while they were ensconced in New Mexico, so that any inquirers could be satisfied that she was an adult. In fact, at this point – when she and McCarthy became lovers – she was 17; he was 43.
They travelled around Mexico – Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico City, Los Mochis, Baja – with McCarthy accumulating the local colour he’d use later in his books. The police and the FBI apparently lost interest in them, and once Britt was 18 the couple lived in various places in Texas, periodically arriving in a new town, opening a bank account and flitting when they’d used up the credit.
However, McCarthy proved to be as hesitant in revealing the truth about his personal life to Britt as he would later be to interviewers. Only after a couple of years together did she discover that he was still married to his second wife, and more time passed before she found out that he had a son about the same age as her from his first marriage. In 1981, deciding that she could no longer trust him, she went to visit her family in Arizona and did not return to him.
No doubt McCarthy scholars will now be arguing for years over whether he was a real-life Humbert Humbert, but he is far from the only middle-aged male novelist to find his fiction galvanised by a relationship with a very young woman. There are striking parallels with Dickens, who was 45 when he met the 18-year-old Ellen Lawless Ternan in 1857, and transmuted her into some of his most interesting female characters in his later novels. Edmund Wilson once pointed out the echoes of Ellen’s name in some of those late characters: Estella in Great Expectations, Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend (who has a quasi-incestuous relationship with her father) and the feisty Helena Landless in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
With Augusta Britt, the influence is just as powerful, but more complicated, as she appears to be present in McCarthy’s fiction as both female and male characters. She first makes her presence felt in Suttree (1979), the novel McCarthy completed while they were in Mexico together, having been wrestling with the book on and off for over a decade.
The novel details the episodic adventures of Cornelius Suttree, a drunken drop-out who has abandoned his wife and son, as McCarthy did in the early 1960s; set in his former hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee, the book clearly owes much to McCarthy’s years of heavy drinking in the late 1950s and 1960s. Late in the book, there is a self-contained episode in which the 30-something Suttree embarks on an affair with Wanda, a teenage girl from a poor family (who has ambitions to be a nurse – as Britt did).
Deliberately and disturbingly, McCarthy constantly stresses Wanda’s youth, with references to her “child’s breath [with] an odour of raw milk”, and to her “holding her arms aloft like a child for him to raise up over them the nightshirt that she wore”. “With his ear to the womb of this child he could hear the hiss of meteorites through the blind stellar depths.” The transgressive nature of the relationship both horrifies and excites Suttree, as in the description of the first time they have sex: “He felt giddy. An obscene delight not untouched by just a little sorrow as he pulled down her drawers.” It is hard to believe McCarthy is not drawing on his relationship with Britt; it is notable that this is the section in the novel in which the wretched Suttree, despite his guilt and his attempts to break off the relationship (defied by Wanda who keeps getting him into bed), manages to achieve some kind of happiness.
It doesn’t last, as Wanda comes to a sticky end under a landslide: indeed, most of the characters based on Britt throughout the books seem to meet violent deaths. Britt confided to Barney that over the years “I always looked to Cormac’s books to see how I was doing. Which was usually dead.” (She has chosen to interpret this as his way of helping to exorcise her demons: “maybe what he was doing was killing off what had happened to me. Killing off the darkness.”)
The parallels between Britt and Wanda are obvious, but Barney also finds traces of Britt in the character of the young, hapless Gene Harrogate, whom Suttree befriends during a spell in prison (where Harrogate has been sent for committing sexual acts with a farmer’s watermelons). Following three austere novels focused on deviant psychology, this fourth novel saw McCarthy unbending enough to introduce an out-and-out comic character for the first time in his work; and Barney claims that Harrogate’s slapstick personality owes a lot to Britt: “[When] I met Britt in the flesh … I recognised her comic influence on the character.
“Within the span of 24 hours of my arrival … Britt climbed on to the stove to get to a cabinet, accidentally turning the burner on and scorching her knees; a long hard sneeze nearly sent her airborne with flapping arms.” One sees the echoes of that in, say, the slapstick description in Suttree of Harrogate’s clumsy attempts to pursue and kill a pig.
McCarthy’s next novel was Blood Meridian, usually cited as his masterpiece and obviously owing much, in its evocation of the borderlands country, to his time on the road with Britt. Britt told Barney that the pair tried peyote together in Baja, and I suspect this may account for a certain trippy quality in McCarthy’s evocation of the landscape in that book. (“All night sheet lightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.”)
Barney also notes that the novel’s teenage protagonist “The Kid”, who “had got on to terms with life beyond what his years could account for”, may be another avatar of Britt, also forced by a difficult youth to grow up before her time; significantly, The Kid is the first unambiguously heroic character in the McCarthy oeuvre.
It seems pretty clear that McCarthy, who had little knowledge of horses himself – “he never [rode]”, Britt has said, “but he liked to watch me” – could not have written his great Westerns without her intimate equine knowledge. After they had split up, Britt worked training horses in Arizona, and McCarthy would visit, watching her in action and plying her with questions. This was not always a comfortable experience. According to Vanity Fair, McCarthy’s visits “were always entangled with what felt to Britt like research. Like an artist visiting his subject for an extended portraiture”.
In the 1990s came The Border Trilogy, the work that transformed McCarthy from critics’ darling to bestseller. Britt is clearly represented in the various teenage love interests of the novels’ young protagonists. In the first volume, All the Pretty Horses, we see her in Alejandra, the daughter of the owner of the ranch in Mexico where Texan teenager John Grady Cole finds work.
Like Britt, Alejandra shockingly defies contemporary mores to embark on a sexual relationship with no prospect of marriage in sight: her sympathetic but straightforward great-aunt tries to warn John Grady off, telling him that the moral code which Alejandra “dismisses as a matter of mere appearance or outmoded custom” holds enough sway in Mexico to mean that her reputation will be damaged for life. (“Here a woman’s reputation is all she has … There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honour and regain it again. But a woman cannot.”) Just as Britt’s family tried to prevent her going off with McCarthy, so Alejandra’s great-aunt interferes in her relationship with John Grady; eventually she saves his life, interceding when he is charged with murder, but on condition that he never see Alejandra again.
Britt is also present in the hot-headed young Jimmy Blevins – often regarded by critics as a reimagined version of Harrogate from Suttree, just as amusingly haphazard, but more violent and dangerous – who gets himself and his friends into hot water when trying to retrieve the Colt pistol he claims was stolen from him, with fatal consequences. Britt claims she had her own Colt pistol which came with them on their Mexican travels (she had stolen it from the man who ran her foster home); she recalls McCarthy setting up bottles for her to practise on and being turned on by her sharp-shooting prowess.
These are not the only echoes of their relationship in All the Pretty Horses, the first book in the trilogy. In the first few pages, there is mention of a small brass calendar permanently stuck on September 13: Britt’s birthday. The protagonist, John Grady Cole, shares his name with a stuffed kitten toy that Britt packed for her Mexico sojourn along with her gun; when they were on the lam she used to sing the toy a song as they went to sleep – the traditional American lullaby All the Pretty Horses.
McCarthy sent her the manuscript of the novel. “I started reading it, and it’s just so full of me, and yet isn’t me,” she told Vanity Fair. “I felt kind of violated. All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction.” When she told McCarthy about her feelings, he replied: “Well, baby, that’s what I do. I’m a writer.” She no doubt saw herself again in Magdalena, the epileptic prostitute in the trilogy’s final volume, Cities of the Plain (1998); here, the ending of the relationship between Britt and McCarthy is dramatised in tragic form, with John Grady’s attempt to rescue Magdalena from life in a brothel resulting in the deaths of both of them.
One sees the McCarthy-Britt dynamic again in No Country for Old Men (2005), in the relationship between the 36-year-old protagonist Llewellyn Moss and his sparky 19-year-old wife Carla Jean, whom he married three years earlier. She is another Britt avatar who has endured a difficult relationship with her family and looks on Moss as a saviour when he happens to walk into the branch of Wal-Mart where she works.
“He asked me where sportin’ goods was at,” she recalls, “and … I told him where it was at and he looked at me and went on. And directly he come back and he read my nametag and he said my name and he looked at me and he said: ‘What time do you get off?’ There was not no question in my mind. Not then, not now, not ever.”
As with Britt, life has given Carla Jean a sense of fragility and tragedy despite her youth (“Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin’ that means the world to you it’s all that more likely it’ll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter”) and she endures a terrible death after Moss’ life spirals out of control when he tries to steal money from drug dealers, leaving him grief- and guilt-stricken. The repeated deaths of the characters based on Britt may have represented McCarthy’s way of working through his devastation at her ending of their relationship years earlier. “Baby, there was nothing wrong with our love. You just threw it away,” he once wrote to her.
Twice in later years, McCarthy proposed marriage to Britt, although he backed out both times. When Britt saw Ridley Scott’s 2013 film The Counsellor, made from a screenplay by McCarthy, she was shocked to find the dialogue in a proposal scene between Michael Fassbender and Penelope Cruz’s characters was taken more or less verbatim from what passed between them during one of his proposals. (“I intend to love you until I die.” “Me first.”) This was the second time she had seen herself played on screen by Cruz, who had portrayed another character based on Britt in Billy Bob Thornton’s 2000 film of All the Pretty Horses.
McCarthy, who continued to pay regular visits to Britt in Tucson and spoke to her on the phone several times a week, seems to have become addicted to plumbing her life for material. In 2022, the year before his death at the age of 89, he published, after a long silence, a pair of linked novels: The Passenger and Stella Maris, on which he had first begun working in the 1970s. The life of the central character, mathematician Alicia Western, draws heavily on that of Britt’s life after her split from McCarthy, including her battles with depression, for which she was hospitalised – although, in Alicia’s case, they culminate in suicide.
The title of the second novel derives from the Stella Maris medal given to Britt by her uncle when she was in a psychiatric ward. The two books – McCarthy’s first attempt in 60 years of writing to place a woman centre-stage – allow McCarthy to explore his late-burgeoning interest in maths and physics, but mediated through his knowledge of the details of Britt’s treatments. Like Britt, Alicia’s mental health issues are caused by the traumas of her relationship with her physicist father, although in her case the difficulties of the relationship are compounded by her guilt over her father’s key role in the Manhattan Project.
Britt told Barney that her depressive spells were exacerbated by McCarthy’s unlicensed borrowings from her life. And yet she remains devoted to his memory. Having decided to tell her story now – McCarthy’s archive, due to be made public next year, would have revealed their relationship to the world in any case, and at least two biographers on the prowl – she says that: “One thing I’m scared about is that he’s not around to defend himself. He saved my life.”
Maybe so. But in giving the pretty-much-failed novelist the inspiring gift of her own personality, in addition to so much else raw material, she probably saved his too. However disturbing some aspects of the relationship may be, his readers are the richer for it.