Cormac McCarthy began a relationship with a 16-year-old girl when he was 42, according to an account given by the woman who says she became his “secret muse.”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road and No Country for Old Men died last year at the age of 89. Augusta Britt, now 64, told Vanity Fair that she first met the acclaimed writer in 1976 at a motel pool in Tucson, Arizona.
“I was in and out of foster care at the time, and I used to go to the pool at this motel off the freeway in the south side of Tucson called the Desert Inn,” explained Britt.
Britt said she recognized McCarthy from the author photo on his 1965 debut novel, The Orchard Keeper. The following day, she returned to the pool with the paperback book.
“I was wearing jeans and a work shirt and I had a holster with a Colt revolver in it, which I had taken to wearing,” Britt recalled. “I had stolen it from the man who ran the foster home that I was in. And Cormac looked at me and he said, ‘Little lady, are you going to shoot me?’ And I said, ‘No, I was wondering if you would sign my book.’”
The pair became close, and when Britt suffered a beating that left her in hospital, McCarthy invited her to come with him on a road trip to Mexico. They traveled along the path of a story McCarthy was researching, which would become his 1985 novel Blood Meridian. The book tells the story of a fictional teenager from Tennessee who runs away from home.
Britt said their relationship became sexual a year after they met, when she was 17 and the author was 43.
“I can’t imagine, after the childhood I had, making love for the first time with anyone but a man, anyone but Cormac. It all felt right. It felt good,” Britt told Vanity Fair.
“I loved him. He was my safety. I really feel that if I had not met him, I would have died young. What I had trouble with came later. When he started writing about me.”
In addition to her influence on Blood Meridian, Britt is thought to have inspired characters in many more of McCarthy’s novels. In No Country for Old Men, the character of Llewelyn Moss becomes separated from his wife, who had been 16 when she married him.
Britt said she lived with McCarthy in El Paso, Texas, but eventually learned he was already married. She later returned to her family, but said she and McCarthy continued to see each other and correspond for the rest of his life.
She explained that her decision to reveal her identity was motivated by the fact that McCarthy’s archives, including their letters to each other, will become public at Texas State University next year.
“I’ve been so afraid to tell my story,” Britt said. “It feels like I’m being disloyal to Cormac. I’ve always wondered, too, who would believe me. I guess I’m just more private than him. But he would always warn me that at some point his archives would open up and people would find out about me.”
