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The author Cormac McCarthy, who died last year aged 89, began a relationship with a 16-year-old when he was 42 and the woman became his “secret muse”, Vanity Fair has reported.
The author of The Road and Suttree gave very few interviews, so little is known of his private life other than that he married three times and lived in Spain and Texas before settling in New Mexico.
Augusta Britt, now 64, told Vanity Fair she was “in and out of foster care” when she first saw McCarthy at a motel pool in Tucson, Arizona, that she would frequently visit. The author looked familiar, and when she got home she realised she had recognised him from the author photo on the back of the novel she was reading, McCarthy’s debut, The Orchard Keeper.
The next day, she brought her copy of the book to the motel, along with a Colt revolver, which she said she had stolen from the man who ran her foster home and “had taken to wearing”, having experienced violence at the hands of her father and foster parents. The author was still there, and apparently asked her if she was planning to shoot him – to which she responded no, she wanted him to sign her book.
Britt said the pair began a relationship and in 1977, after a beating led to her being admitted to hospital, McCarthy asked her to leave her home and come to Mexico with him.
She accepted and they travelled along the path of Blood Meridian, the novel McCarthy was researching at the time, published in 1985, which follows a fictional teenager from Tennessee who runs away from home and travels across the US-Mexico border. Britt told Vanity Fair that the state police and the FBI were after them at one point – McCarthy feared being found guilty of statutory rape or in breach of the Mann Act, which criminalises trafficking – although Vanity Fair did not find any evidence of a police or federal investigation.
Britt said the pair had sex for the first time when McCarthy was 43 and she was 17.
“I loved him,” she told Vanity Fair. “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.”
Vincenzo Barney, the journalist Britt spoke to, believes her influence can be traced in at least 10 of McCarthy’s novels, most obviously in No Country for Old Men, in which one of the main characters, Llewelyn Moss, becomes separated from his wife, who was 16 at the time she married him. Britt said McCarthy proposed to her twice, but that both times he got cold feet.
After the Mexico trip, Britt said she lived with McCarthy in El Paso, Texas, which was when she found out he was still married. Later she found out that he had a son the same age as her. In 1966, McCarthy had married the English singer Annie DeLisle.
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In 1981 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the money from which meant Britt could go and visit her family, she said. “I just never came back.”
However, she and McCarthy reportedly stayed in touch after the split, with McCarthy visiting Britt in Tucson every few months for the rest of his life.
After 47 years of keeping her relationship with McCarthy private, Britt apparently decided to share her story and the love letters she received from the novelist because next autumn the second half of McCarthy’s archives, which will probably contain her letters to him, will become public at Texas State University.
“I’ve been so afraid to tell my story,” Britt said. “It feels like I’m being disloyal to Cormac … But he would always warn me that at some point his archives would open up and people would find out about me.”
