No Substance #206: The Scandal of Cormac McCarthy

Last week, Vanity Fair dropped an article about Cormac McCarthy. Well, sorta. It was about Augusta Britt, the 64 year old woman who met McCarthy when she was 16, and began a relationship with him when she was 17. At the time, McCarthy was 43.

I am pretty ambivalent about McCarthy. He writes nicely, but I have only liked one book, Blood Meridian. I do admit I haven’t read everything so I can’t say I’m an expert or anything. But I read The Road and found it to be really, really conservative, like some bad wet dream, and I hated it. I didn’t mind No Country for Old Men, but I didn’t love it. I didn’t like Suttree at all. I found it tedious, perhaps my most damning complaint. Will I read more of McCarthy’s work? Sure, probably. He writes nicely. I like one of his books. Maybe there will be another. His relationship with a 17 year old girl (who might be younger, or who might be one of many, according to the New York Times) won’t change much of it for me. I never gave much thought of McCarthy crossing the border with an underage girl, or changing her birth certificate in a hotel room, but it all seems like something that could take place in a McCarthy book. I don’t have trouble believing that it could happen in real life.

There are some who don’t believe it, naturally. There are some who have said things are wrong with the article. There’s no author photo on the old paperback of The Orchid Keeper, for example. Britt is lying, or has made something up. Who knows, she might’ve made something up. Britt was named in McCarthy’s will, though, so she’s important enough. Then there’s others who argue that Vincenzo Barney, the author Britt reached out to over his substack, fumbled the whole thing, as if someone hired off his substack was ever going to do it right by everyone. I say this on substack. I say this, also, as someone who is happy to break whatever scandal you have for a fee. Feel free to reach out to me. Anyhow, enough of that. According to various people the article is badly written and the subject matter handled terribly. Barney makes it all about him. He never addresses McCarthy’s grooming, or tries to challenge Britt on the fact that she doesn’t view it that way. Barney’s connectin to McCarthy’s work also leaves a lot to be desired. He argues that Britt is a constant influence throughout.

Your mileage will vary with all this. For my part, I don’t love or hate the way the piece is written. There are some nice parts, some bad parts. I do, however, think Barney’s piece is about Augusta Britt, rather than himself. That, to me, is the most interesting part of this whole story. Augusta Britt has done this to position herself before biographies about McCarthy emerge. I have no idea if any are planned in the next year or two, but McCarthy had biographers, and so I assume that one is at least forthcoming in the near future. Such a book, you imagine, will be quite serious and quite anticipated and will earn its author some nice moments. It’s also apparently true that McCarthy’s biographers, like many of McCarthy’s close friends, knew about Britt and her relationship with their subject. They kept quiet about it due to a respect and, one suspects, because they would be able to reveal that piece in their book. Imagine the sales. Imagine the articles. Imagine, imagine.

Is that why Britt did this? Is that why she went and found herself a young writer of no real consequence, a good looking writer she found on substack (I mean come one) because he reviewed McCarthy’s last novels and she liked what he said enough that she decided he would be the one to announce the relationship she had with McCarthy. She could have gone anywhere, really. She could have gone to those biographers. She was known to them. She had avoided them, but that wouldn’t have mattered. She could have gone to any other named journalist as well. She could have had her pick. But instead she found Barney and the two of them worked to tell her story. It’s pretty hilarious when you stop and think about it, or at least, I think it’s fairly hilarious. You don’t even have to search to hard to find a reason why. In Barney’s article, Britt talks about how unhappy McCarthy was at the end of his life, how he’d betrayed himself, to a degree, with his success. He’d taken up drinking. He was surrounded by fancy, superficial friends, she said. And here she was, now, working with no-one from that circle so she could present her story and have it out there before anyone else.

There’s a lot else to be said. There’s a discussion about McCarthy’s work and his legacy and the place Britt occupies in it. There will be people who like those discussions and those who don’t. Someone will not doubt say that they read a book without considering the author at all, like some loser at a party no one will admit to inviting because their loud and boorish. But I’m not the person to be part of that discussion, really. I’m just not that invested. I’m just here to watch it unfold.

It’s pretty good value, I reckon, for those of you like me.

Ben

(Ben Peek is the author of The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories, amongst others. His next book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)