I Couldn't Recognize Cormac McCarthy from His Author Photo, Could You?

Some of the things Vanity Fair got wrong about Cormac McCarthy

[Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade is the periodic newsletter of Downtown Brown Books, an antiquarian bookseller in Portland, Oregon.]

On November 20, 2024, Vanity Fair published a long profile of Augusta¹ Britt, Cormac McCarthy’s muse and on-again, off-again partner for nearly 50 years, beginning when she was sixteen.

There’s no doubt that Britt and McCarthy had an affair. In fact, a 1992 profile in the New York Times may allude to it.²

What makes novice writer Vincenzo Barney’s³ story big news is the extraordinary detail that it includes.

Unfortunately, it’s in the details where all the trouble lies. The meat of the article begins with a perfect anecdote that’s easy to disprove.

As Vanity Fair tells it, Augusta Britt recognized McCarthy from his picture. Barney quotes her account at length:

“One day I was at the motel pool, and I saw Cormac, and I thought he looked familiar but couldn’t quite place him. So I went back to the home I was staying in and realized that the man at the swimming pool was the man in the author photo on the back of the book I was reading, The Orchard Keeper….It was this beat-up old paperback. I think I paid a nickel for it in a bin outside a bookstore. So the next day I brought it to the motel, and he was still there.”

Within hours of Britt’s profile hitting Vanity Fair’s website, Cormac McCarthy collectors were reaching for their early paperback editions of The Orchard Keeper to look at the photo in question, only to discover there wasn’t one.

Most commenters chalk this up to a simple mistake.⁴ Perhaps Britt was reading the hardcover edition of The Orchard Keeper, which did have an author photo on the back flap (not the back cover)?

I never would have recognized the patterned-shirt-and-bushy-mustache McCarthy of the 1970s if all I had to go on was his conservative mid-1960s author photo. That a teenager could do it out of the blue would be truly remarkable.

If the key detail of the meet-cute story that undergirds the entire profile isn’t correct, then we don’t really know how Britt and McCarthy’s relationship began, and we have to wonder what else in the Vanity Fair profile isn’t quite right.

The story is almost entirely based on interviews and letters that readers don’t have access to. It ran with no photos of Britt and McCarthy together and no pictures of the letters he wrote her. [A Cormac McCarthy collector turned up pictures of McCarthy with a young woman believed to be Augusta Britt.] It’s impossible to independently verify most of the facts, and so the story rests entirely on the credibility of the writer.

For example, the article includes several conspicuous mentions of Tucson’s Miracle Mile. I don’t know why that comes up so often; perhaps it just sounds cool and serves as a metaphor for the whole miraculous story.

The hotel where Britt and McCarthy met is described as “near” the Miracle Mile and a Denny’s where McCarthy used to leave money for Britt is supposedly “on Miracle Mile.”

There is no Denny’s on Miracle Mile in Tuscon, and the hotel site is on the wrong side of the freeway from the Miracle Mile.⁵

The Desert inn pool where Britt and McCarthy are said to have met, at the corner of North Freeway and Congress in Tucson.

These are small errors, but they aren’t the only ones.⁶

Barney describes Britt as “now 64,” the now presumably being the publication date, two months and seven days after Britt’s 65th birthday. He also describes her as “Finnish American,” which is only accurate if you consider someone with two great-grandparents born in Finland to be Finnish-American.⁷

The Vanity Fair article also promotes the retrospectively romantic view of the misunderstood artist by promoting the idea that you couldn’t even buy McCarthy’s novels in the middle 1970s. Barney describes The Orchard Keeper as “McCarthy’s little-read debut, published in 1965 but already out of print along with the rest of his three-novel body of work.” However, according to the 1977-78 edition of Books in Print, both Child of God and The Orchard Keeper were in print (The Orchard Keeper was in print at least as late as 1980). So one of his novels, Outer Dark, was out of print, not three.

McCarthy’s entry in the 1977–78 edition of Books in Print

The errors are evidence that Barney and his editors at Vanity Fair didn’t try very hard to get the facts right, nor did they expend much effort to put Britt’s experience in context.

Her account of running off with McCarthy when she was seventeen (seventeen years and eight months, to be more specific) so that they could consummate their relationship in peace is Vanity Fair’s most lurid revelation.

Close readers of McCarthy have noticed that older men have relationships with underage girls with some frequency in his novels. The affair between John Grady and Alejandra in All the Pretty Horses is one such example. It’s not terribly surprising that these events are at least semi-autobiographical.⁸

In fact, the young Ms. Britt, reportedly a runaway who was in-and-out of abusive foster homes⁹, wasn’t the first girl McCarthy took to Mexico. The author Guy Davenport mentioned another in a published letter. “Cormac McCarthy has just run off to Mexico with a teenage popsy, abandoning a beautiful British ballerina of a wife,” Davenport wrote a friend in 1974.¹⁰

Britt described feeling “shattered” when she discovered more than a year into their relationship that McCarthy was married and had a son almost her age. Imagine how she would have felt if she learned that McCarthy’s seemingly spontaneous and romantic inspiration to go to Mexico was just part of his standard playbook?

Much like the intricate blend of autobiography and invention in McCarthy’s novels, the hash of myth, mistakes, and actual memoir in Vanity Fair’s exposé leaves readers and scholars wondering where the truth really lies.

Let’s hope that Augusta Britt decides to talk to a more experienced journalist who will set the record straight. If she doesn’t, we may never be sure what really happened.

—Scott Brown¹¹

1. Born Sandra.

2. According to the Times, “McCarthy doesn’t really drink anymore—he quit 16 years ago in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends—and Suttree reads like a farewell to that life.” The key word here is one (keep reading). This may refer to Britt, but if so, either the reference to 16 years ago is off by a year or McCarthy had another young girlfriend in El Paso in 1976. I’d like to take credit for ferreting out that morsel in the Times archive, but I found it on McCarthy’s Wikipedia page in a section discussing his drinking.

3. Prior to his piece in Vanity Fair, Barney’s most substantial writing credit appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books website.

4. I don’t know if Barney got the quote wrong or if Britt misremembered. It doesn’t matter. It never should have run in Vanity Fair.

5. Miracle Mile is a road in Tucson; there is also a Miracle Mile historic district on the east side of the I-10 freeway north of Downtown. There is a Denny’s on North Oracle Road and a portion of that street is in the Miracle Mile historic district, but according to public records at the Pima County assessor’s office, that Denny’s wasn’t built until 1979, a few years too late. Probably the story refers to the Denny’s on North Freeway, which is on the wrong side of the Interstate to be considered Miracle Mile. Google Street View also shows it boarded up in the summer of 2023, when Britt began talking to Vanity Fair. The Denny’s subsequently reopened; I called that location to ask about the closure but no one answered the phone. That’s the difference between a free newsletter like this and a national magazine like Vanity Fair. I can let stuff go; VF should meet a higher standard.

6. Another potential error is here” “McCarthy…wrote to the town of Virginia, Minnesota, requesting Britt’s birth certificate.” Birth certificates are typically county documents. The county seat is Duluth.

7. I’m not going to doxx Augusta Britt, but with the information in the story and access to popular databases, it’s easy to construct a family tree. The Britt side of the family comes from Great Britain.

8. McCarthy wasn’t the only one who liked teenage girls. In a letter written in the late 1970s or early 1980s, McCarthy writes about his friend John Sheddan, “Last saw him in the company of a 17 year old hooker and junkie who was having some misunderstanding with the local constabulary over a $20 bill which seemed to be bleeding ink.”

9. I’m going to accept the foster care story at face value, although the Barney’s chronology has gaps that need filling in to make the whole thing make sense. According to VF, Britt met McCarthy while she was sixteen and living in a foster home. When she left Tucson with McCarthy, Barney says the police and F.B.I. used letters found by in her parents’ house to link McCarthy and Britt. She could have been in foster care at 16 and back living with her mother and father at 17, but one would like more details. Perhaps VF could have asked her brother about it.

10. From Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner quoted here. The New York Times story about the Vanity Fair story also cites this letter. It offers up the possibility that Augusta Britt might have gone off with McCarthy even earlier, which is about the only pushback the VF piece has received in the press. Given the Times’s 1992 reference to “one of his young girlfriends,” I think it’s more likely he’d gone south of the border before. Also, I have confirmed that the letters to Britt only go back to 1976.

11. For the sake of transparency, I updated this on November 23, 2024, to add the New York Times quote, the correction of Britt’s age, and the question about her Scandinavian ancestry (which was updated a couple of times). On November 24, I added the footnote about John Sheddan. On November 30, I added the link to photos of Britt and McCarthy in Mexico. On December 3 and 11, I added information from Books in Print.