Cormac McCarthy's Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century: "I Loved Him. He Was My Safety."

[Nevilledog]

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/cormac-mccarthy-secret-muse-exclusive

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https://archive.li/gFkzi

I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the 47-year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the forged birth certificate and clandestine love letters. But above all, they lack the leading lady: the secret muse.

This love story may come as a shock, for Cormac McCarthy is one of the most famous American novelists we know the least about. In June 2022, when he died of complications from prostate cancer at the age of 89 surrounded by Cadillacs and Ferraris at his compound in Santa Fe, McCarthy’s hold on literary awareness was at a stage of maximum receptivity. (So was his bank account; sources say he died with tens of millions in assets.) He had just released a dyad of final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, turning his death half a year later into an eerie consonance. And yet, despite hours of posthumously released interviews with the likes of Werner Herzog and David Krakauer, we still know so little about the man behind the famous Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter.

There are the known years of drinking immortalized in his fourth novel, Suttree, and his efforts to reintroduce wolves into southern Arizona in the ’80s. In 1996, a neighbor pored through his trash in El Paso and found junk mail from the Republican National Committee. For most of his writing career, he was mythically poor, according to several accounts, on purpose. Then there was the light bulb for writing he supposedly carried as he traveled from motel to motel, a detail gleaned from the lone interview he granted in the ’90s, to Richard B. Woodward. In the 2000s he became a trustee and beloved fixture at the Santa Fe Institute, a renowned multidisciplinary research center. “I don’t pretend to understand women,” McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey in 2007, commenting on the lack of them in his novels—despite the fact that he was married three times. And for decades, readers took him at his word.

Upon McCarthy’s death, however, the mystery of his personal life has drawn close enough for us to unravel assumptions into their opposites: Cormac McCarthy did not shirk womenkind in his novels. On the contrary, it turns out that many of his famous leading men were inspired by a single woman, a single secret muse revealed here for the first time: a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl named Augusta Britt. A cowgirl whose reality, McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he had “trouble coming to grips with.”

*snip*

[cilla4progress]

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