Fantastic, must read on Cormac's secret muse. Cormac is way cooler, more pedo-ey, and way more pussy whipped than I imagined Cormac could ever be. He put her on a pedestal. We are certainly the better for it.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/cormac-mccarthy-secret-muse-exclusive
Santa Fe killed the Cormac I knew. He gained fame, wealth, and fancy superficial friends. He turned his back on his old friends like Jimmy Long (J-Bone) and Billy Kidwell. They were left to die, forgotten and alone. He lost much of his compassion and kindness. As the Institute crowd claimed more of his time, he struggled to write. Couldn’t write. How could he? He’d stifled or killed that which inspired him. The advance for The Passenger was spent. He was obligated. These last many years he has taken up drinking again. Living in majestic splendor but enjoying none of it. Surrounded by junk and the clutter of a lifetime. Haunted.
Well, you pretty much laid it all out, didn’t you?’ ” Britt recalls McCarthy saying when she read him her comment over the phone. The two had not lived together full-time for many decades, and McCarthy had become too frail to make his regular trips out to Tucson. Though as was their habit throughout life, they still spoke on the phone multiple times a week and exchanged letters, 47 of which Britt shared with me. In McCarthy’s final years, he lived in near isolation at his compound in Santa Fe, with luxury cars, spare seats, and car parts smattered across its acreage, like “a rich hillbilly,” Britt fondly recalls. The parts weren’t for nothing—McCarthy was an excellent mechanic. But in those last years, worth millions of dollars, the great American novelist had taken to comparing himself unfavorably to the principal in the proverb, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“I’m going to delete it,” Britt told him of her comment.
“ ‘Let’s see what happens,’ ” she remembers him counseling. “ ‘Maybe something good will come of it.’ ”
And something good did come of it. I found her—or rather, she found me, and invited me out to Tucson to tell her story. And I’ve quickly learned she’s not a recluse so much as a closed book, her pages opening now with mesmerizing candor. Over the course of nine months, we will end up spending thousands of hours together. She’ll teach me to take care of horses, to shoot, to read McCarthy’s Cyrillic cursive. Others have not been so lucky. Two hopeful McCarthy biographers have been racing each other to get to her but she has decided to speak only to me. “It feels like fate, meeting each other,” she says. “When I read what you wrote, I knew I liked you. And Cormac liked your essay too, because you weren’t fawning over him. He couldn’t stand that. ‘That’s a fine turn of phrase, Baba, read it to me again,’ he kept saying.”
I feel as though I’m going to throw up when she tells me this. Posting an essay on my favorite writer to Substack on April Fool’s Day, receiving a cryptic comment from his secret muse, and now driving with her to see her horses feels more miraculous than fate. And yet there is something so natural about spending time with Britt. There is a shimmer of recognition with her, an intimate equidistance. After all, I’ve been reading about her for half my life. And now here she is, in the flesh.
If, one morning, Britt woke up between the covers of a Cormac McCarthy novel, she’d find herself right at home: facing insurmountable odds with sustained courage. As previously mentioned, she has woken up between the covers of a Cormac McCarthy book—10 by my count, sometimes in two or three characters at once—and represented on the covers of two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, in Ophelial repose. She’s had the sustained courage to live each one of them down, no matter how many times McCarthy killed her off, no matter how many times the blindsiding novelizations of her life sent her spiraling. As McCarthy put it in his private dedication to Britt in her copy of The Passenger:
It’s my belief that the raw material of good art is human sorrow, and when that sorrow is another’s, one has the obligation to treat it with great care and dignity. But I also believe the one who is loved is placed under an obligation. To survive and bear these trials with grace and dignity. Otherwise all our enterprise is a creature of the fates and all our imagination and invention and care will not be enough to save us.
“I was terrified that they’d find us. I didn’t want to go back to Tucson. I didn’t want to go back to foster homes. I didn’t want to go back to that life. Nobody likes to get hit. Nobody. Every time somebody hit me, it made me feel like a wild animal. I can’t articulate it except to say that it made me feel so wild inside, like a wolf with its leg caught in a trap. If I could have chewed off my leg to escape the feelings, I would have, I would’ve done anything to make it stop. And so when I found out that the police were looking for us, I was pretty frantic. I asked Cormac what we’d do if they found us and he looked at me, and he said in this funny Southern drawl, sorta like Billy Bob Thornton’s future character in Sling Blade, ‘I will shoot them.’
“ ‘Well, what if there’s a lot of them?’ ”
“ ‘I will kill them.’ ”
“That calmed me down. And for as long as I knew him, 47 years, if I was having a bad day or I was really sad, he would try and cheer me up by telling me all the ways he would kill people.”
“That’s so sweet,” I wryly offer.
“I know,” she grins. “It’s so romantic.”