How Do You Cancel a Dead Man?

 Distractions are essential right now but the current literary scandal seems absurd. A man in his mid-years meets a sixteen-year-old beauty who’s been severely damaged. Her family won’t talk about it and neither will she, even now when she’s in her sixties. Her father becomes violent as a result and she’s put in foster care, where her nubility in houses with unlocked doors puts her in more danger.

She’s a voracious reader and she recognizes Cormac McCarthy. Bringing him a battered paperback copy of a book he's written, she asks him to sign it. McCarthy, not yet in his years of fame, is charmed and attracted to this girl who carries a pistol and knows his work. He begins to write to her and eventually the two of them run off to Mexico, returning to the states after she turns 18. She’s the one who leaves but they continue a deep friendship that's still in place until he dies, even after she sees herself cannabalized repeatedly in his novels.

This has all been revealed in a Vanity Fair article because McCarthy’s archive will be opened soon and Augusta Britt decided to tell her story in her own way before it’s revealed in those papers. She contacted a Substack writer whose take on McCarthy was one she liked and she gave him her story. He, of course, is writing a book about it and judging by his turgid sentences in VF, it’s going to be what used to be called a howler.

This is all being scrutinized by 21st century moral standards and words like “grooming” are being tossed about. Pardon me while I yawn. 

I was a sixteen-year-old girl with a traumatic childhood. The edges in my family were blurred where my father slowly lapsed into full-blown pedophilia. Physical attention and parental love were tangled in my mind and, alone in Manhattan, I yearned for both. As callously as any hunter, I chose someone who would give me that, a deliberate and calculated act.

When I think of Augusta Britt, carrying a book and a pistol, accosting a man lying near a swimming pool, I recognize her. She was doing her best to survive her history and McCarthy helped her when she was in peril. What would have happened to her during two more years of foster care?

In the small town where I grew up, a fourteen-year-old girl whose parents were incurably alcoholic married a man who was in his early thirties. They grew old together, and their love for each other was palpable every time I saw them. This sort of thing tends to erode “moral standards.” Their example has done a lot to ensure that I have none.

And yet, when I was in love with a man who was young enough to be my son, I couldn’t maintain a level of physicality with him. I stopped the affair and cherished the friendship. But that wasn’t a moral decision. It was done out of love. That man would never have a full life if we had gone on together, the life he found afterward with a young woman.

Augusta Britt never found that life. She lives alone with letters and memories. But without the love she had with McCarthy, one that prevailed between them after she left, what would her life be now?