Is Cormac McCarthy finished?

During his lifetime, author Cormac McCarthy was renowned for being one of literature’s most retiring, even reclusive figures. Although his books and original screenplays were adapted into high-profile films by the likes of the Coen brothers and Ridley Scott, he barely gave interviews and preferred to lead a quiet and low-key existence in his own home own Santa Fe. Most believed that his solitude simply came about because of his desire to be left alone, but now an explosive new Vanity Fair feature has put a metaphorical rocket under McCarthy’s posthumous reputation.

The article, written by Vincenzo Barney, reveals that, when McCarthy was forty-two years old, he fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, Augusta Britt, who he met by a motel pool. The two began a sexual relationship shortly afterwards, and the relationship continued for forty-seven years until McCarthy’s death in 2023. Now, eighteen months afterwards, Britt has given an interview for a piece that its excitable author calls “the craziest love story in literary history.” She does not consider herself to have been exploited or used by McCarthy, but instead, the now sixty-four-year old Britt says, “Cormac gave me protection and safety when I had none. I would be dead if I didn’t meet him. He was the most important person in my life, the person I love the most. He was my anchor. And now that he’s gone, I’m shiftless.”

Barney’s article has caused enormous and understandable controversy for several reasons. Not only does it suggest that Britt was the model for most, if not all, of McCarthy’s female characters — the author suggested in 2007 to Oprah Winfrey that “I don’t pretend to understand women” — but although the feature is largely, although not wholly, complimentary about McCarthy, it has caused outrage for its revelation that the respected author was not only a serial adulterer (he’s a writer, this is hardly news) but also, legally, a child molester. He began his relationship when Britt was a seventeen-year-old, and therefore a minor. From Blood Meridian to No Country for Old Men, McCarthy won praise in his lifetime for delving into the darkest aspects of human nature. Now, he has revealed that he himself was as flawed as any of his antagonists.

Many have distanced themselves from the author immediately. Aaron Gwyn, a noted McCarthy expert, wrote on social media that, “I fully believe that Cormac had a relationship with a minor. I’ve seen people try to defend him — as the article itself does — but this is indefensible.” Not only did Gwyn suggest that his next article, on McCarthy and Gnosticism, would be the last time that he wrote about him, but also that, “It’s going to be a long time before I can even think about revisiting his work. I imagine seeing everything in the light of these new revelations.”

There will be those who defend McCarthy, whether on the grounds that the relationship was apparently consensual — although given that Britt was, by her own admission, a vulnerable teenager who was spending time in and out of foster care, she was hardly the model of autonomy and independence — or, simply that we should be able to separate the author as a human being from the work, and that it is irrelevant to our appreciation of his novels what he got up to in his private life. Yet as Gwyn observes, the first biography of McCarthy is coming out next fall, and, in his words, “My fear is that we’re about to find out a lot of really dark shit.”

There are many American writers whose private behavior was reprehensible, both by the standards of their own time and our more censorious age. (Philip Roth, for instance, was so bad that his biographer ended up being canceled for writing a balanced, serious account of his life.) There is a difference, however, between deeply unsavory and unpleasant but permissible actions and what may well be a fair amount of criminal indecency. Barney’s oddly incurious and laudatory piece reads badly even now — and may read a lot worse in a year’s time. This, I suspect, is the beginning of an increasingly bizarre and unpleasant story that is going to have a long way to go yet. And McCarthy’s once-mighty literary reputation could well end up being consigned to the reputational trash can as a result.