The letters during this period in the early ’80s are buoyant with pain and, McCarthy admits, resentment. “I have to confess that in a way I was hoping that I wouldn’t hear from you anymore,” one begins. “I have to confess too that there are times when I feel enormous resentment toward you […] Baby, there was nothing wrong with our love. You just threw it away […] I never hear that song I don’t start crying, ‘I never got over those blue eyes.’ I make lists of places in the world to go and things to do now that I have no responsibilities, but everything is just empty.”
We head back into the house. The windows wear the translucent paint of our reflections.
“Can I see some of the letters?” She reads through a few, twisting her necklace. “I hate to say it, but…I think Cormac really did love me.” We laugh.
“I had no family stability, I was homeless, I was vulnerable, I was young. I mean,” she pauses and screws up her face, “who could blame him?”
I know the muse well enough to identify one of her shock jokes.
“What a groomer!” she says, thrusting her hand up into the air, and busts out laughing.
There is a sense of heat ripple to the horizons of Britt’s life after the split, the kind of interstitial oblivions between novels in, say, a trilogy. In conversation we pass through gaps of haze and shimmer: She attends the University of Arizona. Plagued by her childhood trauma, she is interred in a psych ward where her uncle gifts her a Catholic medal of Stella Maris, a title for the Virgin Mary referring to her guidance and protection of seafarers. She works at bars, including Someplace Else. She becomes a nurse. She trains horses. She has a short marriage but never a love again like Cormac McCarthy. She deals, for the rest of her life, with severe depression and low self-esteem. She is, in her own words, “a lost soul.”
Throughout, she speaks to McCarthy multiple times a week and is visited by him regularly. Then, sometime in the ’80s, McCarthy sends her the manuscript for All the Pretty Horses. “The first thing I see, obviously, is the title. And I thought, Oh my gosh. I started reading it, and it’s just so full of me, and yet isn’t me. It was so confusing. Reading about Blevins getting killed was so sad. I cried for days. And I remember thinking to myself that being such a lover of books, I was surprised it didn’t feel romantic to be written about. I felt kind of violated. All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction. I didn’t know how to talk to Cormac about it because Cormac was the most important person in my life. I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about?
“I was trying so hard to grow up and to fix what was broken about me. I still thought I could be fixed. And this felt the opposite of fixing me.
“Cormac called me and said, ‘What did you think about it?’ And I said, ‘Well, I really liked the book. It’s beautiful. But my kitten, John Grady and everything. It feels weird.’ And he just laughed and said, ‘Well, baby, that’s what I do. I’m a writer.’ ”
When she broached Blevins’s death and how it made her cry for days, he said, “ ‘I knew you would. And I’m sorry.’ And I said, ‘Well, you could have let him live.’ And he said, ‘No, I really couldn’t.’ And I felt like I was about two years old for asking him this, but I said, ‘Well, you’ll still kill people for me though, right?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And that was enough.”
For the rest of his life, McCarthy would make visits every few months to Tucson and stay at the Arizona Inn. While the visits were made out of love and longing, they were always entangled with what felt to Britt like research. Like an artist visiting his subject for an extended portraiture.
One year when she was depressed, McCarthy came out and taught her stonemasonry in northern Arizona. Later that year, he sent her a draft of his new play called The Stonemason. When Britt was taming a crazed purebred Babson Arabian at Bazy Tankersley’s horse farm in the ’80s, McCarthy visited to watch her tame it and called her each night on the phone after he’d left to ask her about the horse. McCarthy himself may never have ridden, but the novels of The Border Trilogy teem with intimate knowledge about horses. They teem, too, with other impossible-to-realize 16-year-old love interests, such as Magdalena, the beautiful Mexican prostitute who steals John Grady Cole’s heart in Cities of the Plain. The list goes on, most painfully culminating in her portrayal as Alicia Western in The Passenger, though Britt never suffered from her doppelgänger’s hallucinations.
Sources close to McCarthy confirmed Britt’s role as his muse and love of his life, including his biographer Tracy Daugherty. Michael Cameron is emphatic about Britt’s inspiration. “She was his muse, throughout. Throughout. She’s Alicia Western! There’s no doubt she was the love of his life and his muse. I mean, when you saw them together, they were so in love, just so in love with each other. Their time in Mexico was absolutely the inspiration for All the Pretty Horses, that impossible-to-realize love. I read one of the first typescripts of it, and I told Cormac it made me cry. There is no doubt about it. Cormac loved her and she was his muse. She was the truest witness of his life.”
These fictional uses of her life, however, often led her into deeper depressions, punctuated, she says, by two marriage proposals by McCarthy. The first, at the Gardner Hotel in El Paso, was made several years before McCarthy’s marriage to Jennifer Winkley in 1998. The second, at the Arizona Inn, at the time of McCarthy’s work on the Counselor screenplay. Both times McCarthy got cold feet. The second time he reneged after finding out Britt’s Catholic church in Tucson would not permit a marriage unless McCarthy made a Catholic confession, which he refused to do. The dialogue of his proposal to Britt in the Arizona Inn, she says, is exactly recited by Michael Fassbender and Penélope Cruz in The Counselor, to her shock.
“I intend to love you until I die,” Fassbender says. “Me first,” Cruz replies.
Outside of her time with McCarthy, it is difficult for Britt to give her life artistic resolution. Starting with All the Pretty Horses, she would look to McCarthy for that. “I always looked to Cormac’s books to see how I was doing.” She takes a comedic beat. “Which was usually dead.” In chronological order we have, at the very least: Harrogate, Wanda, John Grady Cole, Blevins, Alejandra, Magdalena, Carla Jean, Laura, and Alicia—who is dead of suicide in the opening italics of The Passenger. Only Harrogate seemingly makes it out alive, with his face averted into his own pale reflection in the train window taking him out of the novel. That sheer, ghostly reflection—in a sense, it’s how Britt sees herself in McCarthy’s mirrory prose, a ghost rising from the characters, the situations, the deaths, a ghost gaining some momentary purchase on herself. Her mission from the age of 11 was to be good, to survive, and yet McCarthy kept killing her. “I thought he must not believe in me,” she says. “It’s taken me decades to realize that maybe what he was doing was killing off what had happened to me. Killing off the darkness.”
A strange thing happens in McCarthy’s body of work after meeting Britt. It is visible at the tail end of Blood Meridian. Morality, not to mention commercial success, starts coming into focus. His worlds are still cruel and full of evil, but he begins writing about characters who display courage in the face of it, who, like Britt “try to be good.” Emulous characters, heroes even, who, beginning with the Kid in Blood Meridian, “had got onto terms with life beyond what his years could account for.” The person, the spirit he’s writing about, is Augusta Britt. Like Britt, his characters are “placed under an obligation. To survive and bear these trials with grace and dignity.” McCarthy would often tell his son John, when speaking of his own cold family and violently abusive father who would savagely beat him as a child, “ ‘The difference between you and me is that you were born a good person,’ ” John recounts to me. “ ‘I had to work hard to become one.’ ” If we take McCarthy’s fiction as a measure, being a good person seems much on his mind starting with All the Pretty Horses, the first of his works brimming in Augustal colors, created in that artistic wiggle room between frisson and fission. Being a good person seemed to be on his mind, too, when he took Britt, a victim of worse male violence than he was, away from the streets of Tucson.
But as his characters started becoming better humans, in Britt’s view, McCarthy, whom she always thought of as a great man, did not. As he dined with celebrities and reinvented himself in Santa Fe as a formidable intellectual—and a very rare intellectual: one who can learnedly contemplate quantum physics and work it into art, with mixed success—Britt thought he turned his back on his oldest friends.
“He felt he’d wasted the last years of his life,” Britt says. We’re up early enough to watch the sun unbraid the first permissive stars. Right before dawn the mountains look soft as dressfolds, and Britt is playing with the hem of her denim shirt. “He felt slightly exploited by the Institute crowd, and I never saw him cry, but we spent a few nights up in Globe together, right before he got really sick, and it was snowing and he started to get teary-eyed, and he told me he regretted all the years not being together.” McCarthy would go on to name Britt in his will, along with ex-wives Jennifer Winkley and Annie De Lisle, youngest son John McCarthy, and Chase McCarthy, whom he managed to fully reconcile with in his last years. John and his mother, Jennifer, cared for McCarthy in his final years and were there with Chase the day McCarthy died. The last words on his Olivetti Lettera typewriter read, “I don’t know, Frank, I say we just leave him hangin’ there.”
There is no gentle summer rain in Arizona. No poised and delicate thunderheads. Storms come with the shock and awe of violent reprisals. By the time you hear the dramatic throat clear of thunder, hail the size of baseballs is upon you. Seeing as it’s supposed to rain later in the day, Britt and I are heading over to the stalls to do as much as we can.
“All horses have two sides. Well, that’s a smart thing to say, of course they do,” she laughs, throwing her hands up in playful self-mockery. “But they have two sides to their brains, and they think and react differently on each side. The right side can spook at something that the left side walks by calmly every day. So that’s to say, you want to put the halter on on their left side. Here, you try.”
Unless I’m unusually timid, waltzing up to a horse I’ve never met before with daring nonchalance strikes me as a great way to get my head stove in, so I’ve been giving Scout a courteous distance. But Britt holds the looped purple halter out to me, inviting me closer.
“Oh, and don’t ever put your head above a horse’s. Horses have the quickest reaction time of any animal, faster than cats. They won’t ever mean to, but they can startle and raise their head so fast, it can knock you out or even kill you. So, no pressure.”
To tie a halter hitch, you’ve got to hug a horse. So I do, standing in the same direction as Scout and pulling the halter over his Roman nose until my right arm is gently wrapped under his neck. Lightly flicking the rope over the top of his head, our eyes are momentarily twinned in the same direction. There is an immaculate, glistening precision in the reflection of a horse’s eye. The level of detail is startling and strikes one at first, brimming over the pupils, of artistic imprecision, creative license. I can see the muse in it—the woman who taught Cormac McCarthy everything he knew about horses—smiling at me with a child’s wise innocence, and I shyly try the hitch, looping and cinching the purple.
