Saturday Links

Cormac McCarthy takes a minor to Mexico, the disgusting art market, a history of inundated towns, the real Tiberius, and more.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Good morning! In 1976, Cormac McCarthy met 16-year-old Augusta Britt at a motel. She wore a holster with a Colt revolver and had a stuffed cat named John Grady Cole. When she was 17, he changed her birth certificate and took her to Mexico. Vincenzo Barney tells the story in Vanity Fair:  

“I met Cormac in 1976, when I was 16,” Britt, now 64, tells me. “He was 42. I was in and out of foster care at the time, and I used to go to the pool at this motel off the freeway in the south side of Tucson called the Desert Inn. It was near an area of town called the Miracle Mile. It wasn’t very safe in the foster homes. They weren’t allowed to have locks on bedroom or bathroom doors, so the men would just follow me into all the rooms. But at the Desert Inn, I could use the showers by the pool to shower. Hey, ‘Use the shower to shower,’ that’s a great line, put that in the profile!” she laughs.

More:

“One day I was at the motel pool, and I saw Cormac, and I thought he looked familiar but couldn’t quite place him. So I went back to the home I was staying in and realized that the man at the swimming pool was the man in the author photo on the back of the book I was reading, The Orchard Keeper.” (McCarthy’s little-read debut, published in 1965 but already out of print along with the rest of his three-novel body of work.) “It was this beat-up old paperback. I think I paid a nickel for it in a bin outside a bookstore. So the next day I brought it to the motel, and he was still there.

“I was wearing jeans and a work shirt and I had a holster with a Colt revolver in it, which I had taken to wearing. I had stolen it from the man who ran the foster home that I was in. And Cormac looked at me and he said, ‘Little lady, are you going to shoot me?’ And I said, ‘No,’ ” her voice sparkles in remembered laughter, “ ‘I was wondering if you would sign my book.’

“He was so shocked. He said he was surprised that anyone had read that book, let alone a 16-year-old girl. But he said he would be delighted to sign it. “Then he asked me why I carried a gun.” So she told him.

They drove to Mexico together when Britt was 17:

The two went out onto the playa behind the hotel in Lordsburg, Britt says, and McCarthy arranged bottles for target practice. Britt nailed them all. “Mother of God,” McCarthy said. Then he threw up a leather strop he carried. Britt shot it straight through the center. He stood in silent amazement, which Britt immediately mistook. She feared she’d done something wrong and panicked, thinking he was about to send her back to Tucson. “I’m very clean, you know.”

“Oh?”

“And I cook. And…” she thought deep, “and I know how to change the ribbon on a typewriter.”

“Oh, well,” McCarthy laughed, “that settles it then.”

And that afternoon, returning to their hotel room, she says, they made love for the first time.

He was 43, she was 17. The image is startling, possibly illegal. At the very least, it raises questions about inappropriate power dynamics and the specter of premeditated grooming. But not to Britt—who had suffered unspeakable violence at the hands of many men in her young life—then or now.

A biography of McCarthy is scheduled to be published next fall. What other details might it contain?