Pity and terror - the tragedy of Cormac McCarthy

Late last year, in what some are calling the literary scoop of 2024, Vincenzo Barney published an account in Vanity Fair of Cormac McCarthy’s relationship with Augusta Britt. The relationship began in 1976 beside a motel pool in Tucson and could be supposed to have concluded only with McCarthy’s death in 2023. The road between ran at first through Mexico, where McCarthy, pursued by the FBI, took then 17-year-old Britt to save her from further violence at the hands of the foster care system and, it seems quite possible, to consummate an infatuation which had reached stratospheric heights of passion.  

Reactions to the story have varied drastically. Noted McCarthy scholar and literary scion Aaron Gwyn, for instance, has made his writings and lectures on McCarthy available to the public free of charge to avoid benefitting financially any further from McCarthy’s legacy. Others, citing the endless list of artists almost as famous for their bad behavior as for their art, have dismissed any moral outrage over these revelations as performative nonsense. We’ve known all along that McCarthy, who was thrice married and who famously sacrificed his family’s needs at the altar of his art, was no saint. The artist’s personal life, they say, is one thing, and his artistic output another altogether.  

The problem with the latter assessment, at least in the case at hand, is that, if Barney’s account is correct, then McCarthy’s art was not something separate from this affair. Rather, it seems to be the case that Augusta Britt, in her beauty, her daring, her suffering, became the model for many of McCarthy’s most important—and remunerative—creations. When Britt read All the Pretty Horses, the first of McCarthy’s novels to enjoy mainstream success, she was startled to find herself looking back from almost every page, whether in the name of the protagonist, John Grady Cole, which was borrowed from Britt’s cat, or in the stunning loveliness of Cole’s impossibly perfect beloved, Alejandra Rocha, or in the very shape of the journey—into Mexico and back. The tale, though certainly rendered in McCarthy’s exquisite prose, with all his power for grounding sublime aesthetic flights in the concrete stuff of creation, is in many respects a distillation of McCarthy and Britt’s relationship and especially of the suffering Britt herself endured.  

So far, so good, we might say. Painters need models. Artists need muses. The work of the fiction writer is, arguably, precisely to distill the truth of experience, real or imagined. And while McCarthy did many bad things, we cannot, some might argue, let ethical judgments regarding the artist himself obscure our aesthetic assessment of his work. Caravaggio may have been a murdering scoundrel, but the value of his art to the western tradition and to Mother Church remains inestimable. Picasso may have been a brute to women, but his teaching us to see the torture of modernity was worth it.

The idea has perhaps been most memorably expressed by William Faulkner in an interview with the Paris Review: “The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” Here is the supreme formulation of what Ta-Nahesi Coates calls “the rank amoralism of being a writer.” As Asher Lev, the genius of Chaim Potok’s novels, puts it, the artist in his studio is answerable to no one, not even to the Master of the Universe.  

There may be something to this. The genius is the one who, through some inscrutable gift, some instinct for the divine, leads mankind beyond the sum of its hitherto attained wisdom. He sees some facet of the mystery of God and man never yet seen and gives his life to reveal it. As Jacques Maritain argued, the artist does not need to be good himself in order to produce good art. But he must give himself unconstrainedly to the demands of beauty.

McCarthy possessed, it seems clear, a kind of genius. And a Christian response to his work, as to any artist’s, must proceed by appreciating the good, the true, and the beautiful, as much as in rejecting the evil, the false, and the ugly. There is much fruit which can be drawn from McCarthy’s work, perhaps especially in The Road, the harrowing retelling of the Abraham and Isaac story which, by imagining our apocalyptic future, reveals us as we are now, devouring each other in our quest for that which rusts and molders.  

Yet it is also possible that an art which ultimately refuses the mastery of God—not laboring in the mystic dark for insight into the divine darkness, but rejecting the divine fire for a Promethean flame of our own making, not striving in spite of the sinful self to follow out a vision of sinless beauty, but rather pursuing evil as the prop of one’s artistry—can produce not beauty, however painful, but an infernal maw, a consumptive vortex rather than a generative light.

McCarthy himself left us an image of such a devouring genius in the person of the Judge, the gigantic, hairless, albino polymath of Blood Meridian. As the Judge accompanies the Glanton gang in its murderous ranging, he carries with him a notebook. Into this he copies images of the world’s beauties, often artifacts handed down from the ancient world, only to destroy the original items themselves. In this way, he establishes himself as judge over man’s making. He is a satanic force, dancing naked, always dancing, claiming in his consumption of the world’s beauties that he will never die.

The artist who sets himself up as supreme authority runs the risk of becoming such a satan. And the fictive half-life he renders himself—can it answer to the Heaven he stands to forfeit? A man’s life is one thing and his art another, until at last they are not. Let genius have its reign and aesthetic insight its place, but we must in the end count all doings tragic which are not gathered up in the eternity of God. And the artist who devours rather than distills, who consumes rather than consummates, runs the risk of the only true tragedy.