And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the forged birth certificate and clandestine love letters.
But above all, they lack the leading lady: the secret muse. This love story may come as a shock, for Cormac McCarthy is one of the most famous American novelists we know the least about. So was his bank account; sources say he died with tens of millions in assets. He had just released a dyad of final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, turning his death half a year later into an eerie consonance. And yet, despite hours of posthumously released interviews with the likes of Werner Herzog and David Krakauer, we still know so little about the man behind the famous Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter.
In , a neighbor pored through his trash in El Paso and found junk mail from the Republican National Committee. For most of his writing career, he was mythically poor, according to several accounts, on purpose. In the s he became a trustee and beloved fixture at the Santa Fe Institute, a renowned multidisciplinary research center. And for decades, readers took him at his word. On the contrary, it turns out that many of his famous leading men were inspired by a single woman, a single secret muse revealed here for the first time: a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl named Augusta Britt.
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. But at the Desert Inn, I could use the showers by the pool to shower. This is the Augustal style: equipoise between the love of laughing at oneself and soliloquy. There are three separate storms to the south, delicately wind-tilted on the horizon. Lightning races them in a stitchless thread, and to the north rain shimmers through the sheerest rainbow, stamped perfectly horizontal against the mountains like the execution line on a document.
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.
