When Your Literary Heroes (Inevitably) Fail You

On learning about Cormac McCarthy's 16-year-old "muse"

Photo by Katie Musial on Unsplash

Yesterday I woke up expecting life to be normal and my favorite author not to be legitimately guilty of statutory rape of a 17 year old when he was in his “early” forties. I also didn’t expect to read this story in a sprawling, romanticized, purple-prose narrative in Vanity Fair. Life is full of stupid and horrid surprises.

So here we are, again, with the reality that a literary giant is a moral degenerate. Cormac McCarthy, despite Augusta Britt’s insistence, did “groom” her—intentionally or not—for a romantic relationship. She was a helpless, abused child, and he positioned himself as a safe adult who didn’t want anything from her when he clearly did. Did he love her? I suppose he did. Does that matter? Not really, no. She was a minor and he took advantage of his age and position and had sex with her. That’s statutory rape. But getting caught up in the sordid details is not my purpose here. You can read the article for yourself and come to your own conclusions. McCarthy scholar

Aaron Gwyn

had a good thread on Twitter about the flaws in the article, so it’s worth reading with a critical eye. My own tentative conclusion was that McCarthy was a passionate man. By which I mean a man driven by his passions and romantic sensibilities. Not always, but certainly in this case. And it drove him to sin and crime which he defended in the name of love. A very old story and a very horrible one.

The question is what to “do” with this news about McCarthy’s past. Gwyn’s response, also posted on Twitter, has been to shut down his writing and YouTube posting on McCarthy. Gwyn writes, “I’m not saying people shouldn’t (continue to) read McCarthy’s novels—everyone has to figure that out for themselves. Personally, it’s going to be long time before I can even think about revisiting his work. I imagine seeing everything in the light of these new revelations.”

I just put my book order in for next semester last week, and I have No Country for Old Men on the list, a book which includes a subplot of an older man picking up a young girl and taking her to a hotel where they bond and she offers him sex, but he declines (perhaps McCarthy’s way of acknowledging how he should have responded decades ago?). When I teach the novel there will be an uncomfortable conversation about the biographical implications of the story and especially this subplot. So I sympathize with Gwyn when he says that he’ll see “everything in the light of these new revelations.” And it will be hard for me to revisit this novel.

Also, if Barney’s analysis in the Vanity Fair article is to be believed, Britt is the inspiration for many of McCarthy’s characters (although not the Judge. We still have Judge Holden!), so she’s woven in to his literary works, not just a horrible and tragic side story we can set aside. Does this mean that all of his later works are in some sense morally soiled with his sin? Here’s my initial reaction: I don’t think so. I can understand personally struggling to separate the two in light of this revelation, but I don’t think we have to allow this revelation to morally taint his work.

I think Cormac McCarthy remains a great literary master despite his significant moral failures. Because his genius was never predicated on his personal moral uprightness. It was never McCarthy the man who drew us in. We hardly knew the man (as this revelation shows). He was a shadow. As one of his fans, I desired him to be upright, because that’s a good desire to have for those we admire, to hope all things of them. But McCarthy’s ability to craft a sentence, to cut into the human heart, to expose the nature of violence, to reveal the need for some form of transcendence in a hopeless world—those things were not dependent upon the man. They were dependent upon his words. And his words stand or fall on their own. In reading these novels, I am not condoning or praising the behavior of the man who wrote them, I am praising what is praise worthy, what is excellent, as Paul commanded us in Philippians 4:8.

Sadly, this problem is an old problem in literature. Eliot had anti-semitic views. Some of our greatest American authors held racist and sexist views which were popular at the time. At 53, J.D. Salinger had a relationship with an 18 year-old fan. Franny and Zooey is still one of my favorite novels. Great literary figures do truly awful things and sometimes believe awful things. This is a fact about history which we must reckon with or have little great literature left to enjoy.

As Christians, we have a way of framing this tension between artist and work. We can accept that a fallen person can make beautiful works out of common grace. And therefore we as readers can appreciate that common grace goodness regardless of the moral life of the author. Now, granted, this is a bit easier in cases like Salinger and McCarthy when the author is dead and you aren’t directly contributing to the lifestyle of the author, but even in cases when the author is alive, you aren’t paying the author so that they can live a sinful life. You are paying them so that you can read their work. The intention matters. We pay sinful people money all the time who go and use their money for wicked lifestyles and we don’t pause for a moment to question the morality of our purchases. But when it comes to artists, we tend to scrutinize their lives as if we are approving of their lifestyle with our purchase of their works.

In reality, all we have are works written by fallen people struggling to communicate some truth about God’s creation as best they can. Some do it well because they have acknowledged God’s creation as creation and strive to live according to God’s laws. Others do it well despite denying creation and God’s laws! Literary history is filled with both. And often the gifts don’t come out like you imagine they would: alcoholics and adulterers who write beautiful poems that tell some truth about God’s creation and saints who write terrible poetry despite knowing the truth. As the expriest says in Blood Meridian, “The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself.”

Our task as readers is to seek out excellence where it is to be found and delight in that excellence regardless of whether it’s a secular or Christian author, whether it comes from a morally upright author or a scandalously immoral author. Our enjoyment and commendation of great works of literature does nothing to commend or judge the lifestyle of the person behind the works.

The word I’ve been avoiding this entire article is “cancellation.” But that’s what we’re really getting at. Should Cormac McCarthy be “cancelled” posthumously for his relationship with Augusta Britt? Clearly I think the answer is “no.” We would be fools to cancel him for his relationship. Can we judge him and condemn his actions and be disgusted by them? Certainly. In fact, if your stomach wasn’t turned by reading that article, I worry that your conscience may be seared. Enjoying McCarthy’s works of literature does not exclude pronouncing moral judgments upon his life. But to cancel his works would be to cut ourselves off from a wealth of beauty and excellence. The reality is that bad people make great art sometimes. As a Presbyterian, I would go so far as to say that fallen people make great art all the time. But there is hope for redemption for all people. And we can find hope in great art made by fallen people.

If you read the Vanity Fair article and felt so disgusted that you can’t imagine reading McCarthy again or for a while, I completely understand. It feels like a betrayal.
I feel disgusted. But I hope that with time we will discover that, as with Salinger and so many other great writers with horrible deeds in their past, we might come to enjoy the literature again, without ever overlooking or condoning their sin. Not for the sake of McCarthy’s legacy, but for our own sakes.