Vincenzo Barney Must Pay For What He Did
The Vanity Fair piece about Cormac McCarthy that made me want to [redacted].
Last Wednesday, Vanity Fair published a long article by Vincenzo Barney about the late author Cormac McCarthy and a woman referred to as his “muse”, Augusta Britt. Like food that’s so disgusting you immediately suggest the whole table tries it, I’ve been telling everyone I know about the piece.
Barney was tasked with revealing to the world that Cormac McCarthy, possibly the most celebrated American Writer since World War II, had kidnapped a sixteen year-old girl from foster care, forged her birth cert to bring her to Mexico, and then committed statutory rape. The first sentence of the piece is: “I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history.”
In an opening scene for their relationship, somehow published as factual reportage in a major magazine, Augusta Britt appears next to a motel pool holding a stolen gun and a copy of McCarthy’s (then out of print) first novel. She (allegedly) recognised the author from a dust-jacket photo and approaches him. I’m about to quote Barney at length (and it is at length, the piece is fucking turgid) because you need to know how ominously sticky you feel after spending time with his prose:
“Just imagine for a moment: You’re an unappreciated literary genius who has not even hit your stride before going out of print. [...] You’re sitting by a pool at a cheap motel when a beautiful 16-year-old runaway sidles up to you with a stolen gun in one hand and your debut novel in the other. She reads in her closet to stay out of violence’s earshot. To survive her lonely anguish, the wound she’s been carrying since age 11, this girl has only literature to turn to: Hemingway, Faulkner, you. She flickers with comic innocence yet tragic experience beyond her years and an atavistic insistence on survival on her own terms. She has suffered more childhood violence than you can imagine, and she holds your own prose up to you for autograph, dedication, proof of provenance.”
This is how you find out about McCarthy’s crimes. You are asked, of course, to empathise with the troubled rapist. You will understand, of course, that the literary marginalia is the most important part of the story. You’ll read a scene where a 17 year-old Britt shoots a leather strop in the air, insists on her domestic bonafides, and has sex with the 43 year-old McCarthy for the first time. Then you’ll struggle through paragraph after paragraph tracing the vague details of Britt’s life transplanted into McCarthy’s novels. Then you’ll find out, thousands of words deep, that McCarthy hid the fact that he was married and had a son from Britt.
Why the fuck did this happen? Well Vincenzo Barney – in his one act of big boy journalism – developed a source. He nurtured a relationship with the now 65-year-old Augusta Britt. He got access to correspondence1 and appeared to live with her for almost a year. She saw off multiple other McCarthy biographers who were looking for her story. She still hasn’t spoken to any other reporters, but Barney insists that she trusted him with the complexity of her story more than any of the other suitors.
This is Barney’s grand defence, his ‘actually my critics are the real sexists’ countermove. He insists that his framing of events – the kidnapping and the subsequent 47 years of sporadic contact between McCarthy and Britt – is how Augusta Britt narrativises her own history. Speaking to Slate, he insists that he has written this story in the way that she needed the world to hear it; “I am also deeply uncomfortable contravening a woman’s authority on her own life. Especially as a young man half her age. She has been emphatic that there was no grooming (as recently as again today).”2
In her classic New Yorker piece The Journalist and the Murderer, later published as a book, Janet Malcolm identifies the journalist/source relationship as fundamentally predatory:
“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
The journalist then, is not tasked with making friends or allies. They aren’t allowing voices to be heard on their own terms, that’s what first-person essays are for. The journalist has a different job: to write something that’s actually true. Something with insight and context and cynicism and some fucking interrogation!
Because there are quotes that appear from Britt that are begging for interrogation. Describing the period of time where McCarthy and Britt thought that the FBI were closing in on the author, Britt is quoted saying:
“I was terrified that they’d find us. I didn’t want to go back to Tucson. I didn’t want to go back to foster homes. I didn’t want to go back to that life. Nobody likes to get hit. Nobody. Every time somebody hit me, it made me feel like a wild animal. I can’t articulate it except to say that it made me feel so wild inside, like a wolf with its leg caught in a trap. If I could have chewed off my leg to escape the feelings, I would have, I would’ve done anything to make it stop.”
So, at some stage in talking to Barney, Britt admitted that the violence of her home life made her desperate to escape to the point of self harm. A real journalist would have pointed out that abuse is a very common risk factor for grooming. A real journalist would have pushed Britt here, asked her if this desperate need for escape may have been something that Cormac McCarthy took advantage of.
Would this have felt great? To interrogate someone who has become a friend? To question her psychological rational and unpick what may well be years of defence mechanisms? Jesus, no! But writing comes with responsibilities to something other than your own masturbatory relationship with your subject.
Barney was too obsequious, to Augusta Britt and to the legacy of Cormac McCarthy, to write seriously and honestly about this case. He failed the public, he failed his subjects, and he failed literary history.
Because there are real questions to be asked here. Questions about power and male entitlement. Did McCarthy feel that Britt’s adoration was something he deserved? Something he therefore felt comfortable taking?
There are questions about authorship. What labour and what pain produced McCarthy’s great works? Were they his labour and his pain?
For some fucking reason, it was Vincenzo Barney’s job to ask those questions.
He failed.
Describing one letter he bravely auditions for worst sentence ever composed in English: “But what we appear to have with lines about pressing “my face between your thighs” is a writer with his nose pressed into the pure perfume between the open thighs of a book.”
He even frames his bad prose as some kind of feminist shield that Britt made conscious use off: “it wasn’t until she read my horrible drek on Substack that she felt it could be pulled off: that is, told from her perspective, with my daringly bad style absorbing most of the controversy and opinion columns.” Although he later claims that Britt loves his writing style and so did Cormac McCarthy himself.