All the ways Vanity Fair messed up the literary scoop of the year (2024)

When Vincenzo Barney, a young, inexperienced writer, brought Vanity Fair the literary scoop of the year, the magazine’s editors must have been thrilled. So thrilled, it seems, that they took leave of their senses and allowed him to write a piece of prose so purple — including claims so bizarre, if not downright problematic — that the shocking story at the article’s heart is done a grave disservice.

Barney reveals that Cormac McCarthy started a clandestine relationship with a 16-year-old girl when he was 42 and she became his “secret muse” for decades. In his 11,000-word essay, Barney unmasked Augusta Britt, “a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl”, as an inspiration behind No Country for Old Men, The Passengers, Suttree, All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain, among other works. McCarthy was notoriously private before his death, aged 89, last year and the revelations add to our understanding of one of the great American novelists.

Britt, now 64, has spoken publicly for the first time about how she met McCarthy by a motel pool in Tuscon, Arizona, having been “in and out of foster care”. That was 1976, and the pair of them ran off to Mexico together the following year, believing that the FBI was seeking the novelist on statutory rape and human trafficking charges — though there is no evidence for such an investigation. McCarthy, who was married to Englishwoman Annie DeLisle at the time, altered Britt’s birth certificate so that he would not be imprisoned for having sex with a child.

Unfortunately, the impact of Barney’s good work is undone by one inescapable fact: he cannot write. His prose is terrible, overwrought, nonsensical. It is so bad that it isn’t even funny. Things start badly — the first paragraph actually reads “I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive” — and rapidly get worse.

Barney’s problems seem to have started when he killed his editor’s beloved pet. At least, that seems to be the only explanation for why Vanity Fair — Vanity Fair! — allowed him to publish a sentence like this, when Britt recounts meeting McCarthy for the first time: “This is the Augustal style: equipoise between the love of laughing at oneself and soliloquy.”

The overwriting just does not stop. “Britt stands poised at the picture’s edge like a foreground that has leaked out of its frame, at play between painting and outer world, portrait and subject,” Barney writes about seeing her in front of some mountains.

If you want to play a game with Barney’s piece, close your eyes and scroll to a random paragraph to see if it makes any sense. Fair warning: you will never win. Barney is always going to beat you, such as when he writes:

“It’s monsoon season, and lightning bobs and weaves in the corner of your eyes all day like floaters. 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.”

The sheer number of mixed metaphors is at once overwhelming but also makes me doubt that Barney has even seen a storm or a rainbow. Does the lightning bob or weave? Does it race in a “stitchless thread”? What is the “execution line on a document”? What does any of this have to do with Cormac McCarthy?

Perhaps more troubling than the mangled prose, Barney seems to treat McCarthy’s paedophilic interest in the vulnerable teenager as a great love story. It is a scarcely unbelievable stance to take in 2024, seven years after the #MeToo scandal first broke and seven decades following the publication of Lolita. The age of consent in Arizona is 18, and he describes their fleeing to Mexico as being typical of the “unconventional morals” McCarthy and his ilk abide by. Shortly after crossing the border, the pair have sex for the first time; she was just 17, while he was 43.

Barney only once, fleetingly, acknowledges that there may be something inappropriate about the middle-aged McCarthy grooming a girl bouncing around foster homes. “The image is startling, possibly illegal,” Barney writes. “At the very least, it raises questions about inappropriate power dynamics and the spectre 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.”

In fairness to Barney, he really has been hung out to dry by Vanity Fair bosses. Daniel Kile, the magazine’s deputy editor (and, presumably, Barney’s sworn nemesis) worked with him on the piece, according to Barney’s Substack. But no fact-checkers seem to have interrogated Britt’s assertions. She claims to have recognised McCarthy from a photograph on the back cover of a paperback version of The Orchard Keeper, his 1965 novel. Yet the only paperback of that book did not include his likeness. Other elements seem entirely fantastical, such as how a 16-year-old could openly carry a holstered pistol, or being able to shoot a leather strop McCarthy threw in the air, first time.

However, the great tragedy for Barney, who appears to be a very sincere young man, is that what he has discovered is fascinating. He obviously cares a great deal about McCarthy, and says he has spent “thousands of hours” with Britt in the past year. But I suspect he feels an affinity with his great hero, such as when he writes: “Just imagine for a moment: You’re an unappreciated literary genius who has not even hit your stride before going out of print.”

You can’t help but feel that Barney considers himself an “unappreciated literary genius” who has not yet hit his stride. Yet there is a tragedy for Britt, too. She describes herself as being a “lost soul” who has to deal with severe depression and low self-esteem for her entire life, feelings that became more pronounced when she saw herself reflected in McCarthy’s characters. Unfortunately for her, she has chosen to break her silence after almost half a century with her frank admissions brocaded with phrases such as “the impatient grandeur below accident, coincidence” or “this is where the muse’s novelistic question mark emerges. An origin story beginning on an ellipse”.

Hard as it may be to imagine, worse is to come. Barney is, apparently, writing a biography of McCarthy and Britt. Everyone has a book inside them. Sadly, I suspect Barney’s will be terrible.

All the ways Vanity Fair messed up the literary scoop of the year (2024)
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