Anonymous
7/18/2025, 6:05:57 AM No.24560298
>Considering the comment she left on my Substack review of McCarthy’s The Passenger a few months before he died, she’s already well on her way:
>>Santa Fe killed the Cormac I knew. He gained fame, wealth, and fancy superficial friends. He turned his back on his old friends like Jimmy Long (J-Bone) and Billy Kidwell. They were left to die, forgotten and alone. He lost much of his compassion and kindness. As the Institute crowd claimed more of his time, he struggled to write. Couldn’t write. How could he? He’d stifled or killed that which inspired him. The advance for The Passenger was spent. He was obligated. These last many years he has taken up drinking again. Living in majestic splendor but enjoying none of it. Surrounded by junk and the clutter of a lifetime. Haunted.
>“‘Well, you pretty much laid it all out, didn’t you?’” Britt recalls McCarthy saying when she read him her comment over the phone. The two had not lived together full-time for many decades, and McCarthy had become too frail to make his regular trips out to Tucson. Though as was their habit throughout life, they still spoke on the phone multiple times a week and exchanged letters, 47 of which Britt shared with me. In McCarthy’s final years, he lived in near isolation at his compound in Santa Fe, with luxury cars, spare seats, and car parts smattered across its acreage, like “a rich hillbilly,” Britt fondly recalls. The parts weren’t for nothing—McCarthy was an excellent mechanic. >But in those last years, worth millions of dollars, the great American novelist had taken to comparing himself unfavorably to the principal in the proverb, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
>“I’m going to delete it,” Britt told him of her comment.
>“‘Let’s see what happens,’” she remembers him counseling. “‘Maybe something good will come of it.’”
>>Santa Fe killed the Cormac I knew. He gained fame, wealth, and fancy superficial friends. He turned his back on his old friends like Jimmy Long (J-Bone) and Billy Kidwell. They were left to die, forgotten and alone. He lost much of his compassion and kindness. As the Institute crowd claimed more of his time, he struggled to write. Couldn’t write. How could he? He’d stifled or killed that which inspired him. The advance for The Passenger was spent. He was obligated. These last many years he has taken up drinking again. Living in majestic splendor but enjoying none of it. Surrounded by junk and the clutter of a lifetime. Haunted.
>“‘Well, you pretty much laid it all out, didn’t you?’” Britt recalls McCarthy saying when she read him her comment over the phone. The two had not lived together full-time for many decades, and McCarthy had become too frail to make his regular trips out to Tucson. Though as was their habit throughout life, they still spoke on the phone multiple times a week and exchanged letters, 47 of which Britt shared with me. In McCarthy’s final years, he lived in near isolation at his compound in Santa Fe, with luxury cars, spare seats, and car parts smattered across its acreage, like “a rich hillbilly,” Britt fondly recalls. The parts weren’t for nothing—McCarthy was an excellent mechanic. >But in those last years, worth millions of dollars, the great American novelist had taken to comparing himself unfavorably to the principal in the proverb, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
>“I’m going to delete it,” Britt told him of her comment.
>“‘Let’s see what happens,’” she remembers him counseling. “‘Maybe something good will come of it.’”
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