A Glimpse into the Life of Cormac McCarthy

A Shipboard Romance

Cormac McCarthy published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965. The book received tremendous praise, and won the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, and a Rockefeller Grant. With his grant money, McCarthy booked a trip aboard the ship Sylvania, where he met Annie DeLisle, a singer and dancer, and a part of the duo The Healy Sisters.

McCarthy and DeLisle quickly fell in love, and their shipboard romance continued on land as McCarthy toured with the Healy Sisters through England and Wales. On May 14, 1966, the couple were married in an old Norman church in DeLisle’s hometown of Hamble, in Hampshire, England.

The newly married couple used McCarthy’s award money and Delisle’s income from performing to travel to Paris and Geneva, before settling on the island of Ibiza. They quickly integrated with the island’s literary and artistic ex-patriate community, becoming friends with another young novelist, Leslie Garrett. As Garrett described, “We were both young literary lions, circling each other, claws extended. Within five minutes, I knew that I had met a future friend. He and Annie and I were the Three Musketeers… We did a lot of carousing, a lot of champagne.” It was during his time in Ibiza that McCarthy completed Outer Dark.

Returning Stateside

Still, in 1967, McCarthy and DeLisle returned to the United States. First, to a farm in Rockford, Tennessee, and then, with the award of McCarthy’s Guggenheim Fellowship, they purchased an old barn in Louisville, which they restored themselves to create their “dream home.”  McCarthy did the carpentry and stonework himself. Amidst the wood and stonework, at an old, salvaged desk he had restored by hand, McCarthy continued to work on Suttree, and completed Child of God in 1973. They bathed in a lake, and Annie learned to catch snakes, as she adapted to life in Tennessee.

These were good times, as recalled by DeLisle: "We had some fabulous times. We never had a lot when I was married to him. But it always seemed we had as much as we needed." She recalled his notorious privacy: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So, we would eat beans for another week.”

Later Career

McCarthy and Anne DeLisle separated in 1976 and he moved to El Paso. They stayed in contact, though, and she recalls typing manuscripts for Suttree, the last of his Southern Gothic novels, published in 1979. His great work, Blood Meridian, was published in 1985 to great acclaim but still relatively small sales, and then in 1991 his popularity finally caught up with his critical praise, and All the Pretty Horses became both a best seller and winner of the National Book Award. Today, McCarthy is considered one of, if not the, most important writer of the second half of the 20^th century, and a veritable star.

For her part, DeLisle, the English native and dancer, remained in Tennessee. Settling in Knoxville, she opened Annie's­— A Very Special Restaurant in 1983, a gourmet eatery cum jazz club widely credited with spearheading the revival of the Old City in Knoxville. Annie recalls, “Always my life, I wanted, I loved jazz, to have a little jazz club, and I thought why not us, why can’t we have live music here. And they came down here and started playing, and that just made it whole. We had a courtyard outside and built a stage, and we had the music outside, and it was so fun, like New Orleans.”  While Annie left for her next adventure in 1989, Annie’s continued to operate in name and then in spirit in Old City Knoxville until 2004.