Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences by Michael Lynn Crews (review)

I remember the delight I experienced long ago as a graduate student when I discovered Joseph Blotner’s William Faulkner’s Library: A Catalogue (University of Virginia Press), an inventory of every book in Faulkner’s personal library at the time of his death. That such a book existed was at once marvelous and perfectly logical, for it was exactly what I needed for a dissertation chapter on Light in August. Michael Crews’s Books Are Made Out of Books provides McCarthy scholars with something analogous. Though Crews did not have access to McCarthy’s actual book collection, he had the next best thing: the early drafts and notes housed in the Cormac McCarthy Papers archived in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University-San Marcos. His book is an invaluable contribution to McCarthy studies because many scholars and teachers will not have the opportunity to research the archives themselves or to do so exhaustively. Moreover, Crews moves well past mere utility in his systematic examination of the archival material to perform what he calls “a kind of archaeological dig” (151) that illuminates McCarthy’s creative processes. His study will become a foundational text for McCarthy scholars, complementing the sort of field research done by such scholars as Wesley Morgan, John Sepich, and Dianne Luce.

Crews does not attempt to ferret out every literary allusion in McCarthy’s canon but instead limits his study to the “reading interests and influences . . . identified through direct references in the archives” (2). His chapter organization follows the Wittliff Collection’s arrangement of the materials by text (novel, play, or screenplay), with an extended introduction and individual chapters devoted to The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, The Gardener’s Son, Suttree, Blood Meridian, The Stonemason, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, The Road, and the unpublished manuscript Whales and Men. Each chapter has a plot summary of the focal text followed by alphabetized entries for each author referenced in the text’s archived materials. Entries also contain cross-references to other related sections. There is also an illuminating chapter on literary references in McCarthy’s correspondence with J. Howard Woolmer and Peter Greenleaf, with whom McCarthy frequently discussed his own reading and literary preferences. Crews focuses only on those authors or texts specifically named in McCarthy’s archived notes and correspondence, so there are no chapters on All the Pretty Horses or The Sunset Limited, because the materials for these texts do not include such references.

While the resulting study is rewarding, I should begin by noting a few limitations. Crews has some organizational issues that, to be fair, may be unavoidable given the ultimately nonlinear nature of McCarthy’s own creative process and Crews’s struggle to maximize the book’s usability for readers. The composition of various texts overlapped chronologically, and McCarthy frequently interspersed notes pertinent to one text with those of another, particularly in the case of Blood Meridian and Suttree. Crews is frequently repetitive. For example, he repeats his discussion of Rick Wallach’s reading of Suttree almost verbatim in the sections on Peter De Vries (69) and James Joyce (95). Although those using Books Are Made Out of Books as a reference tool will not likely notice it, this duplication may dampen the pleasure of the text for those reading it straight through, as a monograph. Moreover, Crews’ arguments tend to become peripatetic (almost like one of McCarthy’s own characters), ending up in a radically different place than they began. The Melville section in The Stonemason, for example, does not actually discuss Melville but masonry (227), while the Ginsberg section in The Gardener’s Son chapter actually focuses on Suttree instead (42). Crews’s placement of the Joseph Wood Krutch section in the Blood Meridian chapter is apparently just a mistake, for the Krutch...