Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen by Stacey Peebles, and: Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences by Michael Lynn Crews (review)

It would be fair to say that, for scholars and fans of Cormac McCarthy, 2017 offered an embarrassment of riches in the form of two substantial and significant scholarly works on the author. Stacey Peebles's first full-length monograph on McCarthy was anticipated with a rare eagerness. Despite her many significant contributions to McCarthy scholarship, her position as the vice president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, and her position as the editor of The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Peebles had yet to write a book on the author. In 2017, she published a study of McCarthy's works other than his novels—namely, his screenplays, stage plays, and the film adaptations of his works. As McCarthy scholarship has largely focused on his novels, this book offers an exhaustively researched and authoritative examination of a critically understudied aspect of his oeuvre. That same year, with much less fanfare yet with equally substantial resonance in the field, Michael Lynn Crews, a recent PhD graduate from Baylor University, published his dissertation work. Crews's Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences represents a singular and significant contribution to McCarthy scholarship: an exhaustive compendium of the sources McCarthy references throughout his corpus. While dissimilar in scope and method, both books represent milestones in McCarthy scholarship and will be key reference points for scholars and fans of the author.

Peebles's Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen takes for its subject a less traveled scholarly path: McCarthy's writing other than his novels. Compellingly making the case that writing for film and stage is neither accidental nor incidental in McCarthy's career, Peebles establishes the important inflections McCarthy's non-long-form prose writing offers to our understanding of his work. In addition to offering a systematic examination of themes and aesthetic strategies in McCarthy's screenplays and dramas, Peebles uses the subject as a platform to explore McCarthy's public persona and to push back against the nearly gospel image of him as a laconic loner, a Salingeresque hermit with little interest in public fame.

Specifically, Peebles offers a detailed analysis of the history of production and critical reception, as well as an analysis of the major themes, of McCarthy's five screenplays and two works for theater, along with "three of the seven film adaptations" with which he has been instrumentally involved (2). In her introduction, she establishes a thematic through-line—tragedy, and especially Aristotelian tragedy, and the role of witnessing as an ethical act of engagement with the world—that guides her interpretations of these texts. She then turns to the different works themselves, classifying them by similarity of production method rather than by date of production.

Her first chapter covers the authorial and biographical aspects of McCarthy's beginnings as a novelist in the early 1960s, a time period that also sees his first evidence of explicit interest in the aesthetic possibilities of writing for the screen as well as in the film industry more broadly. In 1963, Lawrence Bensky, the editor at Random House who took up the manuscript that would become The Orchard Keeper, noted that McCarthy had "real talent" (qtd. in Peebles 18). In fact, as Peebles points out, Albert Erskine, who served as editor for William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Eudora Welty, among others (and would later become McCarthy's first editor), included a notation—the word "Film"—in the corner of a letter from Bensky "announc[ing] McCarthy's completion of the manuscript." Peebles draws on this first reading of McCarthy's fiction to suggest the cinematic bent his writing has always demonstrated. Yet she moves beyond suggesting an affinity for the visual medium; she devotes most of the first...