In 1992, novelist Cormac McCarthy (b. 1933) told interviewer Richard B. Woodward: “[T]he ugly fact is books are made out of books” (1). All Cormackians (as devotees call themselves) know this quip, but until Michael Lynn Crews's new volume, we had only a vague idea of just how true it was. Crews has done a rich and meticulous study of literary sources in the Cormac McCarthy Archive housed in the Wittliff Collection of the Alkek Library at Texas State University in San Marcos. Few know how exciting it can be to pore over a writer's archives, however counterintuitive that sentiment may strike the uninitiated. Crews has gone deep and performed the monumental task of a complete unearthing of the Cormac McCarthy Collection.This reviewer has worked in the Wittliff Collection more than once. My minor efforts took time, money, and dedication, but it was a completely worthwhile investment. Because of my personal knowledge of exactly what it takes to score even a minor coup, I can only marvel at the gargantuan task that Crews set himself: “What books, what writers, were on McCarthy's mind during the composition of his novels?” In his notes and correspondence “and often in holograph marginalia found in the early drafts of the novels, McCarthy tells himself.” Thus Crews begins “an extended study of Cormac McCarthy's reading interests, but only those that can be identified through direct references in the archives. Writers whom McCarthy has mentioned in interviews, or who can be identified through clear literary allusions in his published works, are outside my province.” Crews's project, while admittedly self-limiting, is nevertheless vast: “The focus of my research is on references to other writers that do not appear in any publication, references that can only be found in the Wittliff archives.” His purpose, he tells us, “is to provide readers with information that was not available until McCarthy's papers became available” (2).The question now arises whether this encyclopedic tome is only for specialists. There is little doubt that it is and will continue to be an invaluable resource for Cormackians. While it cannot be definitive as to sources—McCarthy does not tell us every source, nor was it ever his intention to do so—this study will be a necessary primary reference. If Crews had just identified the sources, it would be a welcome addition to the Cormackian toolbox, but he goes far beyond simple identification and discusses some issues at length. His discussion means not only that future Cormac McCarthy scholars will need to look here for those sources—some of which are obscure almost beyond comprehension—but also that future writers of dissertations and scholarly articles will have to take into account Crews's opinions about how his subject has used the material or how he has modified it.This widening gyre also lends a universality to Crews's endeavor. Anyone interested in history, literature, or philosophy—as well as in McCarthy, of course—should find this book fascinating and useful, with its nearly 150 cross-referenced entries. In religion and philosophy, there are entries for Heraclitus and Xenophanes, Artemidorus and Hannah Arendt, Augustine of Hippo and Jacob Boehme, and Albert Camus, Aldous Huxley, Michel Foucault, Eugen Herrigel, William James, and Carl Gustav Jung and Søren Kierkegaard, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne and Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinz Pagels and Walter Pater and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, inter alia.For historians, there is an essay on Oswald Spengler and the Faustian figure. This six-page entry treats Spengler, Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as they relate to the fascinating Faustian figure of the judge in Blood Meridian (1985). The influence of Spengler touches on Suttree (1979) and on The Crossing (1994) via Job and ends by linking them all through Spengler's concept of the Faustian man who stands opposed to God. This fine essay alone is worth the price of the book.To get an idea of the unexpected material herein, consider the short essay on the Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, the “catholic filmmaker” as Robert C. Cumbow put it (and McCarthy quoted it) in his book on Leone (The Films of Sergio Leone [2008]), which McCarthy was reading when he wrote Cumbow a letter praising Leone: “He really is a filmmaker.” Crews concludes: “The similarities between Leone's artistic perspective and his own grim religious vision must not have been lost when reading Cumbow, and it is interesting to consider the degree to which Leone's work inspired McCarthy's shift to the western genre with Blood Meridian” (292). Crews goes on, in a footnote, to speculate about the influence of Sam Peckinpah, which McCarthy has denied but with which I heartily agree, most specifically The Wild Bunch (1969) on Blood Meridian.The entry on Alfred Hitchcock, as well as noting the thematic influence of Psycho (1960) on Child of God (1973), includes Crews's speculations on a larger stylistic influence: “The cinematographic style of Child of God marks the first real departure for McCarthy from the tether of William Faulkner, and, in many respects, the first of his novels to bear his original stamp. Leaner than Faulkner's, McCarthy's prose in Child of God appears less indebted to the lush southern gothic of his literary hero. The turn toward the narrative strategies of film may account for the shift” (37).Now a generational note: As I worked my way through this remarkable compilation, I became aware of some creeping sense of familiarity, and then I realized what it was. McCarthy and I (and all our generation) had read and been influenced by the same books, and we even knew some of the same people. Everyone devoured Camus. Everyone read Allen Ginsberg and Robinson Jeffers and Dylan Thomas and Thomas Wolfe and J. D. Salinger and John Steinbeck (as well as the obvious Faulkners and Hemingways). And if you were more into literary history, say, Jesse Weston. These were givens, and if you had not read them, you could not talk, could not discuss, could not drink beer at Harry's Bar & Delicatessen in Chapel Hill and speak with gravitas about existentialism. One of the few people McCarthy would talk to was the writer Leon Rooke; Leon and I were friends at Chapel Hill in the early 1960s, and we drank beer at Harry's (bear with me). McCarthy told Leon in 1986 that he was reading Norman Rabkin's book on Shakespeare (1967) (Crews 291), and I had recently taken an NEH seminar on tragedy with Norman Rabkin at Berkeley. The creepy feeling dissipated as I began to realize that Crews might actually be doing a service to the current generation of critics by allowing them to share our generation's formation, including especially McCarthy's—what we had in common instead of technology.Is there any practical or substantive value to the last paragraph? I think there is, a question of zeitgeist. Thomas Wolfe, whom few read today. (But we all read him in the '60s. We recited him: “Come up into the hills, oh my young love!”) Crews writes that Wolfe was a serious influence on McCarthy during his formative years. He observes, “Stylistic similarities between Wolfe and McCarthy are evident in early drafts of Suttree.” And he continues, citing “a similar tendency toward self-indulgent lyricism and a kind of treacly and mawkish quality that is happily absent from the final work (after two decades of writing and revision), but perhaps were a hangover from McCarthy's desire to write his own version of the artist's journey a la Of Time and the River” (149). Wolfe may seem self-indulgently lyrical and “treacly and mawkish” to Crews and company, but all the young writers from the 1960s had to get Thomas Wolfe out of their systems, especially the ones from North Carolina or eastern Tennessee. (To his credit, Crews remembers that William Faulkner extolled Wolfe as the best of his contemporaries [149].)There are some quirky entries, ones we perhaps did not see coming, The Malleus Maleficarum or the Tabula Smaragdina. Yet we should not be surprised—they are manifestations of McCarthy's interest in Gnosticism and evil and Hermetic mysticism, alchemy, the occult, Hermes Trismegistus, hallucinogenic substances, and Jung, and Jung and masonry. Crews is quite useful on these arcane items, especially for the uninitiated.So, what little is wrong with Books Are Made Out of Books? For one, it is repetitious. If Crews tells us once, he tells us a dozen times that Suttree and Blood Meridian overlap in composition and therefore share sources—but the repetition is understandable. Crews knows that most readers are not going to read his book straight through. He knows that most readers are going to use this fine book, the fruit of enormous labor, as a reference book, and so he clears an easy if repetitive path for the otherwise-uninformed reader.There is the odd mistake or two, but they also are partly excusable. In the entry for Miguel de Cervantes, Crews tells us that a quotation from “Whales and Men” (an unpublished screenplay, available only in the archives, that not even many Cormackians have read) contains an allusion to Don Quixote: “Beware gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.” He writes that there is a “similar allusion” (in fact, they are exactly the same quote) in All the Pretty Horses (1992), “when don Hector, during a game of pool with John Grady, quotes Cervantes to express his distaste for the Madero generation's veneration of French ideas” (262). There are several problems here. First, there is no real consideration of All the Pretty Horses because there are no notes on it. Yet the quote, regardless of Crews's methodology, is entirely germane to that novel, although not to “Whales and Men.” Second, the quote does not come from the text of Don Quixote. I know this arcane tidbit because I reread Don Quixote not so long ago, trying fruitlessly to find it. It is true that Crews calls it an allusion, and in that, he is correct. It comes from a 1973 BBC television production titled The Adventures of Don Quixote, although if Crews knows about that provenance, he uncharacteristically does not reveal it. The whole business becomes messy because it privileges the unread screenplay over the seminal novel in which the quote is a core concept, one deserving identification.Crews is staying true to his method and his self-imposed limitations, and we need to try to respect that stance. The problem is that his study is so interesting that one wants more rather than less. This reader would prefer more on, say, Ernest Hemingway, who “qualifies” only via an indirect remark about Zelda Fitzgerald in the unpublished “Whales and Men”; more on Hemingway (even in a footnote as with Peckinpah), whose influence winds sinuously and pervasively through late McCarthy as much as Faulkner's through the early novels. Consider that McCarthy incorporates two of Hemingway's finest short stories, “Indian Camp” (1924) and “Cat in the Rain” (1925), into the father's memories of the pre-apocalypse world in The Road (2006), not as a memory of the stories, but as memories from the father's past, memories that McCarthy deliberately intends the discerning reader to associate with Hemingway as a kind of constitutional homage (The Road [New York: Vintage, 2006], 12–13, 187).One other example, not so much a mistake as perhaps a misreading, will suffice. It has to do with the richly imbued term matriz—a term that Diane C. Luce, and after her, Crews, has used to interpret a passage from The Crossing. They read matriz as a mystical essence. Perhaps it is, given McCarthy's penchants, but early in the story, Billy is looking for a way to trap the wolf that is slowly decimating his family's herd, seeking advice from the very old wolf-trapper Don Arnulfo. Crews tells us that Don Arnulfo “equates the wolf with a kind of mystical knowledge of the divine matrix, or la matriz, the mother womb of creation” (234). I think it is about sensorial essence—the scent that the wolf cannot resist—or as Don Arnulfo puts it: “[O]nly shewolves in their season were a proper source” ([New York: Knopf, 1994], 45). These are but minor quibbles—gnostic angels dancing on a spore—quibbles that McCarthy himself does nothing to clarify. After all, Don Arnulfo tells Billy that the wolf is like a “copo de nieve,” that it is made “of breath only.” In his final dictum, he says that “God sits and conspires in the destruction of that which he has been at such pains to create” and that it was that and that only that had made him an “hereje” (The Crossing 46–47). A mystical heretic? A heretical mystic? The beauty is that Crews does not shrink from such Cormackian conundrums.Sometimes au contraire Crews absolutely nails it, revealing insights into sources that shall forevermore be a part of Cormackian criticism. In reading the entry for Heraclitus, we learn the following: “McCarthy's notes for Blood Meridian give away the source of one of the judge's aphorisms as the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.” McCarthy typed in a quotation and then made himself a note: “War is the father of us all and out [sic] king. War discloses who is godlike and who is but a man, who is a slave and who is a free man.—Heraclitus.” Then comes the note to himself: “Let the judge quote this in part and without crediting source.” Not content with the mere revelation, Crews opines astutely: “Since, as this study reveals, McCarthy often interpolates the work of other writers into his own, this direct admission of his adherence to T. S. Eliot's views on literary theft (good artists steal rather than borrow) stands out as a rare example of McCarthy admitting to the crime” (183). That ironic palimpsest is a perfect example of what makes this study intriguing and worthwhile. The effort to open up the text allows Crews to transcend what could have been at best a scholarly effort. He goes far beyond any such dry season, and his book flowers into an often-erudite work of artistic, literary, and philosophical sourcing, in its best moments with the deftness of an accomplished dowser.Crews's depth will underline the importance of Cormac McCarthy's place in American and world literature. McCarthy writes by selective accretion and individual selection on one hand and a uniquely personal linguistic and conceptual brilliance on the other. The combination has produced a corpus that is utterly original and yet for the most part imbedded in American literature, history, and culture. Herein are the classics, the romantics, the modernists, James Joyce and William Butler Yeats; Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway; and here also are Appalachia, the West, and Mexico, merely to begin the accounting Crews so assiduously compiles. If you read Blood Meridian and The Road, you will take a journey—all McCarthy's books are road books and all along the same road—from our earliest history (with the Leonids falling in 1833) to our demise in some un-attributable post-apocalyptic (and starless) disaster. Yes, and it comes in all its dark brilliance from two wells: one, McCarthy's own innate and unplumbable genius; the other, these sources (many unknown or known only to a specialized few) that Crews has unearthed from our collective history and literature. We may never be able to fathom all the recesses of Cormac McCarthy's genius, but now we have secure access to many of his particular sources.Indeed, the sibylline underground currents that Crews' volume reveals—as below, so above—widen our Cormackian gyre.