Cormac McCarthy? Richard B. Woodward? Henry Holland? Paul Valéry? Anonymous?
Question for Quote Investigator: A prominent literary figure was asked to name other influential writers. The sharp reply emphasized the interconnectedness of all cultural text:
The ugly fact is books are made out of books.
This statement has been ascribed to Cormac McCarthy who penned the novels “All the Pretty Horses”, “No Country for Old Men”, and “The Road”. Would you please help me to find a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: In 1992 “The New York Times” published a profile of Cormac McCarthy by critic and essayist Richard B. Woodward. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
McCarthy’s style owes much to Faulkner’s — in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world — a debt McCarthy doesn’t dispute. “The ugly fact is books are made out of books,” he says. “The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”
His list of those whom he calls the “good writers” — Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner — precludes anyone who doesn’t “deal with issues of life and death.”
The notion that some books are constructed out of other books has a long history. For example, in 1844 an article in “The Spectator” depicted the derivative nature of books negatively while extolling the value of empirical exploration:2
The practice discarded by philosophy is still continued in literature, more especially by versifiers and novelists. Most of their books are made out of books or brains, instead of by a close and repeated observation of nature, such as even the tyro in natural science undertakes, to verify received truth.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In 1891 U.S. politician Frederick W. Seward published a memoir which included an entertaining anecdote from 1872 about the English writer Sir Henry Holland:3
Passing through a great library in England, with Sir Henry Holland, we came upon an alcove, where an author sat, surrounded by great piles of works, on the subject of which he was to write.
“There,” said Sir Henry, “is an illustration of the feebleness of all our boasted intellect and invention. That is the way books are made—out of books. Here are eight hundred thousand volumes, on these shelves, slowly and laboriously reproduced out of each other, during successive centuries.”
And they will continue, for centuries to come, gradually evolving others, in which an original thought, or a novel fact, will be the exception: while the great mass of their facts and ideas will be selected, copied, and rearranged with more or less skill, from their predecessors.
In 1944 French poet and essayist Paul Valéry wrote a piece discussing historians. Here is a passage in French4 followed by a translation into English:5
Je dirai seulement ici que l’Histoire ne nous apprend que les historiens : s’ils ont du style, de l’esprit, du talent dans le métier de nous faire croire à des « causes » ou à des « lois » … —c’est-à-dire de quoi accommoder à notre goût de l’ordre et de l’explication ce qu’ils ont pris par ci, par là, chez leurs semblables, car enfin, ils font des livres avec des livres. C’est un art : rien de moins ; mais rien de plus.
I will say here that History teaches us only the historians: if they have style, wit, a talent for the craft of making us believe in “causes” or “laws’’—that is, in whatever they have taken here and there from their fellow-historians—that will suit our penchant for order and explanations (for after all their books are made out of books). The writing of History is an art—nothing less, but nothing more.
Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 comment about the production of books ultimately led English Professor Michael Lynn Crews in 2017 to publish “Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences” which began with the following passage:6
In 1992, Cormac McCarthy granted his first lengthy interview in a career spanning three decades. Asked to comment on his literary influences, he told the interviewer, Richard B. Woodward, that “the ugly fact is books are made out of books…. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” In the same interview, Woodward informs us that “McCarthy would rather talk about rattlesnakes, molecular computers, country music, Wittgenstein—anything—than himself or his books.”
In conclusion, Cormac McCarthy deserves credit for the quotation under examination. However, the concept is much older. In 1844 an anonymous person wrote “Most of their books are made out of books or brains”. Also, circa 1872 Sir Henry Holland said “That is the way books are made—out of books”.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to the anonymous writer whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.
Image Notes: Illustration of books and flowers from Nadi Borodina at Unsplash. The image has been cropped.
- 1992 April 19, New York Times, Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction by Richard B. Woodward, Start Page SM28, Quote Page SM31, Column 2, New York. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
- 1844 April 6, The Spectator, Mr. Tupper’s Tales, Quote Page 327, London, England. (Google Books Full View) link ↩︎
- 1891, Seward at Washington as Senator and Secretary of State: A Memoir of His Life 1861-1872 by Frederick W. Seward, Chapter 72: Table Talk, Date: February 26, 1872, Quote Page 475, Derby and Miller, New York. (Google Books Full View) link ↩︎
- 2016, Paul Valéry Oeuvres, Tome 3, Propos me concernant (About me), Quote Page 673, Le Livre de Poche, Paris, France. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1975, Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Edited by Jackson Mathews, Volume 15, Bollinger Series XLV, Moi by Paul Valéry, Translated by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews, Remarks about Myself, Quote Page 294, (Source Note: Remarks About Myself: “Propos Me Concernant,” foreword to Berne-Joffroy, Présence de Valéry, in the collection “Présences,” (Paris: Plon, 1944). See OEuvres II, Pléiade (1960), p. 1505) Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 2017, Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences by Michael Lynn Crews, Chapter 1: Introduction – Books Out of Books, Quote Page 1, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas. (Google Books Preview) ↩︎