Revisiting the Literary Past From the Open Road

‘Backstory: A Literary Life on the Run’ By Dean Faulkner Wells and Lawrence WellsUniversity Press of Mississippi, 234 pagesThe adventures of this literary couple might be called a group and canine memoir-biography on the road, tracking Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, and many other colorful personalities, gathering research for magazine articles and profiles, showing how the stories got researched and published.Dean Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner’s niece, who died in 2011, provides a memorable portrait of her uncle as family man, introducing her to ancestral rituals and treating her with the grace of a chivalrous gentleman. Her participation in a hot air balloon ride is intersected with the story of Faulkner’s similar experience in early twentieth century Oxford, Mississippi, when a balloon landed right on his family’s property. That collocation of past and present is very Faulknerian, calling forth his often quoted declaration: “The past is never dead.”This coast to coast picaresque reminiscence of travel writing published between 1980 and 2000, oscillating between magazine articles and accounts of how they were done, has a wistful quality. Gone are the days when airline magazines ran 2000-word stories about literary events, historic sites like Monument Valley, and celebrated locations like Bodega Bay, where Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” was filmed. Toward the end of their magazine careers, features ended at no more than 600 words.In Monument Valley, the couple are shown how director John Ford created the architecture of the Western, returning again and again, befriending the native peoples, and even counting on one of them to summon the clouds needed for a shot—or perhaps this Navaho just knew his weather. Ford, at any rate, was in his element, insisting during a threatening storm on filming even when cautioned the footage might not be usable. It was.A visit to “Tom Sawyer’s Hannibal” portrays a town that in some ways remains as Mark Twain left it, proving yet again that sense of a past that is never dead, though Twain himself on rare visits to his home town no longer felt that comfortable in it. Lawrence Wells begins his piece with an epigraph from Twain in 1902: “I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation. I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity.”Mr. Wells provides his own vivid evocation: “Whistle blowing, a steamboat departs the landing leaving a swirling white wake. Passengers cling to the railings looking at Glasscock’s Island, or “Jackson’s Island” in Tom Sawyer. Seen from half a mile away, Hannibal is still a place where kids explore caves or ride a steamboat across the brown Mississippi. Wild hills and brambles overlook the great shining river.”Along for the ride, the couple’s dogs sometimes create mayhem but are usually companionable and absolutely necessary for providing a sense of continuity and bonding that mitigates the trials of traveling, as Dean Wells explains in her backstory about following the Santa Fe Trail: “Readers without pets may disagree but, to us, traveling with dogs is civilized travel. Like pioneers in Conestogas we take our livestock with us. . . We let the dogs run in the waist high grass. History was all around us. I found original wagon ruts, knelt, and touched them. Hard as concrete, the ruts told of wagons and toiling oxen and the crack of whips. I envisioned women, children and dogs wading the creek alongside the Conestogas and laboring up the muddy bank in their wet skirts. At this point in our journey we were four hours by car from Arrow Rock, but it would have taken the settlers weeks. And they still had eight hundred miles to go!”We look to such writers to experience the palpability of the past. The pieces in this book remind me of a passage in Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun,” that begins on a highway “among the road signs and filling stations” and ends up envisioning “the scratching almost depthless in a sheet of old barely transparent glass . . . from the long long time ago,” as if to say “Listen stranger; this was myself: this was I.”Mr. Rollyson is the author of ‘William Faulkner Day by Day.‘

Revisiting the Literary Past From the Open Road

Revisiting the Literary Past From the Open Road

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