Lawrence Wells

Lawrence Wells of Oxford: An Interview

by Charles Chappell

(excerpted from The Mississippi Quarterly, Spring, 1995)

CC: Let's start by talking about your balancing of all your different literary interests. You write novels, you run a publishing company, you write for magazines, and you compose screenplays and telescripts. How do you apportion your time? How do you juggle all of this?

LW: When my wife Dean Faulkner and I started running Yoknapatawpha Press full time in 1979, I had already been doing some fiction writing -- though with not anything published to speak of -- and I was publishing other people's books before my own fiction was published. So I was an editor and thinking as an editor before I wrote Rommel and the Rebel.

CC: The structure of the novel - you have Rommel in America in the first part and then you place him in Africa, gaining his fame, in the second half of the novel. At first he appears in civilian clothing, and in fact uses a pseudonym; all the time he's in America, he is Erwin Rilke. Let's talk further about Rommel and the Rebel. Is it true that you got the idea from a newspaper clipping and from some research you had done into World War II?

LW: I read an article about a Civil War Roundtable in Jackson, MS, where Jack Maxey, a retired lieutenant colonel, gave a lecture comparing Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's tactics to those of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Maxey also believed Rommel was one of five German officers whom Maxey, as a second lieutenant just out of Mississippi

State ROTC, met in Jackson before World War II. I was intrigued. As I began to research Rommel and Forrest, it was uncanny the way they thought alike and used the same tactics. What primarily interested Rommel was how an inferior force harries and delays and counterattacks a superior force and how to use terrain for tactical advantage. After Rommel and the Rebel came out in paperback, I sent a copy to Rommel's son, Manfred, who was the mayor of Stuttgart. He thanked me for writing about his father. "Henceforth," he wrote, "you and I are allies across the Atlantic."

CC: When did you decide to bring Faulkner into Rommel and the Rebel? That's a signal achievement in the novel. As far as I know, yours is the only novel in which William Faulkner appears by name as an important character.

LW: Well, I suppose you could say it took a lot of nerve to impose on William Faulkner's privacy. He's long gone and couldn't defend himself, but I thought, since my wife was his niece, maybe he would forgive me. I asked Dean’s permission. "Do you think it would be OK for me to put Pappy in the book?" She gave me the family seal of approval, and I dived in.

CC: In your novel Rommel and Faulkner exchange books. Faulkner is very friendly to Rommel, but he also is determined that Rommel would not harm America in any way. They hold a debate concerning Germany's growing

military presence while they're playing tennis. Did Rowan Oak, Faulkner's home, have a tennis court at that time?

LW: Yes, it did, a small tennis court behind the stable. In those days it was unusual in Oxford to have a private court with lights. That apparently was part of Faulkner’s sense of fun and play. He was always inventing games to play.

CC: What are some of the parallels between Faulkner and Rommel?

LW: Well, Faulkner was a writer who wanted to be a soldier and Rommel was a soldier who wanted to be a writer and each wishes to be respected by the other. But Faulkner wants Rommel to admit certain things about the Germans which Rommel is not prepared to admit. Faulkner tries to get Rommel to concede the totalitarian state, that Germany

deported writers who were considered security risks and that the Germans are beginning to prepare for war.

CC: By being here in Oxford, being a part of the Faulkner family, which in a way you are because you married into it, you could come to know the man so that when you began to write about him, he really came alive for you the way some of his characters came alive for him. Faulkner said that sometimes as he wrote he heard voices. Is it going too far to ask you if you were hearing him and seeing him as you were writing?

LW: Dean's mother, Louise, said that when she read my novel she could hear his voice.

CC: I'm sure many writers have been intimidated by Faulkner, but you're right here in his presence and it seems more inspirational than it does intimidating.

LW: Well, it is. But then, Faulkner himself was not discouraged by Shakespeare or Dostoevski or Tolstoy or James Joyce. Here's James Joyce's stream of consciousness, and Faulkner gives it a new home in Mississippi, a new direction if you will, and makes it his own. Mr. Bill, as I call him -- Dean called him “Pappy” -- is our guiding star. He had a tragic vision that was Homeric. It was the anvil tone of time. That power that Faulkner had, that transcendence, came out of shared pain. He was immersed in the human tragedy vein for vein, and with that sensibility and his one-of-a-kind talent he was able to achieve what he did. Someone asked Flannery O'Connor, "What's it like to write in the shadow of Faulkner?" And she said, "Nobody wants his mule and wagon to get caught on the tracks when the Dixie Special comes through."