Here is the opening entry in my twenty-something part series in my William Faulkner reading project, “What the Faulkner?!” Let’s begin with his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay.
When you’re like me and have read and re-read the major, mature novels by a literary titan like William Faulkner, you might hesitate to read the early stuff. Why do I want to waste my time with the noble failures, the juvenilia? Who has the time? I have fallen prey to such a prejudice at times, but it’s been to my detriment. A great writer’s first book, flawed though it may be, is at the very least fascinating. Are the seeds of greatness evident? Are they close to discovering their mature voice? Is it flat out terrible?
Soldiers’ Pay, published in 1926 when Bill was 29 years old, is the tale of Donald Mahon, a young World War One fighter pilot who is seriously wounded and returns to his home town in the South. The back cover copy of my paperback edition (New American Library, 1968) dramatically states that “Mahon seeks his place in a world that has remained unchanged while his life was shattered.” And furthermore, he makes an “attempt to win back his faithless former love.”
Neither of which is at all true. Did the jacket copy writer read the book or even the editorial notes? Poor young Donald Mahon is basically a canvas for all the other characters to paint their desires and fears. He barely utters a word, he is blind and essentially out to lunch while some recognize how doomed he is and others hope against hope that he’ll recover to become good ol’ Donald again.
When we first meet Mahon (described as having a “quiet inverted stare”) he’s being escorted on a train by a couple of his inebriated buddies who are driving the rest of the passengers crazy with their obnoxious hilarity. They’re soldiers returned home, drunk as fuck, horny as hell, angry as shit, and not giving a whit what anyone else thinks. It’s a dizzying scene of gabble, groping and vomiting, giving a reader the sense of the disorientation and alienation these combat traumatized soldiers feel back in the good ol’ U.S.A. It’s Hemingway and Dos Passos territory, if not yet at their literary level (as a side note, Faulkner served in the Canadian RAF during the war but never saw combat). It’s written with humor and youthful vigor, two qualities not always associated with Faulkner (although humor is almost always evident in his work).
In the midst of their drunken ramble, Joe Gilligan and Julian Lowe, Mahon’s minders encounter a young war widow, Mrs. Powers. After Lowe peels off for home back in San Francisco (but not before falling in love with Mrs. P), Gilligan (who’s also in love with her) and Mrs. Powers bring Mahon back home to his small southern town of Charlestown.
And that’s when things get even more complex. The group of family, friends and others that orbit the going blind and dying Donald Mahon are coming unglued in their own particular ways. Mahon’s father, a church rector, deludes himself into believing his son will recover; Mahon’s intended, a vain, flighty girl perfectly named Cecily passes out when she sees his scar; Emmy, Mahon’s lifetime friend and the woman who lost her virginity to him, quietly suffers while she takes care of him; and what’s more, two useless young men of the local “Lost Generation” (one of them entertainingly named “Januarius Jones”) spend much of the book attempting to woo Cecily, or failing that Emmy. It’s sort of like P.G. Wodehouse meets Sherwood Anderson.
Does it all hang together? No. But it’s a fascinating regional southern take on the Lost Generation novel. This is a young writer’s novel, both derivative and ambitious.
One of the more impressive features of this book for me is the way Faulkner depicts Mrs. Powers, who is experienced beyond her years, but also empathetic to both the yearning Emmy, the delusional Dr. Mahon, and the lonely and honorable Gilligan. Her recounting of her brief marriage to the killed in the war Mr. Powers is honestly described as the lonely mistake that it was. And there she goes repeating the same mistake by falling for the doomed Donald.
The stream of consciousness style that Faulkner uses so memorably in his mature novels is dabbled with here and there throughout the novel, in its most effective form serving as a kind of town consciousness (not unlike Dos Passos, I reckon). However, the relentless biblical cadences that he will unleash in some of his greatest works are not really evident in this book.
Race, the subject that Faulkner will wrangle with so intensely in his later novels, is not seriously addressed in Soldiers’ Pay. The African American characters serve mainly as comic figures or noble enduring stock characters. Their dialogue is almost painfully minstrelesque. He will certainly improve in that area as he develops as a writer. One of the most poignant but also stereotypical scenes is when Caroline or “Callie,” Mahon’s childhood nurse, visits the dying man. While perhaps overdramatized, Callie’s anguish over her former charge feels genuine, and at least hints at some of the complexity of black and white relations in the south (and yes, I know that’s understating the case).
Finally, I found one of the most impressive sections of the novel to be the one point where we see the world through Mahon’s point of view. It’s a flashback scene in which he relives the moments when he received his (ultimately) mortal wound. It’s vividly written and over before you know it—”Then he felt his hand, saw his glove burst, saw his bared bones.”
As it so happens, this memory is one of Mahon’s last. Good stuff indeed, but not a patch on the death scenes Faulkner will write in his later novels (paging Joe Christmas! We’ll get there…).
I’ve gone on longer than I intended in my impressionistic take on Soldiers’ Pay. This first novel hints at the greatness to come in Faulkner’s later work, but it’s comforting to know that even the “greats” didn’t just roll out of bed writing masterpieces. At least not in this instance. But I read it. Thanks for stopping by.
Coming next in this series: we’ll follow Faulkner to New Orleans for his second novel, Mosquitoes.
uncorrected proof 
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