Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner

First published: 1926

Type of plot: Impressionistic realism

Time of work: April and May, 1919

Locale: Charlestown, Georgia

Principal Characters:

• Donald Mahon, the central character, a young, wounded, and dying flyer, engaged to Cecily Saunders
• Julian Lowe, a young air cadet whose desire for martial glory is frustrated by the Armistice
• Joe Gilligan, age thirty-two, a demobilized soldier who becomes Donald Mahon’s guardian
• Margaret Powers, the novel’s moral center, a young war widow who nurses and later marries Donald Mahon
• Joseph Mahon, the Rector, Donald’s father, an Episcopalian priest who has lost his faith in God but who clings to the illusion of his son’s recovery
• Januarius Jones, a fat, satyrlike, slightly androgynous Latin teacher, who pursues the principal females
• Cecily Saunders, nymphlike, self-centered, and flirtatious; she is engaged to Donald, the war hero, but elopes with George Farr
• George Farr, a young man whose jealous love for Cecily is a constant agony
• Emmy, the housekeeper at the rectory, Donald’s former lover, finally bedded by Jones

The Novel

A work of literary modernism influenced by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), William Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, brings “the lost generation” to Faulkner’s native ground. In describing the impact upon a small Southern town of the return and slow death of an aviator horribly wounded in World War I, the novel re-creates the mood of disillusionment, deflation, and spiritual malaise which was prevalent in postwar American society and art. Eliotic despair is substantially countered, however, by Faulkner’s insistence, often in rich, poetic prose, on natural cycles of renewal, on the essential decency, strength, and humanity of the principal characters, and on the faith and integrity of the blacks who have remained impervious to white society’s spiritual alienation.

The novel opens with an ironic epigraph taken from an “Old Play (about 19-?),” a fragment of dialogue about shaving between Achilles and Mercury cast as sergeant and cadet. The scene is a graphic undercutting of the heroic mood and an effective introduction to Joe Gilligan and Julian Lowe, a demobilized soldier and a young air cadet, respectively, whose opportunity for martial glory has been “cruelly” thwarted by fate: The Armistice had been declared before they could reach the Western Front. On a train heading south from Buffalo, they give vent to their frustration in drunkenness, dramatizing their essential isolation while casting themselves as “lost foreigners” in a “foreign land.”

Into this histrionic scene enters Donald Mahon, a young pilot with a ghastly scar across his brow. He is a symbol of the physical and psychic wounds inflicted by the war, while serving as a focal point of the characters who project onto him their unrealized aspirations. For Lowe, Mahon is the epitome of glamour and heroism, a dying pilot whose wings suggest both angelic martyrdom and, unconsciously, sexual achievement. “Had I been old enough or lucky enough, this might have been me,” Lowe thinks jealously. Yet the novel soon moves beyond Lowe’s adolescent romanticism (and, appropriately, he disappears after chapter 1, persuaded by Margaret Powers to return home—he reappears only through his semiliterate love letters to her) in order to explore the real costs of war, suffered by the soldiers and noncombatants alike.

If Mahon represents the wounded, dead, and dying soldiers, Margaret Powers, whom Gilligan and Lowe meet on the train, represents the women who become widows before their time. Margaret’s husband, Dick, whom she had married on an impulse, was killed in France before he could receive from her a letter saying that she did not love him. Entangled in a web of unresolved emotions, she sees in Mahon the image of her dead husband and thus an opportunity to expiate her guilt through a process of association and substitution: She attempts to “undo” her rejection of Dick by caring for, and eventually marrying, Mahon.

Joe and Margaret are intimately linked by their compassion for Mahon, and they decide to bring him home to Mahon’s father in Charlestown. Their principal mission will be to prepare Mahon’s father for both Mahon’s “resurrection” (he had been reported as dead) and coming death, and to mediate between Mahon and his fiancée, Cecily, who will be repelled by Mahon’s scar and who will refuse, finally, to marry him.

By a technique of counterpoint and flashback, the next section of the novel introduces the world of Charlestown before the arrival of Mahon, Margaret, and Joe Gilligan, a world insulated until now from the stark realities of war, but one clearly affected by the postwar mood of spiritual enervation. Here Januarius Jones and the Rector, Donald’s father, walk within a jaded pastoral landscape, discoursing languidly about God and man. The garden in which they walk emerges as a symbol of the Rector’s retreat into an artificial landscape of imagination and illusion.

The goatlike Jones finds this talk wearisome, however, and he is soon diverted, and then obsessed, by Emmy, the housekeeper, and Cecily Saunders. Lustful and antagonistic, Jones spends his time in pursuit of these not-quite-elusive nymphs, the one homely and faintly wild, the other slim, graceful, and artificial. He chases not so much to capture them (and in this sense, he resembles the lover in John Keats’s urn) but for the imminent promise of conquest continually deferred. These are the young people the war left behind, their slightly malevolent play symptomatic of their essential isolation.

When Donald arrives upon this scene, he becomes the vacant yet powerful center about which the other characters revolve. He has no memory and soon goes blind, and is therefore more fully reflective of the projections of others. Though scarred, blind, and dying, he is for Cecily the returned war hero to whom she is glamorously engaged; to the Rector, he is the dead son miraculously resurrected; to Margaret, he is an incarnation of Dick, her dead husband; to Emmy, he is the faunlike boy with whom she roamed the moonlit hills and made love, in the prewar days of innocence.

Opposed to Mahon’s static condition of death-in-life is the desperate and futile activity around him. Jones continues his mad chasing, while Cecily escapes abruptly her furious vacillation by eloping with George Farr, leaving Margaret Powers with the realization that Mahon may die unwed. Margaret asks Emmy whether she would marry Mahon, but Emmy refuses impulsively, waiting painfully, and in vain, to be asked again. Then, in an act of compassion less for Mahon than for his father, Margaret marries Mahon herself, symbolically repeating her original marriage, and becoming twice a widow at twenty-four.

Mahon dies following a brilliant and vivid scene in which he suddenly recovers his memory of the moment he was shot down. His past and present now connected, he regains his vision, recognizes his father for a moment, and dies with the explanation, “That’s how it happened.” His death brings the disintegration of the group orbiting around him, the most significant and painful breach being that between Margaret and Joe. The novel closes with Joe and the Rector walking through the countryside at dusk, listening to the singing of blacks at a church service and feeling dust in their shoes.

The Characters

Soldiers’ Pay reveals clearly the nature of Faulkner’s mastery of characterization, the genius with which he conjures in the reader’s mind vivid and convincing characters. His technique combines luminous detail with understatement: A few significant strokes are often sufficient to bring a character to life. This method invites the reader to become a cocreator of the character, allowing him to project himself into the narrative and to supply with his own imagination the missing details.

In addition, Faulkner brings the reader into the narrative by involving him in the points of view of the characters themselves: A character is seen primarily as others in the narrative see him. For example, Donald Mahon is not described from an objective, omniscient point of view when he first appears in the novel. Rather, the reader sees him as Julian Lowe first does: “He saw a belt and wings, he rose and met a young face with a dreadful scar across his brow.” Similarly, when Jones sees a photograph of Mahon as a boy, the narrative lets the reader in on his perspective: “The boy was about eighteen and coatless: beneath unruly hair, Jones saw a thin face with a delicate pointed chin and wild, soft eyes.” The subjective, impressionistic manner in which characters are rendered is also clearly demonstrated by Lowe’s description of Margaret Powers: He remarks on “her pallid distinction, her black hair, the red scar of her mouth, her slim dark dress,” a description which becomes even more quintessential a few pages later, where she is imagined as “tall and red and white and black, beautiful.”

The narrator does not restrict himself exclusively to the points of view of the characters, however, and reserves the freedom to add levels of description and symbolism which the characters themselves do not provide. The narrator, for example, compares Margaret Powers to an Aubrey Beardsley drawing, acknowledging that neither Lowe nor Gilligan could have made that connection. More typically, the narrator will compare his characters to animals, nymphs, trees, and flowers in an effort to enrich their symbolic texture. The Rector, for example, is once described as a “laurelled Jove,” whose “great laugh boomed like bells in the sunlight, sent the sparrows like gusty leaves whirling.” In his garden, the Rector is a kind of wood-god, whose arm lies “heavy and solid as an oak branch across Jones’ shoulder.” Jones himself is explicitly compared to goats and satyrs: “Jones’ eyes were clear and yellow, obscene and old in sin as a goat’s”; while Cecily is often compared to trees: “A poplar, vain and pliant, trying attitude after attitude, gesture after gesture. . . . She bent sweetly as a young tree.” As always, Faulkner’s technique is designed to render the felt moment of experience, the perceiving subject’s momentary impression: Jones’s “yellow eyes washed over her warm and clear as urine.” Cecily’s “voice was rough, like a tangle of golden wires.”

Faulkner is a master at rendering his characters’ exteriors; nevertheless, Soldiers’ Pay also reveals his growing technical mastery of psychological realism, his ability to individuate his characters from within. Each character is associated with a recurrent stylistic pattern, a verbal motif that is meant to express his most intimate desires, his most secret pains. Beneath the surface of the Rector’s embattled, pathetic optimism, for example, runs the poignant, silent refrain, “This was Donald, my son. He is dead.” Margaret Powers laments her dead husband and expresses her strained ambivalence with the recurrent phrase, “No, no, good-bye, dear dead Dick, ugly dead Dick.” George Farr’s memory of Cecily’s naked body becomes an obsessive image, rendered as “her body, like a little silver water sweetly dividing.” With such verbal motifs, Faulkner effectively reveals the dynamic of his characters’ inner lives.

Critical Context

With his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, written in New Orleans in 1925 under the encouragement of Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner emerged from a diverse apprenticeship in poetry, graphic arts, and the writing of prose sketches and stories, to begin one of the world’s great novel-writing careers. The work of the young novelist, Soldiers’ Pay has been charged with containing overwritten passages, inadequate structural principles, and strained dialogue. Nevertheless, the novel is a major document of Faulkner’s developing genius, and in its own right a well-crafted, often brilliantly written work of literary art.

Moreover, in its themes, techniques, characters, and structural principles, Soldiers’ Pay prefigures many of the masterpieces to follow. As a central though “absent” structural principle, for example, Donald Mahon hints at the treatment of Caddie Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying (1930); as inarticulate victim, he suggests also Benjy Compson of The Sound and the Fury and Ike Snopes of The Hamlet (1940). Cecily Saunders and Margaret Powers are prototypes of Temple Drake of both Sanctuary (1931) and Requiem for a Nun (1951), while the Rector Joseph Mahon prefigures in many respects Gail Hightower of Light in August (1932). In its concern for war and aviation, Soldiers’ Pay contains narrative elements to be more fully developed in Sartoris (1929), Pylon (1935), and A Fable (1954).

With Soldiers’ Pay, Faulkner established himself as one of the most gifted and promising young writers in America. As the British novelist and critic Arnold Bennett wrote on June 26, 1930:

Faulkner is the coming man. He has inexhaustible invention, powerful imagination, a wondrous gift of characterization, a finished skill in dialogue; and he writes, generally, like an angel. None of the arrived American stars can surpass him in style when he is at his best.

Bibliography

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1974. Once criticized for being too detailed (the two-volume edition is some two thousand pages) this biography begins before Faulkner’s birth with ancestors such as William Clark Falkner, author of The White Rose of Memphis, and traces the writer’s career from a precocious poet to America’s preeminent novelist.

Brodhead, Richard H., ed. Faulkner: New Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983. One volume in the Twentieth Century Views series under the general editorship of Maynard Mack, offering nearly a dozen essays by a variety of Faulkner scholars. Among them are Irving Howe’s “Faulkner and the Negroes,” first published in the early 1950’s, and Cleanth Brooks’s “Vision of Good and Evil” from Samuel E. Balentine’s The Hidden God (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1983). Contains a select bibliography.

Cox, Leland H., ed. William Faulkner: Biographical and Reference Guide. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1982.

Cox, Leland H., ed. William Faulkner: Critical Collection. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1982. These companion volumes constitute a handy reference to most of Faulkner’s work. The first is a reader’s guide which provides a long biographical essay, cross-referenced by many standard sources. Next come fifteen “critical introductions” to the novels and short stories, each with plot summaries and critical commentary particularly useful to the student reader. A three-page chronology of the events of Faulkner’s life is attached. The second volume contains a short potpourri, with Faulkner’s “Statements,” a Paris Review interview, and an essay on Mississippi for Holiday magazine among them. The bulk of the book is an essay and excerpt collection with contributions by a number of critics including Olga Vickery, Michael Millgate, and Warren Beck. Includes a list of works by Faulkner including Hollywood screenplays.

Gray, Richard. The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1994. A noted Faulkner scholar, Gray closely integrates the life and work. Part 1 suggests a method of approaching Faulkner’s life; part 2 concentrates on his apprentice years; part 3 explains his discovery of Yoknapatawpha and the transformation of his region into his fiction; part 4 deals with his treatment of past and present; part 5 addresses his exploration of place; part 6 analyzes his final novels, reflecting on his creation of Yoknapatawpha. Includes family trees, chronology, notes, and a bibliography.

Vickery, Olga W. The Novels of William Faulkner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959. This volume, with its comprehensive treatment of the novels, has established itself as a classic, a terminus a quo for later citicism. The chapter on The Sound and the Fury, providing an analysis of the relation between theme and structure in the book, remains relevant today despite intensive study of the topic.

Volpe, Edmond L. A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner. New York: Noonday Press, 1964. While many books and articles have contributed to clearing up the murkiest spots in Faulkner, the beginning student or general reader will applaud this volume. In addition to analysis of structure, themes, and characters, offers critical discussion of the novels in an appendix providing “chronologies of scenes, paraphrase of scene fragments put in chronological order, and guides to scene shifts.”

Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. A distinguished historian divides his book into sections on Faulkner’s ancestry, his biography, and his writing. Includes notes and genealogy.