When I first bought the first volume of William Faulkner’s novels from the Library of America series, I was hesitatant to start reading his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, because of a random review that I read on LibraryThing. I was put off for months, despite having absolutely loved As I Lay Dying. When I found myself suffering a bit of reader burnout I decided to finally get stuck into Faulkner. From this I’ve learned a valuable lesson: don’t always trust the reviews of people whose literary taste you’re not familiar with. Soldiers’ Pay may not reach the soaring heights of Faulkner’s later masterpieces, but there is a lot to admire in his debut novel.
Soldiers’ Pay opens with a bunch of drunken soldiers returning home by train after the war. Joe Gilligan and Julian Lowe are seated across from the horrifically scarred Donald Mahon and a young woman, Margaret Powers, also finds herself incapable of leaving the injured Mahon to fend for himself. She and Joe prepare to take him home to Georgia, where a flighty and unfaithful fiancée, Cecily Saunders, and worried, oblivious father await him. As they, and other townsfolk, adjust to life touched, broken and irrevocably altered by World War I, Faulkner crafts a commanding meditation on the cycles of sex, death and human relationships.
“It isn’t me that made you lose a night’s sleep. I just happened to be the first woman you ever knew doing something you thought only a man would do. You had nice fixed ideas about women and I upset them. Wasn’t that it?”
The style is undeniably Faulkneresque. The opening chapters have soldier songs interrupted by dreamy descriptions of the landscape, intercut with the drunken dialogue between the characters. It’s an effective technique, intentionally jarring. Characters’ thoughts mix with the words they speak, revealing the contradictions between the two. The style becomes more functional as the story progresses, but does occasionally return to the effectively dramatic style. Admittedly, some passages do read rather awkwardly, perhaps too overwritten and drifting from the focus of the novel. Faulkner convincingly utilizes repetition: the rector father repeating “This was Donald, my son. He is dead.” as he comes to term with the inevitability of his son’s death, and the fixation of certain characters to their memories – Emmy’s recollection of her midnight liaison with Donald, Margaret’s guilt about her dead soldier husband, George’s obsession with Cecily – echoing the inescapable return for these characters to their defining moments. The repetition falters and loses effect as Faulkner chooses to repeat descriptions of landscape, admirable turns of phrase that become tedious with their reiteration.
Like Vardaman in As I Lay Dying, young Robert Saunders’ voice and thoughts express the same youthful inability to comprehend the complexities of the adult world. I am utterly in love with a scene from the novel, relatively inconsequential to the story, of Robert hiding in the bushes listening to Margaret and Joe talk, seeking his revenge for their having spooked him in front of his friends, as he overhears and misinterprets their conversation. Faulkner plays with our awareness of his characters, giving each of them their own unique perspective, slowly revealing their essential core and showing the uselessness of snap judgement. It is quite beautiful. The central relationship between Joe and Margaret is also really tender, very real, complicated by her considered decision to marry Mahon when Cecily cannot go through with marrying the invalid. Their parting scene is, to use a cliched term which doesn’t at all accurately sum up how distraught this scene made me, heart wrenching. Both this and Margaret’s epistolary relationship with Lowe are poignant reflections on the state of flux of human relationships.
In wartime one lives in today. Yesterday is past and tomorrow may never come.
Though showing only hints of Faulkner’s formidable talents, Soldiers’ Pay is a powerful look at the intricacies of human relationships, the breaking of the spirit in the wake of World War I, and the centrality of sex and death to our existence. It manages to be humane, sensitive and with moments of elegantly poetic and perceptive prose. If Soldiers’ Pay is to be considered a minor work in the oeuvre of a master I have a lot to look forward to.
