Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

(The Faulkner Project) Soldiers’ Pay a novel by William Faulkner.  Library of America William Faulkner, Novels 1926-1929.  pp. 1-257. ***1/2

I’ve always been haunted by the fact that my father read Faulkner at the end of his life.  He was only 47 when he died, and had had leukemia for six years; in the final years of his life he was in and out of hospitals a lot, to the point where we had a system for visiting, some member of the family being there most of the day.  The hospital was in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, near the universities, and one day he asked me to go to one of the bookstores on Fifth Avenue and buy him a book.  There were two superb bookstores there, the Pitt Bookstore and (my favorite) Jay’s Bookstall; both would have been well stocked with Faulkner.  He had torn out the page from a paperback that listed all of Faulkner’s works, and crossed off the ones he had read; only three titles were left.  So I went off on that errand and managed to find one or two of the books.  I was inordinately proud of that, somehow (I was fourteen or fifteen).  I think I was just glad that I could finally do something for him; I felt so helpless sitting there on those visits.  And I loved bookstores.

My father was always a great reader (one family story was that, in the year when Gone With the Wind was published, he got the book for Christmas and sat in a chair reading it all day, until it was time for dinner), but not a book collector, though we had plenty of Faulkner around.  I’ve always wondered why Faulkner in particular.  He read As I Lay Dying very close to the time when he actually lay dying.  And I think, having just read that novel and Sanctuary because I owned the Library of America volume, I have some understanding of why.  As I Lay Dying is a masterpiece; there’s no reason to wonder why he read that.  Sanctuary, however, is problematic; it has a vile subject, and its composition gave Faulkner fits, in the original manuscript and the galleys.  But as much as I winced at parts of that book, I thought I understood my father’s obsession.  Faulkner was at a different level from most of the literary world.  There are other American writers at that level, (Toni Morrison comes to mind) but not many[1].  I think my father wanted his final forays into fiction to be a deep encounter with life in all its magnificence and grief and difficulty.  Faulkner was the most dependable place to find that.

So I’ve decided to read Faulkner again, more systematically this time.  I’m not saying I’m at the end of my life (though who knows?), but I read him when I was young and struggled with a lot of it.  I had the feeling then that there was a mammoth world of literature out there and I had to read all of it.  I no longer have that feeling.  I’ve been at it for nearly sixty years and have barely scratched the surface.  But I could do a lot worse than Faulkner, and this time through I can take my time.  And I have the beautiful Library of America volumes to do it.

My father literally read everything; he had early paperback volumes of both Soldiers Pay and Mosquitoes, though those books are not part of the Yoknapatawpha saga and in that way are before Faulkner became Faulkner.  But I’m convinced that even the early work of a great writer is worth reading.[2]  So I decided to start at the beginning.

The Faulkner presented in the LOA chronology[3] seemed to be floundering in his early life.  (One of the things I’m struck by in the cases of both Hemingway and Faulkner is how young they were when they did some of their greatest work.  Hemingway had done a huge amount by the time he was thirty.  And Faulkner wrote what I still consider his greatest novel—we’ll see if all this re-reading changes my mind—when  he was 31.)  He attended the University of Mississippi for a little while but dropped out.  He famously worked at the post office and had that unforgettable line about why he quit.[4]  He traveled some, to New Haven and New York, later to New Orleans and Europe.  He was writing poetry and trying to publish for much of this time.  He was in love with Estelle Oldham, but her parents opposed the match (as who wouldn’t; his prospects were not good), so she married a lawyer for a few years before eventually divorcing him and marrying Faulkner.  In New Orleans he fell in love with a young sculptress, Helen Baird, and dedicated his second novel to her.

He also, like Hemingway, tried to get involved in the First World War, traveled to Toronto to enlist in Britain’s Royal Air Force, but hadn’t gotten past ground school by the time the war ended.  When he returned to Mississippi he wore his uniform around town and gave people the impression he had been shot down.  I seem to remember reading that he even carried a cane and walked with a limp.

Soldiers’ Pay, then, is his war novel, and a strange book it is.  It opens on a train that is traveling through the countryside with various veterans of war.  Among them is Donald Mahon, a man who actually was shot down and sustained a terrible disfiguring wound and head injury that will eventually kill him (I suppose that’s a spoiler, but we understand from the beginning that this man is dying).  A war widow named Mrs. Powers and a couple of soldiers befriend this veteran and accompany him to his home in Georgia, where his father is a preacher and a flightly young woman named Cecily was engaged to be married to him.  Mahon’s father actually believes he was shot down and died, so his son’s arrival is a huge surprise, and not entirely a happy one, since the young man is in a state almost worse than death.  For some reason, Faulkner sets these scenes in Georgia, though he would have known Mississippi much better.  He seems in his early work to be getting away from his background.

This is a bleak story, showing us the existential dilemma of the generation that Gertrude Stein described as lost.  Mrs. Powers lost her husband in battle, though they had married on short notice and little acquaintance; he was heading off to war so she married him, then never saw him again.  Donald’s most loyal friend is a soldier named Joe Gilligan, who acts as his protector and companion until he dies.  Another soldier named Julian Lowe heads home to California but keeps writing back to Mrs. Powers, believing he’s in love with her.  And Donald himself had a secret sweetheart, a servant girl named Emmy, who had lost her virginity to him before he left and wrote him the whole time he was gone.

All of these people were essentially ruined by the war and by the trauma it created in their lives.  None seems to have anything they want to do once they’ve finished taking care of Mahon.  There’s a weird obnoxious obese man named Januarius Jones who attaches himself to Mahon’s father early on and comes on to every woman who comes near him.  The portrait of men in this book is rather unfortunate.  They seem immature and often misogynistic, with little purpose to their lives.

The author himself writes beautifully at times.  The opening chapter on the train was a mess, with everybody getting drunk and the whole episode seriously incoherent; I was surprised an editor read past that (though Faulkner had met Sherwood Anderson in New York, and the man championed his work[5]).  But Faulkner seems to gain confidence as he goes, and the writing steadily improves.  He trusts more and more in his considerable descriptive powers, and even throws in some stream-of-consciousness here and there, having recently read Joyce.  But world weary and disillusioned young people in an obscure part of Georgia are not  Faulkner’s true subject.  He seems to be honing his skills.  In his second novel he’ll take a foray to bohemian New Orleans.  Then he’ll rediscover the little postage stamp of soil that will give him the true subject of his life and writing.

[1] My brother insists I need to add Henry James to the list.  I’m not so sure.

[2] Toni Morrison—I’ll mention her since I already have—doesn’t seem to have any early work.  I do think she made a real advance with Song of Solomon, but The Bluest Eye doesn’t read like apprentice work; it is a masterful novel in its own right.  She started later than Faulkner, and had spent years as an editor.  She seemed fully formed as a writer when she began.

[3] I’ve read two Faulkner biographies.  I read the two-volume Blotner monstrosity when it came out, and I read a one-volume biography years later by David Minter.  I also read Meta Carpenter’s memoir when it came out; that was a real eye-opener.  There is currently yet another two-volume job by yet another professor.  I’m thinking about it.

[4] “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.”

[5] It’s fascinating what an important part Anderson played in the lives of both Hemingway and Faulkner, though they both moved beyond him (and turned against him).