Soldiers’ Pay by William Faulkner (digital e reader txt) 📕
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Soldiers’ Pay is William Faulkner’s first published novel. It begins with a train journey on which two American soldiers, Joe Gilligan and Julian Lowe, are returning from the First World War. They meet a scarred, lethargic, and withdrawn fighter pilot, Donald Mahon, who was presumed dead by his family. The novel continues to focus on Mahon and his slow deterioration, and the various romantic complications that arise upon his return home.
Faulkner drew inspiration for this novel from his own experience of the First World War. In the spring of 1918, he moved from his hometown, Oxford, Mississippi, to Yale and worked as an accountant until meeting a Canadian Royal Air Force pilot who encouraged him to join the R.A.F. He then traveled to Toronto, pretended to be British (he affected a British accent and forged letters from British officers and a made-up Reverend), and joined the R.A.F. in the hopes of becoming a hero. But the war ended before he was able to complete his flight training, and, like Julian Lowe, he never witnessed actual combat. Upon returning to Mississippi, he began fabricating various heroic stories about his time in the air force (like narrowly surviving a plane crash with broken legs and metal plates under the skin), and proudly strode around Oxford in his uniform.
Faulkner was encouraged to write Soldiers’ Pay by his close friend and fellow writer Sherwood Anderson, whom Faulkner met in New Orleans. Anderson wrote in his Memoirs that he went “personally to Horace Liveright”—Soldiers’ Pay was originally published by Boni & Liveright—“to plead for the book.”
Though the novel was a commercial failure at the time of its publication, Faulkner’s subsequent fame has ensured its long-term success.
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- Author: William Faulkner
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“Goodness, I’m beginning to be afraid of you: you know too much. You are right: my husband was killed last year.”
Gilligan looking at her said: “Rotten luck.” And she tasting again a faint, warm sorrow, bowed her head to her arched clasped knees.
“Rotten luck. That’s exactly what it was, what everything is. Even sorrow is a fake, now.” She raised her face, her pallid face beneath her black hair, scarred with her mouth. “Joe, that was the only sincere word of condolence I ever had. Come here.”
Gilligan went to her and she took his hand, holding it against her cheek. Then she removed it, shaking back her hair.
“You are a good fellow, Joe. If I felt like marrying anybody now, I’d take you. I’m sorry I played that trick, Joe.”
“Trick?” repeated Gilligan, gazing upon her black hair. Then he said Oh, non-committally.
“But we haven’t decided what to do with that poor boy in there,” she said with brisk energy, clasping her blanket. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Are you sleepy?”
“Not me,” he answered. “I don’t think I ever want to sleep again.”
“Neither do I.” She moved across the bed, propping her back against the head board. “Lie down here and let’s decide on something.”
“Sure,” agreed Gilligan. “I better take off my shoes, first. Ruin the hotel’s bed.”
“To hell with the hotel’s bed,” she told him. “Put your feet on it.”
Gilligan lay down, shielding his eyes with his hand. After a time she said:
“Well, what’s to be done?”
“We got to get him home first,” Gilligan said. “I’ll wire his folks tomorrow—his old man is a preacher, see. But it’s that damn girl bothers me. He sure ought to be let die in peace. But what else to do I don’t know. I know about some things,” he explained, “but after all women can guess and be nearer right than whatever I could decide on.”
“I don’t think anyone could do much more than you. I’d put my money on you every time.”
He moved, shading his eyes again. “I dunno: I am good so far, but then you got to have more’n just sense. Say, why don’t you come with the general and me?”
“I intend to, Joe.” Her voice came from beyond his shielding hand. “I think I intended to all the time.”
(She is in love with him.) But he only said:
“Good for you. But I knowed you’d do the right thing. All right with your people, is it?”
“Yes. But what about money?”
“Money?”
“Well … for what he might need. You know. He might get sick anywhere.”
“Lord, I cleaned up in a poker game and I ain’t had time to spend it. Money’s all right. That ain’t any question,” he said roughly.
“Yes, money’s all right. You know I have my husband’s insurance.”
He lay silent, shielding his eyes. His khaki legs marring the bed ended in clumsy shoes. She nursed her knees, huddling in her blanket. After a space she said:
“Sleep, Joe?”
“It’s a funny world, ain’t it?” he asked irrelevantly, not moving.
“Funny?”
“Sure. Soldier dies and leaves you money, and you spend the money helping another soldier die comfortable. Ain’t that funny?”
“I suppose so. … Everything is funny. Horribly funny.”
“Anyway, it’s nice to have it all fixed,” he said after a while. “He’ll be glad you are coming along.”
(Dear dead Dick.) (Mahon under his scar, sleeping.) (Dick, my dearest one.)
She felt the head board against her head, through her hair, felt the bones of her long shanks against her arms clasping them, nursing them, saw the smug, impersonal room like an appointed tomb (in which how many, many discontents, desires, passions, had died?) high above a world of joy and sorrow and lust for living, high above impervious trees occupied solely with maternity and spring. (Dick, Dick. Dead, ugly Dick. Once you were alive and young and passionate and ugly, after a time you were dead, dear Dick: that flesh, that body, which I loved and did not love; your beautiful, young, ugly body, dear Dick, become now a seething of worms, like new milk. Dear Dick.)
Gilligan, Joseph, late a private, a democrat by enlistment and numbered like a convict, slept beside her, his boots (given him gratis by democrats of a higher rating among democrats) innocent and awkward upon a white spread of rented cloth, immaculate and impersonal.
She evaded her blanket and reaching her arm swept the room with darkness. She slipped beneath the covers, settling her cheek on her palm. Gilligan undisturbed snored, filling the room with a homely, comforting sound.
(Dick, dear, ugly dead. …)
IVIn the next room Cadet Lowe waked from a chaotic dream, opening his eyes and staring with detachment, impersonal as God, at lights burning about him. After a time, he recalled his body, remembering where he was and by an effort he turned his head. In the other bed the man slept beneath his terrible face. (I am Julian Lowe, I eat, I digest, evacuate: I have flown. This man … this man here, sleeping beneath his scar. … Where do we touch? Oh, God, oh, God: knowing his own body, his stomach.)
Raising his hand he felt his own undamaged brow. No scar there. Near him upon a chair was his hat severed by a white band, upon the table the other man’s cap with its cloth crown sloping backward from a bronze initialed crest.
He tasted his sour mouth, knowing his troubled stomach. To have been him! he moaned. Just to be him. Let him take this sound body of mine! Let him take it. To have got wings on my breast, to have wings; and to have got his scar, too, I would take death tomorrow. Upon a chair Mahon’s tunic evinced above the left breast pocket wings breaking from an initialed circle beneath a crown, tipping downward in an arrested embroidered sweep; a symbolized desire.
To be him, to have gotten wings, but to have got his scar too! Cadet Lowe turned to the wall with passionate disappointment like a gnawing fox at his vitals.
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