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 They meet a scarred, lethargic, and withdrawn fighter pilot, Donald Mahon, who was presumed dead by his family.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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Cadet Lowe, waking, remarked morning, and Gilligan entering the room, dressed. Gilligan looking at him said:
“How you coming, ace?”
Mahon yet slept beneath his scar, upon a chair his tunic. Above the left pocket, wings swept silkenly, breaking downward above a ribbon. Purple, white, purple.
“Oh, God,” Lowe groaned.
Gilligan with the assurance of physical well-being stood in brisk arrested motion.
“As you were, fellow. I’m going out and have some breakfast sent up. You stay here until Loot wakes, huh?”
Cadet Lowe tasting his sour mouth groaned again. Gilligan regarded him. “Oh, you’ll stay all right, won’t you? I’ll be back soon.”
The door closed after him and Lowe, thinking of water, rose and took his wavering way across the room to a water pitcher. Carafe. Like giraffe or like café? he wondered. The water was good, but lowering the vessel he felt immediately sick. After a while he recaptured the bed.
He dozed, forgetting his stomach, and remembering it he dreamed and waked. He could feel his head like a dull inflation, then he could distinguish the foot of his bed and thinking again of water he turned on a pillow and saw another identical bed and the suave indication of a dressing-gown motionless beside it. Leaning over Mahon’s scarred supineness, she said: “Don’t get up.”
Lowe said, I won’t, closing his eyes, tasting his mouth, seeing her long slim body against his red eyelids, opening his eyes to light and her thigh shaped and falling away into an impersonal fabric. With an effort he might have seen her ankles. Her feet will be there, he thought, unable to accomplish the effort and behind his closed eyes he thought of saying something which would leave his mouth on hers. Oh, God, he thought, feeling that no one had been so sick, imagining that she would say I love you, too. If I had wings, and a scar. … To hell with officers, he thought, sleeping again:
To hell with kee-wees, anyway. I wouldn’t be a goddam kee-wee. Rather be a sergeant. Rather be a mechanic. Crack up, Cadet. Hell, yes, Why not? War’s over. Glad. Glad. Oh, God. His scar: his wings. Last time.
He was briefly in a Jenny again, conscious of lubricating oil and a slow gracious restraint of braced plane surfaces, feeling an air blast and feeling the stick in his hand, watching bobbing rocker arms on the horizon, laying her nose on the horizon like a sighted rifle. Christ, what do I care? seeing her nose rise until the horizon was hidden, seeing the arc of a descending wing expose it again, seeing her become abruptly stationary while a mad world spinning vortexed about his seat. “Sure, what do you care?” asked a voice and waking he saw Gilligan beside him with a glass of whisky.
“Drink her down, General,” said Gilligan, holding the glass under his nose.
“Oh, God, move it, move it.”
“Come on, now; drink her down: you’ll feel better. The Loot is up and at ’em, and Mrs. Powers. Whatcher get so drunk for, ace?”
“Oh, God, I don’t know,” answered Cadet Lowe, rolling his head in anguish. “Lemme alone.”
Gilligan said: “Come on, drink her, now.” Cadet Lowe said, Go away passionately.
“Lemme alone; I’ll be all right.”
“Sure you will. Soon as you drink this.”
“I can’t. Go away.”
“You got to. You want I should break your neck?” asked Gilligan kindly, bringing his face up, kind and ruthless. Lowe eluded him and Gilligan reaching under his body, raised him.
“Lemme lie down,” Lowe implored.
“And stay here forever? We got to go somewheres. We can’t stay here.”
“But I can’t drink.” Cadet Lowe’s interior coiled passionately: an ecstasy. “For God’s sake, let me alone.”
“Ace,” said Gilligan, holding his head up, “you got to. You might just as well drink this yourself. If you don’t, I’ll put it down your throat, glass and all. Here, now.”
The glass was between his lips, so he drank, gulping, expecting to gag. But gulping, the stuff became immediately pleasant. It was like new life in him. He felt a kind sweat and Gilligan removed the empty glass. Mahon, dressed except for his belt, sat beside a table. Gilligan vanished through a door and he rose, feeling shaky but quite fit. He took another drink. Water thundered in the bathroom and Gilligan returning said briskly: “Atta boy.”
He pushed Lowe into the bathroom. “In you go, ace,” he added.
Feeling the sweet bright needles of water burning his shoulders, watching his body slipping an endless silver sheath of water, smelling soap: beyond that wall was her room, where she was, tall and red and white and black, beautiful. I’ll tell her at once, he decided, sawing his hard young body with a rough towel. Glowing, he brushed his teeth and hair, then he had another drink under Mahon’s quiet inverted stare and Gilligan’s quizzical one. He dressed, hearing her moving in her room. Maybe she’s thinking of me, he told himself, swiftly donning his khaki.
He caught the officer’s kind, puzzled gaze and the man said:
“How are you?”
“Never felt better after my solo,” he answered, wanting to sing. “Say, I left my hat in her room last night,” he told Gilligan. “Guess I better get it.”
“Here’s your hat,” Gilligan informed him unkindly, producing it.
“Well, then, I want to talk to her. Whatcher going to say about that?” asked Cadet Lowe, swept and garnished and belligerent.
“Why, sure, General,” Gilligan agreed readily. “She can’t refuse one of the saviors of her country.” He knocked on her door. “Mrs. Powers?”
“Yes?” her voice was muffled.
“General Pershing here wants to talk to you. … Sure. … All right.” He turned about, opening the door. “In you go, ace.”
Lowe, hating him, ignored his wink, entering. She sat in bed with a breakfast tray upon her knees. She was not dressed and Lowe looked delicately away. But she said blandly:
“Cheerio, Cadet!
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