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 They meet a scarred, lethargic, and withdrawn fighter pilot, Donald Mahon, who was presumed dead by his family.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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“You were saying, sir”—still watching her oblivious shallow face—“as Miss Saunders so charmingly came in, that I am too specious. But one must always generalize about fornication. Only after—”
“Mr. Jones!” the rector exclaimed heavily.
“—the fornication is committed should one talk about it at all, and then only to generalize, to become—in your words—specious. He who kisses and tells is not very much of a fellow, is he?”
“Mr. Jones,” the rector remonstrated.
“Mr. Jones!” she echoed. “What a terrible man you are! Really, Uncle Joe—”
Jones interrupted viciously. “As far as the kiss itself goes, women do not particularly care who does the kissing. All they are interested in is the kiss itself.”
“Mr. Jones!” she repeated, staring at him, then looking quickly away. She shuddered.
“Come, come, sir. There are ladies present.” The rector achieved his aphorism.
Jones pushed his plate from him, Emmy’s raw and formless hand removed it and here was a warm golden brow crowned with strawberries. Dam’f I look at her, he swore, and so he did. Her gaze was remote and impersonal, green and cool as sea water, and Jones turned his eyes first. She turned to the rector, talking smoothly about flowers. He was politely ignored and he moodily engaged his spoon as Emmy appeared again.
Emmy emanated a thin hostility and staring from Jones to the girl she said:
“Lady to see you, Uncle Joe.”
The rector poised his spoon. “Who is it, Emmy?”
“I dunno. I never saw her before. She’s waiting in the study.”
“Has she had lunch? Ask her in here.”
(She knows I am watching her. Jones knew exasperation and a puerile lust.)
“She don’t want anything to eat. She said not to disturb you until you had finished dinner. You better go in and see what she wants.” Emmy retreated.
The rector wiped his mouth and rose. “I suppose I must. You young people sit here until I return. Call Emmy if you want anything.”
Jones sat in sullen silence, turning a glass in his fingers. At last she looked at his bent ugly face.
“So you are unmarried, as well as famous,” she remarked.
“Famous because I’m unmarried,” he replied darkly.
“And courteous because of which?”
“Either one you like.”
“Well, frankly, I prefer courtesy.”
“Do you often get it?”
“Always … eventually.” He made no reply and she continued: “Don’t you believe in marriage?”
“Yes, as long as there are no women in it.” She shrugged indifferently. Jones could not bear seeming a fool to anyone as shallow as he considered her and he blurted, wanting to kick himself: “You don’t like me, do you?”
“Oh, I like anyone who believes there may be something he doesn’t know,” she replied without interest.
“What do you mean by that?” (are they green or gray?) Jones was a disciple of the cult of boldness with women. He rose and the table wheeled smoothly as he circled it: he wished faintly that he were more graceful. Those thrice unhappy trousers! You can’t blame her, he thought with fairness. What would I think had she appeared in one of her grandma’s mother hubbards? He remarked her reddish dark hair and the delicate slope of her shoulder. (I’ll put my hand there and let it slip down her arm as she turns.)
Without looking up, she said suddenly: “Did Uncle Joe tell you about Donald?” (Oh hell, thought Jones.) “Isn’t it funny,” her chair scraped to her straightening knees, “we both thought of moving at the same time?” She rose, her chair intervened woodenly and Jones stood ludicrous and foiled. “You take mine and I’ll take yours,” she added, moving around the table.
“You bitch,” said Jones evenly and her green-blue eyes took him sweetly as water.
“What made you say that?” she asked quietly. Jones, having to an extent eased his feelings, thought he saw a recurring interest in her expression. (I was right, he gloated.)
“You know why I said that.”
“It’s funny how few men know that women like to be talked to that way,” she remarked irrelevantly.
I wonder if she loves someone? I guess not—like a tiger loves meat. “I am not like other men,” he told her.
He thought he saw derision in her brief glance, but she merely yawned delicately. At last he had her classified in the animal kingdom. Hamadryad, a slim jeweled one.
“Why doesn’t George come for me!” she said as if in answer to his unspoken speculation, patting her mouth with the tips of petulant, delicate fingers. “Isn’t it boring, waiting for someone?”
“Yes. Who is George, may I ask?”
“Certainly, you may ask.”
“Well, who is he?” (I don’t like her type, anyway.) “I had gathered that you were pining for the late lamented.”
“The late lamented?”
“That fox-faced Henry or Oswald or something.”
“Oh, Donald. Do you mean Donald?”
“Surely. Let him be Donald, then.”
She regarded him impersonally. (I can’t even make her angry, he thought fretfully.) “Do you know, you are impossible.”
“All right. So I am,” he answered with anger. “But then I wasn’t engaged to Donald. And George is not calling for me.”
“What makes you so angry? Because I won’t let you put your hands on me?”
“My dear woman, if I had wanted to put my hands on you I would have done it.”
“Yes?” Her rising inflection was a polite maddening derision.
“Certainly. Don’t you believe it?” his own voice gave him courage.
“I don’t know … but what good would it do to you?”
“No good at all. That’s the reason I don’t want to.”
Her green eyes took him again. Sparse old silver on a buffet shadowed heavily under a high fanlight of colored glass identical with the one above the entrance, her fragile white dress across the table from him: he could imagine her long subtle legs, like Atalanta’s reft of running.
“Why do you tell yourself lies?” she asked with interest.
“Same reason you do.”
“I?”
“Surely. You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.”
“Do you know,” she remarked with speculation, “I believe I hate you.”
“I don’t doubt it. I know damn well I hate you.”
She moved in her chair, sloping the light now across her
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