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 They meet a scarred, lethargic, and withdrawn fighter pilot, Donald Mahon, who was presumed dead by his family.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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“I know it,” he answered grimly. “Get in.”
“Don’t, George, don’t! I must go back.”
“Well, when can I see you?”
Her mouth trembled. “Oh, I don’t know. Please, George. Don’t you see how miserable I am?” Her eyes became blue, dark; the sunlight made bold the wrenched thrust of her body, her thin taut arm. “Please, George.”
“Are you going to get in or do you want me to pick you up and put you in?”
“I’m going to cry in a minute. You’d better let me go.”
“Oh, damn. Why, sugar, I didn’t mean it that way. I just wanted to see you. We’ve got to see each other if it’s going to be all off with us. Come on, I’ve been good to you.”
She relaxed. “Well, but just around the block then. I’ve got to get back to them.” She raised a foot to the running board. “Promise?” she insisted.
“Sure. Round the block it is. I won’t run off with you if you say not.”
She got in and as they drove off she looked quickly to the house. There was a face in the window, a round face.
IVGeorge turned from the street and drove down a quiet lane bordered by trees, between walls covered with honeysuckle. He stopped the car and she said swiftly:
“No, no, George! Drive on.”
But he cut the switch. “Please,” she repeated. He turned in his seat.
“Cecily, you are kidding me, aren’t you?”
She turned the switch and tried to reach the starter with her foot. He caught her hands, holding her. “Look at me.”
Her eyes grew blue again with foreboding.
“You are kidding me, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. Oh, George, it all happened so suddenly! I don’t know what to think. When we were in there talking about him it all seemed so grand for Donald to be coming back, in spite of that woman with him; and to be engaged to a man who will be famous when he gets here—oh, it seemed then that I did love him: it was exactly the thing to do. But now … I’m just not ready to be married yet. And he’s been gone so long, and to take up with another woman on his way to me—I don’t know what to do. I—I’m going to cry,” she ended suddenly, putting her crooked arm on the seat-back and burying her face in her elbow. He put his arm around her shoulders and tried to draw her to him. She raised her hands between them straightening her arms.
“No, no, take me back.”
“But, Cecily—”
“You mustn’t! Don’t you know I’m engaged to be married? He’ll probably want to be married tomorrow, and I’ll have to do it.”
“But you can’t do that. You aren’t in love with him.”
“But I’ve got to, I tell you!”
“Are you in love with him?”
“Take me back to Uncle Joe’s. Please.”
He was the stronger and at last he held her close, feeling her small bones, her frail taut body beneath her dress. “Are you in love with him?” he repeated.
She burrowed her face into his coat.
“Look at me.” She refused to lift her face and he slipped his hand under her chin, raising it. “Are you?”
“Yes, yes,” she said wildly, staring at him. “Take me back!”
“You are lying. You aren’t going to marry him.”
She was weeping. “Yes, I am. I’ve got to. He expects it and Uncle Joe expects it. I must, I tell you.”
“Darling, you can’t. Don’t you love me? You know you do. You can’t marry him.” She stopped struggling and lay against him, crying. “Come on, say you won’t marry him.”
“George, I can’t,” she said hopelessly. “Don’t you see I have got to marry him?”
Young and miserable they clung to each other. The slumbrous afternoon lay about them in the empty lane. Even the sparrows seemed drowsy and from the spire of the church pigeons were remote and monotonous, unemphatic as sleep. She raised her face.
“Kiss me, George.”
He tasted tears: their faces were coolly touching. She drew her head back, searching his face. “That was the last time, George.”
“No, no,” he objected, tightening his arms. She resisted a moment, then kissed him passionately.
“Darling!”
“Darling!”
She straightened up, dabbing at her eyes with his handkerchief. “There! I feel better now. Take me home, kind sir.”
“But, Cecily,” he protested, trying to embrace her again. She put him aside coolly.
“Not any more, ever. Take me home, like a nice boy.”
“But, Cecily—”
“Do you want me to get out and walk? I can, you know: it isn’t far.”
He started the engine and drove on in a dull youthful sorrow. She patted at her hair, her fingers bloomed slimly in it, and they turned on to the street again. As she descended at the gate he made a last despairing attempt.
“Cecily, for God’s sake!”
She looked over her shoulder at his stricken face. “Don’t be silly, George. Of course I’ll see you again. I’m not married—yet.”
Her white dress in the sun was an unbearable shimmer sloping to her body’s motion and she passed from sunlight to shadow, mounting the steps. At the door she turned, flashed him a smile and waved her hand. Then her white dress faded beyond a fanlight of muted color dim with age and lovely with lack of washing, leaving George to stare at the empty maw of the house in hope and despair and baffled youthful lust.
VJones at the window saw them drive away. His round face was enigmatic as a god’s, his clear obscene eyes showed no emotion. You are good, you are, he thought in grudging, unillusioned admiration. I hand it to you. He was still musing upon her when the mean-looking black-haired woman, interrupting the rector’s endless reminiscences of his son’s boyhood and youth, suggested that it was time to go to the station.
The divine became aware of the absence of Cecily, who was at that moment sitting in a stationary motorcar in an obscure
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