Who knew that Faulkner could screw up so completely? that the brilliant author of Absalom, Absalom! and As I Lay Dying could start his career off with such a fucking mess of scrambled ideas and no clear vision? Being his first novel, and a novel nearly forgotten by time at that, with even the back-page summary warning the potential buyer it’s no good, should be avoided by all but the Faulkner scholar, I didn’t of course go in expecting a masterpiece, but I was hoping for it to be at least decent, at least a slight bit readable, you know, not this pile of fucking dogshit. I enjoyed the kick-off, the beginning train ride (wreck?) that promised a funny and quirky slapstick war disillusionment story with some slick and prophetic commentary that would be right at home in any contemporary fiction knocking consumerism and suburbiatic post-WWII living, but this ended up being so absurdly out of place—and really, positively unnecessary: you could skip it and lose nothing at all from the experience, much as you could erase the inclusion of 3 or 4 characters and still miss nothing—for once we hit page 50 it’s a soap opera to the end, and a clumsy one at that.
Faulkner seemed to have no idea what sort of novel he was writing—comedy? melodrama?—and if he even cared, I don’t know; Sherwood Anderson told him one day in 1925, Hey, write a book and I’ll get it published, and that’s exactly what he did. Anderson refused to proofread or sample even a line of Soldiers’ Pay for Faulkner before he turned it over to his publishers with the highest of recommendations once the finished manuscript reached his hands (and I assume it was the same way with Faulkner’s second ‘lost’ novel, Mosquitoes). When the book was published in 1926, hardly a soul had anything good to say about it, just another derivative post-war novel, they claimed, and it quickly vanished from print (or so I like to imagine). I’ll give it to Faulkner that, like all his novels, at least as far as I know, the most basic story outline for Soldiers’ Pay sounds terrific: Donald Mahon is declared dead, shot down from the sky in WWI, and as his family deals with the tragedy back home, he stumbles off the local train to surprise his parents and former fiancée, not dead—and yet not exactly alive, neither. More of a shell than anything: his face a grotesque mess of stitches and old gore, brains not altogether there—literally.
(Faulkner himself pretended throughout his life to have been shot down (twice) in the war ‘observing’ for the RAF, although in actuality he joined the RAF at the war’s end because America’s Signal Corps said he was just too dumb to fly for them, and he didn’t get his Toronto wings until after World War I was already over and done with, at which time he went home to New Orleans and refused to take off his uniform for the next six months, showing it off around town and letting all the returning soldiers know he was one of them, with them on the field or in the air over Europe, even when that was simply what he wished he could have been.)
Before he was a novelist, Faulkner was a crummy poet, and it shows. Most of the book, particularly any scenes featuring Donald Mahon’s fiancée Cecily are painfully purple—but not all of it. As with the story, Faulkner didn’t seem to know how the hell to approach writing of whatever the hell he was writing, with the quality and style inconsistently going back and forth, all over the place, the most painful of which is the overly poetic bullshit that takes up the page(s) whenever Cecily is around, and we’re questioning What’s she gonna do? She gonna suffer her altruistic calling and marry this broken and more than likely dying war hero or not?—and that question, unfortunately, is the major focus of Soldiers’ Pay. Sometimes, not often but two or three times, we get a hint of the inimitable style Faulkner would skillfully employ in his future novels and stories, and that’s always a pleasure, a seriously wonderful diversion of the purple melodrama between Cecily and Cecily’s feelings regarding the zombie hero. In total, there are between 10 and 15 pages’ worth of quality in Faulkner’s 221-page debut, but no more.
Donald dies, to spoil it for you, and Cecily marries her second lover, crying out to everyone she’s no longer the good person she once was. You should never, ever read this book, even if your childhood dream was to become a scholar of all things Faulkner, fuck it: this sucks. Stay far away. I’m hoping that by writing this review, I can block Soldiers’ Pay from memory entirely and never again get the curious itch to pick it up for a re-read, that I can refer just to this and be satisfied, reminded of the utter awfulness of Faulkner’s first foray into prose fiction.
William Faulkner has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the I See Dead People's Books group.
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Who knew that Faulkner could screw up so completely? that the brilliant author of Absalom, Absalom! and As I Lay Dying could start his career off with such a fucking mess of scrambled ideas and no clear vision? Being his first novel, and a novel nearly forgotten by time at that, with even the back-page summary warning the potential buyer it’s no good, should be avoided by all but the Faulkner scholar, I didn’t of course go in expecting a masterpiece, but I was hoping for it to be at least decent, at least a slight bit readable, you know, not this pile of fucking dogshit. I enjoyed the kick-off, the beginning train ride (wreck?) that promised a funny and quirky slapstick war disillusionment story with some slick and prophetic commentary that would be right at home in any contemporary fiction knocking consumerism and suburbiatic post-WWII living, but this ended up being so absurdly out of place—and really, positively unnecessary: you could skip it and lose nothing at all from the experience, much as you could erase the inclusion of 3 or 4 characters and still miss nothing—for once we hit page 50 it’s a soap opera to the end, and a clumsy one at that.
Faulkner seemed to have no idea what sort of novel he was writing—comedy? melodrama?—and if he even cared, I don’t know; Sherwood Anderson told him one day in 1925, Hey, write a book and I’ll get it published, and that’s exactly what he did. Anderson refused to proofread or sample even a line of Soldiers’ Pay for Faulkner before he turned it over to his publishers with the highest of recommendations once the finished manuscript reached his hands (and I assume it was the same way with Faulkner’s second ‘lost’ novel, Mosquitoes). When the book was published in 1926, hardly a soul had anything good to say about it, just another derivative post-war novel, they claimed, and it quickly vanished from print (or so I like to imagine). I’ll give it to Faulkner that, like all his novels, at least as far as I know, the most basic story outline for Soldiers’ Pay sounds terrific: Donald Mahon is declared dead, shot down from the sky in WWI, and as his family deals with the tragedy back home, he stumbles off the local train to surprise his parents and former fiancée, not dead—and yet not exactly alive, neither. More of a shell than anything: his face a grotesque mess of stitches and old gore, brains not altogether there—literally.
(Faulkner himself pretended throughout his life to have been shot down (twice) in the war ‘observing’ for the RAF, although in actuality he joined the RAF at the war’s end because America’s Signal Corps said he was just too dumb to fly for them, and he didn’t get his Toronto wings until after World War I was already over and done with, at which time he went home to New Orleans and refused to take off his uniform for the next six months, showing it off around town and letting all the returning soldiers know he was one of them, with them on the field or in the air over Europe, even when that was simply what he wished he could have been.)
Before he was a novelist, Faulkner was a crummy poet, and it shows. Most of the book, particularly any scenes featuring Donald Mahon’s fiancée Cecily are painfully purple—but not all of it. As with the story, Faulkner didn’t seem to know how the hell to approach writing of whatever the hell he was writing, with the quality and style inconsistently going back and forth, all over the place, the most painful of which is the overly poetic bullshit that takes up the page(s) whenever Cecily is around, and we’re questioning What’s she gonna do? She gonna suffer her altruistic calling and marry this broken and more than likely dying war hero or not?—and that question, unfortunately, is the major focus of Soldiers’ Pay. Sometimes, not often but two or three times, we get a hint of the inimitable style Faulkner would skillfully employ in his future novels and stories, and that’s always a pleasure, a seriously wonderful diversion of the purple melodrama between Cecily and Cecily’s feelings regarding the zombie hero. In total, there are between 10 and 15 pages’ worth of quality in Faulkner’s 221-page debut, but no more.
Donald dies, to spoil it for you, and Cecily marries her second lover, crying out to everyone she’s no longer the good person she once was. You should never, ever read this book, even if your childhood dream was to become a scholar of all things Faulkner, fuck it: this sucks. Stay far away. I’m hoping that by writing this review, I can block Soldiers’ Pay from memory entirely and never again get the curious itch to pick it up for a re-read, that I can refer just to this and be satisfied, reminded of the utter awfulness of Faulkner’s first foray into prose fiction.
Mosquitoes—sigh—here I come....
30%
[210]
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”Carry on, Joe.” (