Soldiers' Pay

By William Faulkner

Severely wounded, aviator Donald Mahon returns to Georgia at the end of the First World War accompanied by Joe Gilligan, also a veteran, and Margaret Powers, a war widow. As he is believed to be dead, Donald’s return home proves explosive to those around him. His grieving father welcomes his return as a miracle, and his fiancée is forced to choose between Donald, to whom she had promised herself, and the man for whom she developed feelings in Donald’s absence. From the intrigue surrounding the state of Donald’s engagement, to his worsening condition, to Margaret’s guilt over her husband’s death, Soldiers’ Pay is the story of life after war and its lasting effects on a community.

Originally published in 1926, Soldiers’ Pay was William Faulkner’s debut novel and was inspired by his own frustrated aspirations to go to war. After being rejected by the US military, Faulkner joined the Canadian flyers with the Royal Air Force but was still in training when the First World War ended.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jan 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781443421096

William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962) is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all American novelists and short-story writers.  His other works include the novels The Sound and the Fury, The Reivers, and Sanctuary.  He twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and in 1949 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews for Soldiers' Pay

[alaskayo · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I certainly didn’t expect this. 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]------------”Carry on, Joe.”

[jhudsui_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Almost wholly unremarkable maudlin soap opera with a few traces of Faulkner's future impressive style here and there. I give it three stars because I was entertained and there were a couple of vividly drawn characters I could relate to but this is definitely not a classic or anything anyone needs to add to their queue.

[timbazzett · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I've never been a big fan of William Faulkner, and this book, SOLDIER'S PAY, didn't change that. It seemed overly pretentious, verbose and pompous to the point of being boring. Faulkner's language has always been dense and ornate, but it simply did not work with this subject - a damaged and scarred veteran returning home to Georgia from the war. I'm always interested in reading books about the World Wars, but this one was just too tedious and did not work at all for me. I gave up on it after about 100 pages. My apologies to the late great Mr. Faulkner, but I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this book. (Although I did like the retro cover of this old paperback version.) P.S. I kept reading SOLDIER'S PAY, but it didn't get any better - too many characters, mostly unbelievable. Just a muddy mess of a novel, really. But it was his first one, and I know he got better, so ...

[michael8xolotl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

At its best when Faulkner is just himself, but much of the time it tries too hard to resonate. The dialogue is often particularly uncomfortable. Felt more like an old movie screenplay than anything else and it’s more interesting as Faulkner’s first novel than as a novel in itself. 2.75 stars.

[readhanded · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Soldier's Pay is William Faulkner's first novel. He wrote it in New Orleans, in a house that is now home to Faulkner House Books, where I bought my copy of Soldier's Pay. That alone predisposed me to enjoy this book.Previously, the only Faulkner I had read was As I Lay Dying, which I enjoyed for its stream of consciousness and unique narrative voices. It felt groundbreaking - I had never read anything quite like it before. Soldier's Pay also incorporates this unique voice and rarely used devices to tell the story and involve the readers in the minds and emotions of the characters. For example, Faulkner often uses parentheses throughout the novel to express a character's unspoken thoughts: "Jones, having to an extent eased his feelings, though he saw a recurring interest in her expression. (I was right, he gloated.)" (pg. 73).He also employs a play-like construction that juxtaposes the inner-workings of several characters in rapid succession: Sergeant Madden: Powers. Powers... A man's face spitted like a moth on a lance of flame. Powers... Rotten luck for her. Mrs. Burney: Dewey, my boy... Sergeant Madden: No, ma'am. He was all right. We did all we could... Cecily Saunders: Yes, yes, Donald. I will, I will! I will get used to your poor face, Donald! George, my dear love, take me away, George! Sergeant Madden: Yes, yes, he was all right... A man on a fire-step, screaming with fear. George Farr: Cecily, how could you? How could you?Because of Faulkner's unique voice, I wouldn't be surprised if many people had attempted this novel and gave it up within the first twenty pages. These pages are chaotic, slurred, and blurry. The reader is never quite sure what is going on, who is who, or whether anything is actually happening as depicted. It's actually brilliant because within these first pages, the main characters are all disgustingly drunk. The writing style reflects this drunkenness, making the reader feel almost drunk herself. By page 30, everyone has mostly sobered up, and the writing makes more sense. After that point, the plot and characters are easy to follow. I admire Faulkner for this peculiar strategy, but question his wisdom in beginning the novel with it.The strongest aspect of Soldier's Pay is definitely the writing - the experimentation and amalgamation of various styles keeps the reader on her toes and makes the characters more accessible. That said, the content of the novel is less impressive. These characters all "fall in love" at the drop of a hat. Mrs. Powers, who marries her deceased husband just weeks after meeting him and three days before he is to leave to fight in World War I, somehow falls in love with Donald Mahon a few hours after meeting him. Somewhat understandable except for the fact that Mahon is sleeping or barely conscious for most of that time and has a horrible head wound from the war that both mars his face with a horrendous scar and reduces his intelligence and external awareness to almost nil. I can understand pitying him, taking compassion on him, wanting to mother him, but romantic love? The questions remain throughout most of the rest of the novel: What are Margaret's true feelings for Donald? Is she "in love" with him, or simply looking out for a wounded soldier?Julian Lowe, a nineteen-year-old soldier returning to the States without seeing any action, is just as bad. He "falls in love" with Margaret after seeing her across the room. He's jealous of Donald's wound, of his surely inevitable early death, because he feels that those qualities draw Margaret to him. He wants the wound and the death if it means Margaret will love him. Joe Gilligan also falls in love with Margaret quickly, but his character is more complex and in him, the bond doesn't seem as silly.In all, Soldier's Pay is clearly a first novel, but it is a first novel that foreshadows the great writing to come from William Faulkner. Faulkner does an excellent job depicting the feelings of soldiers returning from war - they are out-of-step, don't quite fit in, and need to reacclimate themselves to their homes, families, and lives, knowing that the only thing that has changed is themselves.

[saramllr · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Faulkner's first novel feels disjointed and aimless. Donald Mahon is shot down during WWI and returns home with a few companions he has picked up along the way. His fiancee marries another man while everyone waits for Donald to die, and he finally does. That's about it.

[headisdead · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Significantly better than I expected from the first novel.