SOLDIERS' PAY" might have been called "What Price Victory?" It deals, vitally and pungently, with the aftermath of the Great War; not with the social and economic adjustments the war necessitated and the soldier faced, but with the human and personal adjustments, or, as too often they turned out, maladjustments; with that, and with the passing away of an old scheme of things.
Whoever thinks Mr. Faulkner's story-people too fantastic to be human must remember that the world they moved in was an overturned world of bitter inverted fantasy, which, as it receded from their eye, advanced with increasing vividness upon their imagination. The war, annihilating conventions, moralities and ideals, not only left them primitives; it left them abnormal primitives. When, all three strangers to one another, a war widow and an ex-private encountered a hopelessly doomed lieutenant on a Pullman, and forthwith forgot their destinations to accompany the dying man to his home in Georgia, their wild overthrow of earlier plans was not so absurd as it seemed. They probably had no real plans: a conventional world had crumbled, in mind and body and soul they were drifting, and to seize this tangible undertaking was probably the nearest approach to adjustment they could have found.
The story of "Soldiers' Pay" is the coming of these three to the town where scarred and dying Donald Mahon had left a father and a fiancée; the ironic, nervous, fantastic, sexually obsessed relationships that arose among them, complicated further by a fat satyr named Januarius Jones and a town youth named George Farr. Mr. Faulkner's method of presentation is as uncontrolled, unconforming, haphazard and desultory as his substance; but it very often achieves a vividness, a fervor, an immediacy which ordered procedure would not project. As primitives, these people are dominated by sex; as abnormals, they are stricken with continual consciousness of their obsession; it fills not only their bodies, but their minds. Mr. Faulkner employs a kind of Joycian pattern to describe them, reveals a kind of Joycian wit and humor, and has something of Joyce's precise recapturing of dialog. Yet he is much more than a disciple of Joyce. His book is not one for facile categories. It is a long way off from the typical war book; it has too much ironic pity and sense of futility to be an indictment; it is a study of the returned soldier, but not of his usual problems. Mr. Faulkner ignores the causes of the abnormalities in his people, to picture only the effects. His book seems to be a rich compound of imagination, observation and experience, an isolated world of Faulkner's own making, shadows having reality of men grope through a maze complex enough to be once pitiful and comic, passionate, tormenting and strange.
