two concerns: frustrated desire, and loyalty silhouetted against betrayal. Powers and Mahon embody the book’s gesture toward a death-suffused loyalty, as though all forms of postwar life were variations on infidelity. Both characters are permanently marked by war violence; neither has, nor wants, a future. Faulkner makes their weirdly destined marriage at the end of the novel appear as simultaneously a funeral—as though, in a world of illusory colors, they share the single authentic hue: black. Powers is awkwardly imported into this plot. Placed by the writer onto that fast-moving train without prior appropriateness, she exists only to be drawn to the dying Mahon. The logic of the novel demands this pairing as a fitting sequel to her having survived her husband. As she attends to Mahon, Lowe and Gilligan paw at her, trying unsuccessfully to reach her feelings. When, at the end of the book, Gilligan presses her one last time, she responds, “Bless your heart, darling. If I married you you’d be dead in a year, Joe. All the men that marry me die, you know” (SP 245). Her utterances are oracular and absolute. A sexually alluring woman yet a deadly mate, she is also the missing mother for these war-orphaned young men. A mother, however—like Faulkner’s own?—whose impress is sinister, if not fatal. Each of the young men seeks out her embrace, yet to enter it erotically is to die. Unshakably wise, she calls the shots in this book. Or we could say that she shares that role with Donald Mahon.
Mahon seems mutely to harbor Faulkner’s own longings. His wound anneals him from all possibility of intimacy, both orphaning him and constituting an impenetrable sanctuary sorely unavailable to his creator. “The man that was wounded is dead,” Powers says, “and this is another one: a grown child. It’s his apathy, his detachment from everything that’s so terrible” (SP 92). Though his former fiancée, Cecily, continues to betray him, Mahon has reached a position of final indifference. It is as though Faulkner bestowed on him both the war wound he never received and the love wound he would never recover from. Mahon is at ease with both these wounds, finally safe behind his scar. He appears as a figure through whom the writer fantasized the immunity that death brings to the dying. Perhaps this is why
Soldiers’ Pay
reads like a burial ceremony—a roundabout means of getting the damaged Mahon properly dead and into the earth.
Surrounding Mahon’s ceremonial descent into death are a choir-like set of antic figures—inconstant Cecily Saunders and her stop-and-start flirtations, drunken George Farr and his frustrated lust for Cecily, goat-like Januarius Jones and his freewheeling predations on whatever female will submit to them. Faulkner makes none of these minor figures interesting.They seem to inhabit a different universe from that of Powers and Mahon.
Soldiers’ Pay
fails to interrelate its cast of characters persuasively, as though there remain ghostly unwritten materials behind the palpably written ones. The writer’s energy—balked from release in either plot or character (Mahon is an unplumbable center, and Powers does not develop)—finds its outlet in gorgeous, overwritten settings: “Beyond the oaks against a wall poplars in restless formal row were columns of a Greek temple, yet the poplars themselves in slim vague green were poised and vain as girls in a frieze. Against a privet hedge would be lilies soon like nuns in a cloister and blue hyacinths swung soundless bells, dreaming of Lesbos” (SP 46). Yet another cocktail of words, poetic phrases doing duty for an ordeal of the spirit that Faulkner does not know how to narrate. No one in or outside the novel cares about the poplars or the privet hedge, the lilies or the blue hyacinths. “When am I going to get out?” the dying Donald Mahon murmured. Behind that question lies another this novel does not pose: when are we going to get in? When will we be
Mahon seems mutely to harbor Faulkner’s own longings. His wound anneals him from all possibility of intimacy, both orphaning him and constituting an impenetrable sanctuary sorely unavailable to his creator. “The man that was wounded is dead,” Powers says, “and this is another one: a grown child. It’s his apathy, his detachment from everything that’s so terrible” (SP 92). Though his former fiancée, Cecily, continues to betray him, Mahon has reached a position of final indifference. It is as though Faulkner bestowed on him both the war wound he never received and the love wound he would never recover from. Mahon is at ease with both these wounds, finally safe behind his scar. He appears as a figure through whom the writer fantasized the immunity that death brings to the dying. Perhaps this is why
Soldiers’ Pay
reads like a burial ceremony—a roundabout means of getting the damaged Mahon properly dead and into the earth.
Surrounding Mahon’s ceremonial descent into death are a choir-like set of antic figures—inconstant Cecily Saunders and her stop-and-start flirtations, drunken George Farr and his frustrated lust for Cecily, goat-like Januarius Jones and his freewheeling predations on whatever female will submit to them. Faulkner makes none of these minor figures interesting.They seem to inhabit a different universe from that of Powers and Mahon.
Soldiers’ Pay
fails to interrelate its cast of characters persuasively, as though there remain ghostly unwritten materials behind the palpably written ones. The writer’s energy—balked from release in either plot or character (Mahon is an unplumbable center, and Powers does not develop)—finds its outlet in gorgeous, overwritten settings: “Beyond the oaks against a wall poplars in restless formal row were columns of a Greek temple, yet the poplars themselves in slim vague green were poised and vain as girls in a frieze. Against a privet hedge would be lilies soon like nuns in a cloister and blue hyacinths swung soundless bells, dreaming of Lesbos” (SP 46). Yet another cocktail of words, poetic phrases doing duty for an ordeal of the spirit that Faulkner does not know how to narrate. No one in or outside the novel cares about the poplars or the privet hedge, the lilies or the blue hyacinths. “When am I going to get out?” the dying Donald Mahon murmured. Behind that question lies another this novel does not pose: when are we going to get in? When will we be
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