Faulkner’s First War: Conflict, Mimesis, and the Resonance of Defeat

In April of 1962, William Faulkner visited the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. Among other events, he submitted to a question and answer session before a class titled “The Evolution of American Ideals as Reflected in American Literature” (the syllabus for which contained Faulkner’s short story “Turnabout”¹). During the session, students asked the author what conclusions he intended the reader take away from the story, which concerns a blithe and callow British Midshipman being killed in action while a hardened American pilot survived; such questions (often framed within the “universal condition” ideas of Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, written some twenty years after drafting “Turnabout”), were met with polite circumvention.² Faulkner had yet to formulate the ideas as to the “general and universal fear” of his prize address when he wrote the story in autumn/winter of 1931³ (and the argument is to be made that he may never have developed that concept into a defined ideological statement). At the point at which he had written “Turnabout,” he had yet to reach, or had only recently reached, a critical juncture in his creative identity: Faulkner had yet to separate in his mind the First World War from the American Civil War, and, in doing so, to separate himself from the expatriate writing of his contemporaries to “make a single Mississippi county his measure of the world.”⁴ Faulkner’s early writing, particularly Soldiers’ Pay and the “Wasteland” stories⁵ reflect an authorial mindset calibrated on mimicking the writing of the other rising stars of his literary class. Flags in the Dust, often remarked as a turning point for the author in that it is the first of the Yoknapatawpha narratives, bears importance for the Faulkner corpus beyond the bounds of Mississippi; it represents the threshold at which Faulkner laid aside the question of his generation—the legacy of world war—to address the inter-generational issues of honor and decay—more nearly associated with Faulkner’s mythologized Civil War—that would characterize his career.

Commentary has persistently linked Faulkner’s “apprentice” writings to other authors, works, or literary movements.⁶ More often than not, such assertions identify Faulkner not as an active participant in a given artistic debate, but rather as a peripheral figure aping his more notable contemporaries. For example, while Faulkner’s career-long rivalry with Hemingway evolved into a dialogue during Faulkner’s middle and late career (on the nature of courage, for instance, in “The Bear” and For Whom the Bell Tolls⁷ or on the nature of love in The Wild Palms and A Farewell to Arms⁸), his earliest work appropriates Hemingway’s style, characters, and attitudes: “One may assume,” William van O’Connor has noted, “that Faulkner in writing Soldier’s Pay [sic] knew the Hemingway stance, and the Hemingway dramatis personae.”⁹ His early writing (through and including Flags in the Dust) has been tied to, inter alia, the French symbolists,¹⁰ the Gothic tradition,¹¹ Scott Fitzgerald,¹² Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Hardy,¹³ the British Romantics, A. E. Housman,¹⁴ James Branch Cabell,¹⁵ Dostoevsky,¹⁶ and popular aviation-fiction writers Elliott White Springs and James Warner Bellah.¹⁷ These assessments are sustained by Faulkner’s own admissions such as the following:

A writer is completely rapacious . . . he will steal from any source. He’s so busy stealing and using it that he himself probably never knows where he gets what he uses . . . he is influenced by every word he ever read, I think, every sound he ever heard, every sense he ever experienced; and he is so busy writing that he hasn’t time to stop and say, “Now, where did I steal this from?” But he did steal it somewhere.¹⁸

Alexander Marshall remarks that “any discussion of literary influence is tricky at best and even more so when dealing with a writer as evasive and noncommittal as Faulkner.”¹⁹ Perhaps this “noncommittal” quality arises from Faulkner having thrown in with a Lost Generation mentality to which he could not fully commit...