Faulkner’s Great War Modernism: New Death in Soldiers’ Pay

For the critic alert to the economic foundations, social history, and material culture of modernity, one configuration looms especially large over William Faulkner’s formative years: the Great War of 1914–1918. The war was at once an uncanny fulfillment of the rationalizing, industrializing, urbanizing, massifying logic of modernization and a quintessential challenge to modernity’s guiding philosophical assumptions: freedom, enlightenment, progress, individuality. Even before turning to the art of fiction, Faulkner had pursued his own response, more civic than aesthetic, to the modernity of the Great War, first by attempting unsuccessfully to register for the draft in 1918 and then by masquerading as a British citizen in order to enlist in the RAF, only to have the war end on him before he had completed cadet training in Ontario.² For the thwarted combat ace, then, Great War modernism would be at best a vicarious affair, responding to a largely imagined experience of the war’s modernity. Nonetheless, Great War modernism proved as central to Faulkner’s apprenticeship in fiction as it did to contemporaneous critical efforts to derive modernism’s aesthetic strategies from its historical circumstances—to imagine the modernity from which the modernists sprang. No less significantly, the war would also become the first face of modernity that Faulkner moved beyond in his ongoing quest for a modernism more hospitable to his experiences and talents.

As John Limon cogently observes, “Faulkner began his career as a novelist on the assumption that coming to terms with the Great War was the first obligation of the modernist” (45). He made his debut as a published fiction writer in 1919 with “Landing in Luck,” a largely slapstick account of a Canadian RAF cadet in training that he published in the student newspaper at the University of Mississippi. Over the next dozen years he would write no fewer than eight additional stories dealing with aspects of the war. One of them, “Thrift” (1930), became his breakthrough into the most lucrative venue for short fiction in the US literary marketplace, the Saturday Evening Post. During this period the Great War also played a major role in two of Faulkner’s first three novels, Soldiers’ Pay (1926) and Sartoris (1929, the abridged version of the 1927 manuscript Flags in the Dust). When Hollywood came calling in 1932, capitalizing on the notoriety Faulkner had gained as the author of Sanctuary (1931), his first screenwriting credit was for a war film, Today We Live (1933), that he adapted from his own story “Turnabout,” another Post success from 1932. Other war-related screenwriting projects from the period include the unproduced “War Birds” (1933) and The Road to Glory (1936).

There can be no doubt that the intellectual and imaginative challenge of thinking the Great War energized Faulkner, perhaps even sustained him, during his formative years as a fiction writer. The sheer volume of material attests to that. So does its range. Faulkner wrote about trench warfare, about the emergent air war, even about naval combat in “Turnabout.” The geographic sweep of his Great War fictions encompasses not only the Western Front but England, Scotland, Germany, Canada, Mississippi, Chicago; the temporal spectrum varies from a single day (“Crevasse”) to several years (“Thrift,” “Victory”) and includes examples of brief actions recounted from an extreme temporal remove as in “Ad Astra” and “All the Dead Pilots,” both narrated in the first person from a dozen years or more after the war’s end. The generic and tonal diversity of the material is equally striking: Faulkner turns to the comic mode in “Thrift” and “Landing in Luck,” the tragic in “Victory” and his novels, and blends elements of both in “Turnabout.” “The Leg” experiments with Great War gothic, “With Caution and Dispatch” with farce, “Crevasse” with surrealism, to capture the shifty intensities of wartime and its aftermath. And he would return to the war, of course, in the 1940s and 1950s, in the agonizing labor of writing and rewriting his self-proclaimed “magnum o,” A Fable. That labor, in fact, even wrote itself into Faulkner’s built environment in the run-up to...