Tuesday 3.24: Lost Cause

Before I left for vacation last week, I started reading William Faulkner’s novels in order, beginning with Soldier’s Pay, a book about a group of people, brought together by chance, trying to readjust to life in America (Georgia, in particular—this is one of the few Faulkner novels that does not take place in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Miss.) at the end of the First World War.

I don’t really think of Faulkner as a “Lost Generation” writer in the same way that I do like Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald, who used their emblematic cosmopolitan wandering and a cynical detachment from the socioeconomic excesses of the 1920s (respectively) to tap into an understanding of an American generation traumatized by a (pretty fucking brutal, remember) war, which found itself (the generation) lacking existential and moral direction. Faulkner spent the bulk of his literary life exploring humanity through the lens of the American South, much like Joyce used Dublin, and a writer so consumed by places, the memory of environments, and the nature and reality of the past (one of his most quoted lines, from Requiem for a Nun, is “The past is never dead and gone. It isn’t even past.”) doesn’t typically spring to mind as a generational voice concerned with the evocation of a particular moment.

Soldiers’ Pay, however, is a book about a generation. It’s also very much a first novel, and not without its awkward moments. While it could be argued that the plot’s absence of character needs is an intentional vehicle to reinforce the sense of shell-shocked alienation, how “going through the motions” feels for a soldier returning from war, it’s a more likely concession that Faulkner’s concern with other stylistic elements of the novel meant that, at the end of the day, he was satisfied to have realistically drawn a bunch of characters who, for better or worse, just sort of bump into one another a lot, driving the majority of the plot.

But I digress.

The reason I wanted to talk about Soldiers’ Pay this week was because we’re in a… well let’s say a scenario that is of course generationally defining. The slow burn of the Coronavirus means it’s a cataclysm whose effects we can analyze in real time. For me, personally, events like 9/11 and the ensuing Iraq War took time to congeal. While it’s often said that there’s so much about the ‘rona we don’t know, that its true effects won’t be understood for years, I think it’s telling that we even have the time and perspective to make that assertion. And in a lot of ways, we do understand what’s happening to us. That’s very much the perspective we’re granted with a book like Soldiers’ Pay, especially with the benefit of an entire sub-genre to contextualize it.

A brief overview: The book opens with Donald Mahon, a grievously wounded aviator returning home from France to Georgia. He’s on a train with Joe Gilligan, another veteran returning home, and Magraret Powers, the widow of a soldier killed in action. Joe and Margaret take it upon themselves, for whatever reason (again, is it their newfound absence of purpose, or Faulkner just saying, “Eh, whatever.”), to get Donald home safely, then stay with him as he recovers. Most of the plot revolves around Donald’s engagement to the superficial and promiscuous Cecily Saunders (an almost comically Fitzgerald-esque character), who isn’t that into him anymore because of his head wound, the relationship between Margaret, Joe, and the nearly comatose Donald, and of course the Faulknerian imperatives like the unrelenting pressures of tradition, the absurd tragedy of racial inequality, &c.

Anyway this is the passage that stuck out to me, the one that I thought I’d write about. In it, Margaret and Joe are walking from the train station, where they have just seen off a useless doctor, back to the Mahon house, via some woods. At this point, they have to cross a stream:

The road passed from dim greenness into sunlight again. It was still sandy and the going was harder, exasperating.

“You’ll have to pull me, Joe.” She took his arm, feeling her heels sink and slip treacherously at each step. Her unevenly distributed weight made his own progress more difficult and he disengaged his arm and put his hand behind her back.

“That’s better,” she said, leaning against his firm hand. The road circled the foot of a hill and trees descending the hill were halted by the curving road’s green canyon as though waiting to step across when they had passed. Sun was in the trees like an arrested lateral rain and ahead where circling the green track of the stream approached the road again they heard young voices and the sound of water.

Hemingway called Faulkner “Old Mellifluous,” and that’s obviously on display here, along with his more Joycean (note the absence of commas in the last sentence, obscuring syntax a bit) coding, evidenced in the repetition of “green” and “sunlight,” a hint to all those visuals represent (Different characters are associated with different colors throughout the book, but this is already treading too deeply in the Senior Seminar ecosystem, so I’ll spare you), and the music in that last sentence is really what has always made me love Faulkner. He’s not at full throat here, but there’s just something so breathtaking about moments like “…they heard young voices and the sound of water.”

That’s fucking beautiful, effortless, and very, very hard to do. But again, I digress. My relevant point is this:

Aside from all that purdy writin’, what struck me most about this passage was the physical motion. This isn’t the first time Joe and Margaret have gone on a walk, but every previous engagement has described the typical romantic physical overtures: Joe (shitfaced) proposes to Margaret within a couple hours of knowing her. They love each other, but are lost to themselves, and so struggle to express that love. Their hand-holding is always stilted, they kiss here and there, but they’re never on the same page about it. This is the moment when they really connect, and look at how they do it: It’s pure utility, militaristic. Their walking is described literally as “exasperating.” Margaret doesn’t say, “Hold me, Joe.” She says, “You’ll have to pull me, Joe.” And he does. Walking arm in arm proves impossible, so he “disengages” (cute, Will) his arm and pushes from her back while she, her heels sinking in the sand, moves awkwardly forward.

I couldn’t help but see in this moment our own difficult American present. Surrounded by the bright sunlit green of brilliant summer, this is where we find our intimacy—on literal shifting sands, unsure footing, slogging ahead, not strolling into the future that we must remember is, no matter how we approach it, still filled with young voices and the sound of water.