ONCE FAULKNER BEGAN to get his fiction published, in the mid-twenties, he attained his artistic maturity very quickly. Only three years elapsed between Soldier’s Pay and The Sound and the Fury, but in the three novels he published in those years we may trace the growth of a major artist. Soldier’s Pay is a wholly immature period piece containing a few passages of lasting power. In Mosquitoes the young artist finds his own voice and declares his independence. In the final third of Sartoris there is a prolonged demonstration of the sort of writing promised in Mosquitoes, a demonstration which the obvious unevenness of the novel does not obscure. The Sound and the Fury is a novel which demands comparison with the greatest in American, or any, fiction. By 1929 Faulkner was beginning his period of most rapid and successful production.
The opening chapter of Soldier’s Pay makes us think of Hemingway, to Faulkner’s disadvantage. The disillusioned returning soldiers, drinking to deaden their awareness of the great nothingness behind and before them, are like classroom examples of lost generation attitudes. If they are less revealing of the period than Jake Barnes and Lady Brett it is because they are not so successfully created. They tell us they are in despair, and tell us why, and the voice of the narrator underscores their explanations. Julian Lowe sits “in a smoldering of disgusted sorrow,” raising, now and then, “a sophisticated eye.” Hemingway’s Nick in In Our Time certainly feels both disgust and sorrow and he becomes what we might call “sophisticated,” but no such words will be found in any description of him. The central fact in the awareness of the characters in Soldier’s Pay is not very different from the fact that shapes the sensibilities of Jake Barnes and his group in The Sun Also Rises, the one expressed in the opening story of In Our Time, or the one that shapes the conclusion of A Farewell to Arms. But the expression of the central fact in Soldier’s Pay is different:
“Joe, do you know he’s going blind?” she said abruptly.
After a time her face became a human face and holding it in his vision he said:
“I know more than that. He’s going to die.”
“Die?”
“Yes, ma’am. If I ever seen death in a man’s face, it’s in his. Goddam this world,” he burst out suddenly.
What really emerges in this passage from Soldier’s Pay is only a vivid impression of Gilligan’s drunkenness: we feel the effort he has to make to attend to his questioner’s words, to see her face, “holding it in his vision.” We have not yet been made to feel the emotion behind his “Goddam this world.” Faulkner has succeeded only intermittently in the creation of a world in the opening chapter of Soldier’s Pay.
It is suggestive of the nature of Faulkner’s creative gift that the second chapter, laid in the small Georgia town to which some of the victims of war we met in the first chapter are returning, is so much more interesting than the first. In a very real sense, this is the beginning of the part of the novel that still lives for us as successful fiction. It begins with a striking image prefiguring a theme as apparent in The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Requiem for a Nun, and A Fable as here. Januarius Jones walks past the Episcopal church and sees the rector,
his shining dome . . . friendly against an ivy-covered wall above which the consummate grace of a spire and a golden cross seemed to arc across motionless young clouds.
Januarius Jones, caught in the spire’s illusion of slow ruin, murmured: “Watch it fall, sir.”
Since the last chapter ends with Gilligan and the rector listening to a service in a Negro church, shabby “with its canting travesty of a spire,” it is no exaggeration to call this image of a falling cross and spire the controlling image of the work. Between the two falling spires in Soldier’s Pay lie all the parts of the book that remain interesting today, both in themselves and as foreshadowing the best in the later works. And implicit in the repeated image itself lies the dominant theme of most of Faulkner’s major works, his tortured and ambiguous mixture of religious denial and affirmation.
Other good things in this book also reappear in more developed form in the great stories and novels. The paragraph describing Charlestown, for instance, foreshadows the section on the town and the courthouse in Requiem for a Nun, written nearly a quarter of a century later. Comparison of these illustrates the persistence of an interest as well as the development of a talent.
Charlestown, like numberless other towns throughout the south, had been built around a circle of tethered horses and mules. In the middle of the square was the courthouse—a simple utilitarian edifice of brick and sixteen beautiful Ionic columns stained with generations of casual tobacco. Elms surrounded the courthouse and beneath these trees, on scarred and carved wood benches and chairs the city fathers, progenitors of solid laws and solid citizens who believed in Tom Watson and feared only God and drouth, in black string ties or the faded brushed gray and bronze meaningless medals of the Confederate States of America, no longer having to make any pretense toward labor, slept or whittled away the long drowsy days while their juniors of all ages, not yet old enough to frankly slumber in public, played checkers or chewed tobacco and talked. A lawyer, a drug clerk and two nondescripts tossed iron discs back and forth between two holes in the ground. And above all brooded early April sweetly pregnant with noon.
There is perhaps no other evocation of a specific place, with its specific atmosphere, to equal this in any American writing of the period. Certainly there is none in the early work of Hemingway, who reached his artistic majority sooner but with whom Faulkner is not in competition in this passage, as he seemed to be in his first chapter. Only in the too consciously “poetic” last sentence is the picture blurred, the spell broken, as we become aware of the sensitive young man observing the scene. The two idioms, realistic and poetic, are not yet perfectly unified as they were soon to be in The Sound and the Fury.
But even before The Sound and the Fury Faulkner could at times achieve his special blend of realism and poetry, a feeling for fact and feeling for the human and imaginative meaning and emotional overtone of fact. He achieves it in the ending of Soldier’s Pay, which is luminous with promise that a major writer is being born. Before the rector and Gilligan come in their walk to the Negro church with the tilting spire, the rector has been trying to comfort Gilligan:
The divine put his heavy arm across Gilligan’s shoulder. “You are suffering from disappointment. But this will pass away. The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten. How does it go? ‘Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ No, no,” as Gilligan would have interrupted, “I know that is an unbearable belief, but all truth is unbearable. Do we not both suffer at this moment from the facts of division and death?”
The rector, a sympathetic character throughout, seems to speak for the young Faulkner as well as for himself and to put the theme of the book into words. But the ending does not leave it there, in abstractions, even in abstractions dramatically conceived. For as they walked,
The road dropped on again descending between reddish gashes, and across a level moonlit space, broken by a clump of saplings, came a pure quivering chord of music wordless and far away.
“They are holding services. Negroes,” the rector explained.
They walked closer to the church and caught the words from within. “Lead Thy Sheep, O Jesus.” The soft light of the kerosene lamps in the darkness, the words conveying to them “all the longing of mankind for a Oneness with Something, somewhere,” the sounds of the voices blended in the hymn, all become entangled in their thoughts and feelings, become the objective correlatives of the content of their awareness. The final sentences of the book, a little too consciously, too poetically perhaps, catch up the theme and embody it in a blend of perception and object:
They stood together in the dust, the rector in his shapeless black, and Gilligan in his new hard serge, listening, seeing the shabby church become beautiful with mellow longing, passionate and sad. Then the singing died, fading away along the mooned land inevitable with to-morrow and sweat, with sex and death and damnation; and they turned townward under the moon, feeling the dust in their shoes.
“Feeling the dust in their shoes.” In this first of Faulkner’s novels, after much intermittent reporting, philosophizing, and poeticizing, we come at last to recognizably Southern dust in an image which combines fact, meaning, and emotion. The image itself comes, one suspects, from the Book of Common Prayer: “Remember, O man, that thou art dust.” The acute awareness of mortality it expresses in context is the book’s final reminder of how directly Soldier’s Pay grew out of Faulkner’s reading, particularly out of his reading in the later nineteenth century. But for once the literary echo is not a blemish. The ending suffers only by comparison with the more perfect embodiment of some of the same themes in the later novels.
Most of the work is of course not on this level at all. The reading that the young author has been doing, for one thing, is too evident. Jurgen and A Shropshire Lad, Oscar Wilde and Swinburne and the experimental little magazines of the twenties, all are apparent, none yet wholly assimilated. The young writer is still a little amazed at the depth of his own disillusion. “Truly vice is a dull and decorous thing,” he tells us, in the accents of fin de siècle. The Rubaiyat supplies quotations to document a despair not very different, at times, from Housman’s generalized sadness; where the method fails, it is sometimes because it does not clearly distinguish between genuine pathos and a self-directed irony which is never absent from the work for long. Here is Januarius Jones again, a faun-like character so disillusioned that only the pleasures of the chase are left him:
Male and female created He them, young. Jones was young, too. ‘Yet ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! That Youth’s sweet scented Manuscript should close! The Nightingale that in the Branches sang, Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!...’ Wish I had a girl tonight, he sighed.
The effect here is chiefly ironic, and the quotation is dramatically functional in further characterizing the literate, decadent Jones; but similar quotations and allusions sometimes reach us in the voice of the author. The general effect of the literary references is wasteful. This is the most allusive of Faulkner’s works. Only A Fable is so “literary.”
The “poetic” passages are also wastefully used, as in this description of the end of a rainstorm in which the conceit is merely decorative, and that in a manner closer to Faulkner’s nineteenth century reading than to his own experience:
Before they were halfway through lunch the downpour had ceased, the ships of rain had surged onward, drawing before the wind, leaving only a whisper in the wet green waves of leaves, with an occasional gust running in long white lines like elves, holding hands across the grass. But Emmy did not appear with dessert.
When we compare this with the long simile describing the reporter’s mother in Pylon, beginning “the fine big bosom like one of the walled impervious towns of the Middle Ages whose origin antedates writing, which have been taken and retaken in uncountable fierce assaults . . .” we see how much Faulkner was to develop his skill in the next several years. Humor is evident in both these figures in which a fecund imagination is given its head, but in the first we become aware of the humor only in the abrupt change of tone of the last sentence, after we have already decided that the elves are a little too much even in a “poetic” novel, whereas humor controls and informs the much more extended conceit in Pylon from beginning to end, without turning it into a mere joke.
Finally, the characters too are disappointing in Soldier’s Pay if we read the book already knowing the characters of the later stories. Cecily Saunders, the empty and selfish flapper, foreshadows the Temple Drake of Sanctuary and others of Faulkner’s young girls, but she is an even less believable creature of the author’s satire than Januarius Jones. The unhappy, unbelieving Episcopal priest, Dr. Mahon, is the only character in the book whose suffering is likely to touch the reader. Mahon lives by a code the basis of which he has had to abandon; he has learned a definition of God not in the Prayer Book:
“Circumstance moves us in marvelous ways, Joe.”
“I thought you’d a said God, reverend.”
“God is circumstance, Joe . . .”
Mahon’s situation is not less moving because in his innocence he is unable to recognize the true character of Januarius Jones and Cecily Saunders. He is kind, but his traditionalism has become formalized and impotent by being cut off from its roots. He is the first in a long line of Faulkner characters in such a plight. Prefiguring the elder Sartorises, he is not unworthy to be compared with them.
Soldier’s Pay, then, is as uneven as we generally expect a first novel to be. It lacks unity: it has not one center of interest but several, and its tone and style are erratic. As Faulkner himself has put it, he found out after writing Soldier’s Pay that a book “had to have a design.”1 The book is also too “wise,” too moralistic, and too full of the author’s reading.
Yet we feel its defects far more acutely than we would if we did not have the later novels in mind when we read it. It still holds our interest even when it does not compel our belief. It suffers by comparison with the work of Hemingway of that time, and with Faulkner’s own later work, but not conspicuously by comparison with most other novels of the period. It is, in fact, an immensely promising work: that is likely to be our final impression, along with a sense of its significance as a revelation of the interests and purposes which were to shape Faulkner’s later career. Remembering its ruinous falling spires and trying to grasp their meaning for the greater works, we may recall a phrase from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist: “. . . how your mind is saturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.” Early in 1925, about the time he was writing Soldier’s Pay, Faulkner wrote in a newspaper sketch of “Jesus of Nazareth with two stars in His eyes, sucking His mother’s breast, and a fairy tale that has conquered the whole Western earth.”2 Soldier’s Pay first states the major themes and exhibits the major tensions of Faulkner’s greatest work. The young author’s intrusive comments are often as prophetic as his successful ending. Man seen as a creature driven, compelled, yet somehow free to choose, tradition seen as empty yet crying out for redefinition, the feeling of meaninglessness and the search for meaning—all are suggested in Soldier’s Pay.
MOSQUITOES might be compared with Portrait of the Artist, though the comparison immediately suggests Joyce’s greater self-absorption and his greater artistic maturity at this stage in his career. Each book is a survey of the artist’s resources, a critique of the folk culture and of the literary environment, and a declaration of independence whose bravado could be justified only by later and greater works.3
The weaknesses of Mosquitoes are thoroughly un-Joycean however. Most readers have found that the fiction serves only as an excuse for an examination of art and life, especially art, in the mid-twenties. There is far more talk than action in the book, and the plot is, as the critics have been nearly unanimous in pointing out, negligible indeed. More important, only about half of the characters are successfully created, the others being either satirical stereotypes (the niece, Pat, for instance) or convenient mouthpieces for the play of ideas. The satire, though perceptive in places, is often unconvincing because lacking in complexity. The flappers of the period were not “sexless,” as Faulkner suggests, merely because the clothes they wore concealed or de-emphasized their curves. The niece tells us more about Faulkner’s distaste for the fashions of the day in clothes and manners than about the real young girls in the straight short shapeless dresses.
More serious is the lack of a clear controlling purpose capable of supplying unity to the work. The clearest evidence of this lack of artistic control is the contrast between the opening pages, with their satire in the manner of Aldous Huxley’s “novel of ideas,” and the closing pages, which amount to an exploratory exercise in the kind of writing that was soon to produce The Sound and the Fury. This contrast between beginning and ending is illustrated in the changing presentation of two of the chief characters, Mrs. Maurier and Talliaferro. Both in the opening were creatures of a bright, brittle, and superficial satire, wholly unsympathetic characters, butts of the young Faulkner’s wit and disdain. But in the end Mrs. Maurier ceases to be a pasteboard figure and her “silliness” gets an “explanation” as Wiseman and Fairchild look at a likeness of her done by the sculptor Gordon:
It was clay, yet damp, and from out its dull, dead grayness Mrs. Maurier looked at them, her chins, harshly, and her flaccid jaw muscles with savage verisimilitude. Her eyes were caverns thumbed with two motions into the dead familiar astonishment of her face; and yet, behind them, somewhere within those empty sockets, behind all her familiar surprise, there was something else—something that exposed her face for the mask it was, and still more, a mask unaware. “Well, I’m damned,” Fairchild said slowly, staring at it. “I’ve known her for a year, and Gordon comes along after four days . . . Well, I’ll be damned,” he said again.
“I could have told you,” the Semitic man said. . . . “I don’t see how anyone with your faith in your fellow man could believe that anyone could be as silly as she, without reason.”
“An explanation for silliness?” Fairchild repeated. “Does her sort of silliness require explanation?”
“It shouts it,” the other answered.
Now Gordon’s perception, expressed in clay, that Mrs. Maurier’s “silliness” springs from suffering, from despair, destroys the satirical effect of the earlier portrayal of her: she ceases to be a target and becomes a human being, taking her place in that crowd of tortured and possessed human beings who people Faulkner’s novels. The effect of this transformation is to weaken the unity of the book, which until its ending we have been invited to take as a satirical novel of ideas. But it is also a momentary glimpse of the world of the later novels, where compassion governs and understanding grows from compassion.
Mr. Talliaferro, too, changes before our eyes from a ridiculous little creature who is seen from the outside with disdain to a pathetic human being whose folly has a cause. As he pursues his last hopeless and absurd attempt to play the dangerous male, we are invited to see him in a different light, a light in which comedy gives way to pathos as we watch him struggle to achieve identity through “love.” Now, at last, we learn why Fairchild and the others have tolerated him so long.
There are other examples of this, notably in the portrait of Mr. Wiseman, but these will serve to illustrate the clear shift in purpose and tone which something, perhaps impatience, has kept Faulkner’s critics from noticing. This transformation, from the feelings and intentions which produced Januarius Jones in Soldier’s Pay to those which produced Benjy and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, is the real sign of the novel’s immaturity. By too great and too sudden a qualification it destroys the novel’s satirical point, asking us to pity those we have first been told to laugh at. To make such a qualification effectively in the kind of novel this one started out to be might be impossible even for a novelist of much greater skill than the young Faulkner of Mosquitoes.
But the book is a promising performance by a young writer of fiction still searching for his artistic identity, and it contains much, despite its defects, that is of real interest.
The portrait of Sherwood Anderson as Dawson Fairchild, for instance, is very perceptive. If the picture is somewhat unbalanced because it does not pay tribute to Anderson’s rare but genuine achievements, it is something better than just: it is brilliantly penetrating. The qualities of personality and outlook that made Anderson fail in the bulk of his work, particularly in his novels, are incisively laid bare here. Fairchild’s “trustful baffled expression” and his “tentative bewilderment” suggest essential qualities that emerge not just in Anderson’s failures but in the best things he did. Even so fine a story as “Death in the Woods” betrays the effort to find words adequate to the feeling, and to express ideas that remain inchoate. Like Hemingway, Faulkner thought he detected in Anderson a crippling distrust of both intellect and art.4
The high point of the Anderson satire in Mosquitoes is Fairchild’s autobiographical story of love in the outhouse. He is trying, with his usual humorless earnestness and honesty, to convey a memory that is for him an epiphany of life’s essence. The tale is a long one of the youthful stirrings of love, of life’s frustrations and its ironies. The point is long in coming. Mark Frost, the poet, goes to sleep before Fairchild comes to the climax. “Children are much more psychic than adults,” Fairchild ruminates, trying to explain to his listeners why he followed the little girl to the privy with its side for men and its side for women, trying to make clear his longing and his curiosity and sense of a quite inexpressible meaning, trying to make them understand why he did what he did when he got inside, and why the golden haired little girl did what she did:
“And I stood there, feeling this feeling and the heat, and hearing the drone of those big flies, holding my breath and listening for a sound from beyond the partition. But there wasn’t any sound from beyond it, so I put my head down through the seat.”
Mark Frost snored. [Those who were still awake] sat . . . seeing two wide curious blue eyes into which an inverted surprise came clear as water, and long golden curls swinging downward above the ordure; and they sat in silence, remembering youth and love, and time and death.
The episode illustrates Faulkner’s early mastery of the tall tale and suggests better than most of the writing in the first two novels the peculiarly Faulknerian blend of folk humor, a sense of the grotesque, and the interweaving of the absurd with the pathetic that was to distinguish much of his best later fiction. The parody is good parody, and it is good writing.
Seen in the context of all the talk about art in the book, the satire on Anderson reveals a good deal about Faulkner’s developing conception of his role as artist. The talk takes two forms, negative criticisms of artistic fashions of the day, and positive statements of an artistic credo and program. The satire on Anderson is a part of the negative phase. Anderson was not simply a writer Faulkner had had the good fortune to know in New Orleans. He was the major American fiction writer of his generation, though few besides Faulkner, Hemingway, and perhaps Gertrude Stein recognized his importance at that time. Faulkner shared with him many traits, many attitudes, many aspects of sensibility. One of the reasons for the power of the tall tale of love in the outhouse is that Faulkner shared with Anderson almost everything but the humorlessness which he parodies in this grotesque epitome of “youth and love, and time and death.” But the younger writer had to find his own way. The portrait of Anderson in Mosquitoes is a significant chapter in Faulkner’s artistic self-discovery.
We may partially miss the point, today, of the criticism of Anderson’s regionalism. Why did regionalism seem such a danger that the young writer had, for once, to be unfair to Anderson, exaggerating and misunderstanding his mid-western Americanism, attributing to him too emphatically the belief that “the function of creating art depends on geography”? The answer can be given very simply: to the young writer from Oxford, Mississippi, regionalism was the most obvious and alluring of temptations. The absorption in his local material, the love of his region, the feeling for family history that produced the Sartorises and made a provincial Mississippi county courthouse into the focal point of the perceptible universe could easily have produced a mere local colorist.
Another point should be remembered. In the mid-twenties regionalism seemed to promise a more luxuriant flowering in American literature than its later development actually produced. Not only Anderson with his Winesburg, Ohio but Masters with his Spoon River Anthology, Lindsay with his poems about mid-western figures written in mid-western accents, Cather with her novels of the Nebraska frontier and Frost with his New England poems all seemed to be following the regionalist’s way. For a young writer who wanted his work to take a different course—partly because that course would be so easy and was so immensely attractive to him—what other way could be found?
The way is implicitly stated in Mosquitoes, chiefly by Mr. Wiseman, “the Semitic man,” as he is usually called. A good many of the opinions that turn up later in Faulkner’s writing as Faulkner’s own and some basic to his later works are expressed by Mr. Wiseman. The creature of a double-edged, partly self-directed irony, he speaks both for the modern mind and for the critical part of Faulkner’s mind. We shall miss much of the point of the book if we do not realize that he is portrayed with irony but not repudiation. He speaks for Faulkner, for instance, when he says that Fairchild’s rebellion is too superficial to get him out of the shadow of Emerson and Lowell, that it betrays “a sort of puerile bravado in flouting while he fears,” and, in the accents of Eliot, that what Fairchild lacks is “a standard of literature that is international.”
Faulkner has never acknowledged a debt to Eliot, despite the frequency of Eliot echoes and allusions in Faulkner’s later poems and in the fiction written up to the middle of the thirties.5 Of Joyce he has said both that he read Ulysses in the middle twenties and that the artist “should approach . . . Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”6 A thorough study of Faulkner’s early reading in relation to his changing theory and practice as an artist remains to be done; until it is, we cannot be certain what Faulkner had in mind as his standard. But there seems to me to be very little risk in hazarding the guess that the “international” standard was chiefly supplied by an expatriate American and an expatriate Irishman. In the work of both Faulkner found the “mythological” method which he was soon to begin to practice in his own way as he celebrated a dark Easter in The Sound and the Fury or took the Bundrens on their epic journey. In the work of both there was a sharpness and clarity of imagery that was never lost as the images expanded into symbols. From such reporting could come “epiphanies,” if only the artist were sufficiently creative. I suspect that Fairchild has ceased to be an object of satire and is speaking for Faulkner when, toward the end, he says that “in art, a man can create without any assistance at all: what he does is his.” Many years later Faulkner would insist to an interviewer that the allusions to the Passion in The Sound and the Fury were simply tools with which he worked to create the novel, as a carpenter works with the tools available.7
As the talk continues it becomes increasingly clear that Faulkner is using several of his characters to express his own views and that he himself hopes to write fiction which will transcend the reportorial and the regional to express “eternal and timeless” truth. Toward the end of the book, Gordon, Wiseman, and Fairchild drink and talk together as they wander through the streets. In this scene, a preparation for the experiments of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Wiseman defines the work of genius in the arts as the creation of “that Passion Week of the heart . . . in which the hackneyed accidents which make up this world—love and life and death and sex and sorrow—brought together by chance in perfect proportions, take on a splendid and timeless beauty.”
Faulkner appears in his own person only briefly in Mosquitoes, and then as “a funny man. A little kind of black man . . . awful sunburned and kind of shabby dressed. . . . He said he was a liar by profession.” The self-satire here is as pointed as it is in the partial self-portrait in Mark Frost, “the ghostly young man, a poet who produced an occasional cerebral and obscure poem in four or seven lines reminding one somehow of the function of evacuation excruciatingly and incompletely performed.” Though Wiseman, not Faulkner, is speaking in the passage defining the Passion Week of the heart, a reader who has listened very long to Faulkner’s voice will recognize the accent, the sentiment, even the words. With such a standard, with the genius to create such a Passion Week, Faulkner hoped he might write something that, again in the words of Wiseman, would have “form solidity color.”
It would be hard to find a phrase more suggestive of the writing Faulkner was soon to do. Fiction which merited this description would bring together once again ways of writing that had come to seem poles apart. It would be aesthetically shaped, symbolic, not a mere record or report (“form”). But it would also be real in the only way fiction can be real (“solidity”). And it would owe something to the impressionists even while its solidity kept it from being merely subjective (“color”). Joyce’s fusion of disparate fictional traditions comes to mind again, though Mosquitoes announces only an aesthetic rebellion, not, like Portrait of the Artist, a religious and cultural one too. Joyce’s intention to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” his intention to “discover the mode of life or of art whereby [his] spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom” finds no parallel in the Faulkner of this period. The “fairy tale” has been lost, the spires are falling, but Faulkner is not in rebellion. Mosquitoes might well have been entitled “portrait of the young man as artist.”
WHEN WE reread Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes today we are likely to be struck not so much by their immaturity, though certainly they are immature, as by their surprisingly complete foreshadowing of the great works which followed them. Soldier’s Pay, it seems to me, is decidedly the less mature of the two novels. The way each of them expresses a theme common to both will serve to illustrate. In Soldier’s Pay the author speaks in his own voice of one of the larger ideas underlying the novel: “Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world. How indissolubly are they associated in us!” But in Mosquitoes Wiseman, at first the voice of modern reason and later in the book the voice of Faulkner himself, says
“People in the old books died of heartbreak also, which was probably merely some ailment that any modern surgeon or veterinarian could cure out of hand. But people do not die of love. That’s the reason love and death in conjunction have such an undying appeal in books: they are never very closely associated anywhere else.”
What has happened between the two books in which these passages occur is a growth of critical, and self-critical, insight, with the resulting possibility of irony. One of the chief defects of Soldier’s Pay is that its irony is intermittent. Irony does not inform the passage on sex and death, or the many other passages like it. We react to the author’s wise statements with important reservations: yes, but. Our unspoken reservations, our sense of the missing qualification, our awareness that the “wise statement” is wise only if we adopt the attitudes from which it sprang and accept the frame of reference within which it has its meaning and its urgency—reservations like these chiefly account for our feeling that Soldier’s Pay is immature.
In Mosquitoes the voice of Faulkner is not heard except as we may discern its accents and sentiments in the words of Mr. Wiseman, the sculptor Gordon, and the poet Mark Frost. Faulkner has ceased to philosophize and begun to dramatize, ceased telling us about and begun to show us; just as important, he has stopped oversimplifying and begun to criticize his own insights. Without taking this step Faulkner could not have kept The Sound and the Fury free of sentimentality: it would have became a simple elegy, a heart-felt lament. Without this step we could never have had the opening of Absalom, Absalom!, with its complex recreation of past-in-present, a past at once heroic, absurd, solid, false. Without it we could not have had the tragi-comedy of As I Lay Dying.
In Mosquitoes the Faulkner feelings and sentiments—the basic, pre-literary building blocks discernible in his greatest works—get the criticism they had to have if they were to become usable for the artist. If we think of Soldier’s Pay as confessional and Mosquitoes as dramatic we shall be in a position to define the most significant difference between the two. Even if Mosquitoes were as bad a novel as the critics have generally thought, it would be very significant for Faulkner’s later career that in it he distributes his ideas and feelings among Mark Frost, Gordon, and Mr. Wiseman. All the major characters except Jenny, Pat, and Mrs. Maurier are given lines which the author himself might have spoken in Soldier’s Pay. But since all of them are seen with amusement, the result is a sanity and a truth not present in Soldier’s Pay. The self-satire in the portrait of Mark Frost is one measure of that sanity, that capacity for self-criticism. The assignment of most of the wise sayings to “the Semitic man” with the descriptive name, the author’s anti-type who speaks for all the wisdom unknown in Jefferson and explains away so deftly the romance of the Sartorises, is another. Out of the double, or multiple, vision here implied were to come all of Faulkner’s finest works; and also, when the ambiguity became unresolvable, the tension too much to bear, his most typical failures.
That is why, quite apart from its own intrinsic merit, which I think is considerable, we shall be repaid for a close reading of Mosquitoes. Again and again we find in it, not only in the larger aspects of its structure but in its details, the clues we need for an understanding of the later development. The “baroque plunging stasis” of Andrew Jackson’s statue as perceived by Gordon gives us the clue to the mature Faulkner’s recurrent feeling about human life: motion and stillness, life and death, so irreconcilably opposed and intermixed that only an oxymoron can express them.8 Fairchild’s realization that, in contrast to fiction as known in the past, “In life, anything might happen; in actual life people will do anything” prepares us for As I Lay Dying and for Miss Burden and Joe Christmas in Light in August: prepares us, in fact, for the whole world not only of Yoknapatawpha but of Pylon and The Wild Palms and all the rest. The narrator’s impatience with “Talk, talk, talk; the utter and heart-breaking stupidity of words” foreshadows a central theme of As I Lay Dying. It also gives evidence that the artist is achieving, painfully, the necessary sophistication about the tools of his own craft: the realization that he must make the words serve his fictional purpose by disappearing to make way for the images, the characters, the actions that can exist only through his words but that must never seem to consist of, or be perceptibly dependent upon, words.
The trouble with Soldier’s Pay, again, is that the words do not become transparent vehicles for the fictional realities they are supposed to create. The rhetoric, some of it quite moving, constantly calls attention to itself; it refuses to die as rhetoric that it may live in character and action. It is a commonplace of criticism to say that Faulkner is a sort of Southern orator, a rhetorician, a speaker in love with, and therefore very willing to trust, words. But his willingness to trust and to explore as fully as possible the resources of words is a potential weakness as well as a source of his greatest strength. Without the distrust of words announced for the first time in Mosquitoes he might have produced later only the sort of achievement we get in the speeches of Gavin Stevens—a rhetorical rather than a fictional achievement.
In short, the self-criticism of Mosquitoes is the act of judgment without which Faulkner could not have produced his best work. When he inserts, between scenes, “Voices without; alarums and excursions, etc.” his use of Shakespeare is on a very different level from the use of his reading in Soldier’s Pay. It means that the young writer is not taking his own novel too seriously and that he is not taking himself—and the Sartorises—too seriously. If he manages to create a career for himself at all, it will not be as an elegist. If Mosquitoes rejects the little sophisticated Bohemia it pictures, it rejects also, in no less emphatic terms, the most obvious alternative. Life, the Semitic man says, “everywhere is the same.” This is the fact overlooked by the regionalists he criticizes. “But man’s old compulsions, duty and inclination: the axis and circumference of his squirrel cage, they do not change. . . . And he who has stood the surprise of birth can stand anything.”