‘Ain’t that a kind of funny doctrine for a parson to get off?’
‘Remember, I am an old man, Joe. Too old for bickering or bitterness. We make our own heaven or hell in this world. Who knows; perhaps when we die we may not be required to go anywhere nor do anything at all. That would be heaven.’
‘Or other people make out heaven and hell for us.’
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?’
Gilligan knew shame. Bothering him now, me with a fancied disappointment! The rector spoke again. ‘I think it would be a good idea for you to stay, after all, until you make your future plans. So let’s consider it closed, eh? Suppose we walk further — unless you are tired?’
Gilligan rose in effusive negation. After a while the quiet tree-tunnelled street became a winding road, and leaving the town behind them they descended and then mounted a hill.
Cresting the hill beneath the moon, seeing the world breaking away from them into dark, moon-silvered ridges above valleys where mist hung slumbrous, they passed a small house, sleeping among climbing roses. Beyond it an orchard slept the night away in symmetrical rows, squatting and pregnant. ‘Willard has good fruit,’ the divine murmured.
The road dropped on again descending between reddish gashes, and across a level moon-lit 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 on in the dust, passing neat tidy houses, dark with slumber. An occasional group of Negroes passed them, bearing lighted lanterns that jetted vain little flames futilely into the moonlight. ‘No one knows why they do that,’ the divine replied to Gilligan’s question. ‘Perhaps it is to light their churches with.’
The singing drew nearer and nearer; at last, crouching among a clump of trees beside the road, they saw the shabby church with its canting travesty of a spire. Within it was a soft glow of kerosene serving only to make the darkness and the heat thicker, making thicker the imminence of sex after harsh labour along the mooned land; and from it welled the crooning submerged passion of the dark race. It was nothing, it was everything; then it swelled to an ecstasy, taking the white man’s words as readily as it took his remote God and made a personal Father of Him.
Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. All the longing of mankind for a Oneness with Something, somewhere. Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. . . . The rector and Gilligan stood side by side in the dusty road. The road went on under the moon, vaguely dissolving without perspective. Worn-out red-gutted fields were now alternate splashes of soft black and silver; trees had each a silver nimbus, save those moonward from them, which were sharp as bronze.
Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. The voices rose full and soft. There was no organ: no organ was needed as above the harmonic passion of bass and baritone soared a clear soprano of women’s voices like a flight of gold and heavenly birds.
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 tomorrow and sweat, with sex and death and damnation; and they turned townward under the moon, feeling dust in their shoes.
The Tnd
In his youth William Faulkner exclusively wrote poetry and he did not complete his first novel until 1925, at the age of twenty-eight. His literary influences were varied and he later stated that he modelled his early writing on the Romantic era in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England. He attended the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) in Oxford, enrolling in 1919, going three semesters before deciding to drop out in November 1920. Faulkner had been permitted to attend classes at the university as his father had a job there as a business manager. He often skipped classes and received a “D” grade in English. However, some of his poems were published in campus publications.
Although today Faulkner is largely identified with the state of Mississippi, he was residing in New Orleans, Louisiana, when he finished work on what is generally considered to be his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay. The influence of Sherwood Anderson’s modern experimental approach to fiction is clearly discernible in this work. Indeed, Anderson was a close friend and assisted Faulkner in his work, recommending his work to his own publisher.
Soldier’s Pay is one of only a few of the author’s novels that is not set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Originally released by the New York-based publishing house Boni & Liveright on 25 February 1926, the narrative revolves around a wounded aviator, who returns home to a small town in Georgia following the conclusion of the First World War. He is escorted by a veteran of the war, as well as a widow whose husband was killed in the conflict.
The aviator has suffered a horrendous head injury, leaving him in a state of almost perpetual silence, as well as blindness. Several conflicts revolving around his return include the state of his engagement to his fiancée, the desire of the widow to break the engagement in order to marry him herself and the romantic intrigue surrounding the fiancée who had been less than faithful to the aviator in his absence.
By the standards of the day, Soldiers’ Pay and Faulkner’s second novel Mosquitoes were commercial failures, as neither sold more than 1,200 copies after their initial release. However, since Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, Soldiers’ Pay has remained in print. First edition copies are valuable among collectors, often selling for upwards of $35,000.
