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  • Faulkner's War Stories:World War I and the Origins of Yoknapatawpha
  • David A. Davis

In June 1918, William Faulkner wrote to his parents with exciting news. "I have got an [sic] chance to join up with the British and get a commission as second lieutenant—leftenant they call it—in about three months after I am sent to training camp," he writes. "It's a wonderful chance, for there is no thing [sic] to be had in the U. S. Army now, except a good job stopping boche bullets as a private" (Watson, Thinking of Home 63). Like many of the young men of his generation, he aspired to join the war in Europe, preferably as a fighter pilot, the most heroic figure of the era. Faulkner's jubilant tone and his optimistic plans for a career as an officer belied his deep insecurity about his future. "At the rate I am living now," he writes later in the letter, "I'll never be able to make anything of myself, but with this business I will be fixed up after the war is over" (63–64). When Faulkner wrote this letter, his life was in crisis. His love, Estelle Oldham, had married another man, he had left Mississippi to live with a friend in Connecticut, and he was working as a clerk in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, but he had no promising career prospects. Meanwhile, dashing soldiers in uniforms attracted the attention of both young women and young men fascinated with military glory. He had attempted to enlist in the US Army, but had been rejected for being too small.1 At the suggestion of a Canadian recruiting officer, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force, eager to live out his dreams of heroism, but the war ended before he finished training, so he returned to Mississippi with "nothing to show for my six months except my 18 pounds I've gained" (Watson, Thinking of Home 135). [End Page 17]

Faulkner, however, did not let his disappointment stand in the way of a good story. When he returned to Mississippi, he wore a British pilot's uniform and told outrageous tales of his exploits in the war, even suggesting that he had a metal plate in his head from a terrible plane crash. His embellishments of his actual experience were his first war stories, fictions of his own creation that would eventually develop into his lifetime literary project, the narrative of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The war was his first muse, allowing him to make something of himself in his imagination. His first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), tells the story of a southerner who served in the RAF returning home to die. For his third novel, Sartoris (1929), he comes back to the theme of the disillusioned veteran with the story of Bayard Sartoris, a pilot who saw his twin brother shot down in a dogfight, who returns to Yoknapatawpha county after the war and struggles to reintegrate with the community. He extends the theme with several short stories written in the late 1920s set in Europe during the war, some of which describe Bayard's experience in France. Faulkner's war was a fiction, and several critics have defined it as a vicarious experience.2 Donald M. Kartiganer claims that "Faulkner's warrior pose became a not quite reconciled meeting between emulation and parody, as if he were struggling to construct a gesture with a solidity of its own" (631). James G. Watson writes that "the theatrical artifice inherent to the war became a staple of the written world Faulkner set about making" ("Faulkner and Theater of War" 25). And David Minter states that "his only recourse was to experience [the war] indirectly—through what he had heard and could read, through what he could feel, project, and express" (32).

Faulkner's war was imaginary. It was based on his experience as an aviator manqué, on the stories he heard from people who served in the war, and on the books inspired by the war that he read. Richard T. Dillon argues that Faulkner borrowed from Elliott White Springs, particularly his 1926 novel War...

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