Faulkner and the Royal Air Force Canada, 1918

Abstract

Faulkner and the Royal Air Force Canada, 1918 Michael Zeitlin (bio) [P.S.] Tell me about Estelle’s wedding. —Faulkner in a letter to his mother, April 21, 1918 (Watson, Thinking of Home 52) Escaping the dismal scene of Estelle’s wedding to Cornell Franklin in Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner went north for the first time in the spring of 1918.1 After a brief stay in New York City (Watson, Thinking of Home 45; TH hereafter), he lived with Phil Stone on the campus of Yale University and worked, from April through June, in the accounting office of New Haven’s Winchester Repeating Arms Company, whose “chimneys,” in the words of Joseph Blotner, “spewed smoke as the factories turned out munitions for the Allies” (vol. 1 202). On April 14, in a letter to his mother, Faulkner writes, “Yesterday I went through the plant and saw the rifle and machine gun assembling rooms. They are making Browning guns. There are eighteen thousand people working there, probably half of them are women and girls, in the machine shops even” (TH 50). Ten days later he writes: “I saw them making the H.E. [high explosive] shells—five and six point ones, about a yard long” (53). Here in the North, as Marx and Engels had observed of Manchester’s Satanic mills, “[m] asses of workers, pressed together in the factory, are organized like soldiers” (Marx and Engels 68–69).2 For now Faulkner serves the war machine as an accountant, but he knows more will be demanded. As he writes to his mother on May 27, “the bill has gone through drafting me when I become of age [i.e. 21 years old] and . . . I had much rather beat them to it and enlist” (TH 58). But not with the Americans: “there is no thing to be had in the U.S. Army now [as he writes on June 7, 1918] except a good job stopping boche bullets as a private” (63). The English Army is the better alternative as its officers are more experienced while “the chances of advancement. .. are very good; I’ll perhaps be a major at the end of a year’s service. I’ve thought about it constantly. . . . At the rate I am living now, I’ll [End Page 15] never be able to make anything of myself, but with this business I will be fixed up after the war is over” (63–64). British Lieutenant Todd, “who was wounded at Vimy Ridge last year” (56), has explained the situation to him over dinner: The English are trying to get officers now—they have two million unofficial reserve troops in house now, which they cant use at all. I can enlist as a second year Yale man, he will recommend me for a commission at once. It’s the chance I’ve been waiting for now. Every thing will be my way, I can almost have my pick of anything, I’ll be in at the wind up of the show. . . . I shall probably have to enlist in the line and take my chances of promotion, which I’d rather do than get in the U.S. Army and be sent into action under an inexperienced officer. The English officers are the best yet, take better care of their men and weigh all chances for them. So I shall learn war in the best of schools, where the elimination of risk is taught above every thing. So I think I shall enlist to-morrow. (63) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Winchester Repeating Arms Company, New Haven. One might be impressed by the lucid manner in which the twenty-year-old weighs the prospect of an officer’s commission in the British Army, even as his excitement at making the leap from clerk to gentleman is more than a little breathless. “That move,” writes Samuel Hynes of the military-age male civilian longing for transcendence in this period, “will be more than a change in [End Page 16] the work he does; it will be a change of class” (13). But Faulkner’s letter also bears the nervous trace of a deeper...