Johnson Goes to War

Jack Lynch’s “Johnson Goes to War” observes that literary histories conventionally link the rise of literary modernism to the collective physical and psychological trauma inflicted by the war of 1914-18. Lynch observes that when we think of Great War literature, we include writers who wrote during the war, like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; those who reflected on it shortly afterward, such as Ford Madox Ford and Erich Maria Remarque, and those who said little about the war itself but whose sensibilities were shaped by what happened there, a category that contains nearly all the writers usually grouped under High Modernism. But Johnson was there too and played a series of important roles. These include how he sometimes served as a reassuring reminder of the civilized world to which the country hoped to return, while others viewed him as a harsh critic of war and empire. If Johnson influenced thinking about the war, thinking about the war also influenced Johnson. It was the year after the end of the Second World War that the Great Cham became Johnson Agonistes, but that was the culmination of a process of rethinking literary icons in general and, Johnson and particular, that began in Flanders Fields.