A Morning After War: C. S. Lewis and WWI [Paperback]

K. J. Gilchrist (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 27, 2005

A Morning After War fills a critical gap in C. S. Lewis biographies with unprecedented detail by tracing Lewis's wartime service, relationships, and earliest publications. Probing war's traumatic destruction upon Lewis's romantic expectations of tranquil life, this book surpasses literary analyses of Lewis's work by asserting a comprehensive definition of war literature. Equally, scholars and students of World War I, war literature, trauma studies, and C. S. Lewis will find this work an invaluable reassessment of central assumptions in their fields. Not least, here finally is the young C. S. Lewis preceding his usual and often idolized personas.

Product Details

• Paperback: 225 pages
• Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing (May 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820476129
• ISBN-13: 978-0820476124
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,606,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book of Rare Insight, May 16, 2005

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Morning After War: C. S. Lewis and WWI (Paperback)

Dr. Gilchrist an expert on British literature and on World War I has selected an interesting subject in this book on the war years of C. S. Lewis.

There are numerable books on what happened in the war. But this one does two things, first it covers Mr. Lewis's war years, a period often skipped in the traditional biographies of Lewis. But second, he uses the war years and their impact on Lewis to examine the expectations people had of a more settled life being replaced by the trauma of an almost unbelievable war. Lewis, an Irishman, wanted to escape the war and wound up on the front lines. He survived the war, but was wounded (and had shell fragments in his chest) and suffered nightmares. This was what we now call PTSD, but it was long before that term was invented.

Dr. Gilchrist has produced a book of rare insight.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Essential yet badly edited, October 23, 2005

By 

Extollager (Mayville, ND United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Morning After War: C. S. Lewis and WWI (Paperback)

No doubt about it, this book is a must for all libraries with collections about C. S. Lewis. It is without peer for its account of Lewis's wartime experiences. Lewisians who have read Surprised by Joy and one of the biographies (Sayer's is a good one) and who would like to know more about Lewis as a soldier should not hesitate to take up this book.

It is remarkably blemished by errors in style, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Deconstructing 2nd Lieutenant Lewis., February 26, 2006

By 

Mark Watney (Dallas Texas.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Morning After War: C. S. Lewis and WWI (Hardcover)

Gilchrist's monograph purports to fill perhaps the largest hole remaining in Lewis scholarship---that of "2nd Lieutenant Lewis," an almost completely neglected image which, he says, "precedes and contradicts most other images that the name CS Lewis evokes"(9). The only problem is that Lewis---as well as almost all those who knew him---said almost nothing about the war. Gilchrist of course admits this, and therefore, in order to fill this "hole," is almost forced, by default, into writing a deconstructionist analyses of Lewis's war years, interpreting his silence as suppression, and privileging what was not said, over what was said: "This book," he writes in the Introduction, "presents an understanding of what Lewis did not say about his war."

Unfortunately, Gilchrist ends up deconstructing a lot more than just Lewis's silence about the war; it ends up deconstructing Lewis's romantic vision itself---or what Gilchrist calls the "romantic assumptions" of his pre-war years. His romantic beliefs he says (including his later belief in a benevolent God) were "shattered" during the war (and then "shattered" once again after the death of Joy Davidman). In support of this astonishing assumption, Gilchrist ties together the two most romantically disillusioned works Lewis ever wrote--- Dymer (written seven years after WWI), and A Grief Observed (written after the death of his wife in 1961). "In both works," he argues, Lewis's assumptions "about life and now about a benevolent God, were shattered"(218).

But what may be a true interpretation of Dymer---the shattering of all Lewis's romantic assumptions---is a completely distorted one of A Grief Observed, an interpretation which not only confuses Lewis's temporal expressions of grief and doubt with his deeper foundation of orthodox faith, but totally ignores his last written work, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer (1963), in which his assumptions of a benevolent God are completely restored. Gilchrist's interpretations could only be considered credible had this WWI veteran not written another forty volumes--- between the two aforementioned works---which comprise perhaps the most formidable defense of romanticism, or Sehnsucht, in the twentieth century.

Gilchrist's deconstruction of Lewis's "romantic assumptions" is based on two faulty interpretations: firstly, of Spirits in Bondage(1919)---which Lewis published right after he was wounded in the Battle of Arras. He calls these poems "the laments" of Lewis's "shattered assumptions" (190)---a true description of the first half of this anthology perhaps(which can be read online), but in the second half Lewis begins to defiantly reclaim these "shattered" assumptions---hence the subtitle "Escape." The second assumption Gilchrist makes is his claim that WWI destroyed most of Lewis's romantic ideals; that his idyllic pre-war world was forever shattered by his experiences in the trenches. Lewis's pre-war years however were spent in what he called the horrors of "Belsen"---alias, British boarding schools. In his autobiography, Lewis makes an astounding claim, which seems to undermine Gilchrist's entire thesis, but which, surprisingly, he fails to challenge:

"Never, except in the front-line trenches (and not always there) do I remember such aching and continuous weariness as at Wyvern. Oh, the implacable day, the horror of waking, the endless desert hours that separated one from bedtime!" (SJ 96.)

Lewis devotes seven chapters in his autobiography to these boarding school horrors. "The dark ages", he calls them, in which the joy of his childhood vanished, and life was often so unbearable that "consciousness was becoming the supreme evil; sleep the prime good"(100). He describes his feelings at the onset of a new term as "the unbearable grinning scull finally peering through" and all happiness dissipating. To describe Lewis as filled with "pre-war" romantic assumptions which were "shattered" in the trenches, could not be further off the mark. War in fact effected Lewis's romantic beliefs in exactly the opposite way in which Gilchrist suggests it did. Rather than "shattering " them, it seemed instead to goad them on. In "Victory"(SB 7), Lewis describes how "the yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man" would never cease striving with "red Nature." Even though it is "vexed" by "the filth of war," it would never be "shattered.":

"

Though often bruised, oft broken by the rod,

Yet, like the phoenix, form each fiery bed

Higher the stricken [romantic] spirit lifts its head

And higher---till the beast become a god.

Yet Gilchrist concludes that these poems are "a record of the hope Lewis bore against reality...and how the war's realities shattered that hope"(201). Lewis however continues to refute this alleged "shattering" right through the second half of this anthology. In his second last lyric he symbolizes his romantic beliefs as a "castle" which represents the "Worlds Desire." He situates it in country made "desolate" by war, but concludes:

Nothing is can trouble it, hate of the gods nor man's endevour."

Gilchrist of course read these defiant lyrics with which 2nd lieutenant Lewis concludes his war poems. He calls Lewis's romanticism here a "defiant tenacity in holding to a vision of beauty beyond the realities confronting him in the trenches." Yet he calls it "a healthy reaction," even though "many of the poems are mere escapism"(199). The problem with Gilchrist's deconstruction of Lewis's romanticism or Joy however,is that it contradicts everything which Lewis later concludes about it in his Christian corpus---namely, that it was "the truest index of our real situation." Again, if the only record we had of Lewis were his two volumes of pagan poetry and his journal as an old man in grief, then we would have less cause to thus critique Gilchrist's analysis. It is in many ways, a deconstruction of Lewis's entire autobiography, Surprised by Joy. But Gilchrist is never mean-spirited in this. His approach is rather like that of a benevolent therapist telling his patient, the perpetual 2nd lieutenant Lewis, that his rare moments of anti-romantic stoicism (in Dymer and A Grief Observed) are really his moments of greatest clarity---not his later works, filled with romantic Sehnsucht.

No other critic has ever claimed that Dymer represents a more mature (ie, less repressed) version of Lewis than does Surprised by Joy, his critically acclaimed autobiography. But for Gilchrist, Dymer is almost Lewis's magnum opus because of its courage in peering "deeply into the abyss"(193) of the horror of war, rather than repressing or silencing it, as he says he does in his autobiography. Only in Dymer, Gilchrist says, does Lewis face "his demons of war instead of repressing them"(204). Only here does Lewis "trace and put to death his romantic young self" along with all his "romantic assumptions" (217). And for about six short years, the stoical Lewis of 1919 to 1925 would have completely agreed with him. But assessing Lewis in this truncated way, as a repressed WWI vet who, for a brief period of time had the courage to reject his romantic fantasies, would be like evaluating Sigfrid Sassoon as a poet, based primarily on his patriotic pre-war Georgian lyrics. Whereas most critics tend to interpret Lewis's pagan "war" poetry (Spirits in Bondage, and Dymer)retrospectivly---ie,through the overpowering lenses of his canonical Christian corpus, Gilchrist, in a complete reversal of this, interprets Lewis's earliest works as if he had put down his pen in 1926 until stung back into writing after the death of his beloved wife in 1961. His book therefore provides a much needed---if distorted---perspective on 2nd Lt.Lewis.