Laura Miller (16 page)

Adults remember learning the truth about Santa Claus as a miniature tragedy. Some of us cried. In the years since, most of us have forgotten that we were also gratified to be recognized as grown-up enough to know the truth. (I recall being impressed with how skillfully my parents had created the illusion, and I tried carefully to maintain it for my brothers and sisters — which was, strangely enough, almost as much fun as actually believing in it.) Likewise, when we mourn the way we used to read as children, that effortless absorption and unquestioning faith, we would do well to remind ourselves of the dangers of putting ourselves at the mercy of a book. For every
Animal Farm,
propaganda you probably agree with, there is a
Turner Diaries,
propaganda I hope you don’t. If we sometimes place a petty, priggish value on reading critically, we nevertheless learn to do it for excellent reasons.

Graham Greene, in his essay “The Lost Childhood,” suggested that reading loses its first, mighty power when books stop telling us what we don’t already know about our lives. Once, each volume was a “crystal in which the child dreamed that he saw life moving,” but eventually what we read only confirms or contradicts what we already believe: “As in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back.” But Greene was a Catholic who was unfortunate enough not to lapse and this made him morose. Think of it another way: We start out with a simple, even religious, relationship to the written word; its authority is unquestioned. We end up with something more complicated, but also something more our own. And then the time comes to decide a few things for ourselves.

Chapter Eleven

Garlic and Onions

I
n
The Horse and His Boy,
the foundling Shasta joins a runaway princess named Aravis and two talking horses in a desperate escape from Calormen, Narnia’s large, powerful neighbor to the south. We’ve met Calormenes before, in
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
where they appear at the slave market in the Lone Islands. They have “dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-colored turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people.” In
The Horse and His Boy,
the fugitives’ route takes them through Calormen’s capital city, Tashbaan, and as they make their way along the streets, they’re bombarded with smells. The stench comes from “unwashed people, unwashed dogs, scent, garlic, onions and the piles of refuse which lay everywhere.” Although the Calormene capital looks magnificent from a distance, up close it stinks.

The Calormenes are vaguely Turkish, with the exotic clothes and florid manners of characters from the
Arabian Nights,
a book Lewis disliked. Their civilization is grand yet decadent. Great lords and ladies are carried through Tashbaan on litters, and “there is only one traffic regulation, which is that everyone who is less important has to get out of the way for everyone who is more important.” So when Shasta catches sight of a fair-skinned delegation from Narnia, walking on foot with an easygoing swing to their step and looking as though “they were ready to be friends with anyone who was friendly and didn’t give a fig for anyone who wasn’t,” he understandably decides that he has never before seen anything so “lovely.” The Narnians are, figuratively and literally, a breath of fresh air from the north, an antidote to the Calormenes’ garlic and heavy perfume.

Recognizing the Calormenes for the racial and cultural stereotype they are was an insight I wouldn’t acquire until my college years, but even as a child I was mystified by the role of garlic and onions in their villainy. Both alliums turn up again in
The Last Battle,
twirling their figurative mustaches for the end-times. The Calormenes have formed an alliance with Shift the Ape, who has tricked many Narnians into following a false “Aslan” (the donkey Puzzle disguised in a lion’s hide). According to Shift, the lion god has ordered the enslavement of the talking beasts and the harvesting of the talking trees for timber.

Early in the book, Narnia’s monarch, King Tirian, and his companion, the unicorn Jewel, kill some Calormene soldiers, and then, overwhelmed with guilt, decide to turn themselves in. The king despairs at the thought that “Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for.” It would be better to be dead at the hands of the Calormenes, Tirian swears, than to live with the knowledge that this is what Aslan really wants for his chosen people. The young king’s surrender is a moment of utter wretchedness, culminating as “the dark men came round them in a thick crowd, smelling of garlic and onions, their white eyes flashing dreadfully in their brown faces.”

For Lewis, garlic was an unwelcome exoticism. He liked his meals mildly seasoned and unsauced; anything livelier he rejected as “messed-up food.” His feelings on this matter were pronounced enough that his brother devoted a whole paragraph to the subject in his introduction to
The Letters of C. S. Lewis.
“Plain domestic cookery was what he wanted,” stated Warnie, and apparently he shared his brother’s preference — although, unlike Jack, Warnie had seen enough of the world during his military tours of Africa and Asia to know what splendors lay beyond the ken of the average British kitchen. The fancy dishes that the Lewis brothers disdained back in England were probably limited to French cuisine and perhaps the Indian curries brought home to the motherland by more gastronomically adventurous Britons. Both types of food would have been redolent of garlic.

In their culinary conservatism, Jack and Warnie remind me of the characters in Barbara Pym’s comic novels of genteel provincial English life. For the staid wives and maiden ladies Pym wrote about, bland cooking symbolized fidelity to all the conventions and proprieties of their class and nationality. When someone in a Pym novel begins to cook with garlic (or oil or saffron), she is running a little wild — often outside the kitchen as well as in it. But for Pym, if not for the Lewises, a certain wistfulness also attaches itself to garlic; it speaks of Latin passions as well as Latin appetites. In
Jane and Prudence,
Jane, a forty-one-year-old vicar’s wife, thinks, “I should have liked the kind of life where one ate food flavoured with garlic, but it was not to be.”

Garlic, for early- and mid-twentieth-century Britons, was the badge of the foreigner, whose extravagant emotions and behavior matched his excessive cookery. The odor of garlic permeates the houses where it is used, insisting upon the carnal nature of those who live there. For well-bred Britons, being reminded of cooking was almost as repugnant as being reminded of sex and other, even more unmentionable bodily functions. Lewis expected his description of the Calormenes and their reek of onions and garlic to provoke an unthinking disgust in his readers, who he assumed would also regard the smell as alien and offensive. This wasn’t an unreasonable conviction in his day; when I mentioned to a bookish friend that I was thinking about the role of garlic in British fiction, he exclaimed (over a plate of spicy Thai noodles), “Oh God! It’s
always
the symbol of the dirty foreigner!”

Smell is so visceral a sensation that it’s strange to think of it as a
symbol
for anything, especially for a relatively abstract concept like “foreigner.” When we walk into a room, we notice the fact that we smell mildew or rotting food before we conclude that the place is filthy. Our response to smell feels primal, and yet it, too, can be shaped by culture and history. Unlike Lewis, I grew up in a house that often smelled of garlic. My mother, an excellent cook, used plenty of it in her famous spaghetti sauce, and my father was known not just as one of the few husbands who cooked but as a pretty decent amateur Chinese chef. He could be found, every other week or so, stirring garlic and fermented black beans in the sizzling oil at the bottom of his wok. So I don’t share Lewis’s disgust for exotic, strong-smelling foods. To me, the aroma of garlic is appetizing and also welcoming, the smell of dinner at home.

On the other hand, both of the Lewis brothers were very fond of their pipes, and they made a game of stopping up the windows and doors of their ground-floor sitting room, lighting a coal fire, and puffing away until clouds of tobacco and coal smoke filled the room; “fugging up” the place, they called it. My parents were committed nonsmokers — even their friends rarely lit up in our house. The odor of stale tobacco smoke on upholstery or someone’s clothes makes me queasy, probably because I associate it with the motion sickness I got while flying as a child, back in the days when people still smoked on planes and left the strange, bitter stench of old cigarettes behind. I think of the Lewis brothers’ “fugged up” room with horror, and if, at age ten, I could have met them, chances are I’d have found them much stinkier than the garlicky Calormenes.

Disgust, however elemental it feels, is often just a matter of the company you keep. Some of its objects — human waste, for example — are universally abominated, while others — certain foods or grooming customs — are prized in one society and reviled in another. A sophisticated and open-minded person makes a point of learning to tell the difference between the two, although acquiring that ability is harder for some than for others. Many see no reason to try. Lewis, who left the British Isles only twice (he went to France in World War I and on a last-chance holiday to Greece in 1960), belonged to the latter group; rejection of the unfamiliar was his default setting. According to one Lewis family legend, Jack, at the age of four, informed his father that he had conceived a prejudice against the French. When Albert asked for his reasons, Jack replied that if he knew the reasons it wouldn’t be a prejudice.

Conservatism can be principled. (Note: I’m speaking here of classical conservatism, the variety that Lewis adhered to, not of what Americans usually mean by the term. Confusingly, the American institution of free-market “conservatism” is often referred to as “neoliberalism” in Europe, and Lewis would have rejected its faith in unrestrained capitalism.) It seeks to preserve ways of life that people sometimes don’t value until they begin to slip away. Lewis and Tolkien mourned the loss of the Britain of their youth and generations past, a rural Britain of ancient social hierarchies, unspoiled by automobiles and factories. Theirs was a conservatism that led them to rail against a grab bag of phenomena ranging from coed schools to real-estate development. Though neither was politically active (and Lewis boasted of never reading the newspapers), some of their strongest political feelings align with what we would now call environmentalism.

With its focus on halting all change, however, conservatism — especially the unconsidered brand of it that Lewis espoused — can be merely reflexive. It is always in danger of enshrining prejudice in the name of tradition, of treating garlic as an emblem of iniquity simply because your own family never cooked with it. Prejudice, alas, runs through the Chronicles, although not all of it is as blatant as Lewis’s descriptions of the odiferous, dark-skinned Calormenes. Some of what I call prejudice wouldn’t be so labeled by other Lewis admirers, even today. A member of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, a group that meets right around the corner from my apartment in Greenwich Village, recently explained to a
New York Times
reporter, “Lewis’s vision was not that we all are equal, but that we are all different in our natural attitudes and natural creativity. Narnia is not about a hierarchy of power, but each kind of creature joyfully living out their natural attitudes.” That’s an accurate enough characterization of Lewis’s thought (“I do not believe God created an egalitarian world,” he once wrote). It doesn’t, however, account for the fact that tyrants always talk of the need for their subjects to accept their proper (and often divinely ordained) station in life.

We could deplore the Calormenes for many reasons — they keep slaves, their society is overly hierarchical, they have imperial designs on Narnia, they compel young women to marry men they don’t love, their government is despotic — and we would be right to do so. Recoiling from them because they eat garlic and onions, or because they have dark skin, might (if we’re brutally honest with ourselves) be our instinctive response, but it is, of course, fundamentally different and fundamentally wrong. This was a distinction Lewis often failed to make, either because he couldn’t see it or because he couldn’t be bothered to look. For him, the wickedness of the Calormenes was of a piece with their foreignness, which was integral to their wrongness; the dark skin and strange smells were all tangled up with the slaveholding and the tyranny and the devil worship, and just about as bad, too.

Lewis’s critics have accused him of many prejudices, but the main ones are racism, misogyny, and elitism. Philip Pullman has complained that in the world of the Chronicles “boys are better than girls; light-colored people are better than dark-colored people; and so on.” Lewis’s champions frequently respond to the racism charges by pointing out that the Calormenes, in addition to being dark-skinned, have a genuinely wicked society and that some of the most evil figures in the Chronicles — the White Witch most notably — have pale skin. Furthermore, at least two of the Calormenes are sympathetic: Aravis and Emeth, the nobleman who is saved by Aslan at the end of
The Last Battle.
(This last and least convincing defense sounds suspiciously like “some of my best friends are . . .” and it doesn’t go very far in counteracting the penny-dreadful phobia evident in lines like “their white eyes flashing dreadfully in their brown faces.”)

The impulse to hero-worship our favorite writers is a leftover of our starry-eyed adolescence, as much a part of that period as the urge to rebel against the authority figures closer at hand. We want the artists who have changed our lives to lead exemplary lives of their own. A college friend of mine was crushed when he learned of the messy and ignoble intimate relationships of his literary idol, George Orwell, who cheated on his first wife and later, when he was at death’s door, married a much younger woman. My friend, a romantic soul, expected Orwell to be, if not faultless, then at least a paragon commensurate with his expressed ideals. One of the things we look for in books, especially when we’re young, is guidance on how to live, and however much we might admire what a great man has to say on this count, his credo loses some luster if he turns out to be unable to abide by it himself.