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.