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.
Even more unrealistic, we also like to believe that our literary sages and mentors had the ability to see through the errors and prejudices of their day and to prefigure the wisdom of our own. T. S. Eliot, for example, was a great poet, but also an anti-Semite. This was not particularly unusual for someone of his background, but it was not universal, either. Tolkien admired Jews, and when, in 1938, his German publisher wrote to ask about his ethnicity, he testily replied, “If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” Tolkien’s contemporary fans are fortunate in this; those who adulate Eliot have on occasion felt obliged to write long and urgent essays for intellectual journals attempting to explain away such slurs as “the jew squats on the window sill” (from “Gerontion”) as “parody.”
Imagine, then, how much more defensive a writer’s acolytes must be when the very foundations of their lives depend, to a certain extent, on his work. This is the case with almost everyone who writes about Lewis today. While Lewis’s literary criticism has drifted into obscurity (as A. N. Wilson has pointed out, criticism is a literary genre especially prone to obsolescence), his Christian apologetics remain nearly as popular as the Chronicles. Most of the biographers and scholars who currently study him first became interested in his religious works. Through his writing, Lewis has served as an avuncular theological mentor, a kindly guide who eases the anxious into the fold and continues to provide them with justifications for their beliefs. (This, incidentally, is precisely the job of the apologetic as a rhetorical form, according to the Oxford American Dictionary; it is “a reasoned argument or writing in justification of something.”)
Among these converts is the geneticist Francis S. Collins, who in his book The Language of God, describes his own transformation from “obnoxious atheist” to evangelical Christian, precipitated by reading Lewis’s Mere Christianity. “Within the first three pages,” Collins told an interviewer, “I realized that my arguments against faith were those of a schoolboy.” Of course, Collins would not have been reading Mere Christianity to begin with if he had not been uneasy in his atheism and searching for some alternative. (He was given the book by a Methodist minister who recognized him as ripe for the plucking.) But Collins, like Lewis, portrays himself as a reluctant convert, and not surprisingly he invests great authority in the writer who persuaded him to cross the line.
For many of the people who study Lewis’s writings, finding moral fault with any of his versions of Christianity, including the Chronicles, amounts to discovering termites in the joists supporting their own faith; it’s not a possibility they’re prepared to seriously contemplate. They may know better than to speak of Lewis’s theological writings as a form of scripture — that would be blasphemous — but veneration is also part of their temperament; it is, after all, one reason why they are religious. For them, Lewis has become the rough equivalent of the eleventh-century French rabbi Shlomo ben Itzhak (or Rashi), whose commentary on the Torah acquired so much authority that it was included in the first printed version of the Hebrew Bible.
This, not surprisingly, makes Lewis scholars pretty skittish about examining the rare occasions when he seems to address race. The fact that the worst of Lewis’s stereotypes turn up in the Chronicles — mere children’s fiction — makes the subject easier to shrug off as inconsequential. David Downing, once again among the braver souls who attempt a defense, picks his battles with exquisite care in Into the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles. He begins by dismissing charges (made by the British academic Andrew Blake) that the Chronicles contribute to the “demonization of Islam.” Islam, Downing observes, is a monotheistic religion while the Calormenes have more than one god. Downing then goes on to explain that Lewis modeled the Calormenes on characters from the Arabian Nights and therefore “every objectionable trait” they exhibit originates in “source materials” that “arose among Middle Easterners themselves.” The section of Into the Wardrobe that presents these evasive and absurdly technical vindications is entitled “Are the Chronicles Politically Incorrect?” rather than “Are the Chronicles Racist?” implying that such questions amount to no more than left-wing pettifoggery.