Bellow the Rainmaker

What made me take this trip to Africa? 

When I picked up Henderson the Rain King to read earlier this month, I was on a Saul Bellow tear. I read Dangling Man and The Victim in July, and The Adventures of Augie March in August. (I read his fourth, Seize the Day, last year). After a detour through Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, I turned to Bellow’s fifth novel. Years before I started on his novels, I had read some of Bellow’s stories, and I wrote about them on this blog: “The Old System” inspired me to write “The Heraldry of Being", “Looking for Mr. Green” led me to write “The Fallen World of Appearances", and “Something to Remember Me By” provoked me to write “Something to Remember Him By”.  

By the time I got to his novels I believed that it was in them that Bellow achieved the highest expression of his gifts. Having read five of them, I have to admit that I’m somewhat disappointed. Dangling Man was a succinct, necessarily limited exploration, set in Chicago, in the form of a diary written during the war by a man who has quit his job while awaiting induction in the US military. The complications (due to his Canadian origins) make his life increasingly difficult and strain his relations with his wife and his family. The Victim, set in New York during a hot summer, is more concentrated, but it, too, is limited by the narrow perceptions of a man whose placid life is disrupted by the death of a nephew and the reappearance of a man who accuses him of ruining his life. 

Then came The Adventures of Augie March, a grand picaresque novel in the tradition of Sterne. But I thought the novel would’ve been better had it been broken in two – the narrative leading all the way up to the reappearance of Thea and Augie’s odd excursion to Mexico is cumulatively brilliant. Everything after it is more diffuse and, for me, far less engrossing. Seize the Day is a short novel, and I agree with the critics who regard it as Bellow’s best. Henderson the Rain King is as satisfying in form – a cohesive, contoured novel from beginning to end. Eugene Henderson asks the question I quoted above at the outset of his story. His life is that of a seeker – he spent most of it looking for something he clearly cannot find. Now in his 50s, his old cook drops dead in his kitchen. 

And I thought, “Oh, shame, shame! Oh, crying shame! How can we? Why do we allow ourselves? What are we doing? The last little room of dirt is waiting. Without windows. So for God’s sake make a move, Henderson, put forth effort. You, too, will die of this pestilence. Death will annihilate you and nothing will remain, and there will be nothing left but junk. Because nothing will have been and so nothing will be left. While something still is—now! For the sake of all, get out.” 

Henderson can never quiet a voice in him that chants “I want I want.” Not knowing what to do with himself, he impulsively goes with a friend and his new bride on their honeymoon to Africa. In mid-air crossing the Atlantic he marvels: 

And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily. (Joni Mitchell has said that she was reading Henderson the Rain King on a plane, came upon these lines and conceived her song “Both Sides Now.”) 

Henderson separates himself from the honeymooners, takes two of their guides, fires one, and tells the other, Romilayu, to take him off the beaten track. “Me tek you far, far,” Romilayu says. Does he ever. After abandoning their jeep (not practical off the beaten track), Henderson and Romilayu walk for several days. At last they encounter a cattle herding tribe, the Arnewi, whose old queen takes a liking to Henderson. When he sees how their watering hole is afflicted with frogs Henderson creates an improvised explosive device with the powder from his rifle shells. The resulting explosion kills the frogs but also destroys the Arnewi’s cistern. He and Romilayu depart the village before trouble brews. 

They trek farther into the bush until they arrive among the Wariri, whose young king, Dahfu (who speaks fluent English) befriends Henderson. During a rainmaking ceremony, Henderson foolishly wagers with the king that the rain won’t come. Then he performs a weightlifting stunt and is cheered as the tribe’s new rain king, while torrential rains pour down on the village. 

Henderson loses the wager and gets involved in palace intrigue. He discusses philosophy with Dahfu in a lion’s den – the lion is Dahfu’s pet, but Henderson is terrified of it. In fact, as soon as he is obliged to don a diaphanous green costume, still wearing soiled undershorts and a pith helmet, Henderson's comical figure comes lumbering to the fore. Yet he knows too well what a ridiculous figure he cuts among the Wariri. He comes to believe that Dahfu will achieve greatness and bring about a change for mankind. He explains to an uncomprehending Romilayu: 

“Americans are supposed to be dumb but they are willing to go into this. It isn’t just me. You have to think about white Protestantism and the Constitution and the Civil War and capitalism and winning the West. All the major tasks and the big conquests were done before my time. That left the biggest problem of all, which was to encounter death. We’ve just got to do something about it. It isn’t just me. Millions of Americans have gone forth since the war to redeem the present and discover the future. I can swear to you, Romilayu, there are guys exactly like me in India and in China and South America and all over the place. Just before I left home I saw an interview in the paper with a piano teacher from Muncie who became a Buddhist monk in Burma. You see, that’s what I mean. I am a high-spirited kind of guy. And it’s the destiny of my generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life. It just is. Why the hell do you think I’m out here, anyway?” 

Saul Bellow never went to Africa. He didn’t have to. Henderson saves himself from the Wariri and flies home to his family. He has learned what he wants. In the final chapter, he ponders, “Whatever gains I ever made were always due to love and nothing else.” Bellow’s embrace of life is so large that it’s useless to complain if it’s sometimes a little clumsy. Through Henderson, Bellow says, “I am a true adorer of life, and if I can’t reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.”