Henderson the Rain King

Henderson the Rain King (1959), undoubtedly Bellow's most loved book, offers his most trenchant analysis of literary modernism. Through parody and satire, Bellow renders laughable many of its banalities. Eugene Henderson, one of his few WASP protagonists, is a burlesque of the absurd, violent, artist-hero of the Stephan Daedalus variety. Violinist and pig farmer, he is a menopausal social outcast. A direct parody of the Hemingway stoic or narcissist, he is metaphysically earnest, introspective, solipsistic, bumbling, and egocentric. He believes with his Eliotic fisher king forbears that there is a curse on the land. He is Bellow's answer to a generation of modern writers who reacted with exaggerated disappointment to the failed promises of Rousseauistic romanticism. With his initials E. H., his drinking, his .357 magnum rifle, private firing range, fascination with African safaris, and his participation in a foreign war, he is Bellow's response to the literary giant, Hemingway, whose reputation and literary formulas dominated Bellow's youth. Eugene Henderson, after he has alienated his wives, children, and friends, and shouted his housekeeper to death, uses part of his inherited wealth to finance a spiritual pilgrimage to Africa. Though this is really a mental journey to the heart of Henderson's contemporary American spiritual darkness, its realistic furnishings are reminiscent of a long tradition of Africanist travel literature. As he journeys deeper and deeper into the wilderness, seeking spiritual enlightenment in the heart of the Africa of myth we see Bellow once again demythologizing much of his protagonist's transcendental inheritance. But he is also demythologizing the romantic disappointment inherent in the contemporary existentialist preoccupation with death. Through Henderson's mystical impasses we read Bellow's comment on the utter failure of nihilistic existentialism to teach us anything humanizing about the nature and meaning of death. Even Henderson's stoicism fails to produce a worthwhile social ethics. Through the supposedly therapeutic romping sessions with Atti, the lioness, Bellow provides his ultimate comment on the castrating effects of the modernist preoccupation with death. Then there is the ever-present Bellowian attack on Freudian personality theory and various crackpot transcendentalist "isms" represented in the character of Dahfu.

Yet beneath all the mockery and intellectual sifting, Bellow develops the story of a sensibility wounded by the modern world, yet significantly restored by a vision of calm stars, simplicity, freshness, and mystery. Once Henderson has purged himself of modernist fallacies, all of his subsequent observations assure him of beauty, design, and grandeur in the universe, despite the fact that he remains his aboriginal Henderson-like self. Beneath sterility and despair in the novel lies a modified form of the grail legend and resurrection myth. Henderson finally offers his soul in prayer to an unknown God: "Oh you...Something...you Something because of whom there is not nothing. Help me to do thy will.... O Thou who tookest me from pigs, let me not be killed over lions. And forgive my crimes and nonsense and let me return to Lily and the kids." It was written during a period in Bellow's life when, in a series of public lectures, he articulated with remarkable consistency his evolving belief in the primacy of the knowledge of the human heart over the intellect.

It is also a remarkable inquiry into the conflicting codes of masculinity which afflict the modern American male. Henderson combines the romantic individualist, wealthy capitalist, rough soldier, schlemiel, philanderer, ugly American, and religious quester. He is an American imago of gigantesque proportions. Significantly, it is not until he has been embraced by African archetypal mother-goddesses, and taken lessons from a lioness, he is able to quell his earlier brutishness to his housekeeper whom he has shouted to death, his daughter whom he has ignored, and Lily whom he has humiliated and abused for years. He is last seen rejoicing in his recently acquired spiritual equilibrium, embracing a woolly-haired orphan child on the polar ice cap of Newfoundland. Finally, the "I Want" voice in his heart is still. However, we are left wondering whether he can maintain this equilibrium found in the monastic solitude of a polar ice cap within the social context of his family.

This period of time, during the writing of Henderson the Rain King, was extremely trying for Bellow. His father had died, his house was constantly under repair, his wife was complaining about lack of money and of boredom, and there were other family funerals. Isaac Rosenfeld, his longtime friend, was dead and so was his publisher, Ben Huebsch, from Viking Press. His other writer friend, Delmore Schwartz, was hospitalized and close to collapse. In the face of these pressing distractions, Bellow buried himself in his fictional world and, through Henderson, escaped to some Africa of the soul. This is a novel whose humor and metaphysical wit transcend the crudities and heavy-handedness of The Adventures of Augie March. It was published in February of 1959, and produced the usual collection of mixed reviews.