Dancing To Henderson the Rain King
Saul Bellow's Novel of Africa is Still a Joy to Behold
Jun 9, 2009
Fifty years ago, in 1959, Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King was published. It occupies a unique place in Bellow’s oeuvre, coming as it did on the heels of the novel and novella that brought him critical attention, The Adventures of Augie March and Seize the Day, and just before the appearance of his overwhelming masterpiece, Herzog, that brought him literary fame. There’s an exuberance and quirkiness to Henderson the Rain King that feels, in retrospect, like a seasoned author taking a deep, healing breath and testing his skills.
It’s still a lot of fun to read, in other words. More important, it’s a good example through which to reassess Bellow’s enduring legacy, as well as to speculate why there are so few young fiction writers of Bellow’s magnitude showing up on publisher’s lists these days.
Don’t Get Out Your Dust Rags
Bellow’s narrator, Eugene Henderson, is a 55-year-old American millionaire who, in the midst of a personal crisis, undergoes a crisis of conscience (with Bellow, crises often overlap and form a thick soup of physical and mental complexity), and decides to go to Africa, not to take a typical Safari vacation, but to really immerse himself in the continent. There he meets two tribes whose primal culture eventually help him get back to his primal roots. His will to live, his “grun-tu-molani” intact, he returns to America.
Bellow had no qualms about revealing that when he wrote the novel, he had never been to Africa, and the story and Bellow’s writing feels more than ever like it teeters on the edge of misinterpretation and even racism. But Bellow was no intellectual slouch (his major in college was anthropology), and the novel bears no resemblance to an old relic that deserves to die out.
Doing It In Style
Much has been made of Bellow’s skill with language and the brilliance of his style. Martin Amis, one of Bellow’s most vociferous champions, said it best in his 1995 essay on The Adventures of Augie March: “Style…is not something grappled on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception.” Bellow was a master, in other words, of making consciously intelligent and sculpted writing not feel like an imposition on the reader, but a gift to them.
James Woods, in his recent How Fiction Works, puts it wonderfully when he describes the feeling that goes through his mind after reading a great Bellow passage: “Until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived eloquence.”
Why are there so few exiting stylists today in the world of fiction? Perhaps because many in the literary establishment come upon books with plots as attention-grabbing as Bellow’s in Henderson the Rain King, and feel that most of the author’s work has been done. The major reason that Bellow’s books, especially the tenuous oddness of Henderson the Rain King (come on, a white millionaire finding himself in Africa?), are must-reads today is because everything in them is suffused and propped up with his enduring talent and rigorous intelligence as a stylist.
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