In Africa, Searching for a Life Less Ordinary: Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

reviewed by Greg Mortimer

In 1959, Chicago native Saul Bellow (who got his degree in anthropology from Northwestern and died earlier this year at the age of 89) published a novel called Henderson the Rain King. While not as commercially or critically successful as Herzog or The Adventures of Augie March, it would eventually be named by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century. And yet, while Bellow's name remains a giant in American literature, this transcendental and ecstatically written novel seems to have slipped under the modern literary radar.

Eugene Henderson, who admits he has "never been at home in life", is a middle-aged millionaire, war veteran, violinist, and pig farmer who, like many of Bellow's characters, is at a crossroads, craving an outlet that will lend his life a higher meaning-or, as he puts it, a way to "burst the spirit's sleep." "Before you know it," he says, "as the years go by, you're just like other people you have seen, with all those peculiar human ailments. Just another vehicle for temper and vanity and rashness and all the rest. Who wants it? Who needs it? These things occupy the place where a man's soul should be." It is a worthy observation, since Henderson has managed to humiliate his wife, ignore his children, and shout his housekeeper to death (literally).

Henderson is also larger than life: with his robust frame (well over 6 feet) and a face like "an unfinished church", he is a vessel of intense, sometimes hyper-realized feeling and narrates in a voice so humorously candid that the reader can't help but invest his hopes in this man: "If I don't get carried away I never accomplish anything," he admits. "I am best at rough carpentry, roofing, and painting, and not so hot as an electrician or plumber. It may not be correct to say that I have an ability to lose myself in practical work; rather what happens is that I become painfully intense, and this is true even when I lay out a game of solitaire."

Responding to a curious voice in him that continually chants "I want, I want, I want" (although the object of this want seems unclear, both to the reader and to Henderson), Bellow's protagonist heads to Africa. After his first encounter with the native Arnewi tribe-where he tries with disastrous results to rid a water cistern full of unwelcome frogs-his guide Romilayu brings him to a new village, of the Wariri tribe, where he develops a close friendship with their king Dahfu. The king, a sculpted demigod who was educated abroad and speaks perfect English, quickly ushers Henderson into a realm of being he could never have anticipated.

While at a convention of tribal rituals, Henderson observes a strongman trying to lift up a mammoth woman named Mummah in a ceremony to make some much-needed rain-but he fails. And then an "estuary, a huge bay of hope and ambition" descends on Henderson: "So inflamed was my wish to do something," he says. "To work the right stitch into the design of my destiny before it was too late." Dahfu submits to Henderson's pleas to let him try and lift Mummah-and of course, he succeeds.

The thunderclouds roll in, and Dahfu named Henderson the Sungo, or Rain King. What develops is a close friendship between the two, colored with Dahfu's philosophical insights and advice that Henderson hopes will satiate his quest to figure out the best way to live his life. Dahfu intends to crystallize Henderson's problem by taking him along on his curious, potentially dangerous ritualistic search for a lion, which is considered to be the reincarnation of his predecessor. The philosophical exchanges between Dahfu and Henderson-along with the disaster that ultimately ensues-communicate Bellow's rejection of what he saw as a modern preoccupation with death and instead present his plea for the conversion of grief into joy, the necessity of imagination, and the life-affirming possibilities of suffering.

But that sounds like the stuff of literary criticism. You should read this book for the sheer pleasure of observing Henderson figure out life while being hilarious, helpless, maddening, compassionate, pitiful, loving, impetuous, and bumbling all at the same time. (And being as self-conscious as he is, Henderson wouldn't have it any other way). But he never strays from his creed of intense persistence. During the tribal rituals, Dahfu asks Henderson, "Do you not rush through the world too hard?" And as this novel euphorically concludes on a snowy field in Newfoundland, you'll thank Bellow for offering the proposition that rushing hard through life-that is, extracting everything you can from it-is really the best way to live it.