BOOKS
The Solitariness of Saul Bellow
BY DAN J ACOBSON Henderson the Rain King* is as ambitious as any of Mr. Bellow's previous novels— which means that it is very ambitious indeed. The reader must not be misled by the novel's appear- ance of `wildness,' by the apparently disconnected Way Henderson, the narrator, throws down his memoirs of his two wives, his father, his feats of strength, his adventures in Africa, his pig-keeping, his ambitions to enter medical school; for this surface disorder is in fact a kind of subterfuge, a way of hiding the carefulness and deliberation with which the allegorical scheme of the novel has been worked out. lf, however, the subterfuge Were no more than a subterfuge, the novel would not be nearly as interesting as it is : the disorder of the book is a genuine part of Henderson's own character, and thus one can be taken along with it, even if one is not ultimately taken in by it. Henderson is an American of great wealth and Patrician ancestry—'his great-grandfather was Secretary of State, his great-uncles were ambas- sadors to England and France, and his father was the famous scholar Willard Henderson who wrote that book on the Albigensians, a friend of Wil- liam James and Henry Adams.' With this back- ground, Henderson feels intensely his responsi- bility for himself and his country; and in his drunkenness, anger and despair, he suffers for What they have both become.- (In my own way I Worked very hard. Violent suffering is labour and often I was drunk before lunch.') On an impulse Henderson leaves the United States for Africa, and the major part of the book is taken up with his adventures among two tribes, the gentle Arnewi and the fiercer Wariri, to whom he be- comes the Rain King and among whom he under- goes a regeneration. The voice in his heart that had said, 'I want, I want, I want,' is silenced; he becomes a man who has 'found satisfaction in being.'
Others were taken up with becoming . . . Enough! Enough! Time to have Become! Time to Be! Burst the spirit's sleep. Wake up America! , Stump the experts. I this process of regeneration Henderson's chief friend and instructor is the Wariri king, Dhafu, Who lends Henderson medical textbooks, and teaches him—in the presence of a lion—to roar like a lion, walk like a lion, think like a lion.
Now you are a lion. Mentally, conceive of the environment. The sky, the sun, and creatures of the bush. You are related to all. The very gnats are your cousins. The sky is your thoughts. The leaves are your insurance, and you need no other. . , . Are you with me? I say, Mr.
Henderson, have you consumed much amounts of alcohol in your life? The face suggests you have, the nose especially. It is nothing personal. Much can be changed. By no means all, but very very much.
°haft' himself is eventually killed by a lion, 1evertheless; but when Henderson, the ex-pig- farmer, returns to the United States, he takes with ..._ 1,,.*eid en EN HDERSON co and Ni THU l so RAIN16s.) KING. By Saul Bellow. mfeld n, t t THE ADVFNITURFS OF AIME MARCH. By Saul eilow• (World Distributors Ltd., 5s.)
him a lion cub in which, according to the beliefs of the Wariri, the spirit of Dhafu now resides. The understanding offered by Dhafu, and the formal rites and disciplines imposed by him, are more than merely thetapeutic; they can fairly be de- scribed as religious, and are seized as such by Henderson, despite his fears and revulsions.
Described in these terms, the novel might sound heavy, forbidding, preachy. Preachy it is in a few passages, especially towards the end; but it is cer- tainly neither heavy nor forbidding. In the first place, it is often extremely funny; the humour, and especially the humour of Henderson's lan- guage, is successful throughout. Henderson the Rain King manages to bring together the formal and the colloquial in a much easier and more effective relationship than was the case with The Adventures of Angie Mareht : in the present book the style truly is the man, Henderson's language is his character—forceful, disorderly, irreverent, quick to turn on itself, of great intelligence and charm. Then, for most of the novel the allegorical scheme or intention does not stand over and above the book, but actually serves a useful and positive function within it, as a mode of defining its pos- sibilities of action. Because everything in Mr. Bel- low's 'Africa' is pure fantasy, and Mr. Bellow is free to make up the rules as he goes along, there could obviously have been a danger of the reader's sense of consequence and meaning being drowned in a flux of arbitrary events. But the fact that Henderson the Rain King is schematic is one of the saving graces of the novel; without the scheme, without the argument, it might have seemed simply self-indulgent, an accumulation of miraculous events, any of which need or need not have taken place. Now some of them have to take place : the argument generates an inevitability of action which would otherwise have been lacking. Thus the allegory becomes in a sense the plot; and the moral intention of the book becomes its 'reality.'
This is unusual : usually when we say that a novel is 'schematic' we are condemning it. Here we cannot do so; and yet in the end Mr. Bellow cannot escape from the trap that he has dug for himself. If the intention of the book belongs to our own familiar world, and if Henderson is really to show us how that world, 'which 1 thought so mighty an oppressor, has removed its wrath from me,' then we are surely entitled to ask that we should see him back in it again, wrath-cleansed, amongst us, who will never have the chance to go to his 'Africa.' As it is, precisely on the point of Henderson's return to our world the scheme does become mere scheme, the intention remains mere intention, unabsorbed into the body of the novel. We never do see Henderson back in the United States; we leave him at Gander, in Newfound- land, on his way home; his transformation is finally no more than a matter of assertion on his part. Early in the book, before his regeneration, Henderson remarks, 'Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay,' and in a curious way one can make this one's judgment of the novel as a whole. Alone in the 'Africa' of his dream, Henderson is pretty good; but society, our society, still seems to have him beat.
It is not unfair, I think, to connect this failure with what is unsatisfactory in Mr. Bellow's previous novels. Their leading characters, too, are on their own, outside society, as Henderson is in Africa, though they walk in the streets of New York or Chicago. They are caught in a self- communion which is never really broken; they are the creators of their own worlds, where conse- quence is what they will it to be. Consider how lonely and insulated Mr. Bellow's characters really are, how little they are affected by anything that anyone outside manages to do to them. The hero of Dangling Man is jobless, alone in his room most of the day; the book consists simply of his own diary of that period of unemployment and loneliness and detachment. Leventhal, the hero of The Victim, is driven to desperation by what Allbee says and does to him, and yet Allbee says and does so little, really, that to explain his effect the author has to make Leventhal suffer from a fierce private dread of madness, so that he too is a self-driven man. In The Adventures of Angie March, Augie's refusal to be regimented, to be turned into what other people want to make of him, has the unmistakable aspect of insulation, of ultimate indifference. Tommy Wilhelm, the hero of Seize the Day (which, of all the books, comes closest to complete success), blunders from one dis- aster to the next, and though he pleads with his father and his wife, they could not sive him even if they wanted to, because he does not wish to be saved. It is worth noting that in all the books the consciousness of the hero is the consciousness of the book, throughout, though in Seize the Day we do have glimpses of Tommy through the eyes of his father; and this is clearly symptomatic of how little intrusion is permitted into the heroes' inner lives, into their own ideas of themselves.
In itself the solitariness of Mr. Bellow's charac- ters does not account for the dissatisfaction we feel, in the upshot, with his novels, though it does impose a limitation upon the kind of success they might have been expected to have. But what one cannot help feeling is that Mr. Bellow has not yet come to terms with the true nature of his talent or genius; that there is still a deep division between his conscious purposes and the deeper motives of his writing. Consciously, Mr. Bellow celebrates love ('Once more,' says Henderson. 'Whatever gains I ever made were always due to love and nothing else'); but for all their concern and eager- ness and compassion, it is something other than love which is acted out by the loneliness of his heroes. When The Adventures of Angie March came out people talked about it in relation to Huckleberry Finn, and Henderson the Rain King must remind us of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; but if we are to go back into American literature to find parallels for one of the strongest elements in Mr. Bellow's work, there are darker figures than these to be named.
Ahab and Bartleby the Scrivener are solitaries too, even monomaniacs. The greatness of Melville is that he let them celebrate what they were, at what- ever the cost to them, or to himself, or to his own beliefs.
Having talked in this way of 'dissatisfaction,' I must add, explicitly that Mr. Bellow's novels are without question as important as any being written in the English language today; in originality and scope of invention, and vigour of execution, there are very few contemporary novelists who can be
brought into comparison with him. And Hender- son the Rain King is one of the best things he has ever done; it seems to me a better book than The Adventures. of Angie March, though I do not imagine it will be as enthusiastically received.
Previous page
