Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

First published: 1959

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Mock-heroic

Time of plot: Late 1950’s

Locale: Central East Africa

Principal characters

• Eugene Henderson, an American millionaire, a traveler in Africa, and a philosophical clown
• Romilayu, his native guide and companion
• Willatale, the queen of the Arnewi tribe
• Mtalba, her sister
• Itelo, the prince-champion of the Arnewi
• Dahfu, the chief of the Wariri tribe
• Horko, the king’s uncle
• The Bunam, the chief priest of the Wariri
• Gmilo, a lion superstitiously believed to contain the spirit of Dahfu’s father
• Atti, a lioness
• Dahfu, her cub, as named by Henderson

The Story:

The seeker in Saul Bellow’s fiction is no Ulysses, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Gulliver, Huck Finn, or Ishmael. He is the philosophical clown, the innocent American, and adventurous discoverer of a spiritual quest that begins with the knowledge that “man’s character is his fate” and ends with the realization that “man’s fate is his character.” Eugene Henderson is a tremendously comic figure, oversized in physique, great in his appetites, obsessed by the demands of an “I want, I want” that clamors without appeasement within him. He is fifty-five years old and has a violent temper; he has more money than even his eccentric needs demand, a second wife, and an assortment of children. He turns his home into a pig farm, learns to play the violin, and acquires a reputation for drinking and crude manners. When he tries to sum up his life, it is, as he says, a mess, a fact he realizes without knowing the reasons for it. When he can no longer face himself, his family, or his past, he flees to Africa with dreams of becoming another Dr. Grenville or Albert Schweitzer. Africa, as Henderson sees it, is an empty and secret land, the last outpost of the prehuman past, a land unmarked by the footprints of history.

With a native guide, Romilayu, he arrives in the land of the Arnewi, where he engages in a ritual wrestling bout with Itelo, the champion of the tribe. Even in that remote place, however, he cannot escape his past; he remains a millionaire, a wanderer, a violent man looking for peace and happiness. The queen of these gentle people tells him that his malady is the grun-tumolani, the will to live instead of to die. Accepted by the Arnewi and courted by the queen’s sister, Mtalba, Henderson plans to cleanse the tribe’s sacred cistern, which is infested with frogs. His homemade bomb, however, blasts away the wall of the cistern, and the water seeps into the parched earth. Rather than face the consequences of this disaster, he runs away.

Henderson next turns up among the Wariri, a more warlike and savage tribe. The king is Dahfu, a ruler considerably more educated than his subjects, for he studied in a missionary school and can speak to Henderson in English. While watching a tribal festival, Henderson is moved to lift the statue of Mummah, goddess of clouds, after several of the Wariri have failed to budge the massive idol. His act of strength, he soon discovers, is sacramental. When a sudden downpour follows, he is acclaimed as the new Sungo, or rain king, of the tribe, and he is compelled to put on the green silk drawers of his office. Henderson, elevated to a post in which he becomes a scapegoat for the capricious rain goddess, is no better off than he was before; he is as much governed by ritual as King Dahfu, who will rule only as long as his powers of procreation last. When those powers fail, he will be strangled and another ruler selected.

In the end, Dahfu is the means of Henderson’s salvation. In an underground pit, he keeps a pet lion, Atti, a creature hated and feared by the Wariri because they believe the beast has bewitched their king. As Dahfu continues to postpone the ritual capture of the wild lion supposed to contain his father’s spirit, the chief priest and the king’s uncle plot against him. Under Dahfu’s tutelage, meanwhile, Henderson learns to romp with the lion and imitate its roars. Dahfu tells him to act the lion’s role and to be a beast; recovery of his humanity will come later.

Dahfu’s lion cult impresses Henderson. His failure has been his bullish or piggish attempt to alter the world around him, to kick back when he feels that he has been kicked by fate. Instead he must alter himself; in particular, he must cure himself of fear by thinking like a lion, by imagining the lion at the cortex of his brain and making himself over as a lion. In spite of his crushing failure with the Arnewi, he learns two things that help him in his daily lion lessons. First, although a man when struck is likely to strike out in revenge (as the Wariri but not the Arnewi do), pure virtue can break the chain of blows. The Arnewi, principally Mtalba, the aunt of Prince Itelo, who was once the companion of Dahfu, are virtuous but cowlike as a result of loving their cows; hence their virtue is not for Henderson. Second, he has been confirmed in a sense of his own worth by Mtalba, who oozes the odor of sanctity and is prepared to marry him. The demanding voice of the “I want, I want” within Henderson becomes the roar of the lion as Dahfu instructs him that a human is still an animal, but that it is possible for him to be a lion and not a pig.

The king’s final lesson is that of courage in meeting death, which Henderson has always thought the biggest problem of all. When Dahfu is killed while trying to capture a wild lion, possibly through the chief priest’s conniving, Henderson flees the Wariri to avoid becoming the next king, and he returns with a captured lion cub to America. The last glimpse of Henderson is at the airport in Newfoundland. He is playing with a little boy, the child of American parents, who speaks only Persian. Dahfu and his lion have done their work. Henderson’s spirit is finally at home in the animal housing of his flesh.

Bibliography

Atlas, James. Bellow: A Biography. New York: Random House, 2000. Atlas spent ten years working on this book, which some critics consider the definitive biography of Bellow. Atlas is particularly good at finding parallels between the tone of Bellow’s novels and his mood at the time he wrote them.

Bach, Gerhard, ed. The Critical Response to Saul Bellow. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Collection of reviews and essays about Bellow’s work that were published from the 1940’s through the 1990’s, including pieces by Delmar Schwartz, Robert Penn Warren, Alfred Kazin, and Granville Hicks. Contains articles about all of the major novels.

Cronin, Gloria L. A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001. A feminist interpretation of Bellow. Cronin argues that his male protagonists search for but ultimately destroy the “lost feminine essence” they desire.

Dutton, Robert R. Saul Bellow. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Focuses on the underlying philosophical theme of humans as “subangelic,” situated between animals and divinity. Henderson the Rain King, with its biblical references and its menagerie of pigs, lions, cattle, and a bear, fits this theme easily.

Fuchs, Daniel. Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984. Traces the evolution of Henderson the Rain King from manuscript versions to the finished book.

Halldorson, Stephanie S. The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Halldorson describes how the two American authors redefine the concept of heroism. Her study focuses on Bellow’s novels Henderson the Rain King and Mr. Sammler’s Planet.

Hyland, Peter. Saul Bellow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Starts with a brief overview of Bellow’s life and career, then discusses the novels chronologically. The discussion of Henderson the Rain King focuses on its mixture of the comic and serious.

Malin, Irving. Saul Bellow and the Critics. New York: New York University Press, 1967. Twelve essays on Bellow’s works. Most of the essays refer to Henderson the Rain King to some extent; David Hughes’s essay, “Reality and the Hero,” compares and contrasts the work to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita in its ability to “illuminate the problems of the contemporary novelist.”

Quayum, M. A. Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Quayum examines Henderson the Rain King and four of Bellow’s other novels to demonstrate the influence of American Transcendentalism, particularly the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.

Wilson, Jonathan. On Bellow’s Planet: Readings from the Dark Side. Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985. Analyzes Henderson the Rain King in terms of anthropology, examining the relation between ritual and order in African societies and in twentieth century America. Includes a discussion of the novel’s ending.