Revisiting Books Long Since Read 1: Saul Bellow

Henderson The Rain King

One of our English lecturers at college was Rev. Michael Paul Gallagher S.J., still hale and hearty and living in Rome where he retired as Professor of Fundamental Theology. His webpage can be visited HERE. Anyway, one of the great novels that Michael Paul introduced us to was Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King (1959) which we read and studied in 1978.  This is a brilliant novel and it deals with that perennial theme in human life, namely the search for meaning.  I was enthralled by Henderson and his quest.  In the novel Henderson is a middle-aged, 55 year old to be precise, menopausal male looking for some meaning in his "meaningless" and boring life.  Indeed the hero, or anti-hero, of this novel is a send-up or burlesque or parody of the more seriously depicted heroes of the modernist novel - the likes of Stephen Dedalus in our own James Joyce's marvellous wee book The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914/1944) comes readily to mind. 

Through parody and satire, Bellow renders laughable many of the banalities of modernism with its self-conscious importance. Eugene Henderson, our anti-hero, one of Bellow's few WASP protagonists, is a violinist and pig farmer and a menopausal social outcast. He is a direct parody of the Hemingway stoic or narcissist - he is metaphysically earnest, introspective, solipsistic, bumbling, and egocentric. He believes with his Eliotic or Eliot-like fisher king forbears that there is a curse on the land.

 This Eugene Henderson, after he has alienated his wives, his children, and his friends, and after he has shouted his housekeeper to death, uses part of his inherited wealth to finance a spiritual pilgrimage to Africa.  Obviously Bellow is here sending up the self-important pose of the modern explorer or the modern searcher for meaning.  Our protagonist goes on a journey to Africa – and this is again a sort of burlesque or send up of the obviously all-too-serious quest of Marlow in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) - in search of himself, in pursuit of some inkling of some meaning to his life.  Again and again, Bellow has his anti-hero utter the refrain or chant (or mantra even): "I want, I want, I want..."  What he wants is not too clear to Henderson at all.  He is just a restless seeker - shades of the great St Augustine's phrase, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee!" 

For a modernist or post-modernist one might re-write this phrase exactly but leave out the last 3 words and finish with "until they..."  I'll leave it to the reader to put in the omitted word or words.  What we may want may not be all too clear to us readers either.  However, I suppose we all want some form of happiness, though in a previous post I referred to Professor Ivor Browne's contention that happiness was/is the wrong goal.  Meaning I suppose is a better goal insofar as it brings with it an ease with self, an ease of being alive and at least an ability to live relatively comfortably in one's own skin.  Through Henderson's journey, or more particularly pilgrimage, as it is at once a physical and spiritual journey, Bellow succeeds in demythologising much of lofty ideals of romanticism and the high seriousness of modernism.  Henderson has many long philosophical conversations with the kings of the various tribes whom he encounters deep in the jungles of darkest and wildest Africa.

He is at 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.  In the end, 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 takes 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."  This again is a send-up or burlesque of a religious conversion and indeed of its formulaic prayers.  What Henderson has found is probably that the search itself was the only interesting thing in the whole escapade.  His restlessness is over.  The demons have been exorcised in the pilgrimage to Africa and the polar ice cap of Newfoundland.

I'll finish these reflections with a little reading from the Tao Te Ching.  Stanza 16 was written for the Henderson within us all.  Every line speaks to the restlessness within us.  It offers some consolations, too, but we must be willing to contemplate them and synthesize them into our own lived experience:

Empty your mind of all thoughts.

Let your heart be at peace.

Watch the turmoil of beings,

but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe

returns to the common source.

Returning to the source is serenity.

If you don't realise the source,

you stumble in confusion and sorrow.

When you realise where you come from,

you naturally become tolerant,

disinterested, amused,

kind-hearted as a grandmother,

dignified as a king.

immersed in the wonder of the Tao,

you can deal with whatever life brings you,

and when death comes, you are ready.