10. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 292-318

21-22

_____

Grief overcomes Henderson, shut in his cell. And then he realizes he is not alone: Romilayu had been picked up when he tried to leave the town, and is there in the cell with him. His presence doesn't deter Henderson from mourning Dahfu. "But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn't last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? That is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven."

The next morning Henderson "felt light, dry and hollow." The Bunam's assistant, the man in black leather who was painted in the white that Dahfu had recognized as an ill omen, attends Henderson, bringing them food. Henderson tells Romilayu, "Dahfu said that when he died I should be king," and Romilayu notes that they are calling Henderson "Yassi," which means king.

Finally, Henderson tells Romilayu that the king was murdered: "It was a scheme. I begin to be convinced of it. Now they can say he was punished for keeping Atti, having her under the palace." He vows revenge, and although the idea upsets Romilayu, he shows Henderson the knife he had kept with him, concealed in his hair. They begin to chip a hole in the wall that separates them from the chamber where the king's body is lying. Through the hole they see the Bunam's assistant sitting on a stool by the door asleep. Next to him is a lion cub, two or three weeks old.

Horko, Dahfu's uncle, arrives to confirm that Henderson is now the Yassi, but that he has to wait until the maggot appears from the dead king's mouth and the cub was displayed to the people before he can make his official appearance. That may take three or four days, and then, Horko tells him, he can marry the king's sixty-seven wives. When he leaves, they hatch a plot: Romilayu will call out that Henderson has been bitten by a snake; when the attendant comes, Romilayu will jam the door open with a rock, and Henderson will take care of the rest.

The trick works: Henderson overpowers the two amazons who respond to the attendant's call, and knocks them out. He is about to strangle the attendant, but Romilayu protests, so he throws the attendant into the cell with the amazons and bolts the door. In the other cell, he says goodbye to the king and then, on an impulse, picks up the lion cub and takes it with them.

It takes ten days for them to reach Baventai, surviving on the roots and insects that Romilayu finds for them. But Henderson's fever grows worse along the way. "I would sit and play with the cub, whom I named Dahfu, while Romilayu foraged." By the time they reach Baventai, Henderson is becoming delirious, but he makes Romilayu promise to look after the lion cub.

They spend several weeks in Baventai, and when Henderson begins to recover they move on to Baktale. "There I bought a pair of pants and the missionary let me have some sulfa until my dysentery was under control. That took a few days." Then Romilayu drives to Harar, in Ethiopia, where Henderson, making a present of the jeep and other things to Romilayu, takes a plane to Khartoum. He overcomes the objections of the consular officials about the lion, and finally takes a plane for Cairo, where he telephones Lily. He tells her to meet him at Idlewild on Sunday and to bring the family lawyer: "I thought I might need his legal help on account of the lion." After stopovers in Athens, Rome, Paris and London, he and the lion cub get onto a plane bound for New York. Henderson scoffs at the passengers who read books instead of looking out of the plane's windows:

I couldn't get enough of the water, and of those upside-down sierras of the clouds. Like courts of eternal heaven. (Only they aren't eternal, that's the whole thing; they are seen once and never seen again, being figures and not abiding realities; Dahfu will never be seen again, and presently I will never be seen again; but every one is given the components to see: the water, the sun, the air, the earth.)

He makes friends with (flirts with) the pretty stewardess, and tells her, "You know why I'm impatient to see my wife, miss? I'm eager to know how it will be now that the sleep is burst. And the children, too. I love them very much -- I think." "Why do you say think?" "Yes, I think. We'll have to see." She tells him there is a little boy on board who has been orphaned and is going to live with his grandparents in Nevada. His parents were Americans, but he was raised by servants in Persia and speaks only Persian. So Henderson lets the boy play with the lion cub, and that night the boy falls asleep on his lap.

Henderson reflects on his past, on the fact that his father had loved him less than his brother, which made the brother's death the more devastating. After an argument, Henderson ran away from home and went to Ontario where he got a job working in an amusement park with a trained bear whose trainer had run off and left it. Henderson and the bear, named Smolak, would ride the roller coaster together twice a day. "We're two of a kind," he told the manager of the park. "Smolak was cast off and I am an Ishmael, too." He became close to the bear:

So before pigs ever came on my horizon, I received a deep impression from a bear. So if corporeal things are an image of the spiritual and visible objects are renderings of invisible ones, and if Smolak and I were outcasts together, two humorists before the crowd, but brothers in our souls -- I enbeared by him, and he probably humanized by me -- I didn't come to the pigs as a tabula rasa.... He had seen too much of life, and somewhere in his huge head he had worked it out that for creatures there is nothing that ever runs unmingled.

Before continuing to New York, the plane has to land in Newfoundland to refill. Because he has spent "so many months in the Torrid Zone," Henderson wants "to breath some of this cold stuff we've been flying through." The stewardess lets him take the boy outside with him:

While to me he was like medicine applied, and the air, too; it was also a remedy. Plus the happiness that I expected at Idlewild from meeting Lily. And the lion? He was in it, too. Laps and laps I galloped around the shining and riveted body of the plane, behind the great fuel trucks. Dark faces were looking from within. The great, beautiful propellers were still, all four of them. I guess I felt it was my turn now to move, and so went running -- leaping, leaping, pounding, and tingling over the pure white lining of the gray Arctic silence.

And so the end of Bellow's novel finds his protagonist -- who had grappled with such great matters as life and death, reality and unreality, desire and necessity, and his own identity (pig or lion) -- running in circles. Do we laugh or cry? Or both?

9. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 254-292

19-20

_____

Henderson dutifully follows Dahfu in his efforts to become lionlike: "Daily, I would come up from the den all shaken by my roaring, my throat grated, my head in fever and my eyes like wet soot, weak in the legs, and especially delicate and trembling in the knees." The king assures him he's making progress: "'Your roaring still is choked, Of course it is natural, as you have such a lot to purge,' he would say." But he also becomes aware "that everybody knew where I had spent the morning and feared me for it."

He knows Romilayu disapproves, and tries to persuade him that it's all for the good, but he senses the guide's skepticism: "And it's the destiny of my generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life. It just is. Why the hell do you think I'm out here, anyway?" Romilayu replies, "I don' know, sah." He's a Methodist, he says, but promises not to bother Henderson by trying to convert him. Finally Henderson decides to send Romilayu to mail a letter to Lily, and gives him the papers for the jeep he had promised him at the start of their journey. But Romilayu is still bothered because he knows Henderson is in trouble.

In the letter he writes to Lily, Henderson tells her about his travels, and that he has "matured twenty years in twenty days." He also writes about Dahfu: "This king here is one of the most intelligent people in the world and I have great faith in him, and he tells me I should move from the states that I myself make into the states which are of themselves. Like if I stopped making such a noise all the time I might hear something nice. I might hear a bird." But to himself he thinks: " I could never take after the birds. I would crash all the branches. I would have scared the pterodactyl from the skies." He also tells her he is giving up the violin, and asks her to enroll him in whatever medical school will take him and to sell off the rest of the pigs.

I believe that I tried to explain to Lily what Dahfu's ideas were, but Romilayu lost the last few pages of the letter, and I suppose that it's just as well that he did, for when I wrote them I had had quite a bit to drink. In one I think I said, or maybe I merely thought it, "I had a voice that said, I want! I want? I? It should have told me she wants, he wants, they want. And moreover, it's love that makes reality reality. The opposite makes the opposite."

Romilayu leaves the next day. Henderson falls into regret: "this is the payoff of a lifetime of action without thought. If I had to shoot at that cat, if I had to blow up frongs, if I had to pick up Mummah without realizing what I was getting myself into, it was not out of line to crouch on all fours and roar and act the lion. I might have been learning about the grun-to-molani instead, under Willatale." But he remains loyal to the king, and when he is told to wait for Dahfu instead of going to the lion's den, he prepares by washing himself: "I had let myself grow filthy and bearded as it was scarcely suitable to get all cleaned up in order to stand on all fours, roaring and tearing the earth."

The king announces that a lion has been spotted that matches the description of Gmilo, and they prepare for the capture. The people of the village come out to cheer them on, but "As far as I could tell they were not enthusiastic for the king; they demanded that he bring home Gmilo, the right lion, and get rid of the sorceress, Atti." And in the king's retinue Henderson notices, "following very closely, a white creature, a man completely dyed or calcimined. Under the coat of chalk I recognized him. It was the Bunam's man, the executioner." Dahfu admits that his presence is not favorable: "White is not the best omen."

The beaters spread out into the bush to drive the lion toward the trap, and their departure leaves "the Bunam, the Bunam's wizard, the king, and myself, the Sungo, plus three attendants with spears standing about thirty yards from the town." Henderson and the king are unarmed, and the king says it must be that way: "What if I were to wound Gmilo." As for Henderson, he says, "You are with me."

They wait in a hut on a platform above the ground, from which hangs a woven cage. The lion would be driven into a cul-de-sac that would be sealed by a gate, and the cage dropped on him. There is also, extending from the platform, a "pole or catwalk, no wider than my wrist, if that wide," on which the king would balance and from which he would drop the net. Henderson tests the pole and finds it stout enough.

From the perch, Henderson notices "a sort of small stone building deep in the ravine." When he asks the king who lives there, "'It is not for the living,' he told me without glancing toward the building. 'A tomb?' I thought. 'Whose tomb?'" But the king says nothing more about it. While they wait, Henderson shows Dahfu the pictures of Lily and his children that he carries in his wallet, and talks about his experiences in the war.

But soon the sounds of the beaters and the fleeing animals are heard, and finally the king points out the disturbance made in the brush by the lion. Henderson stands up excitedly, only to be rebuked by the king: "'Henderson -- do not,' he said. Nevertheless I took a step in his direction, and then he cried out at me; his face was angry. So I squatted down and shut my mouth. My blood was full of fever, as if it flowed open to the glare of the sun."

Then, at the very doors of consciousness, there was a snarl and I looked down from this straw perch -- I was on my knees -- into the big, angry, hair-framed face of the lion. It was all wrinkled, contracted; within those wrinkles was the darkness of murder. The lips were drawn away from the gums, and the breath of the animal came over me, hot as oblivion, raw as blood.

The lion fights, rearing on its hind legs, and suddenly the king says, "Oh, it is wrong." He has realized that the net has left the lion's hindquarters free. "The lion was incompletely caught, and the king was going to try to work the net over the animal's hindquarters." But the combination of the lion's weight and the king's is too much for the fastenings that hold the pulley, and the king falls onto the lion. "The claws tore. Instantly there came blood, before the king could throw himself over." Henderson pulls him away, but it's too late.

"Is it Gmilo?" the king asks. The Bunam comes close enough to the ensnared lion to check the markings on its ears that will identify it, then asks for a musket and shoots the lion. "'It was not Gmilo,' the king said." Then he asks Henderson to "see no harm comes to Atti." Henderson keeps urging the king to return to the palace with him, but Dahfu says no. "I cannot be ... among the wives. I would have to be killed." Then the king reveals that the body in the hut the night Henderson arrived was that of the former Sungo, who was strangled because he could no longer lift Mummah. And Henderson realizes that the reason Turombo had not lifted Mummah was that "he didn't want to become the Sungo, it's too dangerous. It was wished on me. I was the fall guy. I was had." Dahfu also reveals that the Sungo is the successor if the king has no child old enough to succeed him. Henderson reproaches Dahfu: "Was this a thing to do to a friend?" But the king only replies, "It was done to me ..."

The beaters pick up the king and carry him toward the stone building. He dies on the way to it.

This small house built of flat slabs had two wooden doors of the stockade type which opened into two chambers. His body was laid down in one of these. Into the other they put me. I scarcely knew what was happening anyway, and I let them lead me in and bolt the door.

8. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 220-254

17-18

_____

"We talked and talked and talked, and I can't pretend that I completely understood him." That Henderson is taxed by the king's ideas a sign of Dahfu's intellectual superiority, or is it a warning that he's not to be fully trusted? For sometimes the king sounds an awful lot like a New Age guru whose ideas are not fully anchored to this Earth:

He had some kind of conviction about the connection between insides and outsides, especially as applied to human beings.... And what he was engrossed by was a belief in the transformation of human material, that you could work either way, either from the rind to the core or from the core to the rind; the flesh influencing the mind, the mind influencing the flesh, back again to the mind, back once more to the flesh.

So the reader may be pardoned in approving Henderson's question, "Are you really and truly sure it's like that, Your Highness?"

In the end, Dahfu gives Henderson some of the books and journals he had brought with him from medical school. "Dahfu and Horko had loaded it on the donkey when they came over the mountains from the coast. Afterward the beast was butchered and fed to the lioness." But Henderson is not quite up to the task of reading. "Firstly I was afraid to find out that the king might be a crank." And Henderson is "a nervous and emotional reader. I hold a book up to my face and it takes only one good sentence to turn my brain into a volcano."  Reading in one of his father's books, "The forgiveness of sin is perpetual" was like "being hit in the head with a rock.... I didn't want to hear any more than that about sin. Just as it was, it was perfect, and I might have been afraid the guy would spoil it when he went on."

[Let me interrupt here for an observation: Those last two sentences remind me -- in tone, cadence and diction -- of Mark Twain. And it's not the first time I've been reminded of Twain in this novel. "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," as we know, because Hemingway told us so. More on this later.]

Characteristically, Henderson is daunted by his hunger to have it all: "When I started to read something about France, I realized I didn't know anything about Rome, which came first, and then Greece, and then Egypt, going backward all the time to the primitive abyss. As a matter of fact, I didn't know enough to read one single book." But he makes a stab at one of the journals Dahfu had given him because the first paragraph of an article by a man named Scheminsky looks easy. He begins to skim when he encounters the term Obersteiner's allochiria. (Allochiria is a neurological disorder in which a stimulus on one side of the body is felt on the opposite side.)  But he manages to glean that "Most of these articles had to do with the relation between body and brain ... and a few of the descriptions were absolutely dandy. What I kept thinking was, 'I'd better scour, brighten, freshen up the old intelligence, and understand what the man is driving at, for my life may depend on it.'"

That conclusion is reinforced when he is paid a visit by Horko, the Bunam, and the man, clad in black leather, who had pointed the way to the village. "These three made way to let a fourth person enter, an elderly woman who had the look of a widow." This is Dahfu's mother, Yasra. And they have come "to get me to reveal about the lioness and then also to use any influence I might have with the king. He was in trouble, and very seriously, over Atti." They are upset at the king's failure to capture Gmilo, the lion they believe to be Dahfu's father. "They claimed that the lioness was seducing Dahfu, and made him incapable f doing his duty, and it was she who kept Gmilo away."

Finally, "the Bunam signaled to his assistant by snapping his fingers, and the black-leather man drew from his rag cloak an object which I mistook at first for a shriveled eggplant.... This was the head of one of the lion-women -- a sorceress. She had gone out and had trysts with lions. She had poisoned people and bewitched them." She had been captured and strangled. "But she had come back. These people made no bones about it, but said she was the very same lioness that Dahfu had captured. She was Atti."
I could not take my eyes from the shriveled head with its finished, listless look. It spoke to me as that creature had done in Banyules at the aquarium after I had put Lily on the train. I thought, as I had then, in the dim watery stony room, "This is it! The end!"

That night, Henderson startles Romilayu by joining him in prayer:

"Oh, you ... Something," I said, "you Something because of whom there is not Nothing. Help me to do Thy will. Take off my stupid sins. Untrammel me. Heavenly Father, open up my dumb heart and for Christ's sake preserve me from unreal things. Oh, Thou who tookest 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."

The next morning he goes to see Dahfu and asks to talk to him privately. When he takes the king away from the women who are entertaining him, "some attacked me with shrill voices ... while several shrieked, 'Sdudu lebah!' Lebah -- I had already picked the word up -- was Wariri for lion. They were warning him about Atti; they were charging him with desertion." Since the king's life depends in part on his ability to service his wives, Henderson is right to be concerned.

But when Henderson tells him, "In case you don't know it you are in a hell of a position," Dahfu says he knows. He calls the display of the shrunken head "the well-known fear business. We will withstand it." He insists, "I will capture Gmilo and the trouble will entirely cease. No one will dispute or contest me then. There are scouts daily for Gmilo. As a matter of fact reports have come of him. I can assure you a capture very soon."

Meanwhile, Henderson has realized that the king is taking him to see Atti again. But he has grown so dependent on his friendship with Dahfu that although he expresses his fear, he backs off when the king says, "If it is positively beyond you we may as well exchange goodbye and go separate ways." Henderson realizes that "unless I understood about lions, no deepening of the friendship was possible." The threat of losing the king's friendship is too strong. "The threat was exceedingly painful also to him. Yes, I saw that he suffered almost as hard as I did. Almost. Because who can suffer like me? I am to suffering what Gary is to smoke. One of the world's biggest operations."

Dahfu then explains what he can learn from the lion: "First she is unavoidable. Test it, and you will find she is unavoidable. And this is what you need, as you are an avoider.... She will force the present moment upon you. Second, lions are experiencers. But not in haste. They experience with deliberate luxury. The poet says, 'The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.' Let us embrace lions also in the same view.... She has much to teach you." Henderson is prodded forward by the possibility that he might change.

His terror doesn't fade when he enters the den with Dahfu, but he follows the king's instructions, even to the point of going down on all fours. "I understood that he wanted me to imitate or dramatize the behavior of lions," but he's not certain to what end. "I intend to loosen you up, Sungo," the king tells him, "because you are so contracted." Each of his forefathers, he says, "absorbed lion into himself," and he wants Henderson to do likewise. Atti, meanwhile, stretched out on the platform, "with crossed paws, only occasionally looked at us." The king chides Henderson for his reluctance: "Is this the Henderson who flew half around the world because he had a voice which said I want? And now, because his friend Dahfu extends a remedy to him, falls down?"

Eventually, Henderson gets into it:

And so I was the beast. I gave myself to it, and all my sorrow came out in the roaring. My lungs supplied the air but the note came from my soul. The roaring scalded my throat and hurt the corners of my mouth and presently I filled the den like a bass organ pipe. This was where my heart had sent me, with its clamor.... I had claws, and hair, and some teeth, and I was bursting with hot noise, but when all this had come forth, there was still a remainder. That last thing was my human longing.

The king praises Henderson, and gives him a break by shutting Atti away in her other room. But Henderson begins to come down from the experience. He realizes that he isn't the lion Dahfu wants him to be: "'It's the pigs,' I suddenly realized, 'the pigs! Lions for him, pigs for me. I wish I was dead.'"

But Dahfu is still full of ideas, particularly about the power of the imagination. "And then he began to repeat what a procession of monsters the human imagination had created.... 'Think of what there could be instead by different imaginations. What gay, brilliant types, what merriment types, what beauties and goodness, what sweet cheeks or noble demeanors. Ah, ah, ah, what we could be! Opportunity calls to rise to summits. You should have been such a summit, Mr Henderson-Sungo.'" Henderson had talked to him about "grun-to-molani. What could be grun-to-molani upon a background of cows?" Dahfu says, dismissing the commonplace ambitions of the Arnewi. But Henderson is only reminded of pigs again, and of his impulsive,  mocking decision to raise pigs in his conversation with Nicky Goldstein. He recalls when Frances protested against the pigs in the driveway and he told her not to harm them. "Those animals have become a part of me."

He begins to examine his body and find piggishness in it. "It seemed to me that I couldn't even breathe without grunting." And Dahfu notices "the peculiar noise" he is making. He tells Henderson, "You show the work of a powerful and original although blockaded imagination." For Dahfu the imagination is supreme:

"All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!... What Homo sapiens imagines, he may slowly convert himself to. Oh, Henderson, how glad I am that you are here. I have longed for somebody to discuss with. A companion mind. You are a godsend to me."

7. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 190-220

15-16

_____

Henderson is in a bad way, "filthy, naked, and bruised," and he says to himself, "I lost the bet and am at the guy's mercy." But he follows Romilayu's counsel: "You sleep, sah. T'ink tomorrow." When he wakens, two amazons bring him the clothing of the Sungo: green silk trousers that he slips on over his stained jockey shorts. "In spite of my rest I was not in top condition. I still had fever."

He refuses the offer of the two amazons, Tamba and Bebu, to walk on his back in a therapeutic massage, but eats a little pineapple and drinks a little whisky before Tatu the generaless comes to take him to King Dahfu. The Bunam's wives watch as he passes by. "I guess I must have caused them to smile in those billowing, swelling, green drawers of the Sungo and the pith helmet and my rubber-soled desert boots."

The king begins by anticipating Henderson's question: "You see, the Bunam felt sure you would be strong enough to move our Mummah. I, when I saw what a construction you had, agreed with him. At once." But Henderson asks about the wager: How could he be sure that it would rain? Dahfu says that he wasn't: "That was in a spirit of wager and nothing else.... I knew as little about it as you do." And when Henderson asks if the ceremony always works, Dahfu admits, "Very far from always. Exceedingly seldom."

Dahfu tells him about his education and travels. "From my point of view the science instruction was most especially worth while. I was going for an MD degree, and would have done it except for the death of my father." When Henderson observes that it's hard to reconcile the interest in science and medicine with the king's life among the Wariri, Dahfu replies, "It is interesting, I do admit. But also it is not up to me, Henderson -- Henderson-Sungo -- to make the world consistent."

Henderson observes, "Like all people who have a strong gift of life, he gave off almost an extra shadow -- I swear. It was a smoky something, a charge. I used to notice it sometimes with Lily.... It is something brilliant and yet overcast; it is smoky, bluish, trembling, shining like jewel water." He had felt it with Willatale but more strongly with Dahfu than with anyone."

The king then reminds him of the story about how he became king: his father's death, the maggot that bred in his body, and the lion cub that was captured and presented as a replacement. The cub was set free by the Bunam, and now that it has grown, Dahfu has to "capture it alive and keep it with me." The lion that Henderson has been hearing is "quite another animal. I have not yet captured Gmilo. Accordingly I am not jet fully confirmed in the role of king. You find me at a midpoint. To borrow your manner of speaking, I too must complete Becoming."

Henderson is still trying to bring a coherent image of the king into focus: "you saw yesterday what savagery can be if you never saw it before, throwing passes with his own father's skull. And now with the lions. Lions! And the man almost a graduate physician. The whole thing is crazy." Henderson has not yet recognized in the king what amounts almost to a parody of his own "savagery" -- his own disrespect for his father in turning the estate into a pig farm -- or the irony that while he always talked about becoming a physician, and urged his son to become one, it is the "savage" king who actually attended medical school but left to honor a cultural tradition.

And yet, the king is also alienated from his culture, from the people he leads. Henderson initiates a pact between them: They will always expect the truth from each other. And Dahfu confesses, "I intentionally wished to keep you with me a while hoping that exchanges of importance would be possible. For I do not find it easy to express myself to my own people. Only Horko has been in the world at all and with him I cannot freely exchange, either. They are against me here...."

Henderson observes that "it has been going through my mind for some time that there is a connection between truth and blows," and tells the king that when he was chopping wood last winter a piece of it flew up and broke his nose. "So the first thing I thought was truth!" While the king doesn't entirely agree with the relationship of truth to violence, he observes that "there is a law of human nature in which force is concerned. Man is a creature who cannot stand still under blows. Now take the horse -- he never needs a revenge. Nor the ox. But man is a creature of revenges. If he is punished he will contrive to get rid of the punishment. When he cannot get rid of punishment, his heart is apt to rot from it."

Henderson replies, "You say the soul will die if it can't make somebody suffer what it suffers?" And Dahfu says, "For a while, I am sorry to say, it then feels peace and joy." Henderson recognizes the application to himself and to the gods who were punished in the ceremony, but observes that "there are some guys who can return good for evil." Dahfu agrees: "A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow." But, he adds, human nature will have to be transformed for this to be the rule rather than the exception. "Perhaps I am not the one to make a prediction, Sungo, but I think the noble will have its turn in the world." And he asks Henderson's pardon for using him in the ceremony.

"I saw that he was some kind of genius," Henderson says. "Much more than that. I realized that he was a genius of my own mental type." Whatever that may be. Dahfu follows by expressing his admiration for Henderson:

"I see the world in your constitution. In my medical study this became the greatest of fascinations to me and independently I have made a thorough study of the types, resulting in an entire classification system, as: The agony. The appetite. The obstinate. The immune elephant. The shrewd pig. The fateful hysterical. The death-accepting. The phallic-proud or hollow genital. The fast asleep. The narcissus intoxicated. The mad laughers. The pedantics. The fighting Lazaruses. Oh, Henderson-Sungo, how many shapes and forms. Numberless."

As for Henderson, "everything about you ... cries out, 'Salvation, salvation! What shall I do? What must I do? At once! What will become of me? And so on. That is bad." And then he says he wants to show him "something without which you will never understand thoroughly my special aim nor my point of view."

Accompanied by Tatu, Henderson follows the king down a staircase, with Tatu shutting and bolting the doors behind them as they descend. He loses sight of the king in the darkness as they go deeper under the palace until finally he realizes where they have been going: "A low ripping sound behind the door was self-explanatory. It was the lion's den." Dahfu has gone before to prepare the animal for him. "She rubbed herself against him so that I felt the stress of her weight through the medium of his body. She stood well above our hips in height." Dahfu reassures him that she is going to accept him, and tells him that her name is Atti. Henderson watches as Dahfu leads the lioness to a platform where he sits, "taking her head on his knee, scratching and stroking, while she pretended to box at him." Henderson stays put, not even moving to push back his helmet when it falls over his face. "No, I stood there, half deaf, half blind, with my throat closing and all the sphincters shut."

Finally the king tells Henderson to shut the door through which they entered. (Tatu has long since remained behind.) He urges Henderson to come forward slowly and sit on the platform by him. The lioness sniffs at Henderson, and the king tells him not to be afraid. Henderson replies, "It's not only that I'm scared of her, and I'm scared all right, but it isn't that alone. It's the richness of the mixture. That's what's getting me. The richness of the mixture. And what I can't understand is why, when fear has taken me on and licked me so many times, I am not able to stand it."

Dahfu tells him "to appreciate the beauty of this animal," and that he's not testing Henderson. "If I were not positive of my control I would not lead you into such a situation. That would truly be scandalous." And Henderson watches as Dahfu puts his arm into the lion's mouth and then lies down and wraps his legs around her body and his arms around her neck. "Face to face she carried him up and down while he talked to her.... On her own animal level it was clear beyond any need of interpretation that she loved the guy. Loved him! With animal love. I loved him too. Who could have helped it?"

The king takes Henderson's hand and presses it to the lioness's flank. "Slowly her fur passed under my fingertips and the nails became like five burning tapers. The bones of the hand became incandescent. After this a frightful shock passed right up the arm into the chest." But what Dahfu delights in is Henderson's fear:

"And how you are afraid! Really! In the highest degree. I am really delighted by it. I have never seen such a fear manifestation. It resembled anxious pleasure to me. Do you know, many strong people love this blended fear and satisfaction the most? I think you must be of that type.... And when you cried! I adored when you began to cry."

Then Dahfu says, "Atti and I influence each other. I wish you to become a party to this." Henderson is shocked to realize that Dahfu has something in mind that involves him and the lion. Dahfu promises to explain what.

Then he opens a gate that lets the lion into another part of the den and closes it behind her. "Once again I brought to mind that old prophecy Daniel made to Nebuchadnezzar. They shall drive thee from among men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. The lion odor was still very keen on my fingers. I smelled it repeatedly and there returned to my thoughts the frogs of the Arnewi, the cattle whom they venerated, the tenant's cat I had tried to murder, to say nothing of the pigs I had bred. Sure enough, this prophecy had a peculiar relevance to me, implying perhaps that I was not entirely fit for human companionship."

Dahfu explains that he captured Atti about a year or so ago to the great disapproval of the tribe, and especially the Bunam. There is supposed to be only one lion in the palace, "who is the late king. It is conceived the rest are mischief-makers and evildoers." The lion that is the late king must be captured and not left among the evildoer lions. "I am the object of a double criticism. Firstly I have not yet succeeded in obtaining Gmilo, my father-lion. Secondly it is said that because I keep Atti I am up to no good." He vows to capture Gmilo, and when Henderson wishes him luck the king grasps his arm -- surprising Henderson, because the king never does anything abruptly. The king goes on:

"Men of most powerful appetite have always been the ones to doubt reality the most. Those who could not bear that hopes should turn to misery, and loves to hatreds, and deaths and silences, and so on. The mind has a right to its reasonable doubts, and with every short life it awakens and sees and understands what so many other minds of equally short life span have left behind... That human creatures by pondering should be correct. this is what makes a fellow gasp. Yes, Sungo, this same temporary creature is a master of imagination."

Henderson is slow to grasp what Dahfu is getting at, but the king explains, "I am convinced you are a man of wide and spacious imagination, and that also you need ... You particularly need." And then Henderson tells him about the voice: "The form it actually takes is, I want, I want." And that the voice has never told him what it wants. The king is fascinated: "How much better I an interpret now why you succeeded with Mummah. Solely on the basis of that imprisoned want." Henderson is grateful for the recognition, and recalls an article in Scientific American about desert plants that bloom only once in forty or fifty years, and then only when they get the right among of rainfall. "It has to wash over them for a certain number of days. And then for the first time in fifty or sixty years you see lilies and larkspurs and such. Roses. Wild peaches." And the fact that the magazine was one Lily subscribes to brings her to mind. "To speak of Lily also moved me very greatly."

Then the king says that he wants Henderson's "patient confidence. Plus, at the very outset, I request you to believe that I did not leave the world and return to my Wariri with an aim of withdrawal." The king, like Henderson, has something he wants.  

6. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 166-189

13-14

_____

As the ceremonies proceed, Henderson's skepticism about their rain-making possibilities increases to the point that he bets the king that it won't rain. There's not a cloud in the sky. The king takes him up on it. Henderson has been admiring Dahfu's ring, "a huge garnet set in thick gold and encircled by smaller stones," so the king put that up for his side of the wager. Henderson has nothing of equivalent value, so Dahfu, after warning "You should not assume at all that you have a sure thing," proposes, "let us say that if I win you will remain a guest of mine, a length of time." When Henderson asks how long, Dahfu says, "Let us leave it an open consideration for the moment."

Then in the arena some men appear dressed in black plumes and begin to mock the statues of the gods that are placed there. "The attitude of the tribe seemed to be that it was necessary to come to the gods with their vices on display, as nothing could be concealed from them anyway by ephemeral man." Henderson is a little shocked by the irreverence and blasphemy. When the men have kicked over, toppled and moved the smaller statues, they call on the crowd to help with the larger ones. Some larger and stronger men begin to haul the statues around, and when one of them hoists a statue the way Henderson had carried the corpse the night before, Henderson gasps aloud, attracting Dahfu's attention.

Finally, all the gods have been carried out of the middle of the arena except two: "Hummat the mountain god and Mummah the goddess of clouds." Several men have made attempts to move them with no success. Now a man comes out of the crowd and takes on Hummat. Henderson joins in cheering him on, and the man finally carries the statue twenty feet and sets him among the other gods. But he's exhausted and unable to move Mummah. The king comments, "This man, as you see, is powerful, and a good man, as I believe I overheard you to exclaim. But when he has moved Hummat, he is worn out, and this is annual. Do you see, Hummat has to be moved first, as otherwise he would not permit the clouds passage over the mountains."

As the man, named Turombo, struggles with Mummah, Henderson begins to think, "Ye gods! I was shivering and cold. I simply knew that I could lift up Mummah, and I flowed, I burned to go out there and do it." He thinks of his failure with the Arnewi and begins to be convinced that this was a chance to redeem himself. When Turombo gives up, the crowd mocks him. And Henderson decides to step in: "I understood now why the corpse had been quartered with me. The Bunam was behind it. He sized me up right. He had wanted to see whether I was strong enough to move the idol. And I had met the ordeal."

He tells the king what he wants to do, and Dahfu asks, "Do you not rush through the world too hard, Mr Henderson?" Yes, Henderson says, he does, but he feels some compulsion to serve. "I have a feeling that I could move her." Dahfu replies, "I am obliged to tell you, Mr Henderson, there may be consequences." This doesn't deter Henderson:

I had got caught up in the thing, and it had regard only to the unfinished business of years -- I want, I want, and Lily, and the grun-tu-molani and the little colored kid brought home by my daughter from Danbury and the cat I had tried to destroy and the fate of Miss Lenox and the teeth and the fiddle and the frogs in the cistern and all the rest of it.

Finally, the king gives his assent. Henderson pulls off his shirt, kneels before the statue and sizes her up, and "lifted her from the ground and carried her twenty feet to her new place among the other gods." The crowd goes wild. "The sensations of illness I had experienced since morning were all converted into their opposites. These same unhappy feelings were changed into warmth and personal luxury." He returns to the king, who congratulates him, and "the sky began to fill with clouds.... I was inclined to take it as my due."

Then the Bunam appears, "his arms full of of leaves and wreaths and grasses and pines," joined by the "generaless," as Dahfu called her, the head of the amazons. More of the amazons appear, along with the woman who had tossed the skulls with Dahfu. Two of the women are bearing pikes with skulls on top of them, and the others had "odd-looking fly whisks which were made of strips of leather. But then from the way they grasped these instruments I suspected that they were not meant for flies. These were small whisks."

Dahfu tells him, "The man who moves Mummah occupies, in consequence, a position of rain king of the Wariri. The title of this post is the Sungo. You are now the Sungo, Mr Henderson, and that is why they are here." But Henderson is suspicious and fearful, imagining his fate reported back home:

"That big Henderson finally got his. What, didn't you hear? He went to Africa and disappeared in the interior. He probably bullied some natives and they stabbed him. Good riddance to bad rubbish. They say the estate is worth three million bucks. I guess he knew he was a lunatic and despised people for letting him get away with murder. Well, he was rotten to the heart." "Rotten to the heart yourselves, you bastards." "He was full of excess." "Listen, you guys, my great excess was that I wanted to live. Maybe I did treat everything in the world as though it was a medicine -- okay! What's the matter with you guys? Don't you believe in regeneration? You think a fellow is just supposed to go down the drain?"

The king chides Henderson for his suspiciousness. All they want, he tells him, is "your attendance to cleanse ponds and wells. They say you were sent for this purpose.... It is evident you must have been born for something."

And so Henderson is stripped naked by the generaless, and forced to run through the streets with the amazons. "With feet lacerated by the stones, dazed, running with terror in my bowels, a priest of the rain. No, the king, the rain king." The generaless, Tatu, teaches him to yell as they run: "Ya-na-bu-ni-ho-no-mum-mah!" They run beneath the gallows where the vultures are feasting on the hanged men, and when they reach a cattle pond, "They picked me up and gave me a heave that landed me in the superheated sour water." He emerges covered in mud and continues to chant, "crying in my filth and frenzy, 'Ya-na-bu-ni-ho-no-mum-mah!' as before."

Yes, here he is, the mover of Mummah, the champion, the Sungo. Here comes Henderson of the USA -- Captain Henderson, Purple Heart, veteran of North Africa, Sicily, Monte Cassino, etc., a giant shadow, a man of flesh and blood, a restless seeker, pitiful and rude, a stubborn old lush with broken bridgework, threatening death and suicide.... And with all my heart I yelled, "Mercy, have mercy!" And after that I yelled, "No, justice!" And after that I changed my mind and cried, "No, no, truth, truth!" And then, "Thy will be done! Not my will, but Thy will!" 

Henderson labels himself as a Christ figure, a rather unconvincing one. Back in the arena the crowd shrieks. "Above all this I heard the roaring of lions, while the dust was shivering under my feet." He watches as the amazons attack the figures of the gods with whips, and protests against it. In the frenzy he is struck several times too.

Then, after a thunderclap, "after a great, neighing, cold blast of wind, the clouds opened and the rain began to fall." He sees a terrified Romilayu and asks him to bring his clothes. Romilayu leads him to the king, who, unperturbed by the rain, is being carried away in his hammock by four women. The king tells him that he has performed a great service and must have some pleasure after his pain. He also reminds him, "You have lost the wager."

5. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 136-165

12

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Henderson gives up on the dead body problem and spends the rest of the night outside."I was aware of a great peculiarity either in myself or in the day, or in both. I must have been getting the fever from which I was to suffer for a while. It was accompanied by a scratchy sensation in my bosom, a little like eagerness or longing."

The village begins to come to life for what seems to be a day of festival. Finally a group of "women of unusual stature, the female soldiers or amazons of the king," approaches, beating drums and accompanying a "heavily built man" underneath a large umbrella. There is another umbrella that turns out to be for Henderson. The man is Horko, the uncle of the king, and he speaks English. Henderson joins the entourage, which heads toward the palace. Romilayu, staggering under the weight of their gear, follows.

As they approach the palace, Henderson sees bodies hanging upside down from a scaffold. "It was no wonder they hadn't made any inquiry about their corpse. What was one corpse to them? They appeared to deal in them wholesale." But when Henderson mentions them to Horko, he gets no response. They arrive at the palace, which "was three stories high with open staircases and galleries, quadrangular and barnlike. At ground level the rooms were doorless, like narrow stalls, open and bare. Here there could be no mistake about it -- I heard the roar of a wild beast underneath. No creature but a lion could possibly make such a noise."

Before meeting the king, Horko has a bridge table brought out and serves food to Henderson. "I ate some sweet potatoes and drank the pombo, a powerful beverage which immediately acted on my legs and knees.... Half hopefully I thought I was going to be sick. I cannot endure such excitement as I then felt." Finally they climb the stairs and reach the other side of the building were some men were hoisting large stones into the branches of a tree. Horko explains that "these stones were connected with clouds for the rain they expected to make in the ceremony soon to come." Henderson notes that the sky is clear. "There were only, so far, these round boulders in the branches, apparently intended to represent rain clouds."

When they reach the king's quarters, Horko leaves and one of the amazons conducts Henderson into the room. "Before I saw Dahfu himself, I was aware of numbers of women -- twenty or thirty, was my first estimate -- and the density of naked women, their volupté (only a French word would do the job here), pressed upon me from all sides. The heat was great and the predominant odor was feminine. The only thing I could compare it to in temperature and closeness was a hatchery."

Dahfu is stretched out on a long sofa on the other side of the room. He has a "well-developed athletic body" and is "six feet or better by my estimate, and sumptuously at rest. Women attended to his every need." Henderson is seated on a stool about five feet away from the king, and between them is a bowl containing two human skulls. Dahfu says, "Do not feel alarm. These are for employment in the ceremony of this afternoon."

Henderson extends greetings from Itelo, and when Dahfu asks if they wrestled and who won, replies, "We came out about even." Dahfu says, "I could not throw him, which gave him very high pleasure." Again feigning modesty, Henderson says, "I'm beginning to feel my age," which Dahfu says is "nonsense. I think you are like a monument. Believe me, I have never seen a person of your particular endowment." He reassures Henderson that they won't have to wrestle.

"You are my first civilized visitor," he tells Henderson, indicating that they prefer to remain secluded. Henderson thinks "there was something about this man that gave me the conviction that we could approach ultimates together." Then Dahfu asks for "a candid answer to the question I am about to put.... Do you envy me?" Henderson stumbles for an answer, then observes that Dahfu's people seem to value him highly and tend to his every need.

Dahfu then reveals that when he begins to show signs of weakness, the women who attend on him will report it to the Bunam, the chief priest, and that the priests will take him out to the bush and strangle him. The priest will then wait until a maggot appears on the king's body, wrap it in silk and show it to the people as the king's soul. And after while, the priest will go back into the bush and return with a lion cub, telling the people that the king's soul has entered into a lion. And finally, a successor will be named and the story will be told that the lion has become the new king.

Henderson brings up the matter of the corpse in his hut, and Dahfu seems to be indignant about it. He assures Henderson that as far as he knows, there's no significance in it, and apologizes for it, but asks no further questions about who the dead man might have been. Henderson notes, "I was so glad to escape the anxiety of the thing that at the time I didn't note this peculiar lack of interest." He accepts Dahfu's invitation to stay in the palace, but when he says, "I keep hearing a lion," Dahfu changes the subject with the old bothersome question: "What brings you here to us, Mr Henderson?" And when Henderson replies, "I am just a traveler," Dahfu follows up with "What kind of traveler are you?"

"Oh ... that depends. I don't know yet. It remains to be seen. You know," I said, "you have to be very rich to take a trip like this." I might have added, as it entered my mind to do, that some found satisfaction in being.... Being. Others were taken up with becoming. Being people have all the breaks. Becoming people are very unlucky, always in a tizzy.... Now Willatale, the queen of the Arnewi, and principal woman of Bittahness, was a Be-er if there ever was one. And at present King Dahfu. And if I had really been capable of the alert conscousness which it required I would have confessed that Becoming was beginning to come out of my ears. Enough! Enough!  Time to have Become. Time to Be! Burst the spirit's sleep. Wake up, America! Stump the experts. Instead I told this savage king, "I seem to be a kind of tourist."

"Or a wanderer," he said. "I already am fond of a diffident way which I see you to exhibit."

Henderson is stymied, and for a moment tries to summon up a sense of superiority: "I was among savages." But it is the king who observes, "I will not conceal you are a specimen of development I cannot claim ever to have seen."  And Henderson begins to "sweat anew with anxiety." He tells Dahfu that he thinks he is running a fever, but Dahfu observes that he is sweating. He also confides about the broken bridge, that he has "a pretty bad case of hemorrhoids" and is "subject to fainting fits." But it isn't epilepsy, he says, when the king asks if it's "petit mal or grand mal." To himself he reflects that his fainting seems to be "perversity of character ... my heart so often repeated I want, that I felt entitled to a little reprieve, and I found it very restful to pass out once in a while."

The king's scrutiny has made him so nervous that he tries to escape: "I know you are planning to make rain today and probably I will only be in the way. So thanks for the hospitality of the palace, and I wish you all kinds of luck with the ceremony, but I think after lunch my man and I had better blow." The king is having none of it and insists that he stay for the ceremonies, which are about to begin. And so he is forced to accompany the entourage as the king is carried in a hammock to the event.

Along the way, the king mentions that the Arnewi "have a difficulty of water," and Henderson has a panicky moment when he thinks word has reached the king of his disaster with the cistern, but he says only that they seem to have been unlucky in that matter. Dahfu observes, "A legend exists that we were once the same and one, a single tribe, but separated over the luck question. The word for them in our language is nibai. This may be translated 'unlucky.'" The Wariri "'have luck,' he said. 'Incontrovertibly, it is a fact about the luck. You wouldn't dream how consistent it is.'"

As for the Arnewi, "They have made the impression on you which so commonly they make.... Generous. Meek. Good.... Good impresses you, eh, Mr Henderson?" Henderson assents, and, speaking "with a weird softness or longing," Dahfu goes on:

"They say ... that bad can easily be spectacular, has dash or bravado and impresses the mind quicker than good. Oh, that is a mistake in my opinion. Perhaps of common good it is true. Many, many nice people. Oh yes. Their will tells them to perform good, and they do. How ordinary! Mere arithmetic.... M whole view of life is opposite or contrary, that good cannot be labour or conflict.... A dull will produces a very dull good, of no interest. Where a fellow draws a battle line there he is apt to be found, dead, a testimonial of the great strength of effort, and only effort."

Enthralled by Dahfu's talk, Henderson starts to question him about Willatale, but is interrupted by the noise of the crowd as they pass through and enter "a stadium -- I stretch the term -- a big enclosure fenced with wood." They take their seats under a canopy with other members of Dahfu's family, as Henderson surmises from their similarity in appearance, and Horko, Dahfu's uncle, approaches them. Then four amazons enter with the bridge table on which are the two skulls, threaded through the eye sockets with long dark blue ribbons.

With Horko and the Bunam, Henderson recognizes the man who had given them directions the day before, who is a "senior priest. Diviner of a sort." The women soldiers begin to fire off guns, and Dahfu tells Henderson they're firing a salute for him and urges him to stand. Henderson thinks, "The word has got around how I dealt with that corpse. They know I'm no Milktoast but a person of strength and courage. Plenty of moxie." So he "uttered a roar like the great Assyrian bull.... I no longer wondered that this Dahfu had come back from civilization to be king of his tribe. Hell, who wouldn't be king, even a small king? It was not a privilege to be missed."

But then a priest is brought forth and ritually slashed with cuts across the chest, which Dahfu reassures Henderson is a "semi-usual" part of the ceremony. The blood "is supposed to induce the heavens also to flow, or prime the pumps of the firmament," a phrase that delights Henderson. The king then gets up and takes his place in the arena, facing a tall woman whose "face was covered with a beautiful design of scars that looked like Braille." And they begin to whirl the skulls around by the ribbons, throwing them in the air and catching them as they come down. "Soon I understood that this wan't only a game, but a contest, and naturally I rooted for the king. I didn't know but what the penalty for dropping one of those skulls might have been death."

Neither of them drops a skull, however, and the king returns. Henderson is exhilarated by the contest and full of praise for the king, but unable to express it until he finally says, "King, I had a feeling that if either of you missed, the consequences would not be pretty." But the king assures him, "'the factor of missing is negligible.... Some day the ribbon will be tied through here.'  With two fingers he pointed to his eyes. 'My own skull will get the air.' He made a gesture of soaring, and said, 'Flying.'" A cow is then sacrificed. "She fell to the ground and died. Nobody took much notice."

4. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 95-135

9-11

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From the moment Henderson says to himself, "This is going to be one of my greatest days," every reader who has been paying attention knows it won't be. But Henderson forges ahead, enraptured with the "mild pink color, like the water of watermelon," of the dawn:

At once I recognized the importance of this, as throughout my life I had known these moments when the dumb begin to speak, when I hear the voices of objects and colors; then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth, so it seems that even the dogs have to lean against a tree, shivering.

He thinks back to the octopus in France, an epiphany that has for him an opposite significance: "That had spoken to me of death and I would never have tackled any big project after seeing that cold head pressed against the glass and growing paler and paler. After the good omen of the light I approached the making of a bomb with confidence."

This is Bellow beautifully inverting the Wordsworthian "spot of time" or the Joycean epiphany: the moment fraught with experience too intense to articulate. Except that Henderson does articulate it -- incorrectly. His pink light is Gatsby's green light -- and look what happened to Gatsby. Henderson's inner life has never been in tune with the external world before, and there's no reason to expect that it will be now.

But he goes forth to his doom, unfazed by Romilayu's doubts and egged on by the enamored Mtalba. "Owing to the vision of the pink light I was firm of purpose and believed in myself, and I couldn't allow Romilayu to show his doubts and forebodings so openly." He begins to falter a little, though, when he sees that Itelo "looked apprehensive."

He holds on to the bomb until the last second, and when the explosion happens he has a moment of exhilaration, shouting out to Romilayu and Itelo, "How do you like that? Boom! You wouldn't believe me!" But all too swiftly, "I heard shrieks from the natives, and looking to see hat was the matter I found that the dead frogs were pouring out of the cistern together with the water. The explosion had blasted out the retaining wall at the front end."

Stricken with the magnitude of his failure, he calls on Itelo to kill him. But Itelo says, "You want to die, you got to die you'self. You are a friend." Henderson offers to stay and repair the cistern, but Itelo replies, "Bettah you not, sir." So he and Romilayu pack up and leave. Henderson offers to go on alone, but Romilayu won't allow this, suggesting, somewhat hesitantly, that they go to the Wariri. "He seemed to have his doubts about his own suggestion," Henderson observes, but he remembers that Itelo had attended school with the king of the Wariri, Dahfu.

They travel for "eight or ten days," during which Henderson talks about his life and makes Romilayu promise he won't tell the Wariri about blowing up the cistern. He also begins to rationalize what he has done, citing his "good intentions":

"Really and truly it kills me to think how the cattle must be suffering back there without water. No bunk. But then suppose I had satisfied my greatest ambition and become a doctor like Doctor Grenfell or Doctor Schweitzer -- or a surgeon? Is there a surgeon anywhere who doesn't lose a patient once in a while? Why, some of those guys must tow a whole fleet of souls behind them." 

He notices Romilayu's attitude toward the Wariri: that they are children of darkness, which he takes to mean, "they are wiser in their generation and all the rest. But as between these people and myself, who do you think has got more to worry about?" Romilayu, with "a glitter of grim humor playing in his big soft eye," says, "Oh, maybe dem, sah."

Finally they encounter a Wariri herdsman, who points the direction to the village, and before long they are surprised by about a dozen armed tribesmen, pointing their guns at them. Romilayu stretches prone on the ground and Henderson follows suit. He has noticed that their weapons are old enough that some might have been captured from Gordon at Khartoum: "I feel sympathy for Gordon because he was brave and confused."

They are taken to the village, where they wait a long time for a village official to see them. While they wait, "one of those things occurred which life has not been willing to spare me. As I was sitting waiting here on this exotic night I bit into a hard biscuit and I broke one of my bridges.... After this I was compelled to recall the history of my dental work." And we're off into one of Henderson's digressions into the past.

His first bridge was installed by a woman dentist in Paris after the war. "It felt like a water faucet in my mouth and my tongue was cramped over to one side." But the dentist said he'd get used to it "and appealed to me to show a soldier's endurance. So I did." When he got to New York, he had it replaced by a dentist named Spohr, who was a cousin of Klaus Spohr, who was painting a portrait of Lily, which doesn't please Henderson.  

He thinks about his son Edward, who "is like his mother [i.e., Frances] and thinks himself better than me. Well, he's wrong. Great things are done by Americans but not by the likes of either of us. They are done by people like that man Slocum who builds the great dams.... That's the type that gets things done. On this my class, Edward's class, the class Lily was so eager to marry into, gets zero." Edward is something of an idler, and Henderson encourages him to become a doctor -- his own ideal of a profession. Eventually, Edward falls in love with a Honduran woman whose name Henderson recalls as Maria Felluca. Henderson opposes the marriage, which Edward takes to be a reflection on her "family background," which gives him the opportunity to say, "then how about Lily?" Henderson gives in, but he takes his portrait out of the family gallery. "Neither Lily nor I would hang in the main hall."

Then Henderson and the painter's wife, Clara, a "badly ravaged" former beauty, become involved when they meet one afternoon in Grand Central Station. "I saw Clara Spohr coming from the Oyster Bar or being washed forth into this sea, dismasted, clinging to her soul in the shipwreck of her beauty." They take the train back to Connecticut and a taxi to her house where, in the entry hall, she kisses him and he returns the kiss. "Furthermore Lily and Klaus Spohr saw it all. The studio door was open. Within was a coal fire in the grate. 'Why are you kissing each other like that?' said Lily. Klaus Spohr never said a word. Whatever Clara saw fit to do was okay by him."

But then, back to Africa, where Henderson is dealing with his broken teeth by rinsing them in bourbon from a canteen and buttoning them in a pocket "on the chance that even out here I might run into someone who wuld know how to glue them into place." While they wait, they hear a lion roar, and wonder if they keep one in the palace. "The smell of animals was certainly very noticeable in the town." Finally, the official arrives, and a large book that turns out to be an atlas is brought out, so Henderson can show where he's from. The official asks questions of Henderson which Romilayu translates.

One of the questions is "What was the purpose of my trip, and why was I traveling like this?" Once again, Henderson is at a loss to answer:

Could I say that the world, the world as a whole, the entire world, had set itself against life and was opposed to it -- just down on life, that's all -- but that I was alive nevertheless and somehow found it impossible to go along with it? That something in me, my grun-tu-molani, balked and made it impossible to agree? No, I couldn't say that either.

Nor: "You see, Mr Examiner, everything has become so tremendous and involved, why, we're nothing but instruments of this world's processes."

Nor: "I am this kind of guy, rest is painful to me, and I have to have motion."

Nor: "I'm trying to learn something, before it all gets away from me."

So he fudges an answer about how he'd heard about Wariri and wanted to see it. And he and Romilayu are conducted to a hut. It is about eleven o'clock at night, so they make a fire and try to heat some dehydrated chicken noodle soup. As they settle down for the night, Henderson suddenly realizes that there is somebody else in the hut. It turns out to be a dead body. "Why was I lately being shown corpses -- first the old lady on my kitchen floor and only a couple of months later this fellow lying in the dusty litter?"

Henderson refuses to sleep in a hut with a corpse, and sends Romilayu to wake someone to take it away, but he knows from the way Romilayu behaves that he won't do it. Romilayu argues that they should sleep outside the hut, but Henderson insists, "They've unloaded this man on us and the thing for us to do is to give him right back to them." So Henderson decides to dump the body in a ravine about a hundred yards away. Romilayu's reluctance makes it necessary for Henderson to shoulder most of the task, "and, as if dressed in a second man and groaning, my head filled with flashes and thick noises, I went into the lane. And a voice within me rose and said, 'Do you love death so much? Then here, have some.' 'I do not love it,' I said. 'Who told you that? That's a mistake.'"

After Henderson dumps the body into the ravine they turn to see a man with a gun coming toward them. But he says only that the examiner wants to see them again. He asks Henderson to sign his name and compares it to the signature on his passport, and then asks him to take off his shirt. "I thought perhaps I had strayed into a wrestling part of Africa, where it was the customary mode of introduction. However, this did not seem to be the case." The king, he tells them, wants to see Henderson tomorrow and will talk to him in English. So they return to the hut.

"Just inside the doorway, against the wall, sitting in very much my own posture, was the dead man. Someone had fetched him back from the ravine."

3. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 59-95

6-8

_____

The frog problem is a clear setup for culture shock, and Henderson begins his campaign to solve the problem. "I realized that I would never rest until I had dealt with these creatures and lifted the plague." He argues his case to Itelo:

"Do you know why the Jews were defeated by the Romans? Because they wouldn't fight back on Saturday. And that's how it is with your water situation. Should preserve yourself, or the cows, or preserve the custom? I would say, yourself. Live," I said, "to make another custom. Why should you be ruined by frogs?" The prince listened and said only, "Hm, very interstin'. Is that a fact? 'Strodinary."

Anyway, Itelo has something else on his mind: "When stranger guest comes we always make acquaintance by wrestle. Invariable." Henderson tries to talk him out of it: He was trained to kill in the war and he doesn't know any other way to wrestle. They should be concentrating on the frog problem. "And I told him, 'Your Highness, I am really kind of on a quest." But finally Henderson gets the message: "I saw that to regain his respect I must activate myself, and I decided to wrestle him after all."

Henderson wins, largely by using his bulk against Itelo's superior musculature. He sees how much Itelo hates losing. "Though it made my breast ache to win, and my heart winced when I did it, I knelt nevertheless on the prince to make sure he was pinned, for if I had let him up without pinning him squarely he would have been deeply offended." And Henderson also hates to lose, remembering how even when he tried to lose while playing checkers with his children, he could never bring himself to do it: "I would jump all over the board and say rudely, 'King me!' though all the while I would be saying to myself, 'Oh, you fool, you fool, you fool!'" He apologizes to Itelo, who says only, "I know you now, sir. I do know you."

The victory is saluted by the villagers, and Henderson is presented to Queen Willatale and her sister, Mtalba. He is startled when Willatale takes his hand and places it between her breasts.

On top of everything else, I mean the radiant heat and the monumental weight which my hand received, there was the calm pulsation of her heart participating in the introduction. This was as regular as the rotation of the earth, and it was a surprise to me; my mouth came open and my eyes grew fixed as if I were touching the secrets of life.

Willatale takes on for Henderson the characteristics of a divinity or a prophetess, and Mtalba begins to demonstrate an exceptional interest in him. He presents the queen with a plastic raincoat as a gift, and is expected to kiss her belly as a reward. He makes "contact with a certain power -- unmistakable! -- which emanated from the woman's middle." But he pretends not to understand when the corpulent Mtalba wants him to do the same to her.

Itelo says that his aunts are "Two women o' Bittahness," which Henderson mistakes for "bitterness" until Itelo  explains, "A Bittah was a person of real substance. You couldn't be any higher or better. A Bittah was not only a woman but a man at the same time." A challenging moment comes when the queen asks Henderson to
tell her about himself.

Who -- who was I? A millionaire wanderer and wayfarer. A brutal and violent man driven into the world. A man who fled his own country, settled by his forefathers. A fellow whose heart said, I want, I want. Who played the violin in despair, seeking the voice of angels. Who had to burst the spirit's sleep, or else.

But it is the queen who lets him off the hook, changing the subject. 

The queen has a cataract in one eye, and Henderson now wishes he were a doctor so he could operate. "I felt singularly ashamed of not being a doctor -- or maybe it was shame at coming all this way and then having so little to contribute." When he had asked Lily if it was too late for him to become a doctor, she hadn't laughed at him as Frances had. She had said, "'Why, no, darling. It's never too late. You may live to be a hundred'-- a corollary to her belief I was unkillable."

In his admiration of the queen he "felt I might learn to be sustained too if I followed her example. And altogether I felt my hour of liberation was drawing near when the sleep of the spirit was liable to burst." He asks Itelo if he might talk with the queen, "About the wisdom of life. Because I know she's got it and I wouldn't leave without a sample of it. I'd be crazy to." He also tells Itelo "you are really a stronger fellow than I am.... I am strong all right, but it's the wrong kind of strength; it's coarse, because I'm desperate.... My soul is like a pawn shop. I mean it's filled with unredeemed pleasures, old clarinets, and cameras, and moth-eaten fur."

Itelo translates the queen's impressions of Henderson: "You have, sir, a large personality. Strong. (I add agreement to her.) Your mind is full of thought. Possess some fundamentall of Bittahness, also." This pleases Henderson, of course. He adds that Willatale "Says ... you are very sore, oh, sir! Mistah Henderson. You heart is barking." Henderson concurs with all of the queen's observations, and says, "I can fill her in on a lot of counts, though I don't think I would have to. She seems to know. Lust, rage, and all the rest of it. A regular bargain basement of deformities."

And in response to all of Willatale's comments, he asks them to listen:

I started to sing from Handel's Messiah: "He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," and from this I took up another part of the same oratorio, "For who shall abide the day of His coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth?" 

When he finishes, the queen says, "Grun-tu-molani," which Itelo translates: "Say, you want to live. Grun-tu-molani. Man want to live." Henderson repeats the word delightedly.

His mind turns again to the frog problem. "I figured that these Arnewi, no exception to the rules, had developed unevenly; they might have the wisdom of life, but when it came to frogs they were helpless.... And therefore I thought, this will be one of those mutual-aid deals; where the Arnewi are irrational I'll help them, and where I'm irrational they'll help me." But Itelo has a warning for him: "Oh, Mistah Henderson -- you 'strodinary man. But sir. Do not be carry away." Henderson laughs off the warning. And that night he and Romilayu inspect the cistern and Henderson plots the death of the frogs: "My heart was already fattening in anticipation of their death. We hate death, we fear death, but when you get right down to cases, there's nothing like it.... I hungered to let fall the ultimate violence on those creatures in the cistern."

He recalls the argument he had with Lily before he left. Their tenants, complaining about the cold, uninsulated outbuilding they had rented from him, had moved out, leaving a cat behind. Henderson had grown obsessed with the cat, and finally captured it and took it into the attic, where he fired a gun at it and missed. And just then the tenants telephoned to say they were coming for the cat. "The confusing thing is that I always have some real basic motivation, and how I go so wrong, I can never understand." So now he decides that the best thing to do is to rig up some explosives and blast the frogs out of the cistern. Romilayu strongly protests the idea. "I believe he liked me, but it was dawning on him that I was rash and unlucky and acted without sufficient reflection."

Henderson tries to get some sleep: "somehow if I get seven and a quarter hours instead of eight I feel afflicted and drag myself around, although there's nothing really wrong with me. It's just another idea. That's how it is with my ideas; they seem to get strong while I weaken." But his sleep is interrupted by the arrival of Mtalba, whose advances he tries to discourage. When he finally persuades her to leave, he still has trouble sleeping: "I lay with eyes open, bathed in high feeling."

2. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 33-59

4-5

_____

We finally get to Africa with Henderson, and rather swiftly, though first he has a few more things to tell us, particularly about his 15-year-old daughter Ricey. While home for Christmas from boarding school "she passed a parked car and heard the cries of a newborn infant in the back seat of this old Buick. It was in a shoebox." She takes it home and hides it in the closet of her room, mainly from her father. Lily discovers it and helps her feed it, but they let Henderson go on practicing his violin in the basement.

We learn also from Henderson's ramblings about the death of his older brother, Dick. A veteran of World War I with an otherwise stellar record, he was doomed when "for one moment he resembled me, his kid brother, and that was the end of him." In a diner he took out a fountain pen to write a post card, and when it didn't work he had a friend hold it up. He shot the pen out of the friend's hand, but also shot a coffee urn, which began to spray coffee across the diner. Fleeing from the police, Dick ran his car into an embankment, whereupon he and his friend tried to swim across the river. "Dick had on calvalry boots and the filled up and drowned him. This left my father alone in the world with me, my sister having died in 1901."

As for the baby, which is black, Henderson and Lily manage to get into an argument, not so much about the child but about Henderson's ability to accept reality. Hearing the sound of the argument, Ricey takes the child and runs away. When the headmistress of Ricey's school calls and says that Ricey is there with the infant, Henderson goes to the school, argues with the headmistress, who says that Ricey claims the child is hers, and withdraws Ricey from school. The authorities take away the baby and a wall grows up between Henderson and his daughter, whom he takes to stay with Frances's sister in Providence.

On the way back from Providence on the train, Henderson gets drunk, and when he's helped off the train at Danbury, he "lay on a bench in the station, swearing, 'There is a curse on this land. There is something bad going on. Something is wrong. There is a curse on this land!'" But the final break comes when, on a winter morning, Henderson finds Miss Lenox, "the old woman who lived across the road and come in to fix our breakfast," dead on the kitchen floor. He and Lily have been arguing again, and the coincidence of their fight and Miss Lenox's death triggers something in Henderson. "And now one of [Miss Lenox's] cats was looking at me from the tree, and as I passed beneath I denied any blame that the creature's look might have tried to lay upon me. How could I be blamed -- because my voice was loud, and my anger was so great?"

When the hearse backed up the drive, I said, "You know, Lily, that trip that Charlie Albert is going to make to Africa? he'll be leaving in a couple of weeks, and I think I'll go along with him and his wife...." So Miss Lenox went to the cemetery, and I went to Idlewild and took a plane.

Charlie Albert is a boyhood friend, "a year my junior and in wealth he goes me a little better," who was going to Africa to film animals while on his honeymoon. Henderson had been best man, but got off on the wrong foot with Charlie's wife because, or so Henderson thinks, "I forgot to kiss the bride after the ceremony, there developed a coolness on her side and eventually she became my enemy."  Henderson decides to buy a one-way ticket to Africa.

For a while, he is happy: "I felt I might have a chance here. To begin with, the heat was just what I craved, much hotter than the Gulf of Mexico, and then the colors themselves did me a world of good. I didn't feel the pressure in the chest, nor hear any voice within." His eye for what he sees there is extraordinary: "The crocodiles boated around in the lilies, and when they opened their mouths they made me realize how hot a damp creature can be inside." But after "about three weeks ... my discontent returned and one afternoon I heard the familiar old voice within. It began to say, I want, I want, I want!"

So he sets off on his own for the interior. An African guide, Romilayu, says he can take him to a remote tribe called the Arnewi, and they set out into an arid region surrounded by mountains: "it was all simplified and splendid, and I felt I was entering the past -- the real past, no history or junk like that. The prehuman past.... I lost count of the days. As, probably, the world was glad to lose track of me for a while." Finally they reach the village of the Arnewi. "Even the dust had a flavor of great age, I thought, and I said, 'I have a hunch this spot is going to be very good for me.'"

The Arnewi raise cattle, "whom they regarded as their relatives, more or less, and not as domesticated animals. No beef was eaten here." The first Arnewi Henderson encounters are children, and he tries to amuse them with a trick: lighting a small bush on fire with his cigarette lighter. But the trick doesn't go over well. "The kids were unanimously silent, they only looked, and I looked at them. That's what they call reality's dark dream?" And then they flee.

And then more villagers come out to meet them. "In front of them all was a young woman, a girl not much older, I believe, than my daughter Ricey. As soon as she saw me she burst into loud tears." Henderson takes it badly: "What I thought immediately was, 'What have I done?'" He thinks of running back out into the desert "until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look.... Until all the bad is burned out of me. Oh, the bad! Oh, the wrong, the wrong! ... God help me, I've made a mess of everything, and there's no getting away from the results. One look at me must tell the whole story."

But Romilayu enlightens Henderson: It's not all about him. The girl is ashamed because the cattle are dying. The drought is killing them and "they took responsibility for the drought upon themselves." And so Henderson resolves to do something to help. Finally, one of the men in the village comes up to Henderson and starts speaking English. "From his size alone I felt he must be an important person, for he was built very heavily and had an inch or two on me in stature. But he was not ponderous, as I am, he was muscular."

Henderson is as much disappointed as surprised to find that the man, Itelo, speaks English. It violates his sense of being somewhere cut off from the rest of the world. Itelo apologizes for this: "You thought first footstep? Something new? I am very sorry. We are discovered." He is the only English speaker in the village however, and the queen of the Arnewi, Willatale, is his aunt. Henderson, he says, will stay with his other aunt, Mtalbe." Itelo shows him around the village. "Everybody was extremely good-looking here; some of them would ahve satisfied the standards of Michelangelo himself."

But the cattle are dying of thirst, which puzzles Henderson because he sees a cistern not far away. If it's polluted, he tells Itelo, he can probably figure out a way to "strain it or something." But Itelo says it's impossible. Finally, "with a certain reluctance," he shows Henderson the problem: The cistern is full of frogs. "All he could tell me was that these creatures, never before seen, had appeared in the cistern about a month ago and prevented the cattle from being watered." It is considered a curse, Itelo says, "the people is frightened. Nobody have evah see such a ahnimal." Henderson, however, is resolved to do something.  

1. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 1-33

1-3

_____

Eugene Henderson, an American millionaire in his fifties, is in Africa and on the verge of telling why he went there and what happened to him. But he has a lot of back-story to tell us first about, has he puts it, "my parents, my wives, my girls, my children, my farm, my animals, my habits, my money, my music lessons, my drunkenness, my prejudices, my brutality, my teeth, my face, my soul!" 

His father, for example, was so rich that he "used currency for bookmarks -- whatever he happened to have in his pockets -- fives, ten, or twenties." Henderson inherited three million dollars, after taxes, from him. To his father, Henderson also owes the fact that he wasn't thrown out of the Ivy League university he attended. He tried to please his father by marrying "a girl of our own social class," Frances, whom he describes as "private, fertile, and quiet," and as "a schizophrenic." They were married for "about twenty years" and had five children: Edward, Ricey, Alice, "and two more -- Christ, I've got plenty of children." They were divorced sometime "after V-E Day. Or was it so soon? No, it must have been in 1948." He is now married to Lily "(maiden name Simmons)," with whom he has twin boys.

He's a big man: "Six feet four inches tall. Two hundred and thirty pounds. An enormous head, rugged, with hair like Persian lambs' fur, suspicious eyes, usually narrowed. Blustering ways. A great nose." Lily once described him as "unkillable," which "made me very bitter." He imagines people saying about him,

"Do you see that great big fellow with the enormous nose and the mustache? Well, his great-grandfather was Secretary of State, his great-uncles were ambassadors to England and France, and his father was the famous scholar Willard Henderson who wrote that book on the Albigensians, a friend of William James and Henry Adams."

He torments Lily with his misbehavior, making a scene when she is "entertaining ladies," and smashing bottles at a fancy resort: "The guests complained to the manager about the broken glass and the manager took it up with Lily; me they weren't willing to confront. An elegant establishment, they accept no Jews, and then they get me, E.H. Henderson." And then he threatens to blow his brains out with his pistol, which upsets Lily most of all, because that's the way her father committed suicide.

Okay, we are in the realm of the rampaging id, a place often visited by the postwar generation of novelists who transformed American fiction in the 1950s and '60s: Bellow, Mailer, Malamud, Roth, Heller, Updike et al., all male, mostly Jewish. (Which last I mention only because it adds a fillip to Henderson's haut-Gentile origins.)

Back to Lily, who is almost six feet tall and shares with Henderson the fact that "we both suffer with our teeth." She has a bridge because she lost her four upper incisors when her father, drunk, accidentally knocked them out with a golf club. She is twenty years younger than Henderson, whom she first met at a party he was attending with Frances, who absent-mindedly took their car and left him there. Lily offered him a ride, but it was a snowy night and the car went into a skid. She threw her arms around him in a panic, and he took over the car. They talked for a while and she told him, "You ought to divorce your wife." He was taken aback.

They meet again in the summer, and this time he gives her a ride home to "a small house filled with the odor of closed rooms." They make love in her room during a thunderstorm: "Everything got filled and blinded." She repeats "I love you!" over and over. Although Lily had called her mother and told her, "Don't come home for a while," her mother is there when they go to the living room. "I read the signs. Lily had made sure she would be found out.... I realized that she was mentally listing accounts against Lily. 'In my own house. With a married man.'... Lily blamed her mother for her father's death. And what was I, the instrument of her anger?" When they say goodbye, Lily calls him Eugene and he calls her Miss Simmons. "We didn't part friends exactly."

But they meet again soon, after Lily has moved out of her mother's house and into a small, smelly flat "where the drunks hid from the weather on the staircase" in New York City. And Henderson begins to hear "a ceaseless voice in my heart that said I want, I want, I want." He is "seething with lust and seething with trouble." She asks him, "Are you going to waste the rest of your life?" He thinks of a conversation he had had with Frances that told him their marriage was over: He was "then losing interest in the farm" (he raised pigs) and Frances asked, "what would you like to do now?" When he replied, "I wonder ... if it's too late for me to become a doctor -- if I could enter medical school," she laughed at him.

Lily tells him that she will be thirty in a few years and needs to have a child, and that they'll die if they're not together. But when a year goes by and she doesn't persuade him, she marries a broker from New Jersey -- her second marriage. And he and Frances and their two daughters go to France, where she studies philosophy. Lily shows up again in Paris, having left her husband, though his private detective follows them. She tells Henderson that she decided on the way to the wedding that it was a mistake, and that her husband-to-be punched her in the eye when she tried to get out of the car. "Also, my mother is dead."

He begins to drink as they travel around to the cathedral towns in a little convertible, "and the two of us, of grand size, towered out of the seats, fair and dark, beautiful and drunk." She moralizes about things: "one can't live for this but had to live for that; not evil but good; not death but life; not illusion but reality." But she mumbles and he's slightly deaf in one ear, so he's able to ignore her. But she's also dirty, often neglecting "to wash her underthings until, drunk as I was, I ordered her to.... The tour continued and I was a double captive -- one, of the religion and beauty of the churches which I was not too drunk to see, and two, of Lily, and her glowing and mumbling and her embraces." And once again he threatens to blow his brains out.

They break up in Vézelay. "Yellow dust was dropping from the lime trees, and wild roses grew on the trunks of the apple trees. Pale red, gorged red, fiery, aching, harsh as anger, sweet as drugs." They fight and he bursts into tears, and finally he leaves her at the train station and drives to the south of France, where he visits an aquarium:

I looked in at an octopus, and the creature seemed also to look at me and press its soft head to the glass, flat, the flesh becoming pale and granular -- blanched, speckled. The eyes spoke to me coldly. But even more speaking, even more cold, was the soft head with its speckles, and the Brownian motion in those speckles, a cosmic coldness in which I felt I was dying. The tentacles throbbed and motioned through the class, the bubbles sped upward, and I thought, "This is my last day. Death is giving me notice." 

So much for my suicide threat to Lily. 

But he doesn't die. He goes to Africa. And he's still telling us why.

After the war, he becomes a pig farmer. It seems to be a fulfillment of a decision made while fighting in Italy, where he and Nicky Goldstein were the only survivors of his original unit. They talked one day about what they would do after the work, and when Goldstein says he's going to have a mink ranch in the Catskills, Henderson "said, or my demon said for me, 'I'm going to start breeding pigs.' And after these words were spoken I knew that if Goldstein had not been a Jew I might have said cattle and not pigs. So then it was too late to retract." He goes home and converts the family estate into "a pig kingdom, with pig houses on the lawn and in the flower garden. The greenhouse, too -- I let them root out the old bulbs. Statues from Florence and Salzburg were turned over. The place stank of swill and pigs and the mashes cooking, and dung." The neighbors complain and call the health officer, but Henderson only reminds him that "Hendersons have been on this property over two hundred years." Frances says only, "Please keep them off the driveway."

He realizes that he has gotten far away from explaining why he went to Africa, and tries to restart the narrative. After several false starts, he talks again about the war:

The war meant much to me.... The whole experience gave my heart a large and real emotion. Which I continually require.... Well, I've always been like this, strong and healthy, rude and aggressive and something of a bully in boyhood; at college I wore gold earrings to provoke fights, and while I got an M.A. to please my father I always behaved like an ignorant man and a bum.... A student of the mind once explained to me that if you inflict your anger on inanimate things, you not only spare the living, as a civilized man outhg to do, but you get rid of the bad stuff in you.... On my own place, stripped to the waist like a convict, I broke stones with a sledgehammer. It helped, but not enough. Rude begets rude, and blows, blows; at least in my case; it not only begot but it increased. Wrath increased with wrath.

And always there's the voice: I want, I want! But it won't tell him what it wants. The voice only lets up toward nightfall, and he begins to think of listening to it as his occupation "because it would knock off at five o'clock of itself."

He takes up the violin as a cure, having his father's old violin restored. As his strength declined, and after the death of Henderson's brother Dick, his father shut himself away and played the violin. And one day on the way to his violin lesson Henderson meets Lily again. He is divorced and Frances has stayed in Europe. It has been a year since he put Lily on the train. She tells him she's engaged and that her mother is dead. But he remembers that she had told him in France that she had died. Lily admits that she had lied and that she has sold the house where he met her mother and wants him to have something from it. When she tells him it's a rug, he guesses it's the rug from her bedroom. When she sends it to him, he puts it on the floor in the basement where he practices the violin. He continues coming into the city for violin lessons and seeing Lily.

"We courted for about eighteen months, and then we got married, and then the children were born." He gets rid of most of the pigs, and spends his time trying "to reach my father by playing on his violin." As he practices, he is "keeping time with the voice within."