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

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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

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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.