300
PARTISAN REVIEW
complications of his character Henderson decides to hit the road to
Africa in search of Sensation and Truth. He has physical strength, as a
complement to his financial weight; a fair number of the aches and pains
of dissipation and dentistry; and a large dose of breezy boredom, wise–
cracking wonder. Henderson's story is a search, an adventure, a quest;
it is that drama as old as history, in which a man, worn with himself,
goes to a far-away land in search of what we call his own identity and to
learn, perhaps, the meaning of back-home.
The Africa Henderson goes to is not colonial Africa, racial Africa or
even the game hunter's Africa.
It
is a joke Africa with whimsical tribes,
fat native queens and a faithful guide, a travelogue Queequeg, darkly
devoted. There are tall tales about lions. The scenes are wild and yet
tender; the bum millionaire, Henderson, is breezy, boastful, sentimental,
philosophical. His despair is diluted by his cheerful language, which is
Broadway, hip. When he tries to get the frogs out of the drinking water
he blows up the retaining wall and frogs, water and all run out. "It's the
same old story with me; as soon as I come amongst people I screw
something up-I goof." Henderson has the soul of an artist; he might
be an action painter or he might, wearing a little goatee, be Dizzy Gil–
lespie. He thinks in a style afraid of pretension and yet overflowing with
boozy speculations. "Oh, you can't get away from rhythm.... The left
hand shakes with the right hand, the inhale follows the exhale, the systole
talks back to the diastole. . . . And the tides, and all that junk. . . .
Hell, we'll never get away from rhythm.... But the king said I should
change. I shouldn't be an agony type. Or a Lazarus type. The grass
should be my cousins...."
In
The Victim
and his extraordinary story,
Seize the Day,
Bellow
wrote in a manner that is somehow "Russian"-that is, he created works
of realistic fiction in which the events and characters were suffused with
a mysterious glow of meaning and signification. The plots are as tight
as works for the stage and the stories gave the reader unusual intellectual
and artistic satisfaction. In an airless, urban scene, he put down his char–
acters, men deep in predicament, sinking in bad luck or moral un–
certainty. The style is tense, with a peculiarly nervous keenness of ob–
servation and expression.
The Victim
and
Seize the Day
are short and dramatic; in between
them came
The Adventures of Augie March,
which is long and episodic,
narrated in the first person like
Henderson the Rain King,
and has
another embattled, wise-guy hero, a "traveling man." There is a bizarre
incompatibility between the two styles, the two conceptions of subject
