302
PARTISAN REVIEW
matter. Bellow has a superb gift for characterization and milieu-but
Henderson the Rain King
is a book deliberately without any characters at
all. The hero is not a character in the usual sense. He tells us something,
indeed much, about his past but he is seen as a figure in a fantasy, a great
not-unlikely American going through absurd, unbelievable scenes with
various story-book African tribes. The setting is composed of vivacious
words coming, as they used to say, from a "fevered artistic brain" rather
than from any true observation of geography or actual terrain. The
standard to be applied here is not that of realistic fiction, but of, we sup–
pose, odd works like
Don Quixote
or
Gulliver's Travels.
The fantastic
journey is perilous.
If
a work in this form does not succeed brilliantly it
is likely to fail dismally. Instead of accuracy the writer will have to call
upon the rarest imaginative inspiration. A real man can only be evicted
from a real place to make room for the universal destiny, playing itself
out among eternal scenery. The impulse to incur these risks is usually the
satiric talent expressing itself. But Bellow's book is not a satire although
it has satiric bits. Perhaps it is meant as a piece of comic exuberance like
A Sentimental Journey.
But Sterne's post horses and chaises dash up to
real inns.
Henderson, then, is not a "character" but he is an "American"–
traveling about a dry continent he ends up as a god who makes rain. In
his adventures there are possible interpretations, perhaps even "world–
wide implications" tucked away here and there
if
one wanted to look
for them. They do not come readily to mind, giving the reader the sense
that however ridiculous and unreal the events are they represent human
helplessness or folly. When Henderson throws out the water with the
frogs are we thinking of bungling engineers in the Point Four Program?
It is another part of the joke that Bellow, very shortly before the
publication of this novel, should have expressed himself against "deep
readers" and symbolic interpretation on the front page of the book
section of
The New York Times. Henderson
cannot be read except deep–
ly, n)r be understood except symbolically. And the fact that this is so,
that the literal meaning is rather thin in dramatic texture, and that,
nevertheless "deep" and symbolical meanings do not jump out at us is a
real fault. The scenery is too unreal for picaresque comedy; the events
have too little resonance for symbolic fantasy.
Bellow is everywhere felt to be among the best of the young novel–
ists and many would rate him first.
Henderson the Rain King
is very
much less to my taste than his previous work and yet it is not exactly
to be designated a "falling off' or even a "standing still," a repetition.
It is an autonomous work, a mutation. There
is
a suggestion of it
in
