664
Have You Discovered
Journal of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences
The quarterly by which intellectuals
in all fields keep in touch with one
another. Each issue contains eight to
ten major articles and is built largely
around a single unifying theme.
FALL 1959 ISSUE, "QUANTITY AND QUALITY"
PARTIAL CONTENTS
Mathematics Without Numbers,
by John
G.
Kemeny
Quality and Quantity in Quantum Phys–
ics,
by Victor F. Weisskopf
The Quantification of Sensation,
by
S. S.
Stevens
Quantity and Quality in Economic Anal–
ysis,
by Wassily Leontief
Is Preventive Psychiatry Possible?
by
Lawrence
S.
Kubie
The Pastoral of the Self,
by R enato
Poggioli
On Emerson,
by Robert Frost
The Political Philosophy of Jacques
Maritain,
by Clarence Morris
and others
"DAEDALUS has suddenly catapulted its way into
the front rank of our intellectual magazines."
-GEORGE N. SHUSTER
-------- - - - - - ----
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn.
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CORRESPONDENCE
Sirs:
I think Elizabeth Hardwick's review
of Saul Bellow's
Henderson the Rain
King,
perceptive though it often is,
mistakes both the author's intention
and the special quality of the book.
"The fantastic journey is perilous," she
writes. "A real man can only be evict–
ed from a real place to make room
for the universal destiny, playing itself
out among eternal scenery." So she
dutifully looks for deep symbolism–
and doesn' t find it. She thinks Bellow
was just kidding when he recently "ex–
pressed himself against 'deep readers'
and symbolic interpretation" and she
magisterally states:
"Henderson
can–
not be read except deeply, nor be un–
derstood except symbolically."
Why not? Why not take
it
on the
surface, as a humorous
tour de force
which gets its effect from the manipu–
lation of rhetoric? I read it so and
enjoyed it more than any current novel
I've read since
Lolita,
also a fantastic
journey, also a verbal
tour de force,
also very funny.
Augie March
seemed
to me to be reaching for deep mean–
ings and not quite achieving them, but
Henderson
I thought just right. You
can read Reichian therapy, existential–
ism, etcetera into it but you don't have
to; the surface fun and games are
enough. I think the effect comes from:
(I) Bellow's extraordinary ear for lan–
guage, all kinds of language; (2) the
comic vigor and inventiveness of the
description ; (3) the speech of the na–
tives, with its wonderful combination
of pidgin English and formality–
doubtless no African native ever spoke
that way but doubtless they should be–
cause in some cockeyed way it exactly
suggests the quality of the primitive
mind; (4 ) the charm and interest of
