Paperback Jukebox
Henderson The Rain King – Saul Bellow
I read Henderson The Rain King this summer, after picking it up as part of three-for-a-dollar deal at a little festival in Friendship. I knew by its yellowing and disintegrating pages that it didn’t have much of a life left, but the old and stained cover with a cartoon of a man resembling Mr. Magoo cowering under an umbrella convinced me to buy.
HTRK is an adventure story about a bold and likeable middle-aged man and his travels in an exotic and faraway place. We meet Eugene Henderson-- a wealthy, lumbering, hot-tempered drunk-- immediately before his departure for Africa. Once he gets there, he abandons the people he went with, hires a private guide, and goes deep into the African desert, where he has two very different--and equally devastating--experiences with two very isolated local tribes.
But while there is plenty of action and intrigue, this is really the story of a man’s existential crisis (My favorite kind of novel!) We quickly learn that Henderson has a cloud of failure hanging around him, not because he’s lazy or unintelligent, but simply because--at least, in his opinion--he is doomed. He sees himself as a “Midas in reverse,” ruining every person and thing that he touches. For the past several years, his inner voice has been crying, “I want, I want,” but he doesn’t know what it wants. He feels restless and depressed, and so he goes as far away as he possibly can, in search of “the hour that burst the spirit’s sleep.”
Henderson seeks relationships with the royalty of the two tribes that he meets, and develops a very good friendship with King Dahfu of the second tribe, the Wariri. He thinks that the farther he gets from home, the easier it will be to find answers: that because these people are outside his definition of society, that they must know something he doesn’t. He wants the people he meets, and especially King Dahfu, to teach him how to live his life. But, there is no consistency in the values of the people he meets: not among the two tribes, and not even among King Dahfu and those that he rules. But, of course, this is not unique to Africa; there’s no easy answer on how to define yourself, or what makes a meaningful life, in a world of conflicting and varying values. People experience existential isolation everywhere; whether they’re flying to Africa to escape loneliness or just muddling through the daily routine, many people are unsure of how to live.
Henderson makes much of omens--good and bad ones. He takes the color of the rising sun on the white clay of his hut as a sign that everything is going to be ok, only because it reminds him of something he saw when he was young and innocent and still thought that everything was going to be ok forever. And in a moment of hope, he notes “that chaos doesn’t run the whole show. That this is not a sick and hasty ride, helpless, through a dream, into oblivion. No, sir! It can be arrested by a thing or two. By art, for instance. The speed is checked, the time is re-divided.”
What I remember most about the novel is its ending. Incidentally, I cannot read this ending again, as the book is now in the final stages of decay, and the pages following 284 are paper crumbs in the bottom of my tote bag. But I remember that Henderson is on his flight home and the plane lands to refuel in Newfoundland. He suddenly gets the urge to get off the plane, and he starts running laps around it in the cold air while giving a piggyback ride to an American/Persian orphan boy that he just met in the seat next to him. It really doesn’t fit in with the rest of the story, in either plot or mood, but the whole moment is filled with this indescribable joy and meaning. What’s the meaning? I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it’s that by the end of the story, although he has failed in every way, he’s still alive. Or, that just as we can feel isolated by those closest to us, we can also have our most sincere moments with strangers. Or maybe it’s just that like this ending, the moments in life where we finally feel we are our best and truest selves may not be pretty or tidy at all--may be complete anomalies in the preexisting narrative of our lives. I remember thinking, when I put down HTRK, “This is why I read books! I want to feel like Henderson in this moment all the time!” So, it was a 33.3 cents well-spent.
Alicia Barnes graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007. She recently returned from teaching English in Prague and is so happy to be back in Pittsburgh. She is now working as a writer and blog coordinator at ModCloth.com