The terms “thinly” and “deeply” allude to an article Bellow published on the front page of The New York Times Book Review on February 15, 1959, a week before Henderson appeared in print. Its title was “Deep Readers of the World, Beware!” In it Bellow warns reviewers against overly symbolic or “deep” readings, which he parodies. Such readings are often ludicrous, but even when plausible they block or shortcut feeling, which Bellow sees as arising from “the concrete and the particular,” “flesh and bone.” Asking what Achilles’s anger symbolizes can prevent one from realizing that he “was angry. To many teachers he would represent much, but he would not be anything in particular.” Absence of being is just what Hardwick objects to about the character of Henderson, which is why she calls the “Deep Readers” article “part of the joke.” “Henderson cannot be read except deeply, nor be understood except symbolically.” A second criticism is that the deep or symbolic meanings the novel tempts readers into “do not come readily to mind.” The reader senses “possible interpretations, perhaps even ‘world-wide’ implications,” but “that they do not jump out at us is a real fault.”
This second criticism is puzzling, though Hardwick was not alone in voicing it. In an interview, Roth described the novel as “an uninterpretable allegory.… The braille isn’t raised above the page. I think Saul was looking for a loose allegory, to write about breaking loose.”37 Henderson as a symbol of America, however, is multiply signaled. His ancestors “stole land from the Indians” (p. 120). The founder of the family fortune, a Dutch sausage maker, became “the most unscrupulous capitalist in America” (p. 82). His great-grandfather was secretary of state. His father was a renowned scholar and friend of Henry Adams and William James. He’s as American as Chanler Chapman (and as comical, a shadow of heroic or noble ancestors, like many modern literary heroes, an object of satire). “Alfred Kazin asked what Jews could possibly know about American millionaires,” Bellow told Roth in their interview. “For my purposes, I felt that I knew enough. Chanler Chapman, the son of the famous John Jay Chapman, was the original of Eugene Henderson.”38 Henderson is a figure of America in size as well as background: he’s big, six foot four, 230 pounds (fourteen pounds at birth), with a twenty-two-inch neck and an enormous head, as big as an entire baby or half the body of a man (pp. 104, 180). Then there’s his nature: he’s “strong and healthy, rude and aggressive and something of a bully” (p. 121). He’s also turbulent, heedless, striving: “When it comes to struggling,” he brags, “I am in a special class. From earliest times I have struggled without rest” (p. 164).
What exactly Henderson is struggling for he finds hard to articulate, which is presumably what Hardwick has in mind when she says the novel’s symbolic meanings do not jump out at us or Roth when he calls its allegory uninterpretable. “I want, I want, I want!” is Hender son’s cry. “It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger.” When he asks himself “What do you want?” he gets no answer (pp. 121, 122). Henderson is hardly without assets or advantages. He’s an Ivy League graduate, a war hero, a millionaire pig farmer with a large estate outside Danbury, Connecticut, which he shares with a beautiful wife, twenty years his junior, and their two children. Despite this good fortune, Henderson is unhappy, disgusted with himself, a mess (the pig farming recalls not only his sausage-making ancestor but what he thinks of as the piggishness of his own behavior and being). When offered a chance to visit Africa with a friend, he grabs it, “hoping to find a remedy for my situation” (p. 139). Though hard to name, the yearning that drives him is familiar: it is Romantic (the cry “I want, I want” is taken from plate 9 of Blake’s small book of engravings, For Children: The Gates of Paradise), expressing a need for spiritual well-being, rebirth.39 In a letter of March 30, 1992, Bellow says as much, in response to a query from a German doctoral student, Barbara Bitzer: “I can’t say whether his Sehnsucht [longing] has anything to do with Goethe’s zelige Sehnsucht [holy longing]. Romantic literature is filled with longings and Henderson probably got his Sehnsucht from Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth.” When Henderson sees a magical pink light on the side of a white hut in Africa he recalls a comparable light from childhood (discussed earlier in Chapter 3). The childhood light produces an epiphany, what Wordsworth calls a “spot of time,” a moment when perceived object and perceiving subject come alive and come together. In Henderson’s words, “the dumb begins to speak … I hear the voices of objects and colors; then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth” (p. 192). In Africa, Henderson seeks such experiences, things “which I saw when I was still innocent and have longed for ever since, for all my life—and without which I could not make it. My spirit was not sleeping then, I can tell you” (pp. 193–94) (Henderson’s desire to “burst the spirit’s sleep” [p. 171] comes from the Dedication to Shelley’s Laon and Cythna, originally known as The Revolt of Islam).
In addition to being Romantic, the desire for a renewed or awakened life can be thought of as American, though for Henderson, America in its present state is what stands in its way. As Eusebio L. Rodrigues, an English professor at Georgetown University, puts it, the cry “I want, I want” echoes the “promise of hope and rejuvenation that was made when the old world came to the new.” In this sense, Henderson is arche typally American, but he is also of his age, both “the embodiment of mid-twentieth century America, bursting with vital energy, victorious in war [he was awarded a Purple Heart in World War II], triumphant in technology, at the very peak of its prosperity,”40 and unfulfilled, in search of spiritual knowledge, a more than material well-being. “It isn’t just me,” Henderson tells his African guide, Romilayu:
millions of Americans have gone forth since the war to redeem the present and discover the future. I can swear to you, Romilayu, there are guys exactly like me in India and in China and South America and all over the place. Just before I left home I saw an interview in the paper with a piano teacher from Muncie who became a Buddhist monk in Burma. You see, that’s what I mean. I am a high-spirited kind of guy. And it’s the destiny of my generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life. It just is (p. 354).
Early on, Henderson confesses of his adult life in America: “By three o’clock I was in despair. Only toward sunset the voice would let up. And sometimes I thought maybe this was my occupation because it would knock off at five o’clock of itself. America is so big, and everybody is working, making, digging, bulldozing, trucking, loading, and so on, and I guess the sufferers suffer at the same rate” (p. 123). Nine-to-five America not only fails to supply Henderson with what he needs but shapes him to its rhythms.
These rhythms are deforming. In addition to restlessness, they produce recklessness or rashness, the sort that leads Henderson, in an effort to help, to blow up the water supply of the Arnewi, the first tribe he meets. The rhythms of Africa, in contrast, are seen by Henderson as natural, accepting, including of death, which modern America fears and flees. “You fled what you were,” Dahfu, king of the Wariri, tells Henderson. “You did not believe you had to perish” (p. 339). Dahfu is Henderson’s instructor, and his teachings, which take up almost two thirds of the novel, are closely patterned on those of Wilhelm Reich, a point that Bellow’s friend Richard Stern claims to have been the first to reveal in print. “I know Bellow, and have talked with him about this novel,” he admits in a footnote to his review of Henderson in The Kenyon Review, “I feel I know what effects were wanted at certain moments; I also feel ‘in’ on such genetic factors as Bellow’s interest in Reich.”41 For evidence of Dahfu’s teachings as Reichian, Stern points to the attention he pays to Henderson’s rigid posture: “You appear cast in one piece. The midriff dominates. Can you move the different portions? Minus yourself of some of your heavy reluctance of attitude. Why so sad and so earthen? Now you are a lion. Mentally, conceive of the environment. The sky, the sun, the creatures of the bush. You are related to all. The very gnats are your cousins. The
sky is your thoughts. The leaves are your insurance, and you need no other” (pp. 343–44) (presumably because they return in spring). Dahfu is also an advocate of roaring, making Henderson get down on his hands and knees and bellow: “And so I was the beast. I gave myself to it, and all my sorrow came out in the roaring. My lungs supplied the air but the note came from my soul” (p. 345). Henderson’s suffering, we learn on the novel’s first page, is felt as a pressure in the chest, the prime location, Reich claims, of trapped energy; the results are sudden and uncontrolled bursts of repressed feeling.
The Arnewi are presided over by Prince Itelo and his aunt, Queen Willatale. The equanimity of Queen Willatale impresses Henderson deeply. “Good nature emanated from her; it seemed to puff out on her breath as she sat smiling.” Henderson is encouraged to place his hand on Willatale’s chest, between her breasts, a traditional Arnewi greeting. In contrast to the pressure or congestion within his own breast, he feels “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” (p. 166). In later years, Bellow was quite open about the Reichian “factors” in Henderson. “All the while I was writing Dahfu I had the ghost of Rosenfeld near at hand, my initiator into the Reichian mysteries.”42
Henderson’s attitude to Dahfu is like Bellow’s attitude to Reich. Dahfu has life wisdom, but he’s cracked. “It is possible that he lost his head, and that he was carried away by his ideas. This was because he was no mere dreamer but one of those dreamer-doers, a guy with a program. And when I say that he lost his head, what I mean is not that his judgement abandoned him but that his enthusiasms and visions swept him far out” (p. 221). Reich’s enthusiasms swept him far out when he claimed that orgone therapy could cure cancer or when he conducted experiments in “cloud-busting.” Rodrigues is shrewd as well as dogged in uncovering the Reichian elements in the novel. The Wariri, like the Arnewi, suffer terribly in the drought. At the tribe’s rain-making ceremonies, Henderson’s strength allows him to win a competition to lift and carry a Wariri cloud totem, the Mummah, at which point the empty sky fills with lowering clouds. As the cloud bursts, Henderson is declared “Sungo” or Rain King. Rodrigues explains: “The rain-making ceremonies seem to belong to a primitive Africa and may appear to have been derived from Bellow’s anthropological reading [detailed in Chapter 5 of this book], but they are in fact a vivid and comic dramatization of the Reichian method of ‘cloud-busting’ and rain-making.” Rodrigues quotes Reich’s claim that “one may create clouds in the cloud-free sky in a certain manner, disturbing the evenness in the distribution of the atmospheric OR [orgone] energy; thus clouds appear upon drawing energy from the air.” Reich’s experiments as a rainmaker took place at Orgonon, his home and research lab in Rangeley, Maine. “He caused long hollow pipes to be aimed at the cloud-free sky in order to draw off OR energy.”43 Henderson describes the rain clouds that appear after he lifts Mummah as “colossal tuberous forms” (p. 285); he sees the sky “filling with hot, gray, long shadows, rain clouds, but to my eyes of an abnormal form, pressed together like organ pipes or like the ocean ammonites of Paleozoic times” (p. 284). The resulting downpour is figured in orgasmic, which is to say Reichian, terms, as is its effect on Henderson (an effect recalling Tommy’s sobbing at the end of Seize the Day):
A heated, darkened breeze sprang up. It had a smoky odor. This was something oppressive, insinuating, choky, sultry, icky. Desirous the air was, and it felt tumescent, heavy. It was very heavy. It yearned for discharge, like a living thing.… I felt like Vesuvius, all the upper part flame and the blood banging upward like the pitch or magma (p. 284).
Though the cloud burst seems to come about through Henderson’s efforts, he remains skeptical, just as he never loses his fear of following Dahfu into the den of Atti, the lioness, the final phase of his “therapy” (in one early version of the novel he calls his meetings with Dahfu “sessions,” of which there are eleven).44 The scenes with Atti are especially wild and memorable—the novel’s version of the Caligula episode in Augie March. Henderson’s sense of the lunacy of walking into Atti’s den is played partly for laughs; though full of suspense and wonderfully observed descriptions of Atti as she moves about, nuzzling the terrified Henderson “upward first at my armpits, and then between my legs,” the scenes are also farcical. “Are you afraid?” Dahfu asks. “I can’t even bring my hands together to wring them,” Henderson answers (p. 340). Though he follows Dahfu into the den, his faith in the king’s teachings remains qualified. For Dahfu’s sake, he tells us (in a passage quoted earlier in this book, in Chapter 10), “I accepted the discipline of being like a lion. Yes, I thought, I believed I could change; I was willing to overcome my old self; yes, to do that a man had to adopt some new standard; he must even force himself into a part; maybe he must deceive himself a while, until it begins to take.… I would never make a lion, I knew that; but I might pick up a small gain here and there in the attempt” (p. 373). This willingness to suspend disbelief, indulging spiritual intimations, is shared both by the protagonists of succeeding Bellow novels and stories and by their creator, as is a reluctance to commit to one view or the other. “Henderson is not Reichian confusion, but comedy,” Bellow writes in an undated letter to Leslie Fiedler. “I shun doctrine.” “I have always had intelligence enough (or the intuition),” Bellow writes in a letter of April 10, 1974, to Daniel Fuchs, “to put humor between myself and final claims”—about the afterlife, for example (“any psychologist will probably tell that it’s just childish fantasy,” Bellow says in his interview with Manea, “but all the same it’s hard to get rid of these feelings”), or “the original soul,” or God himself, whose existence Bellow seems only at the end of his life, or so he tells Manea, to have “stopped arguing with myself about.”45
What tests or challenges Henderson’s spiritual intimations is his language. Though partly Chanler Chapman’s language, it is also Dr. Pep’s or Gooley MacDowell’s or Augie’s, mixing street slang, Yiddishisms, literary and biblical allusion, philosophical speculation, and arcane learning. The urban world, the world of Bellow’s brothers, is heard throughout despite Henderson’s WASP upbringing. “These guys are putting the squeeze on her,” he tells Dahfu (p. 329). “What do they want?” he asks of Dahfu’s enemies. “You should abdicate, like the Duke of Windsor?” (p. 312). Henderson’s high cultural references are comparably incongruous, improbable. In a conversation with Willatale’s sister, Mtalba, he alludes to T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” “that poem about the nightingale singing that humankind cannot stand too much reality” (p. 196). He talks of “being” and “becoming” (“Becoming was beginning to come out of my ears. Enough! Enough! Time to have become! Time to be! Burst the spirit’s sleep. Wake up, America!” [p. 247]), as if he’d read Heidegger or Sartre; of the “noumenal,” as if he’d read Plato or Kant (as in “the physical is all there and it belongs to the world of science. But then there is the noumenal department” [p. 253]). Henderson’s literary and musical references range from Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé (1848–1910), the French travel writer (p. 113), to Massenet’s opera Thaïs (p. 128), to Homer, The Odyssey in particular, and the poems of Longfellow, Whitman, Tennyson, Blake, John Clare, and Ovid. Elizabeth Hardwick mocks Henderson’s language as “Broadway, hip,” “wise-guy,” a style “afraid of pretension and yet overflowing with boozy speculations.” What she leaves out is Bellow’s comic intent, as when Henderson confronts the sinister Bunam, chief priest of the Wariri, imagining what the Bunam sees in him:
What he was saying I knew. I heard it. The silent speech of the world to which my most secret soul listened continually now came to me with spectacular clarity. Within—within I heard. Oh, what I heard! The first stern word was Dummy! I was greatly shaken by this. And yet there was something there. It was true. And I was obliged, it was my bounden duty to hear. And nevertheless you are a man. Listen! Hearken un
to me, you shmohawk! You are blind. The footsteps were accidental and yet the destiny could be no other. So now do not soften, oh no, brother, intensify rather what you are. This is the one and only ticket—intensify (p. 272).
These words might almost have come from Berryman’s Henry, shifting register from line to line. Henderson’s voice is openly unreal, like the “noble savage” and blackface voices of the novel’s African characters. Its function is partly to debunk (motivated by what Hardwick tendentiously describes as Bellow’s “fear of pretension”), a function taken up in later works by the protagonists’ girlfriends, Herzog’s Ramona, Charlie Citrine’s Renata. Here the women serve other functions. Henderson’s first wife, Frances, smokes gold-tipped Sobranies, like Sasha, and is an intellectual, not at all afraid of pretension; Lilly, his second wife, “a large, lively woman,” (p. 105), is down-to-earth, messy, with “many negligent and also dirty habits” (p. 115). Henderson worries about Lily’s truthfulness rather than her lack of sympathy for boozy speculation. “Look at the way she lied about all her fiancés. And I’m not sure that Hazard did punch her in the eye on the way to the wedding” (recalling Bellow’s skepticism about Sasha’s stories of paternal abuse). Lily’s flaws suggest other complaints against Sasha: “she is reckless and a spendthrift and doesn’t keep the house clean and is a con artist and exploits me” (p. 324).
Neither of Henderson’s wives figures in the main body of the novel, once he arrives in Africa. Nor does Henderson end up in Lily’s arms at the novel’s close, though he’s heading back to her in the final chapter. The women he meets in Africa are objects neither of romantic nor sexual interest. Willatale and her sister, Mtalba, are old, the former a sort of earth mother, the latter enormously fat. The troop of naked amazons who guard King Dahfu press upon Henderson from all sides in “their volupté (only a French word would do the job here)” (p. 240). They are frightening rather than arousing. One of Dahfu’s jobs as king is to satisfy what he calls the “prerogatives” of these wives: “You may not think so on first glance, but it is a most complex existence requiring that I husband myself” (p. 242). If Dahfu weakens, he tells Henderson, the wives “will report me and then the Bunam who is chief priest here, with other priests of the association, will convey me out into the bush and there I will be strangled” (p. 244). When the prospect arises of Henderson succeeding Dahfu as king, the wives loom large in his imagination. “I’d break my heart here trying to fill his position,” he tells Romilayu, “and anyway, I am no stud. No use kidding, I am fifty-six, or going on it. I’d shake in my boots that the wives might turn me in” (p. 390). The passage calls to mind Bellow’s complaints about Sasha’s “needs.” Yet the depiction of women in the African portion of the novel is as much literary as autobiographical. Henderson is a novel of quest and adventure, filled with Odyssean echoes. The Wariri wives function as do the treacherous females Odysseus encounters (Calypso, Circe, the Sirens). They threaten both nostos or return and the realization of the hero’s quest.
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 73