Henderson the Rain King

I Want, I Want

Eugene Henderson is fifty-five years old, six foot four, two hundred and thirty pounds, heir to a considerable fortune, owner of a pig farm in Connecticut, twice married, and in the grip of something he cannot name. The voice in his head says “I want, I want, I want” with the regularity of a tide. He has tried everything available to a rich American: multiple marriages, the pig farm (which his neighbours find appalling), violin playing (which his family finds appalling), and a series of enthusiasms that come to nothing. Nothing quiets the voice.

Henderson’s entrance into the novel is a masterpiece of comic characterisation. His first marriage produced children he doesn’t understand. His second wife, Lily, is warm and decent and he cannot stop screaming at her. He kills his housekeeper’s cat accidentally and sets off a chain of events that convinces him he must leave: leave his farm, leave Connecticut, leave America, leave the whole apparatus of his life. He goes to Africa with a friend, and this is where the novel begins in earnest.

What Bellow captures in Henderson — and it is a genuine capture, not a caricature — is a specifically American form of unhappiness: the unhappiness of a man who has everything his culture defines as sufficient for happiness and has discovered that it is not sufficient. The voice that says “I want” is not the voice of greed; it is the voice of a soul that has not yet found its object. Henderson goes to Africa because it is as far as he can get from the world that has not been able to answer it.

The Two Tribes

Henderson encounters two tribes in Africa, and his experiences among each constitute the novel’s narrative spine. The Arnewi are gentle and afflicted: their cattle’s watering cistern has been invaded by frogs, and the tribe cannot bring itself to kill the frogs because they are sacred. Henderson, with characteristic excess of confidence, offers to solve the problem. He builds a bomb. He throws it into the cistern. He kills the frogs. He also destroys the cistern. The tribe is now without water. Henderson moves on.

The second tribe, the Wariri, are fiercer and more complex. Their king, Dahfu, is one of the great characters in Bellow’s fiction: educated, philosophical, deeply strange, and convinced that the secret of human transformation lies in lions — specifically, in spending time with a lion in a pit beneath the palace, allowing the animal’s nature to infiltrate and modify one’s own. Henderson, through a sequence of events that the novel presents with perfect comic logic, becomes the Wariri’s rain king — a title that requires him to carry a statue of the rain goddess through a rainstorm, which he does with the enthusiasm of a man who has finally found something he can actually do.

Bellow’s Africa is explicitly not an anthropological Africa. He said as much. It is a Africa of the moral imagination — a space outside Western civilization where the questions that Western civilization cannot answer can be asked differently. This is not a defensible position in contemporary terms, and readers should know that going in. What it produces, within the novel’s own logic, is a spiritual landscape of real power: a place where Henderson’s ridiculous excesses actually matter, where his failure and his transformation are taken seriously, where the voice in his head might find an answer.

The Quest

What Henderson is actually looking for — what the voice wants — is reality. Bellow uses this word with great seriousness throughout the novel, and it is worth taking it seriously. Reality, for Bellow, is not a philosophical position but a felt experience: the experience of being fully present, fully alive, in contact with something that is actually there rather than with the mediated, cushioned, inherited life that wealth and civilisation provide. Henderson has everything except this contact with the real, and he will go to extraordinary lengths to find it.

King Dahfu, in the lion pit, teaches Henderson that reality is not found through the intellect but through the body — through the willingness to put oneself in genuine danger, to be afraid and to remain, to allow the proximity of something wild and indifferent to burn off the accumulated habits that separate a person from direct experience. Whether this works — whether Henderson is transformed — the novel leaves deliberately ambiguous. He returns from Africa changed, certainly. The voice in his head is quieter. But Bellow does not give him resolution, only direction.

The novel ends with Henderson on an Icelandic airstrip in the Arctic, holding an orphaned lion cub he has taken from Dahfu’s kingdom, running — for reasons the text does not entirely explain — in circles around the plane. It is one of the most exuberant endings in American fiction: ridiculous, cold, joyful, and somehow exactly right. Henderson is running because he can, because his body works, because the world is large and cold and real, because the voice has stopped for a moment, because this is what it looks like when a man finally finds something that feels like enough.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Bellow’s wildest and most joyful novel, a comic epic about a ridiculous man’s genuine quest for the real — not anthropologically respectable but spiritually alive on every page.