Dun Quixote

HENDERSON, THE RAIN KING (341 pp.) --Saul Bellow--Viking ($4.50).

Is Don Quixote the portrait of a Christian saint? W. H. Auden argues that it is, that Don Quixote sees his mission as "the World--that which needs my existence to save it at whatever cost to myself. He comes into collision with the real world but insists upon continuing to suffer [and] never despairs." When readers first meet Don Quixote, continues Auden, "he is (a) poor (b) not a knight, (c) 50, (d) has nothing to do except hunt and read romances about Knight-Errantry . . . Suddenly he goes mad, i.e., he sets out to become what he admires . . . Religiously, it is a conversion, an act of faith, a taking up of his cross."

Without some such mental preamble, the saga of Eugene Henderson, the quixotic hero of Saul (The Adventures of Augie March) Bellow's new novel, is apt to seem little more than the portrait of one of nature's fall guys, a well-heeled goof. When readers first meet Henderson, he is (a) rich, (b) not a knight, (c) 55, (d) has nothing to do except raise pigs as a hobby and dream about Sir Wilfred Grenfell and Albert Schweitzer. Suddenly he acquires "a form of madness . . . the pursuit of sanity." He flees his wife and family for the heart of Africa. There, amid parching heat and native stench, his ironic adventures form a highly abstract quest for the meaning of life and death, illusion and reality, God and man.

Want, Want, Want. All his life Henderson has tilted at destiny and lost. His father was disappointed in him; his wife tricked him into marrying her; his children do not understand him. His idealistic urge to be a physician was stillborn. A hulking six-footer weighing 230 Ibs., Henderson is a kind of Herculean wreck with a bad leg from a World War II wound, a deaf ear, a bridgeful of false teeth and a nose bulbous from overdrinking. All he has is $3,000,000 and a demonic inner voice that says "I want, I want, I want."

Africa teaches 'him what he wants. From Romilayu, his native Sancho Panza, he learns something of undeviating loyalty. Romilayu leads Henderson to the Arnewi, a sweet-spirited tribe which lives by the rule of kindness. Their Queen Willatale, a woman of imposing gravity, gives Henderson a hint of the demon that drives him on. She tells him that he has the grun-tu-molani, in effect, the will to live rather than die, and to live more abundantly. In gratitude, Henderson proposes to rid the Arnewi of an infestation of frogs which, according to tribal superstition, is ruining the drinking water for their cattle. Henderson lobs a homemade bomb into the cistern, but Quixote-fashion, blows up the retaining wall as well as the frogs, and the precious water seeps into the sand.

Psyche-Semantic. Slinking away in disgrace, Henderson and Romilayu next camp with an ugly-mannered tribe called the Wariri. Here Henderson redeems himself by lifting a previously unbudgeable wooden idol during a riotous rainmaking ritual. He is acclaimed as Sungo, the Rain King, blushingly dons the transparent green silk bloomers of his office and becomes a friend and confidant of Dahfu, the Wariri's chief.

Dahfu is Western-educated and a kind of philosopher-king, a cross between a psycho-somaticist and a psyche-seman-ticist. He promises to help Henderson break the cycle of Becoming for the serenity of Being. Not the least of the lessons in courage the King gives Henderson is in the manner in which he meets his own tragic destiny. At novel's end Henderson is ready to go home, apparently having learned that 1) human nature "needs a shot in the arm from animal nature," and 2) man must not demand heaven of earth, but cultivate the good in himself together with a tragic sense of the human condition.

Author Bellow's Africa is vivid with colors and temperature changes, but essentially it is a climate of the soul much like Hamlet's castle at Elsinore. Henderson's moral dilemma is more real than Henderson. Too often, Author Bellow merely restates what he ought to develop, and the reader cannot tell whether it is the time that is out of joint or merely Henderson's great nose. The Rain King's self-distaste eventually cloys; as Nietzsche put it, "He who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a despiser." At times, Henderson is too greyly overcast with thought to be more than a dun Quixote.

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