Henderson

Call this one Henderson, the Rain King, or How Saul Bellow Made Me Chuck Another One. Bellow (1915-2005) was a Nobel (1976) winning author whom many thought the finest American novelist in the post-Hemingway/Faulkner period. Myself I always had problems with books and I could never seem to get into the stories. I tried but didn't finish Augie March and Herzog. I did finish Seize the Day, but it was only around 100 pages and didn't do a thing for me. But this past week pressed for something to keep my mind occupied I cracked open Henderson, the Rain King and was instantly sucked in.

By the fifth chapter my heart was sinking. Bellow, it seems, already tackled the themes, characters, and situation I was attempting in my on-hold story Estuary, and Bellow wrote it 100 times better than I could. He set up the same deal: a listless American travels to a far off land (in this case, Africa) in search of something he can't define. He encounters natives, has adventures, gains wisdom, and returns a changed man. But Bellow's achievement is to present a protagonist who is entirely self-aware of his faults and all, and yet who continues to let his passions fly even when he knows in the back of his brain that he'll only get into more trouble. Bellow's descriptions of his setting destroy what I could do, as do his characterizations of the natives. See for yourself:

"To have found a man like Romilayu, who sensed what I was looking for, was a great piece of luck. He was in his late thirties, he told me, but looked much older because of premature wrinkles. His skin did not fit tightly. This happens to many black men of certain breeds and they say it has something to do with the distribution of the fat on the body. [note what these asides tell us about the protagonist -ds] He had a bush of dusty hair which he tried sometimes, but vainly, to smooth flat. It was unbrushable and spread out at the sides of his head like a dwarf pine. Old tribal scars were cut into his cheeks and his ears had been mutilated to look like hackles so that the points stuck into his hair. His nose was fine-looking and Abyssinian, not flat. The scars and mutilations showed that he had been born a pagan, but somewhere along the way he had been converted, and now he said his prayers every evening..."

and

"The rainy season had been very short; the streams were all dry and the bushes would burn if you touched a match to them. At night I would start a fire with my lighter, which was the type in common use in Austria with a long trailing wick. By the dozen they come to about fourteen cents apiece; you can't beat that for a bargain. Well, we were now on a plateau which Romilayu called the Hinchagara--this territory has never been well mapped. As we marched over that hot and (it felt so to me) slightly concave plateau, a kind of olive-colored heat mist, like smoke, formed under the trees, which were short and brittle, like aloes or junipers (but then I'm no botanist) and Romilayu, who came behind me through the strangeness of his shadow, made me think of a long wooden baker's shovel darting into the oven. The place was certainly at baking heat."

There's no sense in finishing Estuary the way I'd intended. If I want to tell that story, I need a different way in or a new point of view or use a new prose style.. something. Tomorrow I'll post a collapsed ending for Estuary to put that baby to bed.