The Jewishness of Bellow's Henderson

Abstract

M UCH OF THE CRITICAL COMMENTARY on Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King begins with the observation that, in Richard Lehan's words, Henderson, the first of Bellow's nonJewish characters, is a WASP.1 This observation is quite literally accurate. Henderson's family numbers among its nineteenth-century members such clearly Protestant worthies as a Secretary of State, American ambassadors to England and France, and a friend of Henry Adams and William James.2 Further back, Henderson's ancestors went on the crusades (p. 257). In his travels through Africa in search of self-education and a life worth living, Henderson himself takes on aspects of ambassador and crusader, of Henry Adams and William James themselves. Obviously Henderson is intended as the archetypal gentile American, the heir to centuries of Christian and New World culture. He is yet another incarnation of the American as quester for knowledge, perhaps the commonest character type in our literature and myth.3 Thus Bellow, in sympathetically portraying the spiritual death and rebirth of this inheritor of American tradition, would seem to have made an important break from the usual world of his fiction. Alone among Bellow's novels, Henderson would seem devoid of the Jewish. Yet the case is more complicated than it might at first appear. For while Henderson is explicitly non-Jewish, implicitly he is

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