The Tao of Travel

"I am just a traveler," Henderson says to King Dahfu. But to Chief Itelo he said, "Your Highness, I am really kind of on a quest." It seems to me that this is the crux of the matter: Bellow cannot imagine an Africa that is not full of marvels, odd customs, harems, wrestling matches, lion hunts, and the mystical rain ceremony that elevates Henderson to kingship among the Wariri, in the same way that Tarzan is elevated to chief of the similar-sounding Waziri in The Return of Tarzan.

In the imagined world of the nontraveling fiction writer there is usually a convergence of the grotesque and the stereotypical. A comparison of Henderson with Tarzan is not out of place. The difference is that Burroughs admitted he was writing pulp fiction, while the highly intelligent Bellow, self-conscious in this role as fabulist, often plays it for laughs. This novel—strained comedy, occasional farce, and sometimes outright clowning—is unconvincing to anyone who has lived in an African village, yet when Bellow won the Nobel Prize, Henderson was commended as his "most imaginative expedition."

Burton's First Footsteps in East Africa is invoked by Henderson. But the antiquated nature of the travel and Bellow's invented tribes make me think that (like Edgar Rice Burroughs) he was influenced more by Paul Du Chaillu's 1861 Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, in which Du Chaillu, an American of French descent, was made a king of the Apingi tribe in Gabon.

Du Chaillu wrote, "Remandji said, 'You are the spirit, whom we have never seen before. We are but poor people when we see you. You are of those whom we have often heard of, who come from nobody knows where, and whom we never hoped to see. You are our king and ruler; stay with us always. We love you and will do what you wish.' Whereupon ensued shouts and rejoicings; palm wine was introduced, and a general jollification took place, in the orthodox fashion at coronations. From this day, therefore, I may call myself Du Chaillu the First, King of the Apingi."

Henderson becomes the Rain King in a similar fashion. Challenged by an interviewer about the reality in his novel, Bellow replied, "Years ago, I studied African ethnography with the late Professor Herskovits. Later he scolded me for writing a book like Henderson. He said the subject was much too serious for such fooling. I felt that my fooling was fairly serious. Literalism, factualism, will smother the imagination altogether."

This seems to me a delusion on Bellow's part, yet another delusion of the nontraveling writer.

Arthur Waley: Not Madly Singing in the Mountains

DESPITE PUBLISHING MORE than twenty volumes of his translations from Chinese and Japanese, including The Way and the Power, Tao Te Ching, The Analects of Confucius, and Murasaki's Tale of Genji, Waley never traveled to China or Japan.

Waley claimed that he didn't want to risk being disappointed by seeing the real places so bewitchingly described in poetry and prose. Was this so? The Yale Sinologist Jonathan Spence wrote in the journal Renditions, "One can make all kinds of guesses concerning Waley's reasons for not going to Asia: that he didn't want to confuse the ideal with the real, or that he was interested in the ancient written languages and not the modern spoken ones, or that he simply could not afford the journey. Certainly we are safe in assuming that the trip would have been disconcerting."

Modern China would surely have disconcerted him. Waley was happier in his imagined Tang Dynasty. Here is one of his great translations, and a wonderful affirmation of nature, from the Tang poet Po Chu-i:

Madly Singing in the Mountains

There is no one among men that has not a special failing:

And my failing consists in writing verses.

I have broken away from the thousand ties of life:

But this infirmity still remains behind.

Each time that I look at a fine landscape,

Each time that I meet a loved friend,

I raise my voice and recite a stanza of poetry

And am glad as though a God had crossed my path.

Ever since the day I was banished to Hsun-yang

Half my time I have lived among hills.

And often, when I have finished a new poem,

Alone I climb the road to the Eastern Rock.

I lean my body on the banks of white stone:

I pull down with my hands a green cassia branch.

My mad singing startles the valleys and hills:

The apes and birds all come to peep.

Fearing to become a laughing-stock to the world,

I choose a place that is unfrequented by men.

V. S. Pritchett: A Lot of Verisimilitude, and a Howler