Anticipating the forthcoming publication of Henderson the Rain King, Bellow offered a picnic metaphor he meant to set a boundary between substantial and superficial art. Thinking of E.M. Forster, he quips, “No good novelist is going to invite us to a picnic merely to eat egg salad and chase butterflies over the English meadows or through the Tuscan woods,” He’s sure (perhaps, if some are not) that Forster is not being innocent when he invites us to picnic in his novels.
“Butterflies are gay, all right,” Bellow writes, “but in them lies the secret of metamorphosis,” hinting readers ought to be aware that he’s not “inviting us to a picnic” in Henderson the Rain King. His symbols and imagery, especially lions and bears, are not “innocent.”
Bellow didn’t say it, but “one man’s butterflies and eggs are another man’s lions, etc.”
Featured Image: Saul Bellow. Henderson the Rain King. New York: Viking, 1959. William E. Preston’s cover art for the novel’s first edition.
See Saul Bellow. “Search for Symbols, a Writer Warns, Misses All the Fun and Fact of the Story.” The New York Times. February 15, 1959; Henderson the Rain King. New York: Viking Press, 1959