My Several Worlds (69 page)

Green Hills Farm

Yes, I remember the American years in scenes, unconnected. For example, when the war stopped, we were at New Bedford, in a hotel with all our children for the night, and expecting to get to the island of Martha’s Vineyard in the morning. And that very night the news came that the war was over and everybody in the town went crazy and took a holiday, and even the steamer’s crew was drunk next day. But we had to leave the hotel because our rooms were engaged by other people and so we were quite without a shelter over our heads, while men and women went mad and got drunk and fell into fights, all because of joy. At last we were able to persuade a fisherman in Woods Hole to take us across the Sound in his motorboat and so we arrived, starved and tired and dazed with all we had seen and heard.

And I remember the day I spent with the children on a set in Hollywood. It was my only visit there, and I went because my novel
Dragon Seed
was being made into a picture with Katharine Hepburn in the leading role and I was secretly distressed because she wore a man’s Chinese jacket instead of a woman’s, and when I inquired of someone in command why this was allowed, I was told that she liked the lines of the man’s jacket better than the woman’s. Just as she would not cut off her bangs, although anyone who knew China would know that a farmer’s wife would not wear bangs. They are plucked out the night before her wedding, as a sign that she is no longer to be a virgin. And the bridge they had on the set was all wrong. It was the sort of bridge they used in South China but not in Nanking. And, worst of all, the terraces should never have been on the mountains. The rounded hills outside Los Angeles are very much like the hills outside Nanking, but for
Dragon Seed
they were terraced with bulldozers, whereas there is no terracing on the Nanking hills, and what confounded me most was that some of the terraces ran perpendicularly like great ditches up and down, impossible to imagine except in Hollywood, for terracing prevents erosion and the ditch provides it. When I inquired why the ditches, I was told that they made a contrast to the terraces running horizontally, and this only confounded me further.

Yet why dwell upon such matters now? Pictures improve, I daresay, and later in that same day the people on the set had their chance to laugh at me, too, when they produced the water buffalo which had been an important character in the filming of
The Good Earth
and now had become a sort of pet. I suppose they thought I would fall affectionately upon the beast’s neck but I did not. I remembered that water buffaloes in China have a deep prejudice against white persons and will always attack if they can. It was as much as I could do to put my hand on this one’s horn for a photograph. We eyed each other with mutual distrust, I because he was a water buffalo, and he eyed me because he smelled my fear, and was stirred by ancestral antagonisms. Meanwhile the Americans watching us laughed heartily and I let them laugh. And this brief and single visit to Hollywood brings to my memory the strange story of the filming of
The Good Earth.
I have always disliked mystery stories in which the villain is an Oriental of unknown and sinister character, just as in my childhood I used to dislike the crude Chinese plays where the villain was always a Western man with blue eyes, a big nose and red hair, yet—well, here is the story, and in time it properly begins in that last winter which I spent in the old city of Nanking.

When the stage version of
The Good Earth
, prepared in 1932 by Owen Davis, was sold by the Theater Guild to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, I wished very much that the chief characters in the motion picture could be played by Chinese actors, for the stage play had convinced me that it was impossible for Americans to portray the parts of Chinese with any reality. Nazimova, who took the part of O-lan, was a brilliant exception, but she had some background in Eastern Europe which gave her an almost Asian grace of movement and pose. I was told, however, that our American audiences demand American stars and so I yielded the point, as indeed I had to, for I had no control over the matter.

As soon as I reached Shanghai, the representative there of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came to see me in a state of despair. He had been sent to take preliminary photographs of scenes and people and he had found himself frustrated at every attempt. Finally his studio was burned down by unknown persons and he was giving up and returning to the United States. There are “forces,” he said, who did not want the picture made at all.

“Forces?” I inquired, unbelieving.

He nodded and went away without explaining. Later, I heard that he had committed suicide before reaching the United States, although not, I believe, from artistic frustration but from some private and domestic tragedy of his own.

I discovered, as the months passed, that the “forces” were familiar enough, for they were simply the prickly inverted patriotism of some members in the new government who did not want an authentic film made of Chinese villages and peasants lest it might provide unflattering views of China to foreign audiences abroad. I had a certain amount of sympathy with this, and so I declined at once any association with the making of the film, for friendly relations were more important to me than its success. Nevertheless, during the winter I heard a great deal about the making of that film, and I read of it, too, in Chinese newspapers. For a company was sent from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer complete with cameras and technical equipment, and the story of their travail was relayed to me regularly by my friend the American Consul, who was compelled in the course of duty to be the mediator between the American motion picture group and the Chinese authorities, who objected at every step, and even after mediation, unwillingly acceded to, insisted upon dressing up the villages before pictures were allowed. Every woman, I heard, had to appear in clean clothes, and wear a flower in her hair, the rugged streets had to be cleaned and the houses decorated. The authorities even tried to substitute a modern American tractor, a machine that few Chinese had ever seen, for the redoubtable water buffalo who was an essential character in my story. If I heard the American side of the troubles from the Consul, I had the other side from editorials in the Chinese papers, which ran something like this:

“We fear that in spite of our government’s every precaution, there will be some child in this film with an unwashed face or some farmer’s wife with a dirty apron.”

My sympathies were with both sides by now, and I kept a prudent silence and followed my usual pursuits. It was only after the motion picture was finished and shown and I was living in the United States that I heard of the incredible ill luck that dogged its making. One misfortune followed another until the tale became a legend. It was told to me by a member of the company, and proceeded from minor accidents too numerous to mention to the major disaster of discovering, when the company left China to come home, that most of the film material brought back from China in tin containers had somewhere along the way been destroyed by acid, so that of the entire length of a long film, as it was eventually shown, only about twelve minutes was composed of the original photography taken in China. Even the famous locust scene was made in one of the Western American states, where an opportune locust scourge supplied the necessary local color. The final tragedy was of course the death by sudden illness of the brilliant director, Irving Thalberg, leaving the picture uncompleted.

His successor confessed to his own secret fears one evening when the picture was finished, or so I was told, and at the moment he happened to be standing by a chimney piece in his house, or in some other, and as he spoke an immense and heavy-framed portrait fell from above the mantelpiece, narrowly missing his head.

My own memories of the film are not so sinister. I did not go to the opening although I was in New York at the time, for I dreaded the fanfare and publicity. I waited for a few days and then my husband and I went quietly to the theater and took seats in the gallery. It is an amazing experience to see the characters one has created come alive on the screen, and I was much moved by the effort that had been made, especially by the incredibly perfect performance of Luise Rainer as O-lan. She not only looked like a Chinese woman but she moved like one and every detail of action, even to the washing of a rice bowl, was correct. When I asked her how she had accomplished this, she told me that she had chosen from among the many Chinese employed on the set for the crowd scenes a young woman whom she thought most like O-lan. She had then followed this woman everywhere, watching her until she felt identified with her. When later the film was shown in China, as well as in other Asian countries, where incidentally it was a great success, Chinese friends wrote to me of their surprise and appreciation of Luise Rainer, marvelling, as I had, at the miracle of her understanding.

As for the evening at the New York theater, when I got up to leave my seat after the picture was over, I heard a gusty sigh from behind me and a hearty male voice said: “Well, it’s a good show, but I’d ruther see Mae West.” I knew what he meant. I had seen Mae West, but in a small crowded theater in Java, and hearty males had enjoyed her there, too!

Now and again during these years I have taken the children to see the house where I was born in West Virginia. It stands back from the road in the shelter of the mountains looming behind it, and it belongs to another family, a friendly one, to whom my first cousin went in sad distress, decades ago now, when speculations forced him to sell the homestead he had inherited from my eldest uncle who had it from my grandfather, in old-fashioned primogeniture. I am glad that friends live there but nevertheless the house is sorely changed. It needs paint and carpentering and the great old trees are gone, although the wisteria vine still hangs from the pillared portico. Inside, the house is entirely changed, only the shape of the rooms remaining. The formal old life that I can remember is no more.

But much is gone that is no more and it would be ungrateful of me to be sorry. And I remember instead that the young son of the family who lives in the house now came back a captain from the Second World War, as his father did from the First World War, and as his grandfather did from the Civil War, but this young captain has lost half his body. We were shocked—nay, our children at first were terrified—when he came rolling out of his car that day of our first visit, a stump of a man with no legs. For some impatience in him had made him to decide to live as he is, without artificial legs if he cannot have the ones he was born with, and thus he goes about his business, making his living and managing with the help of friends even to go fishing, a pastime that he loves. He has a good young wife and he has fathered two children, and he told me on a later visit that the only time he cannot bear his loss is when one of his children asks him to do something which he cannot and then he must explain that he has no legs. He has plenty of courage, nevertheless, and I am glad that my sons know him. It takes courage indeed to live as he does, and to wonder sometimes, as I am sure all young men must, whether there is not common sense enough somewhere in the world so that the folly of such loss can never be again.

What else do I remember? One winter I was charmed by radio, and I planned a novel written for that fine medium, so new to me then, and I went quietly to a class at Columbia taught by an excellent radio writer, and there, unknown among young men and women green to the craft, too, I learned and wrote my assignments until the professor’s sharp eye picked me out, and then he told me I had learned enough and there was no more he could teach me. I never wrote the novel, but I wrote a few radio plays during the war, one of which was included in the anthology of that year. Now television has come, and sometimes I ponder how a novelist can use that magic medium, too. It remains to be discovered. Meanwhile, I learned not only from the professor but from those young men and women who were my fellow students.

The young American entices me to ask many questions. I observe him everywhere, in my own house and on the streets of the village and the city, everywhere I go. There is a basic lack in his life, I feel, although I cannot define it. Our young are strangely insecure. I ascribe this, primarily, after much thought and observation, to the general lovelessness of their life as children. In old countries, France, for example, in Europe, and anywhere in Asia, the child is so well loved that he can survive any disaster of his life in childhood, except death itself, because he is always with his family, and in later life because he has had his foundations laid in love. Only in Germany did I see harshness to the young, and I wonder how much that early harshness had to do with their life-unhappiness, the restlessness, the discontent which have forced them into war again and yet again, and compelling them, perhaps, to find a kindly father in any leader who promises them good things.

Our Americans are not harsh to their children so much as indifferent and withdrawn, or anxious and critical. The parent world is too far separated from the childhood world, there are too many absolutes conflicting one against the other, so that our children grow up uncertain of their own worth as human beings. I am amazed when sometimes an unperceptive foreigner tells me that Americans are proud. Bombastic sometimes, yes, and boastful, but this is because we are not proud, but secretly self-distrustful and doubtful of what we do and say and think. A man who knows his own worth does not boast, is not self-seeking, will not domineer or force his own opinion upon others, respects his fellow man because he respects first himself. When we Americans fail in these virtues it is because somewhere we have lost our faith in ourselves, and this happens, I believe, in early childhood. How I wince when I see a mother, or a father, but more often a mother, because American men do not usually take their proper share of responsibility for their children, jerk a child’s arm upon the street, slap the little creature, shout at him, walk too fast for small legs! I long to have the courage to speak, to tell the mother to be careful what she does, because it is by such cruelty that she will lose her child’s heart. I have never dared to speak because I discover that to the American parent his child is a private possession, to deal with as he likes, and this is not as it was in China, where the child belonged to all the generations, and was always defended from parental injustice.