Pearl Buck in China (28 page)

The Shanghai literary scene was full of effete young poets like Yuan’s cousin Sheng, who publishes a slim silver-bound volume of derivative symbolist verses (“exquisite and empty, though they were so fluent in their line and sound”), printed on thick ivory paper and featuring moonlight on a dead woman’s hair, “an ice-bound fountain in a park, a fairy island in a smooth green sea.” This is an accurate if unflattering skit on the vogue for European pastiche among Western-educated intellectuals seeking escape from insoluble political and social problems nearer home. Most of the writers Pearl read and
admired in her twenties had moved in the opposite direction, toward active political involvement. Chen Duxiu, whose campaign in
New Youth
alerted a whole generation to the possibility of literary revolution, was overthrown as leader of the Chinese Communist Party in 1927, afterward becoming a Trotskyite and narrowly escaping execution. Lu Xun, picked by Pearl as the first Chinese to write about the ordinary life of his own people (and later generally acknowledged as China’s greatest twentieth-century writer), turned to Marxism in those years. So did Pearl’s favorite, the poet Kuo Mo-jou (
“that brilliant mind
, whose habit was the utmost candor and whose passion was truth”), currently pioneering the use of propaganda as a tool of the Left in China. Of Pearl’s feminist contemporaries, Hsieh Ping-hsin and Ding Ling—“those two intrepid and fearless women writers who used to make me so proud”—Hsieh acknowledged no political allegiance in her work and faded from public view; Ding joined the Communists and, after fighting many bitter battles for women’s liberation, ended up as one of the Party’s model writers.

There is nothing to suggest that Pearl actually met any of these handsome and clever young Chinese (a species that touched her heart as, in a different context, it did her father’s). The exception was the popular and charismatic poet Xu Zhimo, who seems to have encountered her on a flying
visit to Nanjing
in May 1924. She said she used him as the model for the aloof young
husband in “A Chinese Woman Speaks,”
which she wrote later that summer. Thirty years afterward she singled Xu out in her memoirs in a dismissive account of the superficiality and
“sickening romanticism”
of contemporary Chinese writing at that period: “It even became the fashion to ape Western poets in person and one handsome and rather distinguished and certainly much beloved young poet was proud to be called ‘the Chinese Shelley.’ He used to sit in my drawing-room and talk by the hour and wave his beautiful hands in exquisite and descriptive gestures…. He was a northern Chinese, tall and classically beautiful in looks, and his hands were big and perfectly shaped and smooth as a woman’s hands…. Our Chinese Shelley died young, I am sad to say, for he had a sort of power of his own, and could he have outgrown the Shelley phase he might have become himself.”

One of half a dozen Chinese Shelleys, Xu (also known as the Chinese Byron) was the son of a banking family in Zhejiang who had spent time in Paris as well as studying in the United States, and spending a postgraduate year in England at Cambridge University. On his return to China he became an authority on the West and an arbiter of taste, a glamorous and sophisticated role model, founder of
Crescent Moon
and other experimental literary journals, a high-flyer who made a major impact when he left his Beijing base for Shanghai in 1927. Pearl included a second sketch of Xu, or someone very like him, in a bitter passage in her memoirs about the promiscuity of Shanghai intellectuals, “rootless young Chinese, educated abroad, who did not want to involve themselves in anything more trying than art and literature, the artists from the Latin Quarter in Paris, the postgraduates from Cambridge… who kept their hands soft and spent their time in literary clubs and poetry-making, who published little decadent magazines in English and pretended that the common Chinese did not exist. In such groups there were also a few American women who had come to China for adventure, women who took Chinese lovers and about whom the Chinese lovers boasted….” The American woman who was sleeping with Xu in Shanghai in the late 1920s was
Agnes Smedley
, an intrepid traveler, left-wing reporter, and notorious believer in free love, as indeed was Xu himself. Both had broken family ties, repudiated social convention, and taken a daring public stand on freedom and the future in a way impossible for Pearl, who was not only married to a missionary but living on mission funds under the close and prurient surveillance of the mission community.

Pearl was only four years older than Xu, but she still looked drab, middle-aged, and mousy. When she gave a talk at the Shanghai High School the girls were chiefly struck by the gap between her appearance and her aspirations.
“She was just the wife
of a missionary,” said one of them, “and we thought it very interesting that someone like her would actually be publishing stories about the people who were all round us.” That winter she began losing weight without premeditation and without conscious effort. By New Year 1928 she had lost forty-five pounds and reported that she looked
“more like my old self
than I have in years.” Previous biographers have assumed that Pearl too was having an affair with Xu, which seems unlikely, if only because he was one of the stars of his literary generation, while she was at best an onlooker on the sidelines, having published no more than a handful of pieces in mission publications and American magazines. None of his biographers has found a shred of
evidence for this affair
, and the only Chinese witness who knew them both, a young professor at Nanjing’s National Southeastern University, categorically denied the possibility that Pearl had been Xu’s lover, even if she might have liked to be: “
She was stout
, rather oldish-looking…. He mentioned to me the name of Miss Pearl Buck. My impression was that Miss Buck did not impress him much.”

No one in Pearl’s circle at the time in China, not even her husband, knew anything about this putative affair, apart from a vague assertion made fifty years later by Lilliath Bates that she had heard gossip linking their two names. Pearl admitted long afterward that, when she wrote “A Chinese Woman Speaks,”
“she imagined herself
… marrying a young man such as Xu Zhimo.” Like the hero of that story, Xu had been married young by his parents to a girl he’d never met and couldn’t love, eventually divorcing his wife to make a much publicized and ultimately disastrous love match in 1926. Pearl also claimed that she put something of Xu into the half-Chinese hero of
Letter from Peking,
who was more closely based on the boy she fell in love with as a schoolgirl. The suggestion that either of these romantic heroes might have been based on more than fantasy originated with Theodore Harris, Pearl’s companion in old age, who ghost-wrote her official biography with her collaboration and whose testimony is highly ambivalent.
“It is the privilege
of a writer to grasp a situation as it stands and complete it in her own mind,” he wrote of Pearl’s relationship with Xu. “It could have happened. How much actually did is not for us to know.” Xu gave a course of lectures at Southeastern University in 1929, commuting from Beijing and resigning after twelve months. His early death in a plane crash the year after made him a legend. All that can be said for sure is that he produced a deep impression on Pearl, as on many of his contemporaries, and that her feelings for him grew in retrospect.

What seems to have restored her confidence in herself toward the end of 1927, when by her own account she went through a crisis of acute loneliness and isolation from her own kind, was that for the first time she was moving toward a position where she could begin to take her life into her own hands. Her decision to remove her daughter to the United States, and partial physical as well as moral separation from her husband, made it possible to envisage a professional future in her own right.
All previous bids
to establish herself as a writer had failed. The novel completed in March 1927 had been destroyed by looters in Nanjing, and she had apparently forgotten all about the book-length typescript of her mother’s life (which was in fact salvaged from its wall closet by her students). “A Chinese Woman Speaks,” and the story written as its sequel, packaged together as a novel in response to a request from the New York publishing house Brentano’s, had been turned down. The stories she posted off at random to American magazines took up to six months to elicit a response, which, when it came, was more often than not a rejection slip. Of the three U.S. literary agents listed in a writers’ directory Pearl found in a Shanghai bookstore, two eventually replied that there was no American market for Chinese material. The third was David Lloyd of the Paget Agency, who agreed to handle her stories and also to try to place the two-part novel, now titled
Winds of Heaven
. It was a small, unexpected check forwarded by Lloyd from a U.S. magazine that Pearl squandered so recklessly that Christmas on blue silk and white porcelain, precious symbols not just of her difference from her housemates, but of a new inner life that would mean more to her than any love affair.

Sex was Pearl Buck’s territory as a novelist. One of the prime grievances of her critics from
The Good Earth
onward was the frank sexuality of women as well as men in her novels. Her own sensuous nature was not in question. She said that
even the gardenia
bushes in her Nanjing garden, opening their fleshy white petals in the early morning, could stir her senses so intensely that their heady perfume woke her from sleep. In her early stories she wrote with particular sensitivity about sexual frustration, thwarted desire, the twin miseries of marital rape and marital rejection. Her fictional Chinese lovers never
offer sexual fulfillment; even the mixed-race hero of
Letter from Peking
is an American in bed. The American girl who moves with her Chinese husband into his family home, in the second part of
Winds of Heaven,
reluctantly acknowledges the gap opening up between them:
“Locked in behind these high walls
I imagine things…. He seems to slip back into strangeness…. I have always been used to frankness and cheerfulness and speaking straight out. And here it is all silence and bowing and sliding eyes at me.” Pearl dramatized her own predicament more clearly in “Repatriated,” another story written around this time, about a Frenchwoman married to a Chinese intellectual, who had charmed her as a student in France with his gravity and delicacy, his slender erect carriage, his calm oval face, sleek black hair, and golden skin, but becomes in his own country so elusive and inscrutable that he drives her back reluctantly to her irredeemably coarse and lecherous French lover.

Although Pearl had warned Lossing at the beginning of the year that she had
no intention of moving
the children from the relative safety of Shanghai,
he persuaded her
in July to go back with him and their daughters to Nanjing. Beijing had capitulated to the Nationalists that spring, but Chiang Kaishek established his government in the old imperial capital of the Ming emperors. Still medieval in its lack of sanitation and running water, and its one-storey buildings lining a main street barely four feet wide, the city was now scarred by burned-out schools and churches, with trees cut down, and soldiers everywhere, camping out in gutted houses and using the gardens as latrines. The Bucks were the first white family to return. Horses had been stabled in the kitchen of their house, the living-room floorboards had been set on fire, the bay window ripped out, and the garden destroyed. Temporary repairs had made the place habitable for government officials, but for their first month the family stayed with Chinese friends while Pearl hired a team of masons, carpenters, and painters. The entire house, which had been used at one point as an army cholera ward, had to be sanded, scrubbed with strong-smelling disinfectant, and whitewashed. The work went on long after the family moved back, squeezed into two upstairs bedrooms where Pearl
cooked on an oil stove. For months she was abnormally sensitive to the sound of unfamiliar voices at the gate and the ghostly presence of absent friends in the empty church. One of the first things she did was to dig up the surviving roots from the violet border in her garden and plant them on Jack Williams’s grave. She told Emma there was no way of knowing if she would ever pick the spinach, cabbages, and replacement violets she sowed that winter.

It was a scenario familiar from her rootless childhood, only this time there was no amnesty for foreigners. On a last visit to Zhenjiang Pearl found her parents’ house engulfed by the revolution and its garden reduced to beaten earth:
“Twenty families of refugees
crowded into the rooms… and the plaster was stripped to the laths, and the floors were inches deep in human filth, and the starving people looked out of the holes of windows like desperate dogs.” Even in Nanjing food was short and prices high. People in the streets were mutinous and bitter. Posters everywhere denounced Chiang and the Kuomintang. Attempts at rural reform had turned out to be halfhearted and impossible to enforce. Outside the city walls bandits had instituted a reign of terror. Lossing estimated that
eighty thousand farmers
within a twenty-mile radius of Nanjing were paying illegal protection money on top of increased taxes. Pearl feared a popular uprising. The new administration was no match for crooks and grafters. Even the most hopeful government officials—some of them the Bucks’ friends and former students—were young, inexperienced, and wholly unprepared for the scale of problems posed by overmanned and inefficient agricultural production, the lack of industry and transport systems, the urgent need for educational expansion and public health initiatives, all exacerbated by a bankrupt economy and the presence of an enormously expanded mercenary army. The regime officially welcomed Westerners, but ordinary people no longer bothered to conceal an ingrained contempt reinforced by the ignominious loss of face so recently inflicted on the white community. Pearl got used again to the curses—“Kill the foreigner!”—she had heard shouted when she was a child. Once a fierce young ideologist preaching revolution on the street broke off to swear and spit at her.