Pearl Buck in China (36 page)

A new Buck bestseller was desperately needed to make the future of the John Day company financially secure.
A House Divided,
the long-awaited final installment of
The Good Earth
trilogy, had come out at last in January to disappointing sales. Its impetus was too obviously educational rather than imaginative.
“I conceived the idea
of a series of novels, each of which should reveal some fundamental aspect of Chinese life,” Pearl wrote of its inception. Begun in a period of turbulent personal transition, abandoned during the acute depression
that overtook Pearl on her return to Nanjing, taken up again a year later in an attempt to avert John Day’s collapse, the novel suffered more than either of its predecessors from lack of planning. It tells the story of Wang Lung’s youngest grandchild, the only son of Wang the Tiger, who rejects his father’s militarism in favor of an indeterminate future as a writer. The second of the book’s four sections, describing a period of exile in the United States, is a more or less direct transcription of Pearl’s own response to the sheer scale, waste, and prodigality, the size and splendor of everything American, from urban skyscrapers to illimitable untouched open space,
“fields big enough
to be counties and machines struggling like huge beasts to make ready the fertile earth for gigantic harvests.” Timid and indecisive, terrified of losing his virginity, accustomed to burst into tears at the first sign of trouble, and still crying himself to sleep in his early twenties, Wang Yuan makes an implausibly girlish romantic hero, but an effective and observant authorial stand-in for what is essentially a firsthand report on the revolutionary turmoil of contemporary China as seen through the eyes of three Wang grandsons: Yuan and his cousins, Sheng the trendy poet, and Meng, an idealistic captain in the revolutionary army. The book ends with the destruction of their family house organized by yet another grandson, this time a young Communist agitator who incites local farmers to ransack and burn private property in the name of the class struggle.

It was Lin Yutang’s
My People and My Country
—a first book by an unknown author translated from a foreign language on a subject notoriously impossible to sell—that outstripped John Day’s expectations by becoming a best seller in 1935.
“Pearl sponsored it
and Walsh tailored it for the West,” said Helen Foster Snow. “It was a huge success to the total astonishment of Lin Yutang and everyone else—due mostly to Walsh.” Richard was a brilliant editor, sensitive, skillful and discreet.
“I have seen him
take a muddle of a manuscript and make it a unified whole,” said Pearl, “he would have been a fine critic… he was a genius of his own sort in coaxing books out of writers who did not know they were writers…. He had the gift of universal comprehension, an eclectic mind, a synthesizing judgment.” His touch was so
light that, although the changes he made were sometimes comprehensive, he seemed even to his authors to clarify rather than obstruct or conceal their underlying intentions. He was always the first person to read his wife’s manuscripts, and she trusted him implicitly. In her forties and fifties, when stories poured out of her almost without premeditation, Pearl relied heavily on Richard as a kind of artistic conscience,
“a screening mind
, a critical judgment,” as an old friend put it.
“He was the
only
one who could criticize her,” said one of their three sons.

When her husband finally rejected
The Time Is Noon
Pearl somewhat dubiously offered him instead the biography of her mother she had kept shut up in a drawer for fifteen years. This time Richard had no doubts. Serialization of
The Exile
(for which
Woman’s Home Companion
paid twenty-five thousand dollars), followed by its successful publication in January 1936, put the company firmly on its feet again. The book was greeted with such critical and popular acclaim that Pearl promptly produced a parallel life of her father. She herself said that, although she had come to love him in the last ten years of his life, when he lived with her in Nanjing, it was only after her return to the United States that she saw Absalom clearly. Up until then he had been too inextricably bound up with her past for her to be objective.
“His outlines remained ghostly
to me, even when he ate at my table.” Settled now in her new American home, buoyed by the courage and confidence Richard gave her, freed from the bitterness vented in
The Time Is Noon,
she explored her father’s deeply divided nature with the honesty, humor, and sense of proportion she had advised her contemporaries to cultivate when dealing with missionaries of an earlier generation. It is the strength of
Fighting Angel
that it somehow manages to see the funny side of a career that was tragic in its protagonist’s total failure as much as in its destructive consequences for those closest to him.

The book acknowledges Absalom’s qualities as fully as his defects. Pearl inherited her mother’s warmth, humanity, and integrity,
“her steadfast eye
and her firm mouth and her look of something rock-like,” the qualities Olan passed on to the boldest of her own children in
The Good Earth.
But in the course of writing
Fighting Angel
she seems to have understood perhaps for the first time her own likeness to her
father. She recognized in herself his pride, his dauntlessness, his lofty anger, his secretive withdrawals. She learned to accept and honor the stubborn strength of his vision:

Nor can I tolerate
for a moment any mawkish notion that it was his religion that filled him with that might. Religion had nothing to do with it. Had he been a lesser mind he would have chosen a lesser god, had he been born for today he would have chosen another god but whatever… he did he would have done with that swordlike singleness of heart. As it was, born of the times and of that fighting blood, he chose the greatest god he knew and set forth into the universe to make men acknowledge his god to be the one true God before whom all must bow. It was a magnificent imperialism of the spirit, incredible and not to be understood except by those who have been reared in it and have grown beyond it.

Fighting Angel
was Pearl’s parting present to her father. A second gift (and one he would no doubt have preferred) was
a posthumous edition
of his Chinese translation of the New Testament, financed by Pearl and produced by the Nanjing Seminary. The two biographies, packaged together in October 1936 under the title
The Flesh and the Spirit
and distributed as a Book-of-the-Month Club double, sold more copies than any of Pearl’s previous works except for
The Good Earth.
“I am just
so
happy about the book,” Grace had written to her sister when she read
The Exile
. “It does seem as if Mother’s life is to count for more than she could ever know.” One of the outcomes even Pearl could not have foreseen was the book’s impact in the 1970s and 1980s, after the death of Chairman Mao, on a Chinese generation brought up to regard foreign missionaries as tools of cultural oppression.
“All the political propaganda
, and many years of socialist education, simply went to pieces after people read this little biography,” wrote Kang Liao: “young readers were surprised to learn… so much that is opposite to what they had been told in class and in the textbooks.”
The Exile
set out to right wrongs, both general and particular, but Pearl’s
brief life of her father goes beyond that relatively narrow remit.
Fighting Angel
has the makings of a twentieth-century classic in its truthfulness and simplicity, the strangeness of its subject, and the lapidary precision of its style. Apart from
The Good Earth
—another work long meditated and written under pressure in a single burst of speed—it is probably the best book Pearl ever wrote in the sense that she never fully recaptured its combination of cool, sharp, scrutinizing intelligence and passionate emotion.

The only dissenting voices came from mission colleagues of the Sydenstrickers, who hotly disputed what they saw as cruel and libelous distortion.
“Carie Sydenstricker was
… a comfortably placid person… a devoted wife, admiring her husband, supplementing his dreams with her good sense… living in joy and happiness to the end of her life,” wrote Nettie du Bose Junkin, whose father had known Pearl’s parents from their earliest years in China, and who had been a Kuling neighbor of the Sydenstrickers as a mission wife herself. Junkin’s review was not the only one to protest against Pearl’s heroic portrait of her mother or to defend Absalom as a model father and husband. James Bear, another mission child who had known the family all his life, insisted that there was nothing out of the ordinary about Carie Sydenstricker (“she was just a good average missionary, not brilliant but she did her work”), and was deeply dismayed by Pearl’s “lack of understanding of her father.” Some of her closest friends insisted that if anything she had toned down the harsher aspects of both parents.
“Her mother was a very
, very rigid woman,” said Lilliath Bates. “Pearl told a lot of things about her father, but if people had known all they would have been even more startled.”

If
The Exile
was written in hot blood as an attempt to exorcise the past,
Fighting Angel
brings to bear the kind of dispassionate lucidity that informs Pearl Buck’s articles and speeches but is rarely present in her novels. From now on she would appropriate to herself her father’s power as a preacher, applying the breadth and clarity of mind she had inherited from him to interrogate American actuality in the light of the generous idealistic vision instilled in her from infancy by her mother. For three decades hers was a voice of sanity and balance in U.S.
politics. She campaigned for peace, tolerance, and liberal democracy, for the rights of children and minorities, for an end to discrimination on grounds of race or gender. She had no illusions about the nature of Communism in China, and long before the Nationalists’ ultimate defeat she delivered a scathing analysis of their failures as a government. Pearl was among the first to recognize that the war inaugurated by Japan’s invasion of the Chinese mainland in 1937 would culminate in worldwide conflagration. She struggled tirelessly to raise awareness of China’s situation and to swing public opinion in the United States against the Japanese aggressors. But for all her efforts to open minds and alter policy in Washington, it was in the end her novels that did more than any other single factor to humanize the popular American image of the Chinese people. Pearl’s efforts to link her two worlds by becoming a human
“bridge between the civilizations
of the East and West,” in the words of Richard Nixon, took up much of the second half of her life.

World War II and the Communist regime established in 1949 ensured that she never returned to China.
The Good Earth
appeared in eight pirated Chinese translations in the 1930s and 1940s, one of them going into twelve successive editions.
“No other book
by any foreigner has ever achieved such popularity in China,” wrote Liu Haiping, the leading Chinese authority on Pearl Buck. But Buck’s relationship with potential Chinese readers had been clouded from the first by the anger and anxiety she herself identified in Wang Yuan in
A House Divided
. Attempts by the
Good Earth
’s American film crew to shoot actual Chinese villages in the country around Shanghai met with determined resistance from officials, who eventually arranged for the film reels to be x-rayed during a customs inspection on departure. In 1937 Chinese defensiveness combined with Hollywood commercialism to produce a movie with twelve minutes of authentic Yangtse Valley footage, an all-American cast, and a script built round a romantic love interest wholly alien to the original concept.

Chinese critics complained bitterly about Pearl Buck’s evenhandedness, her lack of ideological content, and the accurate documentation of rural poverty in her books. Their objections were clearly set
out soon after publication of
The Good Earth
in a letter to the
New York Times
by Professor Jiang Kanghu, a distinguished academic moving easily between the United States and China, who had begun his career as a young official at the Manchu court in Beijing. Professor Jiang endorsed Lu Xun’s view that China should be left to the Chinese, cast doubt on the existence of the lawlessness and banditry that form the novel’s background, and reproved the author for writing with deplorable informality about unimportant, low-grade individuals:
“They may form the majority
of the Chinese population, but they are certainly not representative of the Chinese people.” Pearl responded politely but firmly that she could write only about a world she had known firsthand all her life.

Her frankness, coupled with her refusal to gloss over Nationalist shortcomings, made her an unwelcome advocate. When she won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938, the Chinese government acknowledged her importance as an independent commentator by withdrawing its official delegation from the ceremony in Stockholm.
“The withdrawal heralded
a long-term neglect of her in China, Taiwan, and among the Chinese American scholars in the U.S.,” wrote Professor Kang Liao. The Communist regime convicted her of conniving at imperialist and capitalist exploitation by failing to mention their existence. “Buck contradicts Marxist theories by regarding China’s poor and rich as individuals rather than as members of opposed classes.” She was handicapped even by her Chinese name,
Sai Zhenzhu
. The first part was the family name chosen by her father, the second a literal translation of “pearl,” a name with flashy and pretentious overtones in China: the two together sounded like Sai Jinhua, a famous imperial concubine and mistress of an enemy general in the Boxer uprising, signifying to most people a collaborationist tart.