Pearl Buck in China (38 page)

Richard’s dual role as publisher and husband was protective and defensive. Marriage to him ensured that Pearl was insulated and kept at one remove from her material. Partnership with Lossing Buck had done the opposite. For all his shortcomings, his insensitivity to anything but his own concerns, and his prosaic insistence on scientific method, he had deepened and enriched her knowledge of the world her imagination explored so confidently in
The Good Earth
. The only equivalent given her by Richard was
The Townsman,
a relatively conventional saga of prairie pioneers set in his home state of Kansas.
Pearl had gone there with him several times to visit relatives, picking up authentic historical detail and local color so readily that, when she published the book under a pseudonym in 1945, the
Kansas City Star
insisted that the real author must be a lifelong Kansas resident.

The novel has the stock characters, episodic structure, upbeat ending, and highly implausible antiracist subplot that had become Buck trademarks. Pearl’s sense of humor seldom got the better of her didactic intent. Even her firsthand knowledge of China had gaps and blanks by this time. She faithfully carried out her plan to dispel Western ignorance and prejudice through fictional coverage of China’s revolutionary struggles in
The Patriot
(1939) and
Kinfolk
(1949), Japan’s war with China in
Dragon Seed
(1941), Japanese attempts to take over Burma in
The Promise
(1943) and to annex Korea in
The Living Reed
(1963).
Letter from Peking
(1957) and
The Three Daughters of Mme. Liang
(1969) gave an alarming and comparatively accurate impression of what little was known at the time about life under Chairman Mao. These books were polemical in their political content, psychologically simplistic, and often sketchy or out of date in their social context, but they opened up an extraordinary and virtually unknown world. Their strength lay in the storyteller’s consummate conviction in the essential humanity of her characters. Pearl Buck had set out in the 1930s on what Professor Liao described as “
a basically singlehanded crusade
to change the image of Chinese people in the American mind,” a crusade that triumphantly succeeded in dislodging the old visceral antagonism to Chinese immigrants and in shifting public opinion toward support for China’s long, grueling resistance to Japanese invasion.

A key factor in making unfamiliar material acceptable to the American public was cultural anachronism, Pearl’s habit of importing the alien conventions of Western pulp fiction into an Eastern setting. The tremulous beating hearts of virgin lovers, the stolen kisses, secret trysts, and sacred pacts, the bloodless stereotypes of true romance, already starting to infiltrate the background of
A House Divided,
became more and more blatant in her Asian novels from
Dragon Seed
onward.
“Pearl had a very good mind
but she didn’t use it,” said Helen
Foster Snow. Or, to put it another way, she had a powerful imagination, but the audience she wished to reach was not primarily literary. Her aim was always to maximize the number of her readers. She justified her own fiction on much the same grounds as she had once defended the Chinese novel, itself traditionally dismissed by an elitist literary establishment as oral pulp fiction. Pearl’s books sold in the millions and were translated into innumerable languages worldwide, not in spite but because of their bland, trite, ingratiating mass-market techniques.
“The fact remains
that I should not be satisfied if I did not have stories published in the magazines which the mass of people read,” she wrote in 1940, uneasily aware that even her former admirers were finding it hard to ignore the grounds she increasingly provided for critical dismissal by the book world. “The finest and most beautiful do not come from those people, but still they are the root and stock of life. A person so secluded as a writer must not lose touch with them. I value their letters, often so foolish. I
feel
them. Their minds reach mine, and I try to make mine reach theirs.” It was her strength that people read her whatever the critics said, as she wrote defensively of the blockbusting novelist who is in some sense
her alter ego
in
The Long Love
.

Her own bestsellers combine hypnotic elements of fantasy and wish fulfillment with glimpses of more disturbing truths secreted beneath the romantic formulae, and occasionally disrupting it, like the scraps of flesh and bone Pearl had collected as a child from the hillside outside her parents’ house. Her novels, like her life, incorporate a kind of ongoing amnesia. The reassurance they convey comes in part from both knowing and not knowing where the bodies are buried, simultaneously acknowledging and denying realities too painful to face directly.
“She did not think
, she did not feel, she would not remember,” Pearl wrote in
The Hidden Flower,
describing a desperate young Asian mother who gives birth secretly in a Los Angeles public hospital to the unwanted child of an absconding American father. The book was published in 1952 largely as propaganda for the Welcome House Adoption Agency, an institution set up by Pearl after the war to take in otherwise unadoptable minority and mixed-race
children, mostly Amerasians (the word itself was Pearl’s coinage), the tens of thousands of rejected babies fathered by American servicemen on Asian women in Japan, and later in Korea.
The Hidden Flower
starts with a lighthearted interracial love affair in a Tokyo of tourist-brochure Oriental charm, and moves the young couple to the darker atmosphere of New York and Virginia, skating over any serious confrontation with southern bigotry, and ducking out altogether with a preposterous messianic happy ending tacked on in its closing pages. But the grim predicament of the Japanese heroine, caught and skewered between two powerful, opposed, and unforgiving cultures, is explored with delicacy and feeling.

Pearl’s major self-projections, from Susan Gaylord to the brilliant and powerful Chinese women with whom she identified most easily—Madame Wu in
Pavilion of Women
(1946), the empress dowager in
Imperial Woman
(1956), Madame Liang in
The Three Daughters of Mme. Liang
(1969)—are superlatively intelligent, infinitely resourceful, and impenetrably reserved. They are admired, respected, and obeyed by those around them, but none ever achieves intimacy with any other human being. All possess iron self-control. People who knew Pearl in her prime recognized the serenity and courtesy that had characterized her father in the second half of his life.
“He would have been pained
and astonished if anyone had ever told him he was arrogant and domineering,” she wrote in a passage analyzing the split between his conscious will and the unruly instincts it so rigidly suppressed. “Indeed he did not seem so, his bearing was of such gentleness and dignity, his step quiet, his voice soft, his manner always restrained and controlled except for those rare strange sudden furies, when something he kept curbed deep in him broke for a moment its leash.”

The terrifying moments when Absalom hit his children, making them feel they had glimpsed some almost impersonal inner rage briefly let out of captivity, mesmerized Pearl. Half a century later she dramatized the process to macabre effect in
Voices in the House,
a novel whose two central characters represent her own split selves. One is the judicious William Asher, a highly civilized, happily married, wealthy and successful criminal lawyer, who (like Pearl) develops
a professional
“trick of self-suspension”
to protect his inner life from regular exposure to lawlessness and savagery. His is the dull cautious voice of reason that foresees lunacy and chaos unless the workings of the subconscious mind can be safely contained “beneath the routines of daily life.” Sure enough the smooth running of his household is disrupted by the daughter of the Ashers’ cook and butler, a sensitive, dreamy, and exceptionally pretty child named Jessica, who regularly retreats (like her creator as a girl) into a private world of fairy tale and make-believe.

Jessica’s fantasies of being claimed by a gracious, rich, and handsome suitor as his lady wife are grimly parodied when her mother compels her to marry the Ashers’ coarse, pasty-faced manservant. After a year of marriage the luckless husband confides to his horrified employer the scene enacted nightly in their bedroom: “what does a man do when a woman never gives in? What does a man do when a woman bites and scratches him so that he had to hold down her hands and thrust his arm against her throat so that she cannot raise her head and then must mount her hard so that her kicking legs and thrusting feet do not wound him in his tenderest parts?” Images like these go back presumably to stories Pearl heard from the unhappy wives she mentored as a young missionary, or even before that, to her memories of girls trafficked into the Shanghai sex trade, who talked to her as a teenager at the Door of Hope. Jessica solves her problem by acquiring a huge, semisavage, red-eyed mastiff dog, which she keeps tied up and straining at the leash in a kennel between her own and her husband’s twin beds. One night she unties the maddened animal, by now slavering at the jaws and so far beyond control that its former owner, summoned by the terrified, sex-starved husband, has to choke it to death with his bare hands. Pearl found a potent metaphor for her old terror of being treated as an object rather than a person in the marital rape that follows the dog’s death:

Jessica did not yield. She leaped from bed to floor, she clung to the curtains, struggling to throw herself from the windows,
but he had nailed them shut. The curtains fell about her and she hid in them until he tore them from her. She clung to the table, to the beds, until he wrenched her hands away, pounding upon her knuckles with his clenched fists. He beat her with the rung of a broken chair at last until she fell writhing upon the floor, screaming with pain, and still as tireless, thin as she was, as though she were made of twisted wires. He imprisoned her beneath his vast body there upon the floor and held her down, his hands clutching her wrists, his tight mouth pressed upon her turned cheek, his loins fastened upon hers.

J
ESSICA SINKS INTO
rabid paranoia, barking and biting like a dog, having to be removed in a straitjacket and ending up, after a single catastrophic attempt at rehabilitation, incarcerated for life in an asylum. The Asher family recovers shakily from the destructive impact of her dangerous delusions, “strange voices, disturbing, corrupting, cutting across the human grain of their common life,” voices that William recognizes as the dark side of the dreams she had been forbidden to indulge in as a child born into a world that offered no outlet to her secret hopes and longings.

Voices in the House
was published in 1953, the year Richard Walsh suffered a stroke from which he only temporarily recovered. It was the first stage in a steady mental and physical disintegration that left him almost blind, half-paralyzed and bedridden, helplessly dependent on other people, unable to respond or eventually even to understand his wife, becoming almost lifeless before he finally died at the age of seventy-three in 1960. The loss of his companionship, more even than his professional advice and backing, was irreparable for Pearl. She missed his warmth, his generosity, his sharp wit, his calming and unfailingly attentive presence. He had been the ideal husband for a writer—
“possibly the only one
any writer ever had that I can think of,” Helen
Foster Snow said sadly—and his rapid decline bitterly recalled the breakdown of her first marriage.
“The worst thing any man
can do to a woman is to withdraw his love, physically and emotionally, and stay with her,” Pearl said the year before Richard died to a young acquaintance, who was appalled: “It came like a cry from the heart, and it was totally unexpected.”

Pearl’s confidant was the actor Paul Roebling, who played the romantic lead in
Desert Incident,
the most disastrous of the many plays (this one closed after seven performances in 1959) with which she had tried and failed for years to conquer Broadway. Although she sold more rights worldwide than any other living author, her pulling power in the United States was no longer what it had been. John Day still published every book she wrote, and she remained a national figure whose opinions, especially on Asia, carried great weight, but the large-circulation magazines that had always paid her top rates published her less often. The dogmatic right-wing intolerance of postwar America demoralized her and damaged her reputation. The FBI had opened a Buck file in 1937, keeping her under fitful surveillance ever since on suspicion of Communist allegiance because of her outspoken, un-American support for democratic equality and racial justice. She was banned from the pages of
Time
magazine by its proprietor, another old China hand, the virulently anti-Communist Henry Luce, and she figured, like so many well-known authors, on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s blacklists. She compounded her troubles in the mid-1950s by leaving the David Lloyd Agency, which had looked after her for nearly a quarter of a century. “
When Walsh and Lloyd were gone
, there was no anchor,” said Lloyd’s daughter, who was also his business partner. “Father was a constant steadying influence.”

There was no one now in the office to query Pearl’s decisions or protect her from herself on either the professional or the human front. Janice had long since grown up and left home. The four teenagers were already in college, or about to be, when Richard’s long decline began. Pearl had reared her children to be self-sufficient, insisting that they needed practical skills as well as college educations (the three boys regularly spent vacations working on a plot of land
she bought in Vermont, clearing the ground and mixing concrete to build a cabin in the woods that became the family’s summer holiday home). She herself had always coped with confusion and calamity in her private life by taking on more to do, and now her response to the prospect of becoming a single parent once again was to adopt another child. A couple of years before Richard first fell ill, the couple had acquired a half-German, half–African American daughter, and in 1957 Pearl completed her family of seven adopted children with a five-year-old Amerasian from Japan. The two girls and their friends brought life back to the house, now mostly empty except for Pearl and the dying Richard with his nurses.