Pearl Buck in China (40 page)

Pearl retained and if anything increased her power over her readers, who wrote in their thousands year after year to consult her about prejudice and injustice, confiding their life stories and asking her advice.
“They were the communications
of my own people to me,” she said of these letters to which she scrupulously replied. “They were my communication with my own people.” All her life she had been able to absent herself, withdrawing from reality, often seeming to friends and family to be a prisoner of her imagination, present only in body in the actual outer world. “
I could pass her
on the sidewalk and she could go right by without knowing me,” said the director of Welcome House, who worked with her on a daily basis. “She had a trick sometimes of being completely abstracted, and at times, when you would meet her, she would be looking right over your shoulder, as if she didn’t know you were there,” said Natalie Walsh, who acted for a few years as Pearl’s typist. “It wasn’t rudeness, she was just living an interior kind of life, alone.” She spent more and more time in Vermont in that secret place where she could be alone with her people.
Sometimes she hardly distinguished between her imaginary characters and the letter writers who responded to them,
“what I called her
‘paper people,’” said her Vermont secretary, Beverly Drake, who remembered Pearl surrounded by ghostly presences, some real, some fictional. “She often spoke of those characters as if they
were
real people. In one sense they
were
real, these creations who reached out and touched her correspondents who in turn reached out and touched her as creator, until the circle was completed, and then repeated over and over again.”

Outwardly Pearl grew more and more to resemble the last empress, China’s Venerable Ancestor, from whom, as a child, she had believed herself to be descended. James Thomson, who visited her for the last time in her eightieth year, was received by Pearl dressed in brocaded silk and attended by ladies-in-waiting:
“As I remember
one or two wore pantsuits which seemed out of kilter with… her imperial gown.” The two sat uncomfortably side by side on large throne-like chairs in a first-floor audience chamber. She was protected, like the empress, who had herself been both cosseted by and ultimately dependent on the shrewd, manipulative eunuchs running her court, controlling her revenues, and channeling contact with her empire. In Pearl’s book anger was the empress’s driving force, power her goal, and the solitude imposed by power her curse:
“Her spirit dwelt in loneliness
but to this she was accustomed. It was the price of greatness, and she paid it day after day, and night after night.”

In June 1972 Pearl returned briefly to Green Hills Farm to celebrate her eightieth birthday with her sister, her children, and her grandchildren. Shortly afterward she collapsed. Two successive operations meant that she spent much of the autumn in the hospital. By New Year 1973 she was back home in Danby, where she lay dying of lung cancer under heavy medication, refusing visits, slipping in and out of a coma she could not bear even her family to see. She roused herself on February 21, when she sat up in bed, summoned her attendants, and called for paper to dictate what turned out to be the last letter she ever wrote. “
The scene was beautiful
, wild, incongruous. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself,” wrote Mrs. Drake, one of
her waiting women. “In minutes she returned to a helpless state, the brilliant flash of old reality gone. I wish the whole family, the whole world, had seen this incredible lady sitting imperiously on her throne, wrapped in white satin and commanding that her will be done.”

She died in Danby on March 6 and was buried as she had wished beneath an ash tree in the garden at Green Hills Farm. Her name on the stone that marks her grave is inscribed in Chinese characters, Sai Zhenzhu:
One of her last visitors in Vermont had been another old friend from Nanjing, Bertha Reisner, who came with a tourist group to pay homage to America’s Venerable Ancestor.
“We were told a lot
about Pearl S. Buck before she entered. Then at the dramatic moment she came in: very ancient, very dramatic, very immobile. Very oriental, inscrutable. She was there, and very gracious, and yet she was not there. Very distant. You couldn’t be quite sure that she wasn’t captive.”

S
OURCES AND
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Los Angeles art critic Edward Goldman described an installation in Beijing in 2007 called
Staring into Amnesia
. Visitors were invited to board a dimly lit, 1950s railroad car to view multiple screens, installed in each of the windows, “projecting black and white documentary footage of twentieth century Chinese history, with special emphasis on the brutality experienced by Chinese people during WW2 and the Cultural Revolution… long lines of spectators formed to climb aboard the railroad car of Qiu Anxiong’s
Staring into Amnesia
.” Writing this book has been in some ways a comparable experience. Pearl Buck left a vast amount of autobiographical writing in the form of memoirs, essays, articles, pamphlets, and prefaces. As a novelist she constantly drew on her past for source material, sometimes so thinly disguised that it is hard to draw a definite line between fact and fiction. She wrote full-length lives of each of her parents and edited or coauthored two biographies of herself. Almost all of these writings are riddled with selective amnesia. I have treated them as the imaginative equivalent of an archaeological find: dense, complex, richly layered, heavily built up in parts, thin and uninformative in others, a treasure trove of images compressed, elided, or distorted by the pressure of subsequent emotions and events.

Pearl’s various accounts depend almost entirely on her own memory, always a highly creative faculty and one that can be seen at work over half a century exploring, shaping, and reshaping incidents and exchanges from her past. Her early recollections draw heavily on tales her mother told her, collated with her own vivid but patchy infant memory, which started functioning, by her own account, from the
moment she opened her eyes on the day of her birth. Her sense of time was elastic. Two months can expand into ten; several years may be condensed into one or suppressed altogether. She relied scarcely at all on documentation, and most of the few family documents she mentions (her mother’s diaries and letters, the newspaper produced by her oldest brother as a child, certain passages from her father’s memoirs) seem to have disappeared.

In the more or less complete absence of external evidence relating to Pearl’s childhood, I have where possible followed the relatively factual accounts left by her father and sister: a terse but reliable memoir by Absalom Sydenstricker,
Our Life and Work in China,
written in the 1920s and eventually published in 1978 with editorial amendments and additions by his youngest daughter, Pearl’s sister Grace Yaukey; and
The Exile’s Daughter,
Grace’s own brief biography of her sister, heavily edited by Pearl and published in 1945 under the pseudonym Cornelia Spencer. The two volumes of Pearl’s official biography were produced in her lifetime and with her collaboration by the companion of her last decade, Theodore Harris, who strung together her published and unpublished reminiscences with a selection of her correspondence, linked by reverential commentaries of his own.

My chronology is based initially on these often contradictory family sources, supplemented, corroborated, or corrected by material from three major archives. The Buck Papers in the Lipscomb Library of Randolph College (formerly Randolph-Macon Woman’s College) in Lynchburg, Virginia, proved a rich resource, principally because they include the research files amassed by Pearl’s first independent biographer, Nora Stirling, who conducted extraordinarily comprehensive and perceptive interviews with family, friends, assistants, and professional colleagues soon after Pearl’s death. The Nora Stirling Collection is unique, and for me especially precious, in its emphasis on firsthand accounts of Pearl in China. Stirling’s book,
Pearl Buck: A Woman in Conflict
(1983), is more problematic. Written in the sentimental style of popular fiction, containing copious dialogue with no sources specified and little sense of historical context, it gives the impression of being a great deal less reliable than it actually is. Because
the wording of quotations in Stirling’s published text frequently differ from her interview typescripts, I have cited the original typed versions as being probably more authentic. My book owes much to the generous and scholarly support of Theodore Hostetler, the library director; Frances E. Webb, the reference librarian; Adrian Broughman, the archives assistant; and Elizabeth Johnston Lipscomb, who catalogued the Buck Papers.

The comprehensive mission records preserved by the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia made it possible to trace the career of Absalom Sydenstricker in considerable detail through private reports and letters as well as annual records printed for the Southern Presbyterian Mission in Shanghai. I am grateful to the Society for permission to quote from documents in its possession, and to Eileen Sklar and her colleagues for guiding me through the collection’s labyrinthine pathways. The archives of Pearl S. Buck International, meticulously preserved in her old home at Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania, and primarily concerned with her American years (which are beyond the scope of this book), yielded much incidental illumination. My best thanks go to the president, Janet L. Mintzner, and the curator, Donna C. Rhodes. Last I thank Peter Conn, whose authoritative and impeccably researched
Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography
(1996) laid a solid foundation for all subsequent Buck studies. My book could not have been written without constant recourse to Professor Conn’s groundbreaking work, and it has had the benefit of his encouragement and advice from start to finish.

I am grateful to Pearl Buck’s children, in particular to Janice and Edgar Walsh for so patiently answering my questions, and to Paul Buck for permission to quote from his father’s writings. My warmest thanks go to Sue Stephenson, my cultural interpreter and guide in West Virginia, for her insight and hospitality. Also to James E. Talbert, archivist of the Greenbrier Historical Society in Lewisburg; to Lloyd and Elizabeth Lipscomb for introducing me to the Pearl Buck House in Hillsboro, West Virginia; to the house manager, Anita Withrow, for a personal tour; and to Mrs. Betsy Edgar for firsthand recollections of the Stultings, who eventually sold their house to her family.

I owe more than I can say to Prof. Liu Haiping of Nanjing University for moral and practical support. I am grateful for help and instruction to his students Hu Jing, Li Qingshuan, and most particularly to Jiang Qinggang; also to Robert Riggle, Catherine Germond, and Rev. Zemin Chen of Nanjing Union Theological Seminary. My next great debt is to Ye Gongping (Ernie Yeh) of Nanjing Agricultural University for invaluable and indefatigable research, for translating documents, and for sharing with me his extensive knowledge of John Lossing Buck. In Zhenjiang my thanks go to the director of the Pearl S. Buck Research Association, Madame Xu Xiaoxia, and to the Association’s vice directors: Mr. Li Jingfa, curator of the Pearl S. Buck Museum; Mr. Wang Yuguo, vice director of the Municipal Culture Bureau and director of the Municipal Historic Relics Protection Bureau; and Prof. Zhou Weijing, director of the Pearl S. Buck Research Center, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology. I thank too the Association’s general secretary, Mr. Ji Dong. I am greatly indebted to Prof. Shao Tizhong and Prof. Chang Hong of the Pearl S. Buck Research Center, Suzhou College, Anhui, for kindness and hospitality, and to Mr. MU De-hua, vice chairman, Lushan Federation of Literature and Art Circles, Guling, for much information and a guided tour.

My best thanks go to my agent, Bruce Hunter, to my editor, Alice Mayhew, and to Roger Labrie, for encouragement, resourcefulness, and forbearance under provocation.

Finally I should like to thank all those who sheltered me during the writing of this book: Ellen Wagner in New York, Sue Stephenson in Lynchburg, Susie and Nick Reilly in Shanghai, Hilary Tulloch in Westminster, Ian and Lydia Wright in Islington, Ivor and Hilary Cox in Beulah, and, as so often before, Dame Drue Heinz, Dr. Martin Gaskell, and the staff at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland.

Hilary Spurling, Holloway, November 2009

K
EY TO
S
OURCES

All Pearl Buck’s books first published by John Day, New York, unless otherwise indicated. Where quotations come from later editions by other publishers, these are cited in square brackets.