Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  The Good Earth, which Pearl started writing almost as soon as she got home, tells the story of a poor farmer who survives, when famine drives him from his village, by pulling a rickshaw to earn a meager living for his family in a mat shelter built against the city wall. It was an attempt to penetrate the deep underlife of ordinary Chinese people that no one else had ever written about before. The Chinese writers who were Pearl’s contemporaries had little understanding of or contact with the rural proletariat. Even the iconic central characters in Lu Xun’s powerful and sardonic stories of village life are misfits or outsiders. Lao She’s “Rickshaw Boy,” which had enormous success in the 1930s, was what Pearl called an intellectual performance: “That is, I think a Chinese intellectual who is very far from the common people has written what he thinks a rickshaw boy thinks and feels. But I do not believe it is the way the true rickshaw boy thinks and feels.” The traditional Chinese novel, shaped by strong dramatic and structural rhythms, made no attempt to portray the everyday lives of the illiterate fieldworkers who formed its audience, and classical poetry, written exclusively by scholars, ignored their existence altogether. Pearl said her story was already so clear in her mind that all she had to do was set it down: “its energy was the anger I felt for the sake of the peasants and the common folk of China…. My material was… close at hand, and the people I knew as I knew myself.”

  The setting is Nanxuzhou and its hinterland, where Pearl came closest to village farmers, especially their wives. As a writer she had been skirting this sort of material for years, testing the ground in articles and stories, including “The Revolutionist,” written in the aftermath of the Nanjing Incident, about a farmer called Wang Lung, bewildered by the random violence of the ideological warfare in which he finds himself accidentally caught up. This Wang is clearly a prototype for the farmer of the same name in The Good Earth. But Pearl’s first tentative exploration of the territory goes back to another sketch of village life, “Lao Wang the Farmer,” published two years earlier in the Chinese Recorder, where the authors’ names are given as Shao Teh-hsing and Pearl S. Buck. Shao was part of Lossing’s backup team from his first batch of graduates in 1921, the man who ran the university’s experimental farm, a pioneer in rural education and a regional director for the land survey workforce set up in 1930. He was one of very few agricultural students with a practical farming background, having started his working life as a buffalo boy, the child whose job is to mind the beast that serves as his family’s transport and tractor. A second story by Shao Teh-hsing, “Lao Wang’s Old Cow,” a bitter episode from what reads like the author’s personal past, was “translated from the Chinese by Mrs. J. L. Buck.”

  Born in Kiangsu province and sent to school at Wuhu in Anhui, Shao had grown up on the same great northern plain as Nanxuzhou. He was probably the first person Pearl knew who bridged, as she did, the illiterate village world and the cosmopolitan, highly educated Nanjing circle where they met. Perhaps it was talking to and working with Shao that made it possible for her to access the novel that, in her own words, “seemed to be have been in her always waiting to be told.” Possibly he supplied material, made suggestions, acted as some kind of consultant. Certainly he went on to become a writer and editor himself, producing agricultural textbooks and editing the college’s research journal. If his collaboration provided Pearl with a launchpad, he can hardly have had a hand in the actual composition of the novel, which she wrote at speed in two months flat, thinking in Chinese, translating as she went along into a clear, simple, fast-paced English that “sounds biblical but is pictorial, which is the Chinese way of thinking and writing.” An American friend who, like Pearl, spoke Chinese from infancy said that all her early novels had this quality: “If you translated them into Chinese, you would hardly have to make any changes.” The accuracy of her idiom, the mind-set of her characters, “her speech presentation in English of the way Chinese people speak in their native language” can be fully appreciated only by bilingual readers, according to Kang Liao, one of China’s leading Buck scholars. “One can hardly believe it has been written by a foreign hand,” wrote the publisher Zhao Jiabi, an influential voice in China at the time.

  Pearl wrote in the mornings, while Janice was at nursery school, on a faulty, battered typewriter at her desk in the attic: “It was all on the tips of my fingers, what I had to say, and it went very fast… in spite of the fact that I was in an environment that did not and could not take novel-writing or novels seriously and even I myself came to consider it a secret indulgence.” No one in her large household read the book when it was finished. Pearl said her brother (who had returned to China on business and seized the chance to work again with Lossing) was too busy, her father indifferent, and “there was no one else.” The impression she gave later of dreamlike ease and speed may have been misleading. Lilliath Bates maintained that Pearl had been working on a book about Wang Lung during the winter they spent in the same house in Shanghai, and although Pearl herself (backed up by her sister Grace) insisted that her novel was written in a matter of weeks in Nanjing, she also claimed it had been “many years planned and pruned many times.” Presumably she had been experimenting with similar material in the lost or abandoned novels as well as in the short stories of the previous five years. The typescript of what was then called Wang Lung was packed up and posted to her New York agent in late May.

  Pearl’s first novel came out in the United States that April. Winds of Heaven had finally been placed by David Lloyd, after twelve months and more than two dozen rejections, with Richard Walsh, the president of a small, relatively new and struggling publishing firm called John Day. A telegram announcing its acceptance had been sent the year before, traveling from New York to Nanjing, then back to the United States, where it finally caught up with Pearl in September, only to be almost totally eclipsed by the turmoil of her separation from Carol. Both agent and publisher were astonished by Pearl’s laid-back approach when she finally turned up in New York to sign a contract for the novel, now retitled at its publisher’s suggestion East Wind, West Wind. Walsh told Pearl that his firm had been split down the middle, reaching a decision only with his casting vote, which he gave in the book’s favor not because he liked it but because he thought her capable of something better. From Pearl’s point of view the deal’s principal significance was its potential contribution to school fees (no advance was offered, but there would be royalties of 10 percent, rising to 15 percent in the unlikely event of sales above five thousand copies).

  Reviews, when they finally reached China that summer, were encouraging. More encouraging still was a cable from Walsh, followed by a letter that took Pearl’s breath away. “My publisher sent me a personal letter about my second book which is perfectly astonishing,” she wrote to Grace on September 23. “Mr. Walsh is a hard, dry, conservative sort of middle-aged person, so I value this the more. It gives me a wonderful feeling of relief for I feel I can write—I hadn’t been sure.” Her first thought was that now she could provide for Carol’s future, pay for Janice’s education, and give presents—”little extra frills that mission salaries don’t provide”—to the Yaukeys. Walsh offered the same terms as before, and once again Pearl showed the letter to no one in her family. When the book was selected a few months later by the Book-of-the-Month Club, Pearl received four thousand dollars as her share of payment, and the first print run was increased to ten thousand copies. “We can’t afford to think for one moment that this is not going to be a best seller,” Walsh told his office.

  He suggested taking her subtitle, The Good Earth, as the actual title and shortening the text. Pearl consulted two friends, both of whom read the book. One was Margaret Thomson, whose reaction—“admiration, even awe and undoubtedly envy,” wrote her son long afterward—became a Thomson family legend: “she was absolutely astounded, as we would say blown out of the water, by its excellence.” Pearl’s second reader was an unnamed Chinese friend, possibly Shao Teh-hsing (there is nothing to support the supposition,
widely assumed to be a fact, that it was Xu Zhimo). Both urged her not to change or take out anything. She wrote firmly to Walsh, promising no cuts, explaining why she could not tone down the book’s stylistic strangeness: “When I tried to rewrite it, the people were all wrong as if I had dragged them into a foreign house and they didn’t know how to behave.” She told him she was about to start on her third novel and had several more lined up at the back of her mind to follow.

  Incipient civil war flared again that autumn, with major warlords in the north and Communist insurgents in west and south challenging the central government. There were pitched battles up and down the railway line after rebels took Beijing. Armies circled the capital. Lossing reported rumors of a plot to burn down Nanjing University together with all mission schools and houses. Three members of his rural survey teams were captured by Communists or bandits (“It’s difficult to distinguish between the two”). General Chiang stepped up his campaign of terror, running the regions in his control as a police state and driving the Communists from their established bases into bandit country farther west. Pearl began translating one of the greatest of all Chinese novels, Shui Hu Chuan, a hugely popular saga of resistance against a corrupt and unjust government by a band of thirteenth-century outlaws operating in her father’s old territory of North Kiangsu from a mountain lair in Shandong. The book was a favorite with the Communist Party, which published its own revolutionary edition in the 1930s, much quoted by Mao Zedong, who used it to legitimize tactics of robbery, kidnapping, extortion, and murder. Pearl’s was the first English translation, and she called it All Men Are Brothers in preference to its literal title, The Water Margins. It took her four years, working in the early afternoons with one or other of two Chinese scholars, Zhao Yanan and the seminary secretary, Long Moxiang, who read passages aloud to her, translating into modern Chinese, while she deciphered the written characters and produced an English text. She knew the kind of northerners depicted in these pages at firsthand and gave their story a powerful immediacy, according to a subsequent review in a Beijing journal: “She could hear them talk, and see them act.” She was keenly aware of the story’s subversive side: “In the Communists fleeing now into the Northwest, I saw the wild rebels and malcontents who had risen against government in the old days of Empire.”

  In the mornings Pearl started her next novel—“My mind could not rest after I had finished The Good Earth”—and dashed off her children’s book for the Mission Board, The Young Revolutionist. She invited friends to tea every afternoon and entertained a steady flow of her husband’s increasingly distinguished guests, among them in 1930 the English social historian R. H. Tawney, who worked on his Land and Labour in China in the Bucks’ house, the American philosopher Ernest Hocking, and her brother Edgar Sydenstricker, the director of research at the Millbank Memorial Fund in New York, organizing aid for public health and rural education programs in China. Pearl was still teaching at the university, where her concentration had become so patchy—“It’s the papers and grades which oppress me”—that her students complained about her to the president.

  Nonstop activity was her defense against thoughts of Carol: “I miss eternally the person she cannot be. I am not resigned, and never will be.” She fired off begging letters to Emma, to her sister on furlough in the United States, and to anyone she could think of who might visit the child, enclosing long, loving lists of toys and treats, promising to pay expenses, and always hoping for reports. The novel Pearl was working on was The Mother, which includes poignant accounts of a small girl learning painfully to live with disability while the child’s mother, a young village woman abandoned by an unsatisfactory husband, works the farm on her own, rears a family, and learns no less painfully to live with frustrated desire. A tough and angry battler, like Lu Sadze (who was Pearl’s model for The Mother), the nameless heroine finds herself humiliated and betrayed by her own body language (“there was that great, greedy, starving heart of hers showing in her own eyes without her knowledge that it did”), and eventually submits to the casual attentions of the local land agent in a seduction scene of Lawrentian earthiness. The emotion throbbing between the lines is so raw and palpable that Pearl dumped the finished typescript straight into the wastepaper basket. She retrieved it later, but the book remained, like The Exile, too blatantly confessional in her view for publication. “It was very specific about sex” was Grace’s explanation.

  In a time of public prudishness and private inhibition Pearl wrote with extraordinary directness about thwarted sexuality, marital rape, and the physical repulsion felt by women like her alter ego in The Time Is Noon, who leaves her husband’s bed even before the birth of their only child to sleep alone upstairs in the attic with a trunk pushed against the door. At some point Pearl too moved out of the room she shared with Lossing, explaining to Emma White that she could no longer submit to his sexual demands: “I simply cannot stand it—it’s a violation of all that is best in me.” Grace said that, when she visited the Bucks in these years, she sometimes woke in the night to find her brother-in-law standing over her own bed. Pearl’s fighting mood is clear from a piece she published in February 1930, “China in the Mirror of Her Fiction,” pointing out that Chinese novelists accept lust as a routine aspect of ordinary life, taking “open delight in the body and its acts” instead of rejecting them as “abnormal or out of a diseased imagination.” For Pearl at this stage the corollary was the visceral flinching vividly described in passages like this one between the young couple in Other Gods: “She turned… and faced him. Every fibre in her body was quivering and shrinking. Where did the blood go when it left the flesh like this?… Little things she had learned not to notice long ago: the thickness of his hands, the way his lips scarcely moved when he spoke, the clumsy farm speech which he could never change so long as he lived, because it was grown into him…. Uncontrollable irritation flamed out of her.”

  Professionally the Bucks were running neck and neck. Chinese Farm Economy, published in the United States that autumn with handsome acknowledgments—“For editing I am greatly indebted to my wife”—established Lossing as a leader in his field. He was increasingly in demand as a government consultant, and his land survey scheme attracted not only ample funding but international visiting academics, high-caliber faculty members, and increasing student numbers. “The project brought boom times to the Nanjing campus,” wrote Paul B. Trescott, the most recent historian of twentieth-century Chinese economics. The Agricultural College under Reisner and Buck now accounted for more than half the faculty of the entire university and for nearly all the students who completed their education overseas. In 1925 there had been more than four times as many Western staff as Chinese, but five years later the Chinese outnumbered Westerners sixteen to one. Lossing’s own departmental staff would soon reach one hundred, more than any other agricultural economics department in the world. The publications, scientific data, and above all the teachers and practitioners emerging from the Nanjing college affected farming at all levels, from Nationalist government policymaking to local village practice all over China.

  Pearl reached a low point that winter, missing Carol more than ever after a year away, with another eighteen months to go before the time came to return to the United States on furlough. She ended The Mother with the death of the blind daughter from neglect and abuse at the hands of strangers in a far distant valley. “She was always thinking about Carol,” said Lossing. In the first week of January 1931 he took her with him on a boat trip south down the coast to investigate the possibility of extending survey work into the country around Guangzhou, where heavy fighting made their progress difficult. Grace and her family, newly back from the United States, returned with considerable reluctance to their post in the Communist stronghold of Hunan. The Bucks got back to Nanjing to find a cable from Pearl’s publisher announcing her Book-of-the-Month Club selection (she wrote back innocently that she had never heard of it: “Do they know that I am not a member of their club?”). Janice caught w
hooping cough, Lossing had several rotten teeth extracted, and Pearl told Emma she was starting a new novel to pass the time. The Good Earth was published in New York on March 2. Pearl said nobody at home knew of its existence, “or knowing had forgotten it.” When she showed her first copy to her father, he complimented her politely on the jacket but handed the book back after a few days on the grounds that he did not feel up to reading it. Bulletins from the publisher, packages of reviews, and the first fan mail began reaching Nanjing toward the end of the month. Pearl wrote to Emma White that under different circumstances she might have felt excited—“I think I would have been wildly thrilled”—but success mostly mattered to her now because the money it brought made Carol’s future safe.

  The book’s impact was phenomenal. The first prepublication readers responded, like Margaret Thomson, with admiration bordering on awe. Pearl’s agent, David Lloyd, had felt that way before she even wrote it, recognizing star quality in the very first parcel delivered to him from China. “That first novel by this girl who could really write,” said his daughter, remembering the buzz in the office when she was still at school. “That was pretty thrilling.” For Richard Walsh, whose flair, judgment, and publisher’s nose for the right book at the right time were exactly what Pearl needed at this point, it was the chance of a lifetime. “He could feel in his hands already the new big book,” as Pearl put it in a mildly sardonic portrait of Walsh in The Long Love. “He was in the grip of his own private frenzy of creation.” Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a literary heavyweight and Book-of-the-Month Club judge, had started by dismissing her unpromising proof copy from a virtually unknown author—“it seemed to be about agriculture in China”—only to sit up reading the book all night, creeping out at dawn the next morning to alert her fellow judges, who unanimously endorsed her choice. Reviewers did the same, and the American public followed suit. The book topped the best-seller charts for two years running, was translated into virtually every language, and has sold steadily ever since. It won its author a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and the American Academy of Arts’ prestigious Howells Medal three years later (the previous winner was Willa Cather). In 1938 Pearl Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature (the second was Toni Morrison in 1993).