Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  The secret of Pearl Buck baffled and intrigued American readers, who knew next to nothing about her. Requests for interviews could not be processed. Personal details were unavailable. Some people even doubted her existence. She had just passed her fortieth birthday when she slipped into the United States in July 1932, having landed with her family in Canada to be met by her publisher, who dealt with the demands of journalists, editors, PR mongers, and fans by whittling them down into a highly selective schedule, and delivering her himself to the secluded farm belonging to her parents-in-law in Poughkeepsie. The first the public knew of her arrival was a dinner in the Jade Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on August 3. Two hundred handpicked guests, representing the cream of the city’s fashionable intelligentsia in low-cut evening frocks and white tuxedos, were confronted by Pearl, who wore a high V-necked dress with sleeves, little or no makeup, and her hair pulled back in a plain bun, looking so nervous that at least one observer suspected she was about to run away. She made a short shy speech of thanks and captivated her audience by reading from the preface to All Men Are Brothers, written three hundred years earlier by its original editor, Shih Nai-an: “How can I know what those who come after me and read my book will think of it? I do not even know if I myself afterwards can even read this book. Why therefore should I care?”

  It was a characteristically cool and courteous way of capitalizing on her own ignorance and inexperience in a country where, as she said herself, she didn’t understand the first thing about anything, from motion pictures to the banking system. Pearl was courted, fêted, photographed, interviewed by press and radio, and showered with requests that autumn to address literary luncheons, teas, and cocktail parties organized by churches, clubs, and universities. She accepted no more than a handful, including a dinner invitation from Chinese students at Columbia, who urged her for the honor of their country to suppress her translation of All Men Are Brothers on the grounds that it made their heritage look barbaric to Western readers. Sons, her sequel to The Good Earth, was published in September to mixed reviews and escalating sales; eighty thousand copies sold in the first month, preceded by serialization in Cosmopolitan for an unheard-of $30,000, bringing Pearl’s total earnings in 1932 to roughly $100,000. The book starts with Wang Lung’s funeral and explores China’s twentieth-century politics through the careers of his three sons, all of whom ruthlessly exploit the land inherited from their father by becoming respectively an idle, venal landlord, a greedy and manipulative merchant, and a bandit chief. Schematic in format and essentially didactic in purpose, the novel’s vitality and force lie with the lonely, driven youngest son, Wang the Tiger, a born rebel—stern, disciplined, in some sense a stand-in for his author—who spends his first forty years preparing himself for a campaign that pits him against authority and isolates him more or less completely from weaker, less ambitious contemporaries.

  Three months to the day after her first tentative performance at the Waldorf, Pearl initiated a campaign of her own by challenging America’s innate racism, bigotry, and cultural imperialism at a fund-raising event on November 2 organized by the Presbyterian Church. She was by now an international celebrity, lionized wherever she went and claimed as its own by a mission movement that should have known better than to try to cash in on this Pulitzer-winning outsider, who charmed and disconcerted audiences by looking like a homely Dutch housewife while delivering observations that were anything but reassuring. Pearl had agreed under pressure to report in private to interested members of the Mission Board, over lunch at the Astor Hotel, on her findings in four decades as a mission child, wife, and teacher only to discover on arrival that this was to be a promotional event, staged in the hotel’s main ballroom before two thousand paid ticket holders. “I did not know what to do, and yet I didn’t know what to say except what I had prepared very carefully for a few people and certainly not for the public…. Well, I had to give that speech and I got up and gave it. When I had finished I sat down. Deadly silence fell upon the room. It was appalling to me.” A thunderous ovation eventually followed from the hall, but not from the grim-faced religious leaders seated at Pearl’s table. “It gave us cold chills as she went along,” said the Board’s secretary, Dr. Cleland Boyd McAfee, who found himself presiding over a comprehensive indictment of the mission enterprise in theory and practice by an authoritative and devastatingly articulate eyewitness.

  If he or any of his colleagues had bothered to glance back over her career beforehand, they might have had a clearer idea of what to expect. Pearl’s speech, “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” was the final draft of a long, ongoing, internal debate formulated at intervals over the previous ten years in papers published in the Chinese Recorder. It began with a talk given to trainee missionaries at the Nanjing language school in 1923, when Pearl as a young woman was still trying to come to terms with her father’s expulsion from Zhenjiang. She warned her contemporaries against the intolerance of the previous generation, urging them to understand and make allowances for their elders’ stubborn self-righteousness: “It is too much to expect of them in general to get our viewpoint. But we ought to be able to get theirs.” She urged them to acknowledge their own aggressive instincts so as to avoid falling into the same trap themselves: “Don’t mistake a psychological complex for religious emotion or divine leadership…. Don’t mistake a wish of your own for the will of God, nor hurt vanity … for a call of duty to persist in your own way.” It was sensible, practical advice based on painful personal experience. Pearl’s recommended strategy was to cultivate a sense of humor and proportion; to recognize the notion of a single, fixed, unalterable truth as superstitious absurdity; and never to be deluded into operating on anything less than a basis of absolute equality: “We simply cannot express the Gospel with any force if we have hidden within us a sense of racial superiority…. We are no better than anyone else, any of us.”

  In an article published four years later under the title “Is There a Place for the Foreign Missionary?,” Pearl moved her argument from particular instances to general principles, posing and answering the question she would eventually address before a wider forum in New York. Her lucid, unsentimental analysis concluded that church people’s ignorant and hostile dismissal of Chinese philosophy and culture made the missionary position fundamentally untenable, if not actually immoral: “More insidious in its pessimism is… the question of whether anyone has the right to impress upon another the forms of his own civilization, whether these forms are religious or not.” Pearl foresaw a future of increasing conflict exacerbated by the mission force, whose impact on the country had otherwise been negligible, and whose arrogance masked underlying greed, fear, and insecurity: “Consciously or unconsciously we have come to these foreign countries saying in our hearts that we had all to give and nothing to get. We have not… sought to understand the civilizations with which we dealt…. We have had the abominable attitude of one who confers a favor…. Even though we have spilled our blood and have broken our hearts, it has been a favor.” She was fiercer still in a passionate outburst published as a parting shot in the Recorder’s letters column as she sailed for the United States in July 1932, repudiating the Calvinist doctrines of sin, guilt, and damnation that had hung over her childhood and filled her with sick revulsion in her teenage years. “I grew up among such as these and I know them,” she wrote bitterly, describing an entrenched white community that refused to look beyond its own rigid codes of conduct and belief, and ridiculed any attempt to understand or listen to the people whose lives it proposed taking over.

  This long angry letter triggered the text delivered in November at the Astor Hotel, printed in Harper’s Magazine in January, and published by the John Day company as a best-selling pamphlet. Its tone was judicious, even humorous, but its uncompromising message was memorably driven home by a caustic cartoon of the missionary Pearl claimed to have watched all her life with a mixture of inquisitive affection, reluctant admiration, and downright disgust.

>   I have seen the missionary narrow, uncharitable, unappreciative, ignorant. I have seen missionaries… so lacking in sympathy for the people they were supposed to be saving, so scornful of any civilization but their own, so harsh in their judgments upon one another, so coarse and insensitive among a sensitive and cultivated people, that my heart has fairly bled with shame. I can never have done with my apologies to the Chinese people that in the name of a gentle Christ we have sent such people to them.

  IT TOOK NERVE to stand in front of an audience largely composed of this sort of decent, conventional, well-meaning people and tell them that their smugness and mediocrity had added to the wretchedness of the Chinese poor. Pearl explained firmly that sincerity was not enough. Neither was an individual’s solemn conviction that he had heard the call, nor the Church’s subsequent assurance that he had officially been consecrated, “that miserable word… used to cover so many deficiencies and so much sloppy thinking.” Her final constructive plea for the deployment of fewer, more intelligent, and better qualified mission personnel carried none of the conviction of her apocalyptic image of a man with a closed mind, growing steadily emptier and more arid, delivering increasingly mechanical exhortations, failing to establish more than superficial contact with the Chinese and unable to replenish his own dwindling spiritual and intellectual resources from the deep springs of their ancient civilization. “The vast people, the age-old history, the fathomless differences of race, even the enormous opportunity combined with his own apparent lack of success, dwarfed him. He presented, and presents in many cases, the spectacle of a tiny human figure standing among tremendous cliffs and bottomless valleys strange to him. He is lost…. He shouts the name of God over and over, lest it lose reality for him.”

  Initial shock followed by excited applause in the hotel ballroom was reflected in widespread media coverage, which in turn released a flood of letters from all over the country accusing Pearl of atheism, obscenity, material greed, and shameless hunger for publicity. People who had not read her books denounced them as indecent and urged the Church to punish her. One Presbyterian pastor proposed renaming her best-seller The Dirty Mud. Another deplored her “ruthless, heartless, insane, bigoted, intelligentsiacal cynicism” and predicted “that Mrs. Buck will pray for her ‘good earth’ to swallow her up” when physically attacked by what sounds like a lynch mob of enraged fundamentalists. Pearl’s speech coincided with the publication of Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after 100 Years, a report chaired by her old acquaintance Ernest Hocking, who reached conclusions very similar to her own, backed up by hard evidence and statistical tables. Between them the two precipitated a national controversy, with Pearl as its focal point. She had paid generous tribute to her husband in her talk, citing him as an exemplary anonymous “agricultural missionary,” eager to learn from local farmers and to provide them with the kind of practical ministry regarded by both Bucks as the only viable future option for the Church. Lossing had stood by his wife at the hotel on November 2 but took no part in the media scrum that followed, returning instead to work on his Cornell thesis in lodgings at Ithaca. Absorbed in gathering material and drumming up recruits for his land survey, suffering from overwork and eye strain, running out of time and energy and reluctant to waste either on any more trips to New York to attend public functions as his wife’s sidekick, he was only too happy to devolve escort duty on her publisher.

  RICHARD WALSH WAS everything Lossing was not. Witty, urbane, cosmopolitan, and exceedingly well-read, he had been a classmate of Robert Benchley at Harvard and knew everyone who mattered in the New York book world. Pearl’s initial impression of him as hard, dry, and conservative melted in the warmth of his easy unassuming charm. He was in his mid-forties, projecting to perfection the image of a comfortable pipe-smoking 1930s bookman in rumpled tweeds and brogues. He lacked the ruthless drive and ego that might have made him a sharper businessman, but he was a natural promoter, fascinated by marketing, publicity, and the art of spin. Pearl said he had a lovely smile, a brilliant intuitive mind, and humorous eyes, “wasted on a man, for they were pure violet with long black lashes.” He took over all the things she hated about the celebrity circuit, programming her days, supervising contacts with press and radio, screening out unwanted approaches, and organizing an exclusive contract that made the John Day company responsible for her speaking engagements. In these first hectic months he barely left her side. He took her to fashionable restaurants, introduced her to other literary high-flyers, and accompanied her to theaters (a disastrous adaptation of The Good Earth with an all-white American cast opened and closed that autumn in New York). In spare moments they worked in her hotel room, going through correspondence, sorting out future commitments, and putting together a first collection of her short stories. Together they edited her two-volume translation of All Men Are Brothers, a costly enterprise that drained the firm’s resources in spite of selling better than anyone expected on publication at the beginning of 1933. Pearl had never known anything like the quality or quantity of attention Richard gave her. “Sympathy and understanding appreciation are so delightful,” she wrote to him on November 3. “I am not used to them—and it is for me wonderful.”

  For his part he was enchanted by her both professionally and personally. Virtually overnight she had transformed the fortunes of his small, ambitious, desperately hard-up firm, and now her management and protection monopolized him to the exclusion of all his other authors. He made her laugh, and her combination of awkwardness and innocence with highly sophisticated perception took his breath away. The two responded to one another like dancing partners taking to the floor. “He was an impresario of writers and books,” she wrote long afterward, “but a man of such tender understanding of the needs and delicacies and shynesses of talented persons that he guided without seeming to do so…. he never seemed to lead although he did not follow, he uncovered without shaping.” She flowered for him, gaining confidence, dressing better, looking ten years younger, and growing slim again. The change in her was immediately apparent. “Pearl dropped into my office the other day,” her brother Edgar wrote to Grace that winter. “I have never seen her looking so pretty. She seems to have the world wrapped round her finger, and yet she is exactly the same. It hasn’t touched her at all. I am just beginning to realize what a wonderful girl she is, and she has only just begun.”

  Walsh was a family man with three teenage children and a devoted wife, all of whom were caught up in the Buck campaign. “He presented her as his star,” said Richard’s daughter Natalie. For a time the Walshes included Pearl in a relaxed and cheerful domesticity quite different from her own home life. Richard’s wife, Ruby, looked after Janice when her mother came to stay for the weekend. Lossing was invited to join Walsh family outings, and the two couples planned holidays together. Pearl had taken a suite of rooms in the Murray Hill Hotel on Park Avenue so that she could commute between New York and the Vineland School in New Jersey, spending a day or two each week with Carol. The child had adapted well to her new life, and Pearl planned a house, Carol’s Cottage, specially designed to meet the needs of her daughter and a group of companions the same age. Now that she was no longer tormented by anxiety about the future or distracted by strangers’ disapproving stares and whispers, Pearl could relax in Carol’s company, taking pride in her happiness and accepting whatever she had to give. These regular visits had to be carefully planned, with security precautions in place at the school to protect the children from intrusive publicity (Richard proved adept at deflecting the glare of media attention). Pearl repaid the borrowed money spent on fees and presented the school’s director with a check for forty thousand dollars. Her priority was Carol, but forty years of scrimping made her delight in lavish giving. She bought a Buick for Lossing and posted parcels off to China: costly woolen wraps for the elderly amahs, toys for her nephews, a whole box of new dresses for Grace. Her parents-in-law got their house repainted and a new porch, a suite of furniture, and shrubbery for the garden.
Her farewell gift when she sailed back to China in the summer was to buy their rented farm and sign it over to them for the remainder of their lives, adding a five-thousand-dollar annuity for each of them.

  On March 7, 1933, the front page of the New York Times featured an unexpected plug by America’s most famous cowboy, Will Rogers, who picked The Good Earth as the best book of his generation: “So go get this and read it. It will keep you out of some devilment and learn you all about China, and you’ll thank me for it.” Rogers reached a whole new layer of readers no other critic could. Sales were further boosted in early April by a fresh outbreak of controversy, amounting this time to a public witch hunt spearheaded by a hard-core fundamentalist, Dr. J. Gresham Machen of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, who charged the Mission Board with scandalous laxity, identifying Mrs. J. L. Buck as the prime culprit and demanding her immediate dismissal as an unbeliever. Machen’s challenge was the signal for a further round of accusation and counteraccusation. There were calls for Lossing as well as his wife to lose their jobs. Pearl escalated the conflict with an article in Cosmopolitan questioning the Church’s exclusive claim to Jesus Christ, and maintaining that the power of his teaching did not depend on his supposed divinity. The press spoke darkly of lynching, martyrdom, and the Inquisition. Pearl was widely reported to be facing trial by the Church for heresy. Her husband told the press he could not comment. Richard advised her to go into hiding.