Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  This time Pearl’s fairy-tale account skips a whole year of dire personal and professional problems. The first confronted the couple as they landed in Vancouver, to be met by Richard’s assistant with news that his publishing house faced bankruptcy. The worldwide economic crisis, brought home by Roosevelt’s surprise closure of the banks, meant that, in spite of Pearl’s phenomenal success, John Day had been struggling throughout the previous year. Payment of her substantial royalties had been delayed in four successive quarters, with a further postponement requested at the beginning of 1934. She tried to solve the problem by reluctantly producing the manuscript of The Mother, which raised thirty-five thousand dollars from serialization in Cosmopolitan and sold eighty thousand copies within three months of publication. But this proved a temporary reprieve, not helped by the head of the firm’s absconding for six months to the far side of the world, and in June John Day’s accountants issued a final ultimatum.

  Richard avoided liquidation by sacking his entire staff except for a single secretary, raising money on his life insurance, taking out a mortgage on the house occupied by his wife and family, and persuading the printer to accept old stock in place of payment. Asia magazine, now housed in the John Day offices on Forty-second Street, was also in trouble. The paper’s new editorial policy had increased its influence but minimized its advertising without a corresponding boost in circulation. This was the kind of situation that brought out in Pearl her father’s fighting spirit. She waived future royalties, offering instead to draw out money from the company only as and when she needed it, and effectively replaced Richard’s office staff by taking on their editorial jobs herself under the official title of consultant. Pearl now put in many hours a day in the John Day office on top of a punishing work schedule of her own. She wrote every morning from nine to one, turning out articles and stories on an industrial scale, as well as appearing regularly on widely different platforms as a public speaker.

  Between commitments she concentrated with characteristic vigor and decisiveness on a series of family catastrophes. Carol was still thriving at Vineland, growing more stable and talking better, but the school’s elderly director seemed to be losing his grip on the verge of retirement. Pearl, who mistrusted his deputy’s capacity to replace him, galvanized trustees and parents into organizing the search for a successor. She underlined her backing in a will, leaving everything in trust to her two daughters, with the school as her residual legatee. Next on her list was the third child of her sister Grace, a baby girl whose nervous system had been irremediably damaged in a bungled delivery at birth. “It is Carol all over again so far as I am concerned, Emma, and I must buckle down and make as much money as I can,” Pearl wrote, adding ominously, “you may see many more potboilers from now on!” She talked to top American consultants, found out where to get the best palliative treatment, paid for a specially made film demonstrating the recommended techniques to be shipped to China, and encouraged the Yaukeys to return to the United States, even fixing up a prospective career for Grace as an author in her own right. Pearl had long since replaced her mother as the cohesive center of the Sydenstricker family, comforting her sister and spending much time with their brother, whose second marriage was already showing signs of strain exacerbated by Edgar’s ill health and a long-term drinking problem.

  Already frantically overworked, Pearl was apprehensive about a visit in the winter of 1934 from Lossing, who had been summoned by the U.S. Treasury on the strength of his success as a government adviser in China to discuss the potential role of silver in replacing the gold standard (the consultation ended with Lossing being appointed, to his wife’s amazement, personal adviser in China to the secretary of state, Henry Morgenthau). Disconcerted by the size of his office and by the evident respect accorded him in Washington, Pearl took the opportunity to press for a divorce. Lossing agreed on condition—a proviso suggested by Morgenthau—that it was his wife, not he, who sued for dissolution in the divorce courts of Reno, Nevada. Ruby Walsh, who could apparently refuse her husband nothing, did the same. In a bizarre maneuver instigated presumably by Richard to minimize sensationalist press coverage, the two wives took the train together to Reno, where they spent the six weeks necessary to qualify as local residents in the same hotel. Nothing if not methodical, Pearl used the time to lose all the weight she had put on in the past twelve months, tackling the problem with cabbage soup and a professional masseuse. She and Richard were divorced and remarried in the space of just over an hour on the morning of July 11, 1935. They escaped from a press barrage thanks to Pearl’s portly masseuse, who stood behind the honeymoon car in the middle of the road with arms extended, blocking the photographers’ exit.

  PEARL FOUND HERSELF yet again the subject of nationwide notoriety, and for once unable to claim the moral high ground. When media attention made her feel like an object rather than a person, her remedy was to withdraw. She had bought a house that spring, a plain stone farmhouse just outside Perkasie in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where her original American ancestor, Philip Sydenstricker—probably a shoemaker from Bavaria—had settled briefly in the 1770s before the family moved on to Virginia. By her own account she built her house first in her imagination, recognizing it instantly from a postage-stamp-size snapshot in an estate agent’s office in New York. She insisted that the only successful way of transplanting a person or a tree was to establish new roots straightaway. She planted sycamores to show that she meant to grow old in her new house, choosing them because she said they were an essential adjunct to all Pennsylvania farms, “not the dapper white trees of the city, but great old snarled crooked sycamores, tents of big green leaves in summer and ghostly shapes in winter, their branches twisted and angular, the seedballs swinging at every tip of twig.” This was the first home Pearl had ever owned, and over the next thirty years she would transform the property, putting in electricity and running water, building bathrooms and a new kitchen, throwing out a wing, adding offices for herself and Richard (Pearl’s opened straight into a conservatory full of camellias), converting the barn, and buying up surrounding farmland. The garden on a sloping hillside with its stream and its clumps of bamboo recreated the view from the Sydenstricker bungalow in Zhenjiang. This was as close as Pearl could get to a China lost forever once she and her sister had sold their family house in Kuling, now the summer capital of Chiang Kaishek, later to become a favored resort of the Communist Party under Chairman Mao, who staged some of the grimmest sessions of his presidium on top of Mount Lu.

  Pearl turned Green Hills Farm into an ideal home for the large family of happy, healthy children she had dreamed about in her own childhood. Now she set about realizing that dream too at her usual fast tempo. After due consultation with the eleven-year-old Janice (who had been sent to boarding school), the Walshes adopted two baby boys, both one month old, in the spring of 1936. The year after they adopted two more babies, a boy and a girl. At first the parents looked after their new family entirely by themselves. Pearl had no live-in nanny at Green Hills, only a farm woman who came in to cook at midday and local girls to help with the house and children. The whole family commuted for three days a week to an apartment at 480 Park Avenue, with the four babies laid out in market baskets side by side on the back seat of the Cadillac. They were a source of constant delight and satisfaction. “She was proud of those four laundry baskets,” said Richard’s grown-up daughter, Natalie: “when they went into the Park Avenue apartment, it was great to have this bunch of kids.” Pearl had a natural affinity with babies and often sat in the living room talking unselfconsciously to visitors with a naked infant cradled in her lap, much as she herself used to lie comfortably on Wang Amah’s knee. Many years later she and Richard adopted two more daughters, bringing their brood to seven, the same number as the siblings—some ghosts, some not—in her mother’s house. Pearl herself sailed serenely on regardless of the doubts of friends and family. “I guess we questioned it some because of her hectic life,” Grace said, “but she had everything
under control. She usually has.”

  The first years of rerooting and new growth at Green Hills marked a slow recovery from extreme dislocation. Pearl was in many ways a political innocent when she landed in America, quite unprepared for the impact of the major confrontations she was about to take on. She told Richard the morning after her extraordinary performance at the Astor Hotel that she had twice come close to blacking out in the course of her speech. Her first horrifying glimpse of life in the South, as depicted in the Harlem exhibition, affected her so deeply—“It was a blow from which I could never recover”—that she had to shut herself up alone for several days in order to absorb the shock. The adjustment between her two worlds was too great, the transition had been too sudden and the excision of her past too drastic, for Pearl to find her way easily through chaos and confusion back to any kind of solid footing. Intense activity was an escape from desperation. Its antidote was the peace and isolation of country life. The Walshes knew no one among their neighbors in Perkasie except for local people who came to work in the house or on the grounds. They created from scratch an all-American family with lavish trimmings: mammoth Sunday breakfasts cooked by Pearl in her big new farm kitchen, huge hospitable Christmases for themselves and their houseguests, ponies and a pool for the children. But the only visitors who came to stay at Green Hills were members of their immediate family: Grace and Jesse Yaukey, Edgar and Phyllis Sydenstricker, Richard’s mother and his daughter Natalie, together with writers the couple had recruited jointly on their Asian trip, what the family called “John Day Chinese,” and the few of Richard’s New York friends sufficiently sophisticated to take a double-divorce scandal in their stride. Insofar as she was capable of it, Pearl slowed down her work schedule: “I didn’t write any big books in 1935.”

  What she did write was unpublishable. Pearl told Richard that her missionary speech had opened a door she had never opened before. The novel she started working on after her final return to the United States flung wide many long-locked doors on suppressed anxiety and terror. The Time Is Noon, begun in 1935 but not published until 1966, contains harsh and vengeful portraits of Pearl’s father, her newly divorced husband, and her Buck in-laws as well as slighter but no less wounding sketches of minor characters. Edgar Sydenstricker was seriously ill when she wrote it (he would die prematurely of heart failure at the beginning of 1936). The heroine’s fictional brother in The Time Is Noon is a handsome, talented, eager boy who grows up to be an ignominious failure, helplessly dependent on his stronger sister, destroyed by the loss of his mother, his father’s inadequacy, and his own fatal attraction to wholly unsuitable women, a compulsion that drives him in the end to suicide. The dim pale younger sister, who rashly tries to follow an imaginary vocation as a missionary, is killed off by revolting heathen rather than forced, like Grace and her husband, to give up and go home. Pearl made short work of complaints that her fiction at this point came too close to fact. “Of my work I must be my own judge,” she wrote tartly when Emma objected to a story, “Fool’s Sacrifice,” about a long-suffering wife who finally manages to cut free from an unworthy husband. “Lossing’s type is so average that if I never write about anyone like him I shall be hard put to it…. But always I shall write as I please about whom I please.”

  Arrangements for publication of The Time Is Noon went ahead in spite of Richard’s misgivings, which remained so insistent that without consulting Pearl he sent a set of galley proofs to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, the Book-of-the-Month Club judge who had launched The Good Earth and gone on to become a mutual friend. Fisher confirmed that bringing out the book would seriously damage its author’s professional reputation, quite apart from its repercussions on her private life. “I accepted their decision without comment,” Pearl wrote, “although I knew the book had to be written for my own sake. I had to get rid of all my life until that moment—not my Chinese life, but my own private years…. There was no hope ahead so far as my eyes could see. And I was not sure whether I could enjoy life in my own country or even adjust to it…. I confess now to hours, even days and weeks of doubt in those first years in my own country. In this mood I began to write The Time Is Noon.”

  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.