Fighting Angel was Pearl’s parting present to her father. A second gift (and one he would no doubt have preferred) was a posthumous edition of his Chinese translation of the New Testament, financed by Pearl and produced by the Nanjing Seminary. The two biographies, packaged together in October 1936 under the title The Flesh and the Spirit and distributed as a Book-of-the-Month Club double, sold more copies than any of Pearl’s previous works except for The Good Earth. “I am just so happy about the book,” Grace had written to her sister when she read The Exile. “It does seem as if Mother’s life is to count for more than she could ever know.” One of the outcomes even Pearl could not have foreseen was the book’s impact in the 1970s and 1980s, after the death of Chairman Mao, on a Chinese generation brought up to regard foreign missionaries as tools of cultural oppression. “All the political propaganda, and many years of socialist education, simply went to pieces after people read this little biography,” wrote Kang Liao: “young readers were surprised to learn… so much that is opposite to what they had been told in class and in the textbooks.” The Exile set out to right wrongs, both general and particular, but Pearl’s brief life of her father goes beyond that relatively narrow remit. Fighting Angel has the makings of a twentieth-century classic in its truthfulness and simplicity, the strangeness of its subject, and the lapidary precision of its style. Apart from The Good Earth—another work long meditated and written under pressure in a single burst of speed—it is probably the best book Pearl ever wrote in the sense that she never fully recaptured its combination of cool, sharp, scrutinizing intelligence and passionate emotion.
The only dissenting voices came from mission colleagues of the Sydenstrickers, who hotly disputed what they saw as cruel and libelous distortion. “Carie Sydenstricker was… a comfortably placid person… a devoted wife, admiring her husband, supplementing his dreams with her good sense… living in joy and happiness to the end of her life,” wrote Nettie du Bose Junkin, whose father had known Pearl’s parents from their earliest years in China, and who had been a Kuling neighbor of the Sydenstrickers as a mission wife herself. Junkin’s review was not the only one to protest against Pearl’s heroic portrait of her mother or to defend Absalom as a model father and husband. James Bear, another mission child who had known the family all his life, insisted that there was nothing out of the ordinary about Carie Sydenstricker (“she was just a good average missionary, not brilliant but she did her work”), and was deeply dismayed by Pearl’s “lack of understanding of her father.” Some of her closest friends insisted that if anything she had toned down the harsher aspects of both parents. “Her mother was a very, very rigid woman,” said Lilliath Bates. “Pearl told a lot of things about her father, but if people had known all they would have been even more startled.”
If The Exile was written in hot blood as an attempt to exorcise the past, Fighting Angel brings to bear the kind of dispassionate lucidity that informs Pearl Buck’s articles and speeches but is rarely present in her novels. From now on she would appropriate to herself her father’s power as a preacher, applying the breadth and clarity of mind she had inherited from him to interrogate American actuality in the light of the generous idealistic vision instilled in her from infancy by her mother. For three decades hers was a voice of sanity and balance in U.S. politics. She campaigned for peace, tolerance, and liberal democracy, for the rights of children and minorities, for an end to discrimination on grounds of race or gender. She had no illusions about the nature of Communism in China, and long before the Nationalists’ ultimate defeat she delivered a scathing analysis of their failures as a government. Pearl was among the first to recognize that the war inaugurated by Japan’s invasion of the Chinese mainland in 1937 would culminate in worldwide conflagration. She struggled tirelessly to raise awareness of China’s situation and to swing public opinion in the United States against the Japanese aggressors. But for all her efforts to open minds and alter policy in Washington, it was in the end her novels that did more than any other single factor to humanize the popular American image of the Chinese people. Pearl’s efforts to link her two worlds by becoming a human “bridge between the civilizations of the East and West,” in the words of Richard Nixon, took up much of the second half of her life.
World War II and the Communist regime established in 1949 ensured that she never returned to China. The Good Earth appeared in eight pirated Chinese translations in the 1930s and 1940s, one of them going into twelve successive editions. “No other book by any foreigner has ever achieved such popularity in China,” wrote Liu Haiping, the leading Chinese authority on Pearl Buck. But Buck’s relationship with potential Chinese readers had been clouded from the first by the anger and anxiety she herself identified in Wang Yuan in A House Divided. Attempts by the Good Earth’s American film crew to shoot actual Chinese villages in the country around Shanghai met with determined resistance from officials, who eventually arranged for the film reels to be x-rayed during a customs inspection on departure. In 1937 Chinese defensiveness combined with Hollywood commercialism to produce a movie with twelve minutes of authentic Yangtse Valley footage, an all-American cast, and a script built round a romantic love interest wholly alien to the original concept.
Chinese critics complained bitterly about Pearl Buck’s evenhandedness, her lack of ideological content, and the accurate documentation of rural poverty in her books. Their objections were clearly set out soon after publication of The Good Earth in a letter to the New York Times by Professor Jiang Kanghu, a distinguished academic moving easily between the United States and China, who had begun his career as a young official at the Manchu court in Beijing. Professor Jiang endorsed Lu Xun’s view that China should be left to the Chinese, cast doubt on the existence of the lawlessness and banditry that form the novel’s background, and reproved the author for writing with deplorable informality about unimportant, low-grade individuals: “They may form the majority of the Chinese population, but they are certainly not representative of the Chinese people.” Pearl responded politely but firmly that she could write only about a world she had known firsthand all her life.
Her frankness, coupled with her refusal to gloss over Nationalist shortcomings, made her an unwelcome advocate. When she won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938, the Chinese government acknowledged her importance as an independent commentator by withdrawing its official delegation from the ceremony in Stockholm. “The withdrawal heralded a long-term neglect of her in China, Taiwan, and among the Chinese American scholars in the U.S.,” wrote Professor Kang Liao. The Communist regime convicted her of conniving at imperialist and capitalist exploitation by failing to mention their existence. “Buck contradicts Marxist theories by regarding China’s poor and rich as individuals rather than as members of opposed classes.” She was handicapped even by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhu. The first part was the family name chosen by her father, the second a literal translation of “pearl,” a name with flashy and pretentious overtones in China: the two together sounded like Sai Jinhua, a famous imperial concubine and mistress of an enemy general in the Boxer uprising, signifying to most people a collaborationist tart.
Pearl Buck raised too many awkward questions, exposed too much unpalatable reality, remained essentially too skeptical to suit doctrinaires on the Left or Right. In the 1950s she was stigmatized as a suspected Communist in the United States at the same time as her books were banned in Communist China. By this time she was used to attack from both ends of the ideological spectrum. “Nothing in Communist theory enrages me more than Trotsky’s callous remark that peasants are the ‘packhorses’ of a nation,” she wrote. “Who made them packhorses?… in all my years in China I never ceased to feel intolerable pain and anger when I looked into the thin intelligent face of some Chinese peasant twisted into sheer physical agony because on his back he bore a burden too much even for a beast.”
Pearl retained to the end the view of China laid out at the start of her career in her Messenger prize essay of 1925: “as the inevitable f
uture leader of Asia, and as a monumental force in herself with her unmeasured resources, both human and material, she will exert a tremendous influence upon the future of the world.” She spent the greater part of her life thinking about and speaking for the common man, exploited successively in China by Western capitalism, by the bureaucratic inefficiency and military brutality of the Nationalist regime, and by the Communists’ overriding drive for power. Her stance was never ideological. She had known too much too young about ideological campaigns to reeducate other people for their own good, and all such attempts filled her with revulsion. “Yesterday in New York a young Chinese woman… told me breathlessly of the great and marvellous changes that the Communists are making in China,” she wrote in her memoirs in 1954, remembering perhaps the glorious changes once envisaged by her father and his colleagues. “And in her words, too, I caught the old stink of condescension.”
POSTSCRIPT
Paper People
WHEN PEARL FINALLY left China to settle in the United States in 1934, she marked this last great uprooting of her life with a burst of autobiographical writing, looking backward and forward in the two biographies of her parents and in the three fictional books she wrote immediately before and after: The Time Is Noon, This Proud Heart, and Other Gods. These were her first novels set in America, and in them she rewrote her past and shaped her future, clearing the ground, establishing control, and getting rid of the heavy, cumbersome, potentially toxic baggage she carried with her.
Storytelling had been an escape for Pearl ever since, as a small child, she found she could forget her troubles by reading and rereading the collected works of Charles Dickens. She said that every one of her own novels included a character who was a version of herself, and that her imaginary world of dreams, projections, and fictional presences came to seem to her as substantial as the real world. Writing occupied a special compartment in her mind, the mental equivalent of the attic at the top of her Nanjing house, a safe place “where she could go and be alone with her people.” There she re-created as an adult the kind of virtual reality she had entered as a child through other people’s stories: “more and more it came about that her only companionship was in the attic with her people.”
This Proud Heart, published in 1938, was for Pearl herself as well as for those closest to her the nearest she ever came to a deliberate self-portrait. Its heroine, Susan Gaylord, marries a local college boy and sets out with high hopes to become a model wife and mother in a small house exactly like all the others in the small town where she grew up. Class president and valedictorian of her school year, she sings, plays the piano, and dismays her contemporaries by cooking, cleaning, sewing, and bringing up babies effortlessly, and far more expertly than they can themselves. But Susan’s marriage is shadowed from the start by a craving neither her husband nor his suburban world can satisfy. She too leads a secret life in an improvised workroom under the roof of her suburban home: “desire stirred in her, deep and blind, the intolerable, sweet, dark, solitary desire which she knew so well, which she could share with no one else. She rose to her feet and she went slowly upstairs, past the bedroom door, up to the attic.”
Susan appeases her blind urge by modeling a clay child. “Up in the attic the thing she had made remained a presence. It was there, a part of herself and yet separate from her.” Looking back at the end of her long life, Pearl described the people she created out of words in similar terms: “when I speak the names of my characters, they stand here before me as though they were in this room…. Perhaps being surrounded by the people I have created, I don’t need other people…. They seem real to me…. I just don’t distinguish between the people in my books and the people outside my books. One is as real as the other to me.” On the birth of her first baby, Susan (like her creator) turns away from an activity she sees as dangerously compulsive. For months the attic door remains locked, and dust gathers on the work inside. In the end, overcome by desire in spite of her best efforts to resist, she goes back to the abandoned attic. Working at top speed in a trancelike state without training or preparation, she models a woman out of clay, probing, groping, gouging, feeling the figure take shape and grow beneath her fingers. “Each day when she opened the attic door it was to open it to ecstasy, and when she shut the attic door behind her, it was as upon that secret ecstasy.”
Technically speaking, this is absurd. It is not possible to make a freestanding, life-size clay figure on impulse with no kind of external support or internal armature, any more than it would be feasible for a provincial housewife without funding or formal training to carry off a major New York hospital commission and leave for Paris on the proceeds, as Susan Gaylord does, in a bid to turn professional. She studies in the studio of a prize-winning American sculptor—“Beauty was his soul’s food”—currently making statues of what he calls his Titans, twenty-one massive males ranging from Galileo, Leonardo, and Napoleon to Thomas Edison, “a gallery of history in stone.” In Paris in the era of Brancusi and the young Giacometti, at a time when the aims and means of sculpture itself had been redefined in abstract terms by works in plaster, papier-mâché and wire from Matisse, Picasso, and Julio Gonzalez, Susan Gaylord becomes an academic practitioner, dreaming of monuments in bronze and stone, taking it as a personal slight when told that only very few great men still sculpt in marble. “Her proud heart reared its head like a lion in her woman’s body. ‘How do you know I am not great?’ it demanded.”
Susan represents in highly stylized form the hopes and aspirations of a generation of housewives who found any prospect of pursuing a professional career extinguished by domesticity: “She had not enough to do. However busy she was, she knew there was an energy in her still unused, a primary function unperformed.” Potential problems—child care, financial dependence, the doubts of family and friends, her husband’s lethal feelings of inferiority, Susan’s own sense of being a cut above everyone else she has ever met—evaporate as if by magic. Her central dilemma resolves itself when her husband conveniently dies young of typhoid, contracted on the day she receives news of her first major commission. After a brief second marriage to a far more sophisticated New Yorker, she opts for independence and a single life, winning national acclaim for her American Procession, a patriotic sequence starting with an enormous black marble statue of her cleaning lady. Like its heroine’s most famous work, This Proud Heart spoke to and for American womanhood, using an old-fashioned and reassuringly familiar narrative format to convey a new and timely message. It was, by Pearl’s own account, a dream come true.
“The book told of the difficulty of being a superior person,” her official biographer put it. So did her next American novel. Serialized like This Proud Heart in Good Housekeeping, and published in January 1940, Other Gods explores the penalties of instant fame through its lovely, shy, sensitive, book-loving heroine, the suggestively named Kit Tallant. Like the central characters of both The Time Is Noon and This Proud Heart, Kit marries a dull, coarse-grained, well-meaning but thick-witted farmer’s son, distantly derived from Lossing Buck. An amateur mountaineer, Bert Holm becomes an international celebrity overnight after accidentally scaling an unclimbed Himalayan peak. Pearl said that her own sudden unexpected fame dehumanized her and made people treat her as an object, a sensation she had known and dreaded as a white child in Zhenjiang, surrounded on the street by Chinese crowds calling out insults about the foreign devil’s fair skin, yellow hair, and “wild-beast eyes.”
Old terrors resurfaced in these years between the lines of her books. Memories of casual abuse, of being shouted and spat at on the streets after the Revolution, of being forced to flee from murderous looters in 1927—“all that I had purposely forgotten”—lie behind passages like the one in Other Gods where Bert finds himself pursued by the press and mobbed by screaming fans at the head of a brass band tickertape parade down Broadway that terrifies his wife: “Madness was about her—something mad and uncontrolled. Her knees began to shake… she wet her lips… the noise rose into a
high wild howling.” Kit takes refuge in the peaceful book-lined library of her family’s country home. “At once her mind stripped itself…. She sat in a long fruitful daydream, shaping her own mood, holding fast her own feeling, until at last she began to feel slowly words in a rhythm, two lines, then another and another. And once this progress began it went on to a completion, whether final or not she could not tell now, but at least to some sort of end, because she felt released and full of ease.”
This seems to be a pretty accurate account of the way Pearl worked at Green Hills Farm, where she increasingly retreated from the glare of publicity. As a writer she relied on the knack she had perfected as a child of removing herself from time and place: “once more I found myself withdrawing into my secret habitation. There I am alone. No other enters.” She spent every morning at her desk, emerging exhausted, dazed, and stupefied from these sessions with what she called her book people, or sometimes her real people. She wrote in longhand without revision or correction, seldom pausing, covering page after page at phenomenal speed in a small compact script, producing on average 2,500 words at a sitting. “Then I never look at the papers again,” she told Helen Foster Snow. “My secretary types them out and my husband edits them. I never have anything more to do with the book until it is published…. I cannot stand to read over anything I write. My husband takes care of everything for me except the first draft. He works in the other half of the house.”
It was Richard, working with two typists in the next-door office, who applied the critical intelligence Pearl increasingly withheld from the dreamworld of her fiction. He edited her books heavily, and her agent, David Lloyd, did the same for the short stories. “It took two anchors to hold her,” said Lloyd’s daughter, Andrea. “Father and Walsh… It took two men, one couldn’t hold her…. Her work was always pouring out of her.” For four decades she published a book or two a year as well as keeping up a steady flow of magazine stories, articles, and speeches. Her earning power was prodigious. For ten years or more she could count on up to five thousand dollars for a story in magazines like Cosmopolitan, the Saturday Evening Post, or Woman’s Home Companion, which meant that, with royalties, translations, and serialization fees, her total income came to $60,000 to $100,000 a year. But her production rate inevitably precluded firsthand contact with the world she wrote about. Pearl had little intrinsic understanding of American idiom or thought patterns. She didn’t know how ordinary people behaved, and she had never heard them talking casually among themselves. In Shanghai in 1928 she had been mystified by a stranger who said, pointing at Carol, “The kid is nuts.” A decade later in Pennsylvania she depended on Richard to interpret for her (“he said it was fun to be married to me because I was so ignorant that he could tell me all the old American jokes, and they were new to me”).
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