Memory for Pearl was an intensely creative faculty. It opened and closed like quicksand over fragments of the past, absorbing and transforming them, sucking them down only to disgorge them once again as much as ten or twenty years later in fictional or nonfictional form, sometimes in both one after the other. During the transitional period marking the collapse of each of her two marriages, the treacherous sands of memory became especially active, swallowing and regurgitating the past as if in readiness for an uncertain future. “I have to make all I do out of my own life,” says Susan Gaylord in This Proud Heart. “It’s my only material.” The same was true of Pearl. Even Imperial Woman, the fictionalized biography of the dowager empress that occupied her in the first uneasy years of Richard’s illness, drew as much on her own personal experience as on the historical and biographical sources she consulted. Like all other portraits of the empress at the time, it relied heavily on a hostile account by J. O. Bland and Edmund Backhouse, whose supposed authenticity was shown to be spurious only after Pearl’s death. Her novel paints a relatively reliable picture largely thanks to intuition. “You could see Pearl all through that book,” said Andrea Lloyd, “the way she pictured herself anyhow.” “She was very much like the old empress,” said Sarah Rowe, Pearl’s secretary at Green Hills. “Nothing happened there that she didn’t know and approve of…. when you’ve had all the success she’d had, maybe your imagination spills over into fact, and I think it became more and more difficult to discern the difference between actuality and the wish.”
of all the bright young men who charmed Pearl and dispelled her loneliness, the most persistent and persuasive was her red-haired dancing master, Theodore Harris. He was a natural courtier, eager, assiduous, and deferential. Pearl said he had the looks of a Greek god together with the glamour of the young President Kennedy. Born Fred L. Hair in rural South Carolina in 1931, he was a school dropout who worked his way up to become an instructor at the Arthur Murray Dance Studios in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. Pearl hired him in July 1963 to teach her two youngest daughters. They disliked him, but from the first day he captivated their mother, becoming a constant visitor at Green Hills. Within three months he had organized a charity ball in Pearl’s barn to raise money for Welcome House. It was the first step in an ambitious nationwide campaign built around grand fund-raising balls held in twenty-one different cities. “Mr. Harris was presenting Pearl just as Richard Walsh had done thirty years before,” said Richard’s daughter Natalie. Pearl was thrilled by the possibilities he opened up. Harris felt comfortable, as she did, in a world where fantasy merged easily with fact. When his irrepressible energy, lavish spending, and big ideas failed to persuade the Welcome House board members to offer him a job for which he had neither training nor experience, she sidestepped their objections by setting up the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in January 1964, with herself in the chair and Ted Harris as president.
Its aim was to house and educate destitute Amerasian children in their own homelands, starting in Korea, and its staff consisted largely of dance instructors. Ted and his young friends, “the Arthur Murray crew,” infiltrated Pearl’s personal and professional life at all levels from then on. Financed initially from her own pocket, the Foundation had a star-studded board whose names headed the begging letters circulated in an extensive mailing program. Pearl roped in everyone she could persuade to sign on, from Joan Crawford to Dwight D. Eisenhower and Robert Kennedy. Harris devised a plan for Pearl to sign over her copyrights to the Foundation, which would bank her royalties and provide her in return with whatever income she required. She also made a will leaving her entire estate, including Green Hills Farm, to the Foundation, which meant that (apart from the Amerasian children) Harris was her principal beneficiary. At Pearl’s request the board voted him a massive annual salary of forty-five thousand dollars in perpetuity, regardless of whether or not he remained in their employ.
Harris reinvented Pearl by treating her like royalty. “She imagined herself a queen, an empress,” said one of her young men, who watched her transformation at Harris’s hands into a character from her own fiction. For years Pearl had tended to assume what Margaret Thomson, her tart-tongued old friend from Nanjing, called “aspects of imperial grandeur.” Now she had found a trusty henchman who made her feel like the heroine of Imperial Woman, “the true ruler, the beautiful powerful woman who feared no one and by whose charm and strength all were subdued.” The fund-raising balls became ceremonial occasions, opened by Pearl taking the floor in Ted’s arms in elaborate jewels and a full-length pink, white, or silver ball gown. She had a white mink coat with snap-on white fox-fur trim and a Chrysler limousine with her monogram in silver on the door (Ted had a matching one marked with his own initials). Together they installed the Foundation’s headquarters in a handsome Philadelphia townhouse with luxury suites on different floors for him and her, and a state room filled with trophies, starting with Pearl’s Nobel insignia. Margaret’s son, James Thomson, working as assistant to Chester Bowles, the undersecretary of state in Kennedy’s first administration, was amazed when Pearl came to call in a personalized limo “that seemed… twice as long as the Secretary of State’s.” He saw Pearl’s Philadelphia setup as an unlikely re-creation of the Manchu court, centering round a figure gifted, like the empress in her book, with innate authority, imagination, courage, ambition, and a tiger heart. “Magnificence became her, as always.”
Part of Harris’s remit was to rewrite Pearl’s image. She herself had authorized and edited a short biography, The Exile’s Daughter, written by her sister and published in 1944 under the name Cornelia Spencer as part of an attempt to launch Grace as a writer. Partly perhaps because of its subject’s constant intervention, the book is admiring and insipid, chiefly interesting in retrospect for occasional independent insight into their parents’ lives. More problematic are the three books put together by Harris with Pearl’s collaboration: For Spacious Skies, much of it dictated on their trips together in the back of one or other chauffeur-driven limo, and the two strange, scrappy, confessional volumes of Pearl S. Buck: A Biography. Their coverage is uncoordinated and unreliable, especially in passages where Harris attempts to strengthen his own position by denigrating Pearl’s second marriage. She was already well into her seventies by the time these books came out, and her memories drift and waver in the disconcerting time warps of old age, clouding over in some areas but startlingly clear in others. Many of her disclosures have the pristine freshness of authentic recollection. Harris’s prompting was not malicious or exploitive, but soothing and reassuring. If he was unscrupulous, it is in the sense that he tried to release the locks and censors that controlled Pearl’s access to the past, and to console her by relieving its sometimes intolerable emotional pressure. His style was naïvely ingratiating, his judgment biased, and his understanding limited, but his sense of what distressed her was acute.
The first volume of his life of Pearl was published by John Day in 1969, which turned out to be a dreadful year for both of them. An FBI inquiry into Harris’s running of the Foundation had been shelved a couple of years earlier, but newspaper allegations now resurfaced, first in Korea, then in the United States. “The Dancing Master,” a well-documented, detailed, and damning piece of investigative journalism published in the July number of the monthly magazine Philadelphia, accused Harris of mishandling charitable funds and making sexual advances to Korean boys in the Foundation’s care. He promptly resigned his post, denied the charges, and disappeared. At least one board member had already left in protest, and more now resigned. Feeling deceived, betrayed, and publicly humiliated like her father before her, Pearl rallied in furious defense, briefly taking charge of the organization herself, flatly rejecting every allegation, and threatening the press with lawsuits. Shortly before her seventy-seventh birthday she decamped, leaving behind everything that had rooted her life in Pennsylvania for more than three decades—her family, her house, garden, farm, and barn, her books and possessions, her beloved stands of sycamore a
nd ash—to settle in Vermont with Ted. “Destiny compelled her onward, and her own she must leave behind,” she had written of one of the empress’s many flights in Imperial Woman.
Pearl spent the last years of her life in self-imposed exile in Vermont, keeping up a certain state in isolation but not obscurity. “She lived alone, this Empress, the walls of her courtesy impregnable and inviolate, and through that wall there was no gate.” She and Ted had initially taken refuge in the summer house built by her sons in the Green Mountains, which reminded Pearl of Kuling’s Mount Lu. Later they moved into the little neighboring town of Danby, where Pearl bought several rundown properties, setting up Ted and his former dance-instructor friends as antique dealers with a sideline in local crafts, while she lived in rooms over the shop. Their high hopes for the business dwindled in the end, and so did their even more optimistic schemes for transforming the future of Danby and its people. The outfit ended up more like a junkshop selling curios and copies of Buck books, with Pearl herself often seen seated at a window in Chinese silk robes, drawing five or six thousand people each summer as the town’s sole tourist attraction. “I take my prestige with me,” she had said grandly many years before to a woman who protested that wealthy charitable patrons would never attend balls in unfashionable locations like Philadelphia’s Convention Hall. Pearl remained largely cut off from her children, who were liable to find their visits curtailed or barred altogether by their mother’s entourage. Ugly disputes about money and access simmered beneath the surface. As Pearl approached her eighties, still in full command but growing frailer, it became hard to get through to her even on the telephone.
She followed, indeed sometimes almost seemed to be directing, world affairs from exile in Danby, emerging occasionally with a small train of attendants for meetings at the Philadelphia offices of her Foundation (now effectively reconstituted after its drastic shake-up, working better than before, and moving toward eventual merger with Welcome House). She gave interviews, wrote articles, and fronted a TV show as guest host for a week in Boston. She told a journalist that she had never gotten used to America and still could not feel at home there. Her longing to return to her roots, to revisit the country that had shaped her and to see her parents’ graves again, intensified as the U.S. government seemed to draw closer to the People’s Republic. “By birth and ancestry I am American,” she said, “… but by sympathy and feeling, I am Chinese.” In February 1972, when President Richard Nixon announced his intention to visit Beijing, Pearl planned to go with him, or alternatively to follow in his wake. Proposals were drawn up for fiction and nonfiction books on the trip, syndicated newspaper coverage, and a TV documentary. She sent telegrams and letters to anyone who might assist her, from the president himself to the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai, who came from Tsingkiangpu, where Pearl grew up. It was a bitter shock when, after months of waiting, a curt note from a junior Chinese diplomat in Canada turned down her visa application on the grounds that her works had for years “taken an attitude of distortion, smear and vilification towards the people of new China and its leaders.” Nixon brought her back a set of nesting lacquer boxes as a consolation. Long after her death it turned out that Zhou had personally signed the memo banning her return.
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.”
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
Pearl Buck in China Page 30