A Bridge for Passing: A Meditation on Love, Loss, and Faith

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Can you bear it,” I once asked him, “if you see yourself in a novel? Not just as you are, of course—I always create my own people, but I steal whatever I need—the ways in which you asked me to marry you, for example, which I am sure no man ever used before. I might need a few of them sometime for other men and women.”

  He smiled. He had a wonderful smile, beginning in his deep blue eyes—eyes wasted on a man, for they were pure violet with long black lashes, but I liked them, and so perhaps they were not wasted. “Take it,” he said. “It’s yours anyway. Take anything I have to give—”

  The unique attribute he had was that he understood an artist. I doubt he understood women or cared to understand them. He had a low opinion of women in general. He did not dislike them but his attitude was impersonal and somewhat condescending. When I complained that he was unjust he replied calmly,

  “I don’t look down on women at all. On the contrary, I think they could be much more than they are. They rate themselves too low if they are content to be cooks, cleaning women, and nursemaids when they can be anything they wish to be and do whatever they like. Nobody stops them except themselves.”

  Since he himself had an English gentleman’s attitude toward housework—he was English on both sides and his mother was born in England—I felt a pervading injustice in these remarks, but I am not one to carry on an argument and certainly he was no puritan, so far as women were concerned. He began life early, graduating from Harvard as an honors man when he was only twenty and marrying at once. He was attractive to women and knew it, with blue eyes and black hair and brown skin. His manners were charming, deceptively so sometimes when he was talking with a woman. Yet he had his own invincible code. He would not, for example, call a woman in his employ by her first name or invite her to luncheon or arrange a meeting with her outside of office hours. He felt that any demand of a personal nature made upon an employee was unfair use of employer’s power. I remember that he had at one time a secretary who was an unusually young and pretty girl. When a male friend or business caller made teasingly envious remarks he was cold as only an Englishman can be.

  “Miss Kirke is an efficient secretary or I would not employ her,” was his invariable reply.

  The result of such an attitude was, of course, the total devotion of his secretaries. Even today, when Miss Kirke is married and has grown children, she and the others like her say to me in loving remembrance,

  “He was so much fun to work for—and you could trust him. He never made passes at you. You could be yourself.”

  A humble tribute, but how significant! And yet he could make me happily furious sometimes. For example, he liked to say that I was unlike any other woman he had ever known because, he said, I had the brain of a man in the body of a woman. I flew out at him, invariably, at such a notion. Why should a woman, I demanded, be said to have the brain of a man merely because she had a good mind? Did Nature give the supreme gift only to men? Was there a law of inheritance which denied brains to women? He laughed, pretended to seek shelter, and then said gravely that I was right.

  “I apologize,” he said, his eyes twinkling, but of course he never apologized for what he believed.

  What was precious beyond diamonds to me was the fact, indisputable, that he enjoyed my mind. He liked profound conversation on abstruse subjects. He enjoyed repartee. And far beyond diamonds and life itself was the fact that he understood I had to be alone when I was writing. He never asked what I was writing or even what the book was about. When a novel was finished and typed and ready to be given to the publisher I took it to him myself and presented it formally, Chinese fashion, with both hands. His office was next to mine, but there were two doors between. His was the older building, and the short passageway was once the smoke house, where farmers for a hundred years smoked ham and bacon. The two doors were always closed when I was writing and he never opened them, but he rose when I came in with the finished work and received it gravely.

  “This is a big day,” he always said.

  A big day it always was, and he put aside everything else and sat down to the task he loved, he told me, above all others, the reading of a manuscript I had written. He edited carefully but sparely. I do not remember that he ever made a change involving anything more serious than a misplaced preposition or a time confusion. The Chinese language has few prepositions and I have never quite learned to manage these refractory and precise little English words. As for time confusion, it was something from which I had always to be saved. I have no sense of time. I do not mean that I am unpunctual. On the contrary, I learned early to be punctual to a fault—I say to a fault for I am too punctual and waste my own time waiting for other people. My parents were two separately busy persons who lived on separate schedules into which I as a child had to fit. I live on schedule, too, as a separately busy person and so did he. No, I mean that I pay no heed to what year it is, what month, or what day. I cannot remember birthdays, anniversaries, or any of the important dates women are supposed to remember. A secretary has to remember for me and warn me in advance. He, on the other hand, had the disconcerting habit of perfect time recall. On any morning at the breakfast table, or at any time during the day, he could look at his watch and ask,

  “Do you remember what we were doing ten—twenty—(etc.) years ago at this moment?”

  At first, wanting to be perfect, I tried to remember. Later, resigned to myself, I said boldly that I did not remember. Then he would tell me.

  “It was the first time I kissed you—or proposed to you—or you said you wouldn’t have me—or I took you by surprise in Yokohama, etc., etc.”

  The chase had indeed been a long one. We were past our first youth when we first met, each resigned, we thought, to unsatisfactory marriages, and each well-known in our own fields. I had firmly refused him in New York, Stockholm, London, Paris, and Venice, and then had sailed by way of India for home in Nanking, China.

  In six months he cabled me to meet him in Shanghai in order to hear “no” again and this time forever. I went alone after that to Peking for some months of research necessary for the completion of my translation of Shui Hu Chuan or All Men Are Brothers, and had been there less than a week when he appeared unexpectedly in the midst of a violent dust storm out of the Gobi desert. We parted again eternally and he went to Manchuria and I home again to Nanking to pack my bags for a summer visit to the United States to see that all was well there with my retarded child. I had my younger daughter and my secretary with me, and was in a resigned state of mind when I left, so far as he was concerned. I had, I thought, made the wise decision. I did not want turmoil in my life.

  It was a fine July morning, I remember, and we were docking at the pier in Yokohama. I had planned not to go ashore, for I had been many times in the city. Instead I would work on my translation and my secretary would take my little girl to the park. I had no sooner settled myself to my lonely task when I heard the voice which was now the one I knew best in all the world.

  “I’ve turned up again—I shall keep on turning up, you know—everywhere in the world. You can’t escape me.”

  There he was, lean, brown, and handsome, and smoking his old briar pipe. … In spite of that, I said “no” every day on board ship and again in Vancouver and all winter in New York. But spring in that magic city was my undoing and we were married on the eleventh of June and lived happily ever after, together as man and wife, separately in our professional work.

  He was a great editor—I have seen him take a muddle of a manuscript and make it a unified whole—but he would have been a fine critic. He would have judged the writer on how well he had accomplished the goal he had set for himself, and not have befuddled the reader by irrelevant remarks of his own. And he was a genius of his own sort in coaxing books out of writers who did not know they were writers. A notable example was a short manuscript that came to him one day from an American woman in Siam. He was then editor and owner of Asia magazine. I remember the article. It was entitled “The K
ing’s English,” and the King was the King of Siam. The author had done a nice little piece of research into the King’s vernacular English, which was fearful and delightful. But he saw much more than the light little essay. He saw a character and a man, and he invited the American woman to write more about this King. A few articles arrived and at last, upon his persuasion and encouragement, a book-length manuscript. He set to work to create a book out of the material he found there and to demand what was not there. The result eventually was a fascinating book, which he called Anna and the King of Siam, and this book later became a fabulous musical on Broadway, The King and I, by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

  The list is distinguished. He was the one who brought Jawaharlal Nehru’s great books to Americans, and through his publishing company to readers all over the world. He was the one who discerned in the young Sukarno of Indonesia the promise of a future Asian leader and encouraged him to write his first book and so become known to the West. He was the one who published the first book in the United States of warning against Nazism, a prophecy so far ahead of its time, though not of reality, that it found few readers. And he was the one, too, who edited all of Lin Yutang’s best books and first established his reputation as a writer. He had the gift of a universal comprehension, an eclectic mind, a synthesizing judgment, enlivened by faith in talent wherever he found it.

  He was proud of being a publisher and he felt it a noble profession. Making money was never his impetus. If a book was good enough to merit publishing, he accepted it with enthusiasm, and this whether or not he agreed with what it said. His own opinions were always firmly on the side of the intelligent liberal. In a strongly Republican family he voted for the Democrats, occasionally varying it for the Socialists as a protest vote. Yet he published authors who were conservative and sometimes in the narrowest sense. He believed that they too had a right to be heard and if they presented their opinions well, he gave their books the same editorial care he gave to all others. The range of the authors he developed was from Fritz Sternberg to James Burnham.

  An editor, he believed, had the high privilege of discovering talent and the duty of helping it to develop to its best fruit and then of presenting it to the world. He was an impresario of writers and books, 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, drawing forth their ideas by skillful questions and honest praise and appreciation. Of the numerous letters I received after his death many were from writers who said that until he helped them to understand themselves they had not been able to write.

  And of myself what shall I say? It was he who saw something in my first small book, a tentative effort rejected by all other publishers until he perceived in it the possibility that its author might one day write a better book. His staff was equally divided against the book, and it fell to him as the president of the company to cast his vote. He voted for it, and on that narrow chance my life began.

  Ah me, it does not do to dream too long. The lobby of the old Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was empty except for a sleepy clerk. The rain had stopped and a new moon was swinging above the clouds when I walked outside to breathe the cooled night air. The new moon? I had been in Tokyo for three weeks. For two months I had been alone.

  Music has always been an important part of my life, background and medium for thought and feeling. For the picture I wanted Japanese music, not the synthetic nonsense that passes for Oriental in our American attempts, but original creation in Japan and by a Japanese. Moreover, it must be modern Japanese, for the change that has taken place in every aspect of Japanese life is nowhere more evident than in music. Music is the barometer—and thermometer, for that matter—of every culture, the art most revelatory of a people’s temperament, character and response to outer influence. I was pleased, then, when Toshiro Miyazumi said that he would like to write the music for The Big Wave. I knew his work, but I had never met him and it was a special pleasure to find him waiting for me one morning in my hotel sitting room. He rose and introduced himself and at the same time handed me a gift, a record of his symphony, Nirvarta.

  “I am your composer,” he said modestly.

  We sat down and I looked at his face frankly. It was a charming face, strong and gentle, quiet and poetic and without guile. An innocent face, I would have said, except that it was not the face of a child, although there was a child’s openness in the expression. I recognized this quality, for it is to be found only in highly gifted persons, wise as serpents and gentle as doves, as the old book puts it.

  “I am fortunate,” I told him.

  Toshiro Miyazumi is called the Leonard Bernstein of Japan and he does indeed resemble Bernstein in the brilliance of his talent. Unlike Bernstein, however, he devotes himself to composing music. True, he has conducted, but he prefers to compose.

  “Please tell me about yourself,” I said.

  There was nothing to tell, it seemed. He bit his lip, he tried to remember.

  “You were born in 1929,” I reminded him.

  A flash of gratitude lighted his charming calm face. “Ah yes, I was born but I began my life at six years of age, composing and playing the piano.”

  “Then?”

  He considered and finally spoke. “I went to the University of Tokyo.”

  I was about to inquire, “Nothing between?” and decided not to speak. I would wait and let him present his life as he saw it. There was nothing, then, between six and the University of Tokyo.

  He continued after reflection.

  “When I was twenty-one I received a scholarship to Paris for one year, to the Conservatoire. There was a man, Tony Oben, teaching me. Very conservative, not interested in the new method of composing … So I was a bad pupil. Because the techniques there were formal, the rhythms old-fashioned somewhat and harmony traditional. … Creation is different. The energy is emotion. I cannot, because I use the twelve tone method. So I searched and went to Austrian composers—Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, who use new methods to express contemporary composition.”

  “But you use classical themes, too,” I reminded him. “You are versatile—”

  He accepted this with a smile. “It is very difficult to support my life on classical music alone, however I love it. I returned to Japan and for several years composed many kinds of music, orchestral, chamber, and so forth, as well as for musical films. I suppose television and radio music were my job, but I want always to be an artist. …”

  There was a long pause, covering years. “So after five years I went back to Europe, and I went to music festivals in Sweden and Germany and other places where my music was played.”

  “How does it feel to hear your music played across the world?” I asked.

  He gave me an eloquent look and was too modest for words. “I came back to Japan and I made a group for contemporary music and some prizes were given to me. That is all.”

  All is a good deal for a young man of thirty-one, but apparently his story was told. He was not in the least shy, and he sat relaxed and waiting.

  “And this record?” I asked, indicating the gift.

  “It was played in Tokyo, premiere in April, second day, 1958, after working about a year.”

  “Are you interested in religion? The title suggests Buddhism.”

  “The Japanese Buddhist temple bell,” he said. “It is a typical mixture of sounds. I am very fond of it, since I am interested in concrete music and electronic music, that is, creating musical structures out of sound energy, as Edward Varese suggests. In other words, the method of composition is by giving musical life to the energy inherent in the sound itself. So I bring new timbres into my compositions—for example, mixed tones. Combinations of several dozen pure tones have become dominant in my works.”

  The calm face had suddenly become animated and beautiful.

  “I am attracted by the voices of Buddhist priests chanting sutras—no melody, of course, but habitual intonation and rhythm, and when any priests t
ake part together, the group produces a sort of musical noise through the mixing of the voices of varying pitches. I added to a full orchestra treble woodwind instruments and bass brass instruments, placed in different corners of the hall to achieve a directional sense by means of the crisscross of sounds over the heads of the audience—”

  No silence now—the words poured from him in a flow of creating thought!

  “Nirvana, the ideal state of being for the Buddhist, is symbolized by the toll of the bell. So perhaps I am religious. I composed this symphony with the idea of creating my own musical Nirvana. It is not religious music, I suppose, in the purest sense of the word. It is a sort of Buddhistic cantata. I hope you like it.” He smiled suddenly. “I talk too much.”

  I broke the next silence. “What do you do next, after our picture?”

  “I go to New York, to write music for the New York City Ballet. It will be played next season.”

  “Quite different from a Buddhist cantata?”

  “I like difference, but before I go to New York I will finish the music for The Big Wave. This picture is unusual, too, and altogether different. I have the music in my mind clearly, really romantic, not Wagnerian romantic, strong and delicate together, with contemporary Oriental philosophy. How is it you write like this? The emotion is Oriental.”

  It was my turn not to know what to say. How can a writer say how she writes? But he had forgotten his question.

  “I want a song in it,” he was saying. “I want a song that is like the sunrise, young and fresh and full of hope. Your young people, beginning their life again in their own time, at this moment, never before lived, I want that song.”

  He leaned toward me, all demand and pleading. “If I write the music, will you write the words?”

  “I cannot,” I told him.

  There was nothing more to be said. We shook hands and he was gone. And the song was written by someone else.