My Several Worlds: A Personal Record

by Pearl S. Buck

  I should not be truly myself if I did not, in my own wholly unofficial way, speak also of the people of China, whose life has for so many years been my life also, whose life, indeed, must always be a part of my life. The minds of my own country and of China, my foster country, are alike in many ways, but above all, alike in our common love of freedom. And today, more than ever, this is true, now when China’s whole being is engaged in the greatest of all struggles, the struggle for freedom. I have never admired China more than I do now, when I see her uniting her peoples against the enemy who threatens her freedom. With this determination for freedom, which is in so profound a sense the essential quality in her nature, I know that she is unconquerable. Freedom—it is today more than ever the most precious human possession. We—Sweden and the United States—we have it still. My country is young—but it greets you with a peculiar fellowship, you whose earth is ancient and free.

  Afterwards, Dr. Fermi’s speech following mine, a burst of singing from the huge court below the hall told us that the evening’s dance was about to begin and the students were already marching in from the university. My pretty stepdaughter had been invited by the son of the Crown Prince to open the dance with him, and like a little Cinderella in her white gown, her eyes shining, she floated down the broad stairway upon his arm and we stood on the balcony above and looked upon the scene, lovely with gaiety and youth.

  The crowded happy days followed fast upon one another, and the chief event of the next day was the dinner at the palace with the King. In the interstices of our full program there were visits and newspaper interviews, as a matter of course, and from each of these I gained further knowledge of Sweden and its remarkable people and was thus provided with a background of understanding for later days. A century and more ago Sweden, worn and consumed by its many wars and conflicts with neighboring peoples, had been compelled to face its own condition and to decide whether it would allow itself to be destroyed by the burdens of war, laid upon the people by military leaders whose career was war, or, on the contrary, deny the leaders and build a life of peace, based upon an unchangeable policy of neutrality in all times of war. They chose peace, and in the decades since that fundamental decision, which every nation must make sooner or later if its people are to survive, Sweden has grown steadily in wisdom and prosperity. Neither wisdom nor permanent prosperity is possible for a nation in the constant turmoil of war.

  With such ideas crowding my mind, I proceeded on the evening of that day to the palace and found at its entrance many school children waiting for me. I could not forbear lingering and talking with them until the guards at the gate grew a little impatient with me and urged me on so I mounted the wide curving staircase to the rooms where I was to wait, with Dr. Fermi, for the two who were to escort us to the banquet hall.

  My memory of that banquet hall is not very clear, I suppose partly because I had already become accustomed to magnificence. Behind every chair was a steward and across the table from me sat the King between two elderly Princesses, the only ladies of sufficiently high rank to be next him. But the vagueness of my memory is partly, too, because I sat next to the King’s brother, Prince William, an explorer and a hunter of big game, a man of wide knowledge and experience, and I became entirely fascinated with his conversation and especially by the account of his visits to the pigmies in Africa. One delicious dish after another was placed before me, the pièce de résistance being reindeer steak, I remember, and suddenly, before I knew it, the meal was over. That is, the King rose. The entire extraordinary menu had been served in forty-five minutes! The reason? Court etiquette demands that when the King finishes with a course all plates are removed with his. Some dishes, I fear, I never tasted, for I found my plate gone before I had lifted my fork. The King, a Court lady explained to me afterward, did not usually talk much with the two Princesses, whom he knew very well and had to sit between on many such occasions. Therefore, without conversation, he ate rapidly and hence the fine banquet was soon ended.

  In the reception room afterward, we all stood until it pleased the King to seat himself, and I heard a stout Court lady next to me sigh and whisper. “It does seem as though our dear King likes to stand longer every year!”

  At last, however, he sent for me as I had been told he would, and seating himself on a couch he bade me sit beside him and then everybody could take seats. I felt at ease for it is the rule that a King must begin a conversation, and this time responsibility was not upon me. Meanwhile his coffee was served in a gold cup, mine in a porcelain one. He stirred in his sugar and kept silence, and I had time to see again how exactly even his profile resembled that of my father. But it would not have been becoming to mention it, and so I did not. After a moment of stirring and sipping, he began to talk, asking me a few questions which I do not remember. What I do remember is that suddenly he leaned forward, his frost-blue eyes mischievous, and glancing affectionately and half ironically about the room, he told me how weary he often was of being a king, and how little freedom a king has, how he must assume not only the heavy responsibilities of state, but also the burden of meticulous personal behavior, so that none of his subjects are hurt in their feelings. But once a year, he told me his blue eyes still sparkling, he had a vacation from being a king. Then, incognito and known only as Mr. G., he went to the Riviera or wherever he liked, and had a holiday, not a king at all, but a gay old man, enjoying his tennis and other games, while his son, the Crown Prince, took over the royal duties. He loved tennis, he told me, and he related with relish a game he had played with the French champion, Suzanne Lenglen. He had missed the line when he served to her, and she had called across the net to him, “You should move a little more to the left, Your Majesty!” To which he had retorted, “Ah, that is what my ministers are always telling me!”

  In a little while he rose, we all rose, and the evening was over.

  The next day I had somewhat dreaded, for it was the custom for recipients of the Nobel Prize to address the Swedish Academy, a distinguished group of scholars. What did I know to present to them? I had by then lived only long enough in the United States to realize that I knew too little of my own people, that it would take years of living and observation before in our patternless society I could discern the causes behind what we felt and said and did. It would be presumptuous to try to speak so soon. Moreover, I had been reminded often enough of my ignorance. Even when the Pulitzer Prize had been awarded The Good Earth, certain critics had objected to so American an award being given to a book about Chinese peasants, written by a woman, and worse than that, a woman who had never lived in her own country.

  My address therefore before the Swedish Academy was upon a subject I did know well, and about which very little is known by most westerners. The title of my address was The Chinese Novel, and the address itself was later published in a little book under the same title.

  From the end of that hour and for the rest of my stay in beautiful Stockholm, the events were pure pleasure, to be enjoyed without responsibility. I must mention, however, that I met at a luncheon given me by Mr. Bonnier, my Swedish publisher, Selma Lagerlöf, a great woman and writer whose books I have loved. She was already very old but still strong in mind and speech, though simple and modest in manner and looking very pleasant in her grey silk dress and a scarf of violet velvet. She told me that the two biographies of my parents had decide her vote for the Nobel award for me that year, and to hear this of course made me happy. I like to think that the bold and original lives of my father and mother were part of those Stockholm days, as they have been of all my years.

  Perhaps this is the place to share a bit of amusement of my own. When the Nobel award had first been announced in the United States it was mistakenly thought to be for The Good Earth alone. This was not true. It was awarded for the whole body of my work, then mainly composed of my Chinese novels and the biographies. My American publishers corrected the mistake, whereupon orders began to come in from bookstore customers for a book, purportedly by me, enti
tled The Body of Her Work.

  On the morning of the twelfth of December, the day before we were to leave Stockholm, I rose early, having been gently forewarned, and wrapped myself in my dressing gown and went back to bed to receive a guest. The door opened at eight o’clock and a pretty girl entered wearing a crown of lighted candles on her head, and bearing in her hands a silver tray with coffee cups. She walked with slow and graceful steps, singing “Santa Lucia” as she came. In every home in Sweden, suppose, a similar scene was going on, the Lucia being always the youngest daughter or sister. Thus opened the Santa Lucia Festival, o the Festival of Light, so significant in a winter-darkened country. On that day the sun has reached its lowest point upon the horizon an thereafter the light increases. It is the custom, too, to choose a Lucia for the whole city, and for that year of 1938 Ingrid Lohman, a pretty employee in a furrier’s shop, had won the prize. In the evening there was to be a great banquet in the City Hall to celebrate the festival and to crown the queen, and I was invited, too.

  I found it a fascinating contrast to the occasions of state which had preceded it. The vast hall was crowded with people sitting closely packed around the simply set tables where we dined. Music and laughter and speeches went on in enjoyable confusion while the pretty queen was crowned, and I saw a different Sweden, a popular one, very free and easy and gay. I liked it and said good-bye reluctantly at the evening’s end.

  The next morning early we boarded the train that was to take us to the sea again, and it was touching to find at the station a group of Americans. They had come to see us off, and after greetings and handshakings they began to sing as the train moved away, and the sound of their voices in harmony floated after us as they sang:

  Home—home on the range,

  Where the deer and the antelope play.

  Where seldom is heard,

  A discouragin’ word,

  And the skies are not cloudy all day.

  We gathered speed under the dark northern skies of Sweden and the haunting melody caught my heart, homeward turned.

  The home-coming was the best of all. The sight of the beloved house upon the hill as we drove across the bridge and up the lane, made the heart beat fast. Why did I ever think I had no roots in my own country? I had already put down deeper roots here than anywhere in the world, and never would they be pulled up again for any reason. We were at the end of the lane now, and there were the great red barn and the sturdy stone house. Christmas wreaths were hanging on the doors and at the windows. Four small figures in red coats and leggings came running over the snowy fields to meet us, and here the heart stopped! What embracings and kisses and cries of surprise and how big the four had grown even in a month and how rosy were the cheeks and bright the eyes! Yes, coming home was best of all, the happy end of every journey.

  Yet underneath all the joy and peace of home and family at that Christmastime of a memorable year I was acutely mindful, as I shall always be, of what was happening on the other side of my world in Asia. War had begun in deadly earnest, and previous engagements were only skirmishes in contrast. The Japanese armies attacked at Marco Polo Bridge, near Peking. The Nationalist forces, centering their strength around Shanghai and the Japanese aggression there, resisted with more strength than expected, while still the Communists did almost nothing. Alone the Nationalists were to continue resistance through 1939, but failing all along the way to hold their ground. Nanking had been lost in 1937, and the government had retreated up the Yangtse to Hankow, only to lose that city, too, in 1938. The whole coast was indeed too quickly lost, proving what we had sadly feared, that Chiang Kai-shek’s hold upon the people was rootless. Thus the richest and most important part of the country fell into enemy control, the industrial areas of the great cities and the fertile plains of the riverland, and Nationalists retreated into the ancient regions of that mountainous West so untouched by modern life. Universities followed the government, which finally settled in Chungking, there to remain for the duration of the war. The Nationalist party was by now divided into two groups, one favoring continued resistance to the Japanese even if only by the guerrilla tactics the Chinese Communists were beginning to use in the North as Japan came close, and the other favoring compromise. It is to Chiang Kai-shek’s honor that he refused all compromise with the foreign enemy, as he had with Communism. He continued his waiting position, still hoping that a world war would demand that the United States become deeply involved, this time against Japan, and that in the universal conflict China would emerge on the side of the victorious nations. He did not doubt that the combination of the United States and Britain would be invincible.

  How well I remember the day war began in Europe! We had taken a house in Martha’s Vineyard that summer, a comfortable place next door to Katharine Cornell’s beautiful house on the bay. The water was perfect for our children, shallow, warm and clear, and they tumbled in and out all day, fat and brown and merry. We ourselves spent the day between work and play, my husband devoting himself to the delightful but difficult task of editing Lin Yutang’s monumental novel, Moment in Peking, and I at work upon my own novel, Other Gods. One morning, however, unable to work, and oppressed unreasonably, I hoped, by premonitions of war, I joined the children on the beach earlier than usual. A few minutes later I saw my husband hurrying down the dunes. It was to tell me the fearful news from the radio, that war had been declared in Europe.

  It seemed impossible, in spite of certainty. The sun shone upon the calm sea and upon the smooth white sands. Our two babies, hand in hand, were running up and down the beach in the shallow water, while the two little boys dug for sand crabs. Farther up the coast where the sea swept in a great curve, people were swimming in front of Katharine Cornell’s house. She had been to visit us, handsome and brown with sun and wind, her dachshunds trailing after her. We had met a few times in New York, without quite becoming well acquainted, each shy, I think of the other. I have always kept my Chinese trait of reverence for great people—a trait not suited to my American world, where no one is embalmed in reverence. We had talked but not easily, and she said that it was difficult for her to make speeches, I remember, or even to converse easily, because actors use the words of others to express themselves. But she had told me a little of her early life in the city of Buffalo, an incongruous name for the home town of such an elegant and sophisticated woman.

  Upon this scene in spite of all its grace and calm, the war broke that day and we knew, my husband and I, that our life would never be the same again, for war would change our country and our people. It would change, indeed, the whole world.

  Why, on the other side of that world, did not Chiang Kai-shek do what the Communists did, arm the peasants and bid them fight the invaders? The answer is that he feared the peasants armed. He knew they were not for him, that his government had failed them, and he dared not trust them. He preferred to leave them as they were, defenseless, rather than to give them arms which someday they might use in rebellion against him. He waited, hoping and longing, while Americans remained neutral and unwilling.

  And would we remain neutral? Could we? I hoped so. I had seen too much of war to believe in it as a means of permanent victory. And this war would be the worst, I knew, for it would unleash in Asia all the angry forces of the peoples. Each Asian people would use world war to further its own passionate determination for freedom and independence. And after the war, what? Certainly no victory!

  I remember a hot day in 1940. My husband and I were driving across the high plains of Kansas. It is one of my favorite states, and I return to it again and again as the heart of our country, its people honest and excellent, intelligent and civilized, while living in simple houses. We were vaguely anxious that day, for President Roosevelt was to make an important speech. At the hour we drew up in the scanty shade of an angular tree so that we might listen with whole attention. We turned on the radio and the rich eloquent voice came rolling over the air. It brought no declaration of war—not yet. It was the famous “quarantine�
�� speech. But I knew, as I heard it, that war was inevitable, and over the sunny golden landscape the shadows fell.

  We continued our journey, sober and silent, we shortened it not at all, turning northward to the Dakotas to visit my sister and her family then living in Pierre, South Dakota—“Peer,” as everyone called it. And when we arrived, I remember, I found my small nephews excited with all the other small boys, because on a dry hilltop near the town a huge petrified fish had been found that very day, a creature the size of a whale, and I went with them and there it was, complete in soft stone. It was lifted and taken to the museum, but bits fell off and I brought one home with me and put it beside our pool. It turned quickly to dust, however, as all flesh does, when subject to sun and wind and time.

  That was a good journey to make in such a year as 1940 for we wandered through the stupendous Badlands, the Needles and the Black Hills, and again the variety and the beauty of our country were impressed upon me, and not only of landscape, but more than that, of people. In Pierre I wished to find the artist who had made a favorite painting then hanging on our living room wall, a dark red sun setting over the desert and a ruined empty cabin. I found her in a tiny restaurant making potato chips for a living. The reason? People here were too poor to buy paintings, she told us, but she could not leave the magnificent landscapes. She had learned painting in Paris and had thought that she would always live there until she had found South Dakota.