Arts and Letters

Most of us have thought Pearl Buck won the Nobel Prize on the strength of one work alone, The Good Earth. Not so. After the award Anders Osterling, Chairman of the Nobel Committee on Literature, wrote: "The decisive factor in the Academy's judgment was, above all, the admirable biographies…. As literary works of art, the two biographies remain incomparable with anything else in Pearl Buck's both earlier and later production."

Biographies? Yes. Pearl Buck published two of them in 1936, five years after her famous novel, one year after the Academy awarded her the Howells Medal, and the year in which she was elected to the Institute.

The first draft of one of them, The Exile, was Mrs. Buck's first attempt, as she turned thirty, at writing a book. Unsure of its worth, she put it on a closet shelf. When revolutionaries looted the Buck home in Nanking in the uprising of 1927, they destroyed the manuscript of a novel she had just finished, but they did not find the draft of The Exile, and in later years she took it up again and rewrote it.

The Exile tells of the failed life of her own mother. Caroline Stulting was a sensuous, Puritanical, witty, quick-tempered young West Virginia woman, who, caught up in the missionary fervor of her time, promised herself to God if he would only beckon to her somehow. When Caroline's mother, fatally ill, said in the moment of dying, "Why—it's—all true!" Caroline took this as the sign she had been waiting for. She told her father she wanted to become a missionary. He emphatically refused permission. But soon afterward she met a young minister named Absalom Sydenstricker, who was about to go out to China; against her father's wishes, partly just to have her way, Caroline married Absalom, and they set out at once for China. Her life there turned out to be one long hellfire of homesickness. Absalom was a narrow, selfish man who asked nothing of her but housework. He and his angry, rigid God took her by surprise with seven children; and this same God chose to kill four of them in childhood. She told her surviving children tales, full of yearning, of West Virginia, of a charming drunk who had courted her once, of a father she wished she had obeyed. She came down with tuberculosis but chose to remain by Absalom's side, anchored by a perverse, defiant strength she had. During one of several occasions when she and her family were threatened by a murderous anti-foreign mob, she went to the gate of her compound, opened it, and, with her children around her, serenely offered tea to the crowd—and they abashedly took it instead of her blood. She started a clinic for Chinese mothers; she helped the husband she hated to translate the Bible into Chinese. But when she lay dying she would not let him come near her.

Fighting Angel, about that husband and father, is a harsher, tighter book. Six of the seven sons of a tyrannical West Virginia farmer became missionaries; Absalom was one. When, after college, he told his parents he wanted to be a missionary, his mother said he might, but only if he would marry first. So Caroline Stulting gave him his convenience; having won her, he absent-mindedly bought only one railroad ticket for his wedding trip. In China he scorned the safe, fort-like missionary compounds and took his family to live right among the hostile Chinese. He existed for one end only, to harvest souls. He was baffled by his restless, hot-blooded wife; his obsession cut him off from his children. Once Pearl showed him a report card from Miss Jewell's School—99 in geometry. "A good mark," the father said, "a hundred would have been better." This Absalom, this unbending preacher of his own version of the gospel of love, was robbed, cursed, beaten, stoned. During the Boxer Rebellion he was the only white man in his region. Once he awoke from sleep to find a Chinese man standing over him with a meat cleaver in his hand. Absalom prayed out loud—what was it in his tone of voice that made the assassin flee for his life? Only when the father grew senile and, at last, helpless, did his daughter, Pearl, come to like the brittle old shell of a man.

Of course the biographies would not have been noticed by the Nobel Committee had not the earlier novel taken the world by storm. The Good Earth, written in the manner of the Chinese storytellers' sagas and in the rhythms of the King James Bible, "was discovered by the public," as Malcolm Cowley has said, "while the literary scouts were looking the other way." The book gave her greater popularity abroad than any other American writer save Mark Twain. It was an immense success—and deserved to be; it was not until years later that serious critics, our Mr. Cowley among them, began to say that the book was, indeed, a masterpiece of the strange sort, to which Wuthering Heights also belongs, that seems to spring like an impressive weed from unlikely soil.

Of the rest: Pearl Buck wrote, alas, too much, too fast. Perhaps feeling she was not getting a fair shake from the critics, she began in the mid-forties to write some books under an assumed name, John Sedges. The first of the Sedges novels, The Townsman, was published in 1945, a year in which Mrs. Buck also published five other books under her own name (two were collaborations), and furthermore staged a play. In the quarter-century after the publication of her first book, there was but one year in which she published no book at all, and but ten years in which she published only a single book.

"The trouble," she once told her sister, "is that I always have too many things I am interested in and live too many lives." The causes of retarded and abandoned children, coeducation, the end of colonialism, the Negro; Welcome House, for adoptions; The East and West Association; United China Relief—too many lives. Fascinating, just now, are her feminist essays, especially two articles in Harper's in 1938 and 1941, in which she anticipated nearly every single one of the recent "discoveries" of the Women's Liberation Movement, right down, for example, to the question whether women should accept male doctors for female ailments.

In her Nobel Lecture, Pearl Buck made a crucial declaration, and in it we may find both the large generous impulse and the artistic limitations of her body of work:

Like the Chinese novelist, I have been taught to want to write for [ordinary men and women]. If they are reading their magazines by the million, then I want my stories there rather than in magazines read only by a few. For story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free. No, a novelist must not think of pure literature as his goal…. He is a story teller in a village tent and by his stories he entices people into his tent. He need not raise his voice when a scholar passes. But he must beat all his drums when a band of poor pilgrims pass on their way up the mountain in search of gods.