Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America: The Battle of Life 9811635552, 9789811635557

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Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America The Battle of Life Rob Hardy

Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America

Rob Hardy

Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America The Battle of Life

Rob Hardy Henan Normal University Xinxiang, China

ISBN 978-981-16-3555-7 ISBN 978-981-16-3556-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3556-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

To the memory of my American Methodist missionary grandparents Murray and Olive Titus: intended for China but at the last moment diverted to India.

Acknowledgements

I have been fortunate to have been encouraged in this project by some dear friends and colleagues. At Henan Normal University, it has been my privilege to teach with Professor Liang Xiaodong, Dean of the Department of International Studies. I have also been fortunate to receive the friendship of Professors Li Linying, Jiang Shichang, Hou Linmei and Zhang Junmin, Deputy Dean. A special mention also goes to my Chinese teacher Professor Du Lijun, who made her lessons so amusing and enjoyable. My good friend and colleague Professor Tian Peng has left me with many lovely memories of our joint Ph.D. class and has encouraged me in this project. I have been most fortunate to teach students in that and other classes at Henan Normal University: very hard working, highly intelligent and kind and generous people that they are. At Shanghai International Studies University, I have been fortunate to receive encouragement from Professor Li Weiping and from my friends and colleagues Professor Nie Wei and Professor Zhou Min. Two small sections of this book were given as unpublished keynote speeches at the biennial international literature conference at that university. I am also fortunate to have as a friend Professor Peng Di from Hainan Normal University, who from the first expressed interest in this project. I would also like to mention my two colleagues Dr. Frances White and Dr. Miles Leeson of Chichester University, England whose friendship and encouragement are so important to me.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Also sincere thanks to Pat Robinson for reading a draft of this book and providing suggestions. And last but very far from least: gratitude to my brother, the Revd John Hardy, who checked my script for theological and related solecisms, and above all to my good friend Professor Yue Jianfeng, who translated Chinese articles into English for me and accompanied me to Pearl Buck’s houses in Zhenjiang and Nanjing. And love to Christopher and Emma, Ruth and Calvin and, now, Esme—always. The author and publisher are grateful for permission to quote from the following: Ding Ling: I Myself Am a Woman by Tani E. Barlow, Gary Bjorge © 1989 by Beacon Press. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston; Pearl of China by Anchee Min, 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc © Anchee Min; Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography by Peter Conn, 1996 by Cambridge University Press © Peter Conn; The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction by C. T. Hsia, 1968 © The Chinese University Press; ‘Introduction’ by Maggie O’Farrell, to The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2009, Hodder & Stoughton © Maggie O’Farrell; Pearl S. Buck by Paul A. Doyle, 1980 Cengage Learning Inc.; Beyond the Good Earth: Transnational Perspectives on Pearl S. Buck edited by John Cole and John R. Haddad, 2019 © West Virginia University Press; The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 1979 Yale University Press © 1984 by the authors.

Introduction

She was born in 1892 in West Virginia, named Pearl Comfort, and a few months later taken to China by her parents. They, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, had left the United States immediately after their wedding twelve years earlier to make the long journey to China as missionaries; when they arrived at the station, Buck’s American biographer reports, it emerged that Absalom Sydenstricker had forgotten to buy his new wife a ticket, and he cites Buck’s later comment that her father had married but ‘could never quite remember it’ (Conn, p. 9). In 1899 the little girl, aged six, gave some brief biographical details about herself in a letter to an American newspaper: telling its readers that she lived in China, and that her big brother would shortly be coming from college in America ‘to help our father tell the Chinese about Jesus’, she added I have two little brothers in heaven. Maudie went first, then Artie, then Edith, and on the tenth of last month, my little brave brother, Clyde, left us to go to our real home in heaven. Clyde said he was a Christian Soldier, and that heaven was his bestest home. (Conn, p. 1)

Peter Conn reports this letter as coming from the child’s own pen; Hilary Spurling suggests it must have been largely composed by her mother (Spurling, loc. 487), a fruitful disagreement between biographers since it highlights how far the child’s and her mother’s lives were intertwined in grief. A few events which shaped her life thereafter included hopeless yearning as a small girl for a doll in an American mail order catalogue; ix

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formal tuition in Chinese philosophy and language by a Confucian tutor, saturation in her parents’ set of the novels of Charles Dickens which she read from the age of seven, as well as in Chinese life and common speech; threat of death as a child during the Yihetuan (‘Boxer’) uprising; attending boarding school in Shanghai as a teenager during which she attempted pastoral work with despised and rejected women; four years’ undergraduate study in a college in Virginia; return to China to nurse her sick mother; marriage to John Lossing Buck; the birth of her daughter who as she grew developed a severe learning disability; her own and her family’s mortal danger during the ‘Nanjing incident’ in 1927; her return to live in America in 1934; her divorce from Buck and marriage to her publisher; her adoption of seven children during the course of her life; her foundation of an adoption agency for unadoptable children; her unsuccessful attempt to revisit China in 1972. These events also shaped her writing life, which included the 1938 award of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the publication, according to Conn, of over seventy books in different genres, including a translation of a major Chinese novel and five novels set in America under a male pseudonym. Pearl Sydenstricker Buck died in Vermont in 1973 having never returned to China, the country where she had spent most of the first half of her life. She never fully recovered from this loss, just as her mother had never recovered from the loss of America when she crossed the Pacific Ocean as a young woman for the first time all those years before. Charles Dickens told his biographer that he really did ‘not know what this story is worth’ (Douglas-Fairhurst, loc. 365)—the story being his fourth Christmas book, The Battle of Life, published in 1846. Critics of Pearl Buck, whose first novel was published sixty-odd years after Dickens’ death, have asked themselves a similar question. What, really, are her stories worth? Their answers have ranged from admiration to contempt to attempts at measured evaluation and reveal as much about their own views of the world as they do about Pearl Buck’s. In China, where most of Pearl Buck’s books of the 1930s and 1940s were translated into Chinese (Liu, in Lipscomb et al. 1994, p. 58), at least fifty articles on Pearl Buck in Chinese journals or as prefaces to translations of her books were published between 1930 and 1934. Some Chinese critics cited as a reason for Buck’s excellence her seeing the world as a Chinese might see it. The influential publisher Zhao Jiabi, despite reservations, wrote of her Nobel prize-winning novel The Good Earth that

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the reason it has won praises the world over, including in China, is that it not only draws the appearance of the Chinese, but also shows part of their soul. Except for its medium of writing, everything else, such as the subject matter, the characterization, the milieu and the mood, is Chinese. The book, on the whole, is very authentic, and one can hardly believe it was written by a foreign hand. (Liu 1994, p. 60)

Another reviewer suggested that ‘Pearl Buck’s body was no doubt born of her American parents, but it was China that endowed her with spirit and soul. That was why she calls America her motherland and China her fatherland’ (Liu 1994, p. 58). One critic suggested that Buck’s writings ‘could easily pass for works of Chinese authorship’ (Yu Chu 1934). Another article—of its time in its angry conceptualization of the relation between China and the West—drew attention to the pain suffered by a Chinese man or woman contemplating their image overseas: it suggested that Buck might have deserved praise for her ‘sincere and objective approach in her portrayal of Chinese life’, but only in comparison with the prevalent Western archetype of Chinese ‘men with long pigtails and women with bound feet, all skinny with running noses and dirty, ugly faces’ (Liu 1994, p. 59). Other readers, decreasingly interested in Western misperceptions of their country, were more dismissive. Lu Xun, China’s most revered twentieth-century writer, influentially condemned Buck for having attempted a task beyond any foreigner: ‘it is always better for the Chinese to write about Chinese subject matter, as that is the only way to get near the truth’ (Liu 1994, p. 63). Subsequent reviews were straightforwardly hostile. Liu summarizes three which unexpectedly appeared in 1960, reactions to Buck’s 1950s writings about China after the founding of The People’s Republic in 1949. Their charges against Buck are reminiscent of those brought by George Orwell against Dickens. They included: Buck’s attribution of China’s pre-Communist misery to ‘poverty, famine, diseases and ignorance’ while ignoring its structural cause—native feudal oppression aided by foreign imperialism; secondly, they attributed what they described as Buck’s proposed solution to this misery—the fusion through intermarriage of Chinese feudalism and Western liberalism—to her ignorance of the only real solution: proletarian revolution; thirdly, they argued that Buck unfairly portrayed Chinese Communists as cruel

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and heartless, particularly in comparison with members of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). All these charges against Buck were summarized succinctly in the 1972 letter refusing her application to enter China: in view of the fact that for a long time you have in your works taken an attitude of distortion, smear and vilification towards the people of new China and its leaders, I am authorized to inform you that we cannot accept your request for a visit to China. (Liu 1994, p. 57)

—the most contemptuous if not the final word on Buck by a Chinese reader. It is not known whether the author of this letter, a minor official in the Chinese Embassy in Canada, had in fact read anything by Pearl Buck. It is unlikely. Conn suggests that Buck’s erasure from Chinese intellectual life was assisted by the personal enmity of Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong (Conn, p. 374) who promoted a simple message about Buck to any Chinese who might have wanted to read her. The novelist Anchee Min records that I was ordered to denounce Pearl Buck in China. The year was 1971. I was a teenager attending the Shanghai 51 Middle School. Trying to gain international support for rejecting Buck’s China entry visa (to accompany President Nixon on his visit), Madame Mao organized a national campaign to criticize Buck as an “American cultural imperialist.” I followed the order and never questioned whether Madame Mao was being truthful. (Min 2010, p. 277)

What is known is that only with the introduction of the Chinese government’s open-door policy in the late 1980s (Yao in Cole and Haddad 2019a, p. 245) did Buck’s writings become available again in China and the subject of study by new generations of Chinese readers and critics. Yao, who offers a post-graduate course on Pearl Buck at Nanjing Normal University, taking up the story of Buck’s reception in China where Liu left off, cites recent translations of Buck’s work into Chinese as evidence of her increasing reputation in his country: No longer labelled as “an owl” or “a vanguard of the cultural invasion of American imperialism,” as she was accused of being in the 1960s, she is regarded as a supportive friend of the Chinese people, a great novelist who

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treats Chinese subjects well, a scholar of the Chinese novel, a committed social activist, and a cultural “bridge” who devoted her entire life to intercultural understanding and ultimately the well-being of humankind. (Yao 2019a, p. 249)

—a reaction which might have touched Pearl Buck greatly, signalling as it does her affectionate and admiring welcome home to the country of her heart—at last. She might also have been touched by the efflorescence of twenty-first Chinese scholarship about her. Yao’s important review of this scholarship (Yao 2019b) suggests that it has continued to facilitate Buck’s growing reputation in China in three main ways. The scholarship has: (a) identified Buck as a writer with greater breadth than previously thought; (b) suggested that all Buck’s writings, non-fiction as well as fiction, deserve study through emerging methods of critical inquiry; and (c) continued to restore Buck’s image from under the deformations imposed by the compliant organs of the Mao-era CCP. Examples of (a), Yao suggests, include the suggestion (2009) of Zhang Ziqing (who refers to Buck as ‘our beloved friend’) that all Buck’s work should be translated into Chinese including two novels critical of the People’s Republic— Letter from Peking (1957) and The Three Daughters of Madame Liang (1969) since only with all her work in view can a just estimate of it— from a Chinese perspective—be made (Yao 2019b). In 2015 (the seventieth anniversary of the end of Chinese war of resistance against Japan) Yao himself highlighted another previously unappreciated aspect of Buck’s breadth. Yao’s international academic conference in Zhenjiang entitled ‘Pearl Buck and the Anti-Japanese War’ focussed on Buck’s support for China, exemplified in her novel Dragon Seed; after the conference Yao also hosted the ‘Pearl S. Buck Column’ of The Journal of Jiangsu University with additional contributions by Lu Jiande and Guo Yingjian: their discussion topics included Buck’s firm support of wartime China and her narrative approaches to the anti-Japanese war (Yao 2019b). In this context Yao has also emphasized the research carried out by Chinese scholars into Buck’s writing about countries other than China—The Living Reed (1963), for example, which Yao describes as ‘an epic’ about Korea (Yao 2019b). Continuing the theme of Buck’s previously unidentified breadth of subject, Yao cites Zhang Chunlei’s (2005) research into Buck’s large corpus of short stories which Yao praises for their profundity: Zhang’s paper describes the careful structural patterns of these stories, such as the conflict between old and new ideas, between love and hate, and between

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everyday ordinary life and the intrusion into it of the extraordinary. Zhang also argues, according to Yao, that beneath these surface patterns we can glimpse Buck’s own deep psychological structure, her cultural position in transitional times, her love for Chinese people and her admiration of the Chinese novel (Yao 2019b). Continuing to produce evidence for Chinese scholarship’s exploration of the breadth of Buck’s work Yao (2019b) cites the interest of scholars like Tang Yangfang in Buck’s non-fictional explorations (as in China Past and Present ) of Chinese culture and history, plus research into Buck’s writings about Chinese fiction (Yao 2011), especially her translations— which brings Yao to his next two themes: the expansion of Chinese critical enquiry, enabling new insights into Buck from approaches such as feminist, post-colonial and comparative literature; plus, lastly, the importance of Pearl S. Buck as a figure in recent and contemporary Chinese history. From an English-speaking Sinophile perspective the question raised by Wang Yingguo (2003)—whether or not Buck should be included in the history of twentieth-century Chinese literature—is heart-warming, as is Yao’s point that Buck has now been compared with important modern Chinese writers such as Lu Xun, Bing Xin, Lao She and Shen Congwen, as well as Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Laureate. The overall impression of a reader even only casually acquainted with modern Chinese literary scholarship about Pearl Buck is that she has acquired something approaching revered status in at least parts of the Chinese academy. Yao suggests (2019b) that the efflorescence of twenty-first Chinese research into Buck marks the fourth stage of her reception in that country. The first three stages of Buck’s critical reception in the United States—from admiration to contempt to measured evaluation—were not so different from the first three stages of her reception in China; the fourth stage, if it can be so described, I will mention shortly. An early review (signed ‘E.G.’) in an American journal described the experience of reading Buck’s first novel, East Wind, West Wind as one of the most moving experiences in one’s life (E.G. 1930, p. 506)—a view given weight five years later by the English novelist Phyllis Bentley who, reviewing Buck’s output to date, including ‘that miniature masterpiece, The Mother’, asserted that for the interest of her chosen material, the sustained high level of her technical skill, and the frequent universality of her conceptions, Mrs. Buck is entitled to take rank as a considerable artist. To read her novels is to

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gain not merely knowledge of China but wisdom about life. (Bentley 1935, p. 800)

E.G.’s admiring early view of Buck, reinforced by Bentley’s article in Britain, was joined by the responses of common readers—those ‘private people’, as Virginia Woolf described them, with whom Samuel Johnson had rejoice[d] to concur - for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to [literary] honours. (quoted Woolf 1925, p. 1)

The recommendation of Dorothy Canfield Fisher (that highly uncommon reader) to other Book of the Month Club judges that they choose The Good Earth—‘I was just electrified by the quality of it’ (Conn, p. 123)— resulted in The Good Earth’s becoming the bestselling book in the United States in both 1931 and 1932 (Conn, p. 123). Buck’s further prestigious accolades in the 1930s included the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature (and before that the Pulitzer prize and Dean Howells medal (Spurling, loc. 3286). Her detractors, however, were not far behind. Conn reports that Buck’s Asian subjects, her prose style, her gender, and her tremendous popularity offended virtually every one of the constituencies that divided up the [American] literary 1930s. Marxists, Agrarians, Chicago formalists, New York intellectuals, literary nationalists, and New Humanists had little enough in common, but they could all agree that Pearl Buck had no place in any of their creeds and canons. (Conn, p. 210)

and Conn cites William Faulkner’s 1949 comment on the Nobel prize: ‘I don’t want it’, since he would rather not find himself in the same company as ‘Mrs Chinahand Buck’ (Conn, p. 210). The Cold War, impacting every area of American life, did not bypass Buck. Spurling summarizes: ‘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’ (p. 255). However, before her death she was to have had her books selected by the Book of the Month Club fifteen times in total (Conn in Lipscomb et al. 1994, p. 1), a sign of the pleasing indifference of American common readers to critical orthodoxy or political pressure.

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The first single-authored, critically orthodox (in its time), book-length attempt in the United States to evaluate Buck seriously as a writer appeared in 1963, ten years before her death, marking the beginning of her critical revaluation in the country of her birth. (A second edition appeared in 1980.) Paul A. Doyle presented himself as one giving an evaluatively measured view of Buck—‘her work does not deserve the disdain that many literary pundits have heaped upon it. On the other hand, her books do not merit the uncritical adulation that they have often received’ (Doyle 1980, p. 8)—and he emphasized the seriousness of his approach by discussing her ‘Naturalism’ (or was it ‘Realism’?) together with that of Zola, Hemingway and Dreiser (40). He also paid Buck the high compliment of applying to The Good Earth Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: The principal object…was to choose incidents and situations from common life…to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature (quoted Doyle, p. 37)

—arguing that ‘the faraway coloring of The Good Earth lights the familiar elements with new freshness and appeal. Realism and romanticism blend in just the right proportions’ (Doyle, p. 37)—a view at odds with that of Peter Conn, who remarks that while Buck possesses ‘a gift for making the strange seem familiar’ she lacked the gift possessed by the strongest writers, ‘of making the familiar seem strange’ (Conn 1996, p. 380). Both Doyle and Conn agree, however, that Buck’s work declined over the decades. ‘In the 1930s she produced several fine books, after this decade she never again reached the same level of achievement’ (Doyle, p. 92); ‘I will argue…that a dozen or so of her books, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s…ought to be valued more highly than they are’ (Conn xvii). Conn’s indispensable ‘cultural biography’ of Buck was published in 1996 and continued Doyle’s quest: to provide a measured response to Buck’s huge output seen (in Conn’s case) against the detailed background of her extraordinary life. And, although Conn’s book remains key in encouraging the rehabilitation of Pearl Buck’s reputation as an American writer, it emerged as part of the growing consensus among some Chinese and American academics that Buck deserved a new approach acknowledging

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her important role in building bridges between the country of her birth and the country of her heart: that she was in some sense a transnational writer, and it is this which might be described as the fourth stage of Buck’s critical reception in the United States. Conn had contributed a paper— ‘Pearl S. Buck and American Literary Culture’—to a centennial symposium in 1992 at Buck’s old college discussing her work (published two years later as The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, March 26–28, 1992), and that event, featuring presentations by Chinese and American scholars, was succeeded not only by Conn’s biography but also by the international scholar Kang Liao’s 1997 book Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge across the Pacific. This study was an important multi-cultural indicator of the future turn English language Pearl S. Buck studies would take and was followed by other books and articles focussing on Buck as a transnational writer, one of the most important of which was Richard Jean So’s 2010 article arguing for the importance of Buck as a facilitator of the emergence of the Asian-American subject both in her work towards the repeal of the 1943 Chinese Exclusion Acts and in her writing. (So’s revelation of Buck’s reasons for choosing to translate Shui Hu Zhuan rather than other classic Chinese novels was an essential part of his argument.) By working ‘at the interstices of U.S. and Chinese cultures in order to redefine democracy’s meaning Buck would write this concept into existence […] in The Good Earth, which constituted the basis of an emerging, trans-Pacific literary sphere’ (So, p. 87) So contrasted his argument with that proposed by Karen Leong which ‘situate[d] Buck within the tradition of U.S. Orientalism’ (So, p. 88). Other work resonating with So’s transnational approach to Buck included Stuart Christie’s article describing Buck as both the outsider - inside a particular Chinese cultural tradition as well as an insider - outside the tradition of Chinese fictionalized historiography (the modern xiaoshuo) which allowed for the birth of a globalized ‘China’ in the English-language novel (Christie 2010)

as well as three 2018 articles emerging from a forum held at Nanjing University. King-Kok Cheung compared ‘the intellectual and political affinit[ies]’ of Pearl Buck and the Chinese writer Bing Xin, suggesting that both were ‘precursors of Chinese American subjectivity’; Guo Yingjian explored ‘the relationship between Buck and Asia from an inter-Asian

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and transpacific perspective to better understand Buck’s global perspective in her writing’; and, thirdly, Yao Junwei discussed Buck’s non-fiction in order to ‘affirm her “spirit of cultural dialogism” in her presentation of Chinese people and culture, a laudable alternative to the Orientalist epistemology denounced by Edward Said’ (Cheung et al. 2018). These three articles were succeeded a year later by a book with contributions by several Buck scholars of Asian/American provenance, enlarging the transpacific, transnational and transdisciplinary focus of Buck studies. Beyond the Good Earth: Transnational Perspectives on Pearl S. Buck (Cole and Haddad 2019) included chapters by scholars from a wide range of disciplines, in one of which—‘Gateways into The Good Earth: Myth, Archetype and Symbol in Pearl S. Buck’s Classic Novel’—Carol Breslin returned to Doyle’s early critique of Buck, quoting with approval his assertion that ‘The Good Earth gives to its readers the sense of being “shaped by eternities”’ (quoted Breslin p. 228). This theme Breslin discusses in her ground breaking exploration of the dimensions represented by O-Lan in that novel: ground breaking but also building on the work of earlier writers on the subject of women in Buck’s fiction, notably by Gao Xiongya (2000), Zhou Haipeng (2010) and Gayreen Lyngdoh (2015), the last an illuminating study of the uses to which Pearl Buck and Amy Tan put their women characters. The amount of critical work generated by Pearl Buck’s writing goes some way to answering the question with which I started: what, after all, are Pearl Buck’s stories worth? Well, commanding the attention of many people across the world, both professional critics and ‘common readers’ indicates that they are worth something, to put it no more highly than that. In this book I have not asked what Pearl Buck’s stories are worth. ‘Literature is transmitted being’, Philip Davis states, and in what follows I have tried to learn from the being Pearl Buck transmitted into her fiction, by trying to see ‘with her eyes [and] feel with her heart [and] think with her mind’ (Davis, p. 2.). I have done so because, as Peter Conn and Hilary Spurling have vividly shown, Pearl Buck’s was an extraordinary life. In what follows I emphasize that this is not only because of where it was lived but because of how. Spurling, without appearing to disagree, quotes Helen Foster Snow’s comment that ‘Pearl had a very good mind but she didn’t use it’ (loc. 4050). In this book I argue that, on the contrary, Buck’s use of her magnificent mind to illuminate what she saw and felt resulted in her transmitting a being into her writing by which readers (at least those ‘uncorrupted by literary prejudices’) can be guided, from

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which they can learn and in whose presence they may find delight. This book traces the transmission of Buck’s being—primarily as recorded in her fiction—into her struggle with Christianity (Chapter 1), into her meditations on Chinese life and thought during tumultuous times (Chapter 2); into the uses to which she put her voluminous reading (Chapter 3); into her battle to adjust to life in America (Chapter 4); and into the final phase of her life after the death of her second husband (Chapter 5.) This book is a work of literary criticism not biography, and I use the latter only to facilitate the former. I have said that I have not asked what Pearl Buck’s stories are worth. But by the end of the book it should be clear that I think they are worth a great deal, especially when read to mute for a while the current moronic xenophobic roars from both sides of the Atlantic. A word on the title. Two words recur in Buck’s fiction: life and death, used both literally and metaphorically. The Battle of Life seems apt because (a) it was chosen by her beloved Charles Dickens for one of his own stories; (b) because for Pearl Buck her own life was indeed a battle; and (c) because both Dickens’ story of that name and Pearl Buck’s childhood share an archetypal image: a subterranean horror zone. In Dickens’ story, the buried physical fragments left by a terrible battle fought long before sometimes erupt into the green living English countryside above them; in Spurling’s biography we first encounter the child Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker among the tiny graves she has made for fragments of unwanted children: sometimes, as I wandered alone over the Chinese hills, I came upon strange and tragic fragments of[…] little bodies – most often of little girls, but sometimes of very small boys who had died of some illness in families too poor for funerals, or of babies who had been born dead. […] Sometimes I buried only a bit of a hand or a skull or even only a bone, but sometimes it was more. They were always children and always very little ones, and I buried them with flowers, or if it were winter with a twig of evergreen or a bit of bright tile or a pretty pebble. (Harris vol. 2 pp 74, 75, quoted Spurling [loc. 4392])

Spurling argues that this image—of the child burying bone fragments—is a powerful visual metaphor for Buck’s burying other memories too painful to be resurrected, although at times these too surface in her writing ‘like a dismembered hand or leg’ (p. xii). In what follows I imply that Buck’s control over her buried life was greater than that: that her ‘memories,

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ideas, imaginative transformations’ (Davis, p. 2) emerged in more bodily shape; that, for example, the completed character Ran Colfax in Buck’s last novel, The Eternal Wonder, emerged as the result of her long meditation on how even a desperately sorrowful life might reconstitute itself creatively. Such a life was also Pearl Buck’s.

References Bentley, P. 1935. The Art of Pearl S. Buck. The English Journal 24 (10): 791– 800. Cheung, King-Kok., Guo Yingjian, and Yao Junwei. 2018. New Perspectives on Pearl Buck. Amerasia Journal 44 (3): 51–73. Christie, S. 2010. The Anachronistic Novel: Reading Pearl S. Buck Alongside Franco Moretti. Literature Compass 7 (12): 1089–1100. Chu, Y. 1934. Mrs. Buck, Author of The Good Earth. Nu Qingnian Yuekan Issue 13 (3): 107–118. Cole, J., and J. Haddad. 2019. Beyond the Good Earth: Transnational Perspectives on Pearl S. Buck. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. E.G. 1930. Review of East Wind, West Wind. Pacific Affairs 3 (5). Gao, Xiongya. 2000. Pearl S. Buck’s Chinese Women Characters. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press. Liu Haiping. 1994. Pearl S. Buck’s Reception in China Reconsidered. In The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, March 26–28, 1992, ed. E. Lipscomb, F. Webb and P. Conn. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Lyngdoh, G. 2015. Her Quest for Self: A Journey: Revisiting Select Novels of Two American Women Writers. India: Partridge. Min, A. 2010. Pearl of China. London: Bloomsbury. Wang, Yingguo. 2003. Important Issues for Exploration in Pearl S. Buck Studies. Journal of Jiangsu University (Social Science Edition). 5 (1): 63–68. Woolf, V. 1925. The Common Reader, Series 1. 2017, OK Publishing ed. London: Hogarth. Yao, Junwei. 2019a. Chinese Culture “Going Global”: Pearl S. Buck’s Methodological Inspiration. In Beyond the Good Earth: Transnational Perspectives on Pearl S. Buck, ed. J. Cole and J. Haddad. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. Yao, Junwei. 2019b. A Review of Pearl. S. Buck Studies in 21st Century China. English and American Literary Studies 31 (2): 170–181. Yao, Junwei. 2011. A Study of Dialogicality in Pearl Buck’s Studies of the Chinese Novel. Journal of Jiangsu University (Social Science Edition). 13 (6): 58–63. Zhang, Chunlei. 2005. An Analysis of the Structural Patterns and Creative Psychology of Pearl S. Buck’s Short Stories. Journal of Jiangsu University (Social Science Edition) 7 (5): 48–53.

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Zhou, Haipeng. 2010. Feminism Lost in Translation? When a Chinese Woman Speaks Through an American Woman’s Voice in Pearl Buck’s East Wind, West Wind. Feminist Formations 22 (1, Spring): 39–56. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Contents

1 2

‘Under the Shadow of a Great Creed’: Pearl Buck and Christianity

1

‘Better to Be a Dog’? Pearl Buck’s Reflections on Chinese Life and Thought in Troubled Times

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3

Pearl Buck’s Reading: ‘As If for Life’

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4

‘If a Way to the Better There Be, It Exacts a Full Look at the Worst’: Pearl Buck’s American Search After 1934

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5

In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions

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Afterword

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

Rob Hardy has written two books—on religious narratives in Iris Murdoch’s novels and on the feminine divine in the work of D.H. Lawrence, Dion Fortune and Ted Hughes plus a book chapter on Iris Murdoch as well as articles on Paul Bailey and the social worker novelist John Stroud. He is an honorary professor at Henan Normal University, China.

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CHAPTER 1

‘Under the Shadow of a Great Creed’: Pearl Buck and Christianity

‘In him was life; and the life was the light of men’ (John 1:4) ‘Death was a battle with life, and she lost’—Pearl Buck on her mother (Fighting Angel ) ‘Feed my sheep’ (John 21:17)

Ted Hughes (Hughes 1992, p. 5) argued that in the early work of some writers can be found a version of what they will be compelled to rework obsessively for the rest of their lives. Hughes’ argument provides a useful approach to Pearl Buck. She once told an audience that she advised unborn novelists not to ‘be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of salvation. Go out and be born among gypsies or thieves or among happy workaday people who live in the sun and do not think about their souls’ (Buck 1935, quoted Conn 1996, p. 178)—a humorous command since, as she knew better than most, we cannot chose our parents or where to be born. Pearl Buck in adulthood dispensed with her parents’ Christianity, but it affected her to her core and in book after book she had to return to questions like these: what does it do to a Christian to believe in an allpowerful and loving Father when confronted with daily suffering—their own and others’? What is it like for a Christian missionary to leave her home and country and live among people in another country to whom Christianity is incomprehensible? What in Christianity is life-affirming, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Hardy, Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3556-4_1

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what is life-denying? How does Christianity view the relation between men and women? What does it mean, to ‘believe’? What is it like, to search fruitlessly for God all one’s life? How might such a person find peace? How might the child of such a person find peace? Being a novelist, Pearl Buck was compelled to consider these questions not in the abstract but in relation to intensely imagined individuals. The first she wrote about was her mother, and it was the urgent issue of how she might find healing for her dead mother and for herself, her mother’s grieving daughter, which she was to address, together with the other questions, in her first book, her biography of her mother written immediately after her death. The urgency of these questions makes the book read as not only about one woman’s otherwise soon-to-be-forgotten life, but also as that of the daughter-narrator reflecting on the cruelties of a story that—unreflected on—might provoke only despair. The daughter-narrator (appropriately called Comfort, one of Pearl Buck’s given names) emerges from the shadows as one of its characters only rarely, but when she does the effect is to highlight poignantly her own lack of ability as a growing daughter to give the comfort her living mother sorely needed but which perhaps no one on this earth (including a kind husband, had such existed) could have given. Remembering an image of her mother towards the end of her life, Buck describes the cruelty which imprisoned her and to which all the major events of her life had contributed—extreme loneliness. ‘Andrew’ is the name Pearl Buck gives her father, Absalom Sydenstricker: It was after all a makeshift life. Something dimmed her. She was one who needed to do great tasks, for she could do them. All the lovely, rich outpouring of her nature seemed somehow pent up. She was perhaps one of the loneliest creatures in the world at this time of her life, for she had to have intimate love. While her children were little they had given it to her so that she had scarcely missed it elsewhere. Now that they were grown and out of the home her life seemed intolerably empty. “It would be so nice,” she used to murmur sometimes, “to have someone to take a little walk with - someone of one’s own.” This she said watching Andrew’s figure going alone down the winding road. It would not occur to him, wrapped in his thoughts and services as he was always, to ask her to go with him, and she was too proud to suggest it. Strange remote soul of a man that could pierce into the very heavens and discern God with such certainty and never see the proud and lonely creature at his side! To him she was only a woman. Since those days when I saw all her nature dimmed I have hated St Paul with all my heart and

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so must all true women hate him, I think, because of what he has done in the past to women like Carie, proud free-born women, yet damned by their very womanhood. (Buck 1936a, p. 283)

The passage refers to one of the terms (the inferiority of women) in teaching attributed to St Paul, perhaps the single most influential writer in the history of Christianity and the putative author of at least seven of the twenty-seven books which constitute the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Buck is perhaps thinking of the propositions in one book attributed to St. Paul (the first letter to Timothy) that women should ‘adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety’; that they should ‘learn in silence with all subjection’; that Adam, created before Eve, ‘was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression’; and that St Paul himself ‘suffer[ed] not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence’ (1 Timothy 2:12). In the biography we learn that this command was followed to the letter by Pearl’s father and his fellow male missionaries, to the stifled fury of Pearl’s mother. We also learn that four of Pearl Buck’s siblings had died in childhood, leaving only three alive to give their mother ‘intimate love’ during their own childhoods, and that the grief caused by those deaths had nearly overwhelmed her. The missionaries’ teaching derived from St Paul’s narratives of his own suffering included this key proposition: that suffering brings one closer to Jesus Christ. This by St Paul, for example, in the Authorized version translation, where he celebrates the physical suffering (the ‘thorn in the flesh’) as well as the ‘weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities’ he has received ‘for the sake of Christ’: there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong. (2 Corinthians 12:7–10)

The virtue of suffering and the unimportance of anything beside the imperious command to follow the Lord Jesus Christ are two key teachings derived from St Paul’s stories of his own life (as well as the teaching

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presumed to be his about women) which were imported into the narrative of the good life promulgated by the Southern Presbyterian Church to which Buck’s parents belonged. Buck shows how the power of this narrative was a key influence in her mother’s decision as a young woman to go China as a missionary. At her own mother’s (Pearl’s grandmother’s) deathbed Carie, Pearl’s mother, had vowed to sacrifice her life to God as a missionary and thereby obtain the knowledge of God which would—the implication is—retrospectively buy her own mother’s salvation: Suddenly Carie could not bear the fear in her mother’s eyes. Oh, if only she knew about God - if only she could say to her mother, “I know.” She must have a sign [...] She would give herself. “I will give my whole self to God - my whole life,” she whispered passionately. Her mind went searching recklessly ahead. There must be no half-measures - no sacrifice that was not complete. “I will go as a missionary, surely I cannot give myself more than that.” (Buck 1936a, p. 76)

The central question the biography poses is what it meant for this woman to ‘give her whole self to God’, given the internal and external places to which this act of self-giving led her. Because while Pearl Buck portrays her father as scarcely aware of where he lived externally, and internally accepting St Paul’s teachings with serenity, she describes her mother as anything but serene. While her father found quietness in his belief that ‘the voice of human suffering…was too often…the voice of those who cried out against the just punishments for their sins from a just God’ (Buck 1936a, p. 231), the intolerable pain Pearl Buck’s mother personally experienced and saw around her in the lives of the poor meant that the serene places of her life were those she cultivated in imagination and memory because the present was too terrible to live in. They were those she brought in memory from America and nurtured where possible in her Chinese houses and gardens—flowers, trees, fresh water—the places where Pearl’s grandmother had lived but which Carie had left in order to follow the Pauline narrative of the virtues of sacrifice and suffering. Pearl Buck shows that the deep loneliness of her mother’s fractured, ‘makeshift life’—caused by the deaths of her children, her husband’s emotional unavailability, her living in one country while dreaming of another—is related to what Buck increasingly represents as a great emptiness at its core. ‘The question of her life’—‘where and what was God’—was to

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receive no answer. Pearl compares Carie’s mother’s deathbed experience with Carie’s own towards the end of her life: Sometimes in the deep night when the darkness pressed upon her and she grew faint and breathless, she turned her enormous eyes toward Comfort who was with her and she asked the old question her own mother had asked, “Child - is this - death?” And when Comfort cried out passionately, “I will not let you die!” she smiled and said, “How like me you are - so I told my mother, too.” (Buck 1936a, p. 306)

But whereas Pearl’s grandmother at her death had exclaimed ‘it’s all true’, when, shortly before her death, someone plays Carie the record ‘O rest in the Lord, Wait patiently for Him’, Pearl Buck reports Carie saying, with a quiet and profound bitterness, ‘Take that away. I have waited and patiently - for nothing’ (Buck 1936a, p. 307). ‘We never played it again’, the narrator records, ‘and to this day I cannot endure that music for the memory it brings back of her voice—not a sorrowful voice, but quiet, proud, resigned, courageous. She had faced by this time the truth, that the search for God with which she had begun her life was not in her time to be fulfilled’ (Buck 1936a, p. 307). One reader, reacting to the divine silence which met that search, might say that Buck identifies it as the silence of the austere God who was unable to value the mother’s ‘pagan quality’ (Buck 1936a, p. 67) and her devotion to the body rather than the soul, to what she had felt was ‘too passionate in her own blood’ (Buck 1936a, p. 67). One of the most poignant aspects of the biography is its record of different characters’ attitudes to the word ‘body’. To Buck’s father, people were primarily souls whereas, when ‘someone [said] of another’s dead child, “The body is nothing now, when the soul is gone”’, Carie said simply, “Is the body nothing? I loved my children’s bodies. I could never bear to see them laid into earth. I made their bodies and cared for them and washed them and clothed them and tended them. They were precious bodies” (Buck 1936a, p. 135)

and Buck presents her mother’s grief over her dead children as continuous with her wistfulness when hearing of a great romance, which she, in her functional marriage, had never experienced:

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Once, when we were listening to a story a woman was telling of a great romantic love in her life, I saw in Carie’s eyes a certain wistful look. But it passed soon, and she said quietly, “my children have been my great romance”. (Buck 1936a, p. 147)

Another reader might say that the essential sadness and loneliness of the mother’s life was caused by her tragically ill-judged dedication to a narrative and a God not her own. C.G. Jung spoke of the self-knowledge necessary to find the proper narrative, or myth, of one’s own life: Buck describes her mother, in her fruitless solitary searches for God, as ‘never [understanding] her own nature well enough to know that when she took time to withdraw from human life and from men and women and all their human needs, it would be only because she was dead’ (Buck 1936a, p. 264). The Exile, this reader might conclude, is the tragic account of an increasingly lonely life lived against the grain of its own nature, as were the lives of all women who lived in stories derived from St Paul’s misogynistic life-denying teachings, passed down generation by generation and which no one woman of Pearl’s mother’s time and place could have been strong enough to resist. But such a conclusion does not take account of this fact: that The Exile is not simply a daughter’s record of the sadness and loneliness of her mother’s life. It also reads as if it had been written out of a compelling need both to heal the dead mother and find healing for the writer herself. What does this mean? Trying to find healing for oneself through telling a story is comprehensible, but healing for the dead? Isn’t the idea related to that which had possessed Pearl’s mother when she was young—of sacrificially ensuring her own dead mother a place with God? That can be argued. But what I want to do justice to is the love which fills the pages of Buck’s biography of her mother and which often seems like a yearning to give life to the woman whom the writer intensely imagines before her as she writes, not in order to ensure her place with God now that she is dead. ‘Here she stands’, we read in the first pages of the book, ‘in the American garden she has made in the dark heart of a Chinese city on the Yangtse River. She is in the bloom of her maturity, a strong, very straight figure, of a beautiful free carriage, standing in the full, hot sunshine of summer’ (Buck 1936a, p. 9). One need do no more than point to the power of the words ‘doing justice to’ and say that Pearl Buck’s obvious wish to do justice to the life of her dead mother was the same wish that was to power her loving portraits of Chinese mothers in novels such as The

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Good Earth and The Mother, women who share some of the characteristics of Pearl’s own American mother. In doing justice to these women and to her own mother, in describing their lives from childhood to death, Pearl Buck was possessed by the idea energizing all great fiction or biography written out of love: that writing is a kind of magic enabling the author to say (in Shakespeare’s words) to her beloved character, ‘bequeath to death your numbness, for from him dear life redeems you’ (The Winter’s Tale, V iii.). The unspoken sorrow behind such an idea is that it is not true. But the author has to write as if it were, and the power of The Exile comes from its living in two worlds at once: one where Carie is dead and another where she lives on in her daughter’s mind. In this world the daughter can at last bear witness to her mother’s courage and kindness and tell her story the way it should have been told during her life, had a witness been there to tell it: the story which Carie’s husband (Pearl’s father) could not tell. The daughter attempts to give the mother a life lived under a loving and approving gaze, and in this sense becomes the life companion she should have had. Her numbness bequeathed to death, the mother becomes in the biography’s pages redeemed and healed by ‘dear life’ not by the deathly narrative of the virtue of suffering. The word ‘life’, applied to her in the first page of her daughter’s description—‘One was caught and held with the vigor and the strength of life in her face’ (Buck 1936a, p. 9)—is a key opening another door in the biography: to understanding how Pearl brought some healing to herself by telling her mother’s story. For The Exile not only retells the mother’s story under a loving adult gaze, but also structures the stories of all its characters around the polar opposites of the words life and death. I have referred to the life-denying narrative imported into the biography which Buck believed derived from St Paul, but other Biblical stories, those of the life of Jesus, also inform it. For implicitly the whole book refers to Jesus, in whom ‘was life; and the life was the light of men’ (John 1:4). Reading the mother’s story under the illumination shed by those stories one sees more in it than the conflict between two mismatched innocents and the woman’s subsequent long self-condemnation to suffering: it is also the story of one passionate to protect the little ones of the earth. Jesus’s teaching that ‘not a sparrow falls to earth without your Father’s knowledge’ (Matthew 10:29) or his lament over Jerusalem, which would not allow him to gather its children together, ‘as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings’ (Matthew 23:37;

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Luke 13:34), illuminates one of the earliest episodes in The Exile—where Carie poured out [on the gardener who had robbed a bird’s nest] a torrent of well-articulated Chinese, and he skulked astonished from her presence. Then in a passionate pity she turned to the fluttering mother bird and her voice fell until one would not have said it was the same voice, and she coaxed the mother bird and twisted the rose branches this way and that and picked up the despoiled nest and put it tenderly back, and sorrowfully and angrily she gathered the broken eggshells together and buried them. (Buck 1936a, p. 11)

Carie’s ‘passionate pity’ is recorded many times in the biography—not only for a mother bird whose nest had been ‘despoiled’ but for those whose homes were places of torment, or prisons of solitary confinement, or only distant memories: these she invited into the home which she had taken such pains to recreate after her distant American childhood, and listened to their stories. They included that of a dazed Chinese woman whom Carie rescued from ‘her wretched hut’ (Buck 1936a, p. 135), after she found her holding the body of a newborn baby girl, its skull crushed by the man ‘not her husband’ (the woman thereafter ‘never left [Carie] until old age made her incapable’ [Buck 1936a, p. 135]); or an itinerant American whom ‘the world had dealt with…until he was scarcely to be recognized as human’ (Buck 1936a, p. 212), and who, when he left after a week, ‘hesitated at the door and at last…muttered, “Never reckoned I’d see America again - have, though, and right here, ma’am!”’ (Buck 1936a, p. 213); or the daughter of an English business man and a Chinese woman, ‘an ignorant, pretty girl with whom he had become infatuated in a sing-song house’ (Buck 1936a, p. 53)—the daughter becoming, as she grew up accepted by neither Chinese nor English, ‘lonely beyond imagination’. It is clear, as Buck tells these stories, that she is leading the reader to the foundation text of St Matthew 25:35–40 behind them, and which she explicitly refers to at the end of the book: She was one of those who, having visited the sick and those in prison and cared for the widowed and fatherless and fed the hungry and wept with those who wept and laughed with those who were merry, reproached herself that she had not chosen a better part. She was one of those who reproaching herself humbly might have said to the God she sought, “Lord,

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when did I all these things for You?” To such a one might He make answer, “Inasmuch -”. (Buck 1936a, p. 314)

This—of her mother ministering to life, not preaching death—is the triumphant story The Exile intends to tell as an alternative to the story of failure which Buck thinks Carie herself would have told: I suppose she would have considered her life a failure if she had judged it by the measure of what she had meant it to be. Certainly if at the beginning she could have seen the end she would have called it failure. The search for God, the need of the deep, puritanical side of her multiple spirit, was never fulfilled. (Buck 1936a, p. 313)

And this alternative story, bequeathing to death all Carie’s suffering so that the richness of the life she actually lived—‘to us, among whom she lived, what a life it was!‘—reads not only as the gift of a daughter breathing life into the memory of her beloved mother, but also as that daughter’s attempt—the first, since this was Buck’s first book—to resolve in herself the two great psychological conflicts which tore ‘the multiple spirit’ of her mother and which she had inherited: conflicts about the nature of God taught by Presbyterian missionaries, as well as those arising from living in one country while carrying the cultural and religious inheritance of another. For her mother she tried to resolve the two conflicts not only by identifying her with ‘the righteous’ of Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats—those who unknowingly served God, but also by restoring to her the identity of full citizen of her beloved homeland: ‘to the thousands of Chinese she touched in every sort of way she was America. How often have I heard them say, “Americans are good, because they are kind. She was an American…To all of us everywhere who knew her this woman was America”’ (Buck 1936a, p. 315). And if restoring to a child’s consciousness the image of her parent as having after all lived a triumphant life can bring that child healing, then this book does so. But it does not do so completely, because the resolutions Pearl Buck gives her mother were not enough for herself. For herself she had to do more. She had to do more because her China, as Hilary Spurling has shown, was not her mother’s, while the ‘America’ of Pearl Buck’s childhood was partly an imaginary construct built by her mother’s memories and stories (as well as the religious teaching of both parents) which, though imaginary, nonetheless had a profound effect on the little girl. Carie’s solution,

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as we have seen, to the problem of having to live in two countries at once, of the present and of memory, was to retreat to and recreate, where she could, the home of memory, until, her daughter records, she lost ‘the old sick longing for the West Virginia Hills’ having learned ‘that home and country are in one’s own heart’ (Buck 1936a, p. 260). In contrast, Pearl could not retreat from China; it was her home. ‘I spoke Chinese first, and more easily…If America was for dreaming about, the world in which I lived was Asia…I did not consider myself a white person in those days’ (Harris 1969, p. 44; quoted Spurling, p. 2). Her imperative was to try to resolve the childhood conflict caused by living in a world which was her home among adults for whom it was not. According to her own account she did so by keeping the door between her two worlds firmly closed. Spurling argues that Pearl decided to shut the door in childhood: as an adult she spent her life trying to keep it open: but one must not minimize the long-term effect on her of that childhood decision, with the weight of her American inheritance sometimes threatening to slam the door on her Chinese self and give the adult Pearl Buck a false American identity in the image of her parents and their missionary colleagues. For as well as ‘for dreaming about’, America was represented for Pearl by her childhood experience of the small community of Southern Presbyterian missionaries, and by Biblical fundamentalism’s centrality to their lives. This meant that not only was Buck exposed from a very young child to the language of the Bible, whose beneficial effect on her prose can be seen, but also to the attitudes of Presbyterian missionaries towards Chinese life and culture (see especially Silver 1973), such as those represented by her father’s 1889 article in The Chinese Recorder: The truth is the Chinese are spiritually and mentally very much in the same condition as many of them are physically, under the influence of a fatal opiate...They seem almost as devoid of mental and spiritual life as the idols they worship are of physical life. (Sydenstricker, p. 329)

The influence of a powerful father on a highly sensitive child cannot be overestimated, and it is hardly surprising to learn, therefore, that Pearl Buck herself, during the time she lived in Anhui province, was to express similar attitudes. For two years from August 1917 Buck, now in her midtwenties, and her new American husband John Lossing Buck worked as missionaries in Nanxuzhou, described by Hilary Spurling as ‘a nondescript settlement, mud-walled with mud houses and unpaved mud streets,

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barely a mile across, on the vast, flat, featureless, deforested flood plain of the Hwei River’ (Spurling, p. 103), where Buck adopted her mother’s ‘fortress mentality’ (p. 128). It was this landscape in which her Nobel prize-winning novel The Good Earth was to be set, that lyrical and admiring account of the lives of a poor Chinese farming family, but it was also here where Buck’s American inheritance waged war on her Chinese identity. Her letters of the time, written in what Spurling calls the ‘terminology of repentance and expiation…set out in a tone of paranoid self-righteousness’ (Spurling, p. 24), could have been written by either of her parents, with descriptions of China’s ‘dreadful wickedness and weakness’ (Spurling, p. 24) and ‘the terrible degradation and wickedness of a heathen people’ (Spurling, p. 123), examples of which were, Buck suggested in her end-of year report to the New York church that sponsored the Nanxuzhou mission, ‘idol worship, infanticide, alcoholism, gambling, and opium addiction’ (Spurling, p. 123). ‘China’, Pearl Buck wrote to her parents-in-law, ‘is a country given to the devil’ (Spurling, p. 127). The woman who had lived in two worlds as a child had apparently solved the conflict between them as an adult by firmly and finally identifying herself as American, as her mother had done, and pushing her Chinese self out into the cold. But only apparently, because for her this solution could not last. She could not stop yearning for the China of her childhood which during this two-year period she renounced. ‘Religious solutions’—meaning adopting the language and beliefs of Presbyterian missionaries, Spurling writes— ’might provide the only available means of dealing with constant, intolerable exposure to the consequences of slavery, forced marriage, the murder of female infants and the suicide of young women the same age as herself’ (Spurling, p. 124), but adopting these solutions uncritically also meant that Buck was in danger of denying herself at a very deep level. What good would it have done her to have gained America but to have lost her Chinese soul? One way of looking at the novels set in China which immediately succeeded her biography of her mother is to say that they were the places where she attempted to heal the deep divisions which tore her as they had torn her mother, where, in the language of a former time, she tried to save her soul by telling the stories not only of what was tragic and pitiful but also of what was most life-affirming and admirable in the lives of China’s people, particularly its women. These stories, particularly The Good Earth (1931), Sons (1932), The Mother (1934) and A

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House Divided (1935), were created not by the narrow vision of a fundamentalist Christianity interested only in giving or imposing but by the expansive and compassionate vision of an artist who allowed herself to receive, reflect on and be healed by the lives of the people among whom she had been brought up during her formative years. For a time such a soul-saving strategy, where she in turn pushed Christianity out into the cold, into caricatures of Western missionaries (such as the red-haired, long-nosed apparition in The Good Earth), worked. But it could not work forever. One reason was because Absalom Sydenstricker, as if repressed by his daughter’s superego in her biography of his wife, became increasingly present to that daughter, as if he also demanded the right to tell his story. And, in allowing this, shortly after his death, fifteen years after she wrote her mother’s life, Buck gave voice to the archetypal religious male who had chosen ‘the greatest god he knew and set forth into the universe to make men acknowledge his god to be the one true God before whom all must bow’ (quoted Spurling, p. 252). But this figure, who sometimes seems like the hero of Buck’s rewritten version of Jane Eyre, where St. John Rivers does indeed compel Jane to follow him as his missionary wife, was more than an archetype. He was Pearl Buck’s own father, and the questions about being a Christian she had asked in relation to her mother return in her biography of her father with increasing urgency. To reiterate: for Buck questions about Christianity were always about individual Christians and the more urgent when they were about her own parents. How could her father believe in an all-powerful and loving God when confronted with daily suffering? How did he view suffering? How did he approach those among whom he had come to live and work and to whom Christianity was incomprehensible? Was there anything life-affirming in his version of Christianity? How did it really view women? We might also ask: in writing the story of her father’s life did Buck try to give him healing as she had her mother? Did she further heal herself? And—although she did not ask this question, we, her readers, can: what compelled her to return to the examination of Christians and Christianity in subsequent novels? But perhaps those questions miss the main point about Buck’s biography of her father because of the paradoxes which characterize him, the first being this: that in his daughter’s version of him he is both solidly present and curiously absent. His stubborn solidity seems to answer all questions which his daughter might want to pose to or about him. Suffering—including that of dying unbaptised Chinese people who would

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go straight to hell? It was what the Lord willed—seen in her story of a medical missionary’s reaction to a Chinese girl’s death: I as a child was once in the courtyard of her hospital and a poor slave girl was brought in dying of opium which she had swallowed. Dr Greene, hearing of her extremity, rushed into the courtyard, but it was too late the poor thing died at that instant. I had seen plenty of dead people, even at that age, but this was my first sight of a soul passing out of a body. And the girl was so pretty - so pretty! I could not keep from crying and I begged Dr Greene, “She won’t go to hell, will she? God wouldn’t send her to hell, would He?” Dr Greene’s gentle pale face moved a little, and she sighed, “I don’t know, my child - I don’t know. It doesn’t bear thinking about.” And she stroked the girl’s fading, cooling hand. It was a heresy, of course. It would never have done to say such a thing in the presence of the saints [the other missionaries]. Not to know! It was a sin not to know. (Buck 1937, p. 172)

From the humane agnosticism of one like Dr. Greene were to proceed later liberal creeds palatable to modern tastes, but poison to her father’s. ‘I have not seen anywhere the like of Andrew and his generation’ (Buck 1937, p. 63), Pearl Buck reports, less with admiration—though that is certainly there—more with simple recognition of his towering, extraordinary presence in that company of ‘saints’, themselves no ordinary men and women; a presence informed by one quality above others: solid certainty of his life’s purpose. It was this that enabled him, against great opposition from fellow missionaries, to undertake his translation of the Greek New Testament into Chinese; to show extraordinary personal courage and endurance of hardship; to acquire a knowledge and love of impoverished Chinese people which meant that at the end of his life they would not tolerate his replacement: Looking back, I can understand how these young priests did not savour such an uproar about an old man whose ways of working were not their ways. It could not have been pleasant to hear that they were not loved as he was loved, nor welcomed as he was. Nor did they realize how many years it had taken him to win that love - how much persecution he had borne and how steadfastly he had visited the sick and stayed by the dying and how often upheld a struggling soul. None of us know how often he did these things, for he never told us. They were simply part of his work. Most of all the Chinese loved him because he knew no colour to a man’s soul and

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he took the part of the yellow man again and again against the white man - the lonely convert’s side, the poorly paid native preacher’s side, against the arrogant priest, the superior missionary. (Buck 1937, p. 220)

Occasionally Buck gives a more detailed picture of one of ‘those little handfuls of converts that wrings my heart even at the distance of these years’ (Buck 1937, p. 82): those who had ‘come out from the safety of their people to believe him’, those whose difference from their fellows was drawn to what was different in her father, for example the old woman whose eyes were always too intelligent, too profound. She had been born with more wisdom than her fellows. It had not been quite enough for her, the common life of marriage and bearing children. She had enough for all this and something more. Ask her why she was there and she would answer a little painfully, “I have tried all the other ways to find peace, but I have not found peace.” “What ways, lady?” “I have prayed to many gods. I have listened to many priests, but I have this aching in me.” She puts an exquisite old hand delicately upon her breast [...]. “I ask myself, why am I alive? Why are all these about me alive? What does birth matter and marriage and birth again, since at last there is only death? What does this mean?” “And you hope to find peace here?” “I do not know - only here is a god I have not known, and here is a strange priest I have not heard.” “You believe what he says?” “I do not know, but I feel at least he is to be believed because he so believes himself. It is something when a priest believes himself. So I will try.” (Buck 1937, p. 83)

In such testimony her father comes alive, breaking down attempts to fit him neatly into a niche: his missionary achievements—which Buck presents as real, particularly his insistence on fostering the independence and education of Chinese Christians—the product of his unswerving certainty, his complete belief in having been called by God. But this solidity paradoxically coexists with another aspect: his absence, as though he was never quite fully in or of this world, which meant that ‘he fitted into no niche as a father’ (Buck 1937, p. 186), never really attended to his daughters and wife as bodies rather than souls, indeed doubted whether, as women, they had souls. ‘A woman’s soul could scarcely count as a soul…In his records of converts he always noted

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them […] A really successful year was when the percentage of women was low’ (Buck 1937, p. 81). Buck records, in a poignant image of her father’s unawareness of his children’s needs (she is obviously referring to herself), a young daughter’s hopeless yearning for an unobtainable doll in an American catalogue: the doll remained upon the pages of the catalogue to dream over and at last to relinquish, except to this day that child, now long grown, cannot pass the doll counter in a toy-shop - cannot have her fill, for that matter, of real babies. (Buck 1937, p. 139)

—a record, if ever there was one, of a human heart’s aching need. There is the additional paradox that her father’s (literal and metaphorical) absence from his family was accompanied by his increasing communion with God, so that at times he was ‘without the body…conscious of the presence of God…like a strong light shining, day and night’ (Buck 1937, p. 146), until at the end of his life his body was no more than a ‘pearly shell’. Buck ends her father’s biography with another poignant detail relating to her parents: that around the grave of her mother, who all her life yearned for the empty spaces of America, ‘is the ceaseless roar of human shouting and quarrelling and laughter’ (Buck 1937, p. 273) while around her father’s, whose life’s work was set in that human scene, ‘the winds blow and the sun and the stars shine down, and there is no human voice to be heard anywhere’ (Buck 1937, p. 273). It was for his daughter to try to encourage her father’s voice to speak, the father who, after she had persuaded him to write his autobiography, could only manage twenty-five pages. ‘Our Life and Work in China is a factual record of his religious journey in the service of the church stripped of human interest and omitting all but perfunctory passing references to his wife and children’ (Spurling, 210, p. 160). And it was for this daughter, too, to tell his story for the same reason that she had told her mother’s, to give him posthumous life—though with this difference, that she found she could not give her father life as she had given it to her mother, because, as she writes in her extraordinary penultimate sentence, he had ‘never touched the fringe of human life, he never knew its stuff, he never felt its doubt nor shared its pain’ (Buck 1937, p. 274)—her final judgement on a man who ‘lived, a happy soul, and never knew he died’ (Buck 1937, p. 274). From one perspective the man emerges from his

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daughter’s pages as so deeply damaged by his emotionally starved childhood, by the unsatisfied ‘craving that a child has, kept through all the scores of years, for affection and understanding’, that as an adult he did not know how to give or receive either. From this perspective her father’s huge self-confidence was a great wall—or ‘pearly shell’—inside which the small child cowered, his fear flashing out only at moments—at the word ‘death’ when ‘terror crept into his eyes’ (Buck 1937, p. 269). From this perspective also his daughter’s task when he was an old man was not to try to give him a richer life but to preserve his equanimity, minister to his very simple needs, preserve the shell inside which he lived: Carie’s daughter [Pearl Buck] listened and never argued with him, or ever showed her unbelief. Not for her life would she have robbed Andrew of one atom of that faith which had made life so worth living to him, not now when he was old and needed the faith by which to die. (Buck 1937, p. 270)

But from another perspective Buck’s compassionate understanding of her father at the end of his life, her becoming more his mother than his daughter, came at a cost. Who was available to understand and give her the affection she so needed? Who ‘thought to ask her what her own faith was’? (Buck 1937, p. 270), caught as she was between the shadows cast by those two extraordinary people her parents, one never finding her faith, the other never losing it? Certainly, her father never thought to ask his daughter about her faith, ‘being so full of his own’ (270). So she had to work out further, and in solitude, her attitude to Christian faith after the deaths of her parents. The figure of the missionary did not cease to haunt her. She ended a book published two years before her death by hailing the work of the original Christian missionaries in these words: And there were others, more and more of them as the years passed and the story of Jesus Christ become known throughout the world. Through them the message of love and brotherhood became the new hope of the nations. And that hope will never die. (Buck 1971, p. 679)

One response to these words is that at the end of her life Buck reverted to type, became again her father’s daughter. But another is that these words only join, do not supersede, all the others with which she used the

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figure of the missionary to think about Christianity. Her father was one version of this figure, but there were others. One especially shared Pearl’s father’s commitment to preaching the Gospel among the poor and tried to take even less thought, if that were possible, for where he and his family should live or what they should eat or drink or wear. The brief story of Paul Miller and his family, told in the first chapter of God’s Men (Buck 1951), is one of Buck’s most powerful and again faces head-on some of the questions with which we started: what it does to a Christian to believe in an all-powerful and loving Father when confronted with daily suffering; what it is like for a Christian missionary to leave home and country and live among an alien people to whom Christianity is incomprehensible; and, most of all, what it is like to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and try to take no thought for one’s own or one’s family’s life? And Buck’s answer is not a simple denunciation of such ‘folly’ (loc. 6504): with care she develops Paul Miller’s story (mainly lived in near beggary on the impoverished turn-of-the century Beijing streets) against the background of another kind of missionary who follows Jesus as long as he doesn’t lead his family and himself too far from the safety of their mission compound or prevent his son going to Harvard. Buck develops this background with a humour that would have graced George Eliot, as in the missionary wives’ discussion of what to ‘do’ about Paul Miller and his family: The ladies began to talk again. He [the son destined for Harvard] perceived at once that they were talking about the Faith Mission [Paul Miller’s] family and saying exactly the sort of things with which he could agree. Mrs. Tibbert, a Methodist and therefore not quite the equal of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, although better than a Baptist, was redeemed by being the wife of a bishop. (loc. 245–250)

In contrast, Paul Miller, who, like Pearl’s mother, dreams all his life of the sweet American air, started his life in China ‘anxious to follow in the exact footsteps of Jesus’, and had preached in a boat ‘from the waters of the dirty Whangpoo in Shanghai to those who gathered upon the shores to listen. There had been more staring than listening’ (loc. 268). Buck has taken her parents’ story and given it to Paul Miller and his wife, minus the distracting variable of marital incompatibility, enabling her to ask what it would be like for a devoted and undistracted couple to follow Jesus. In

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that case, could following Jesus be life enhancing rather than denying? But what if the couple have children? For the variable Buck does not remove in God’s Men, present also throughout her biographies of her parents, is the watching presence of a sensitive and thoughtful child: called Comfort in The Exile, ‘Carie’s Daughter’ in Fighting Angel and Clem, the Millers’ son, in God’s Men. As Pearl Buck sees with Comfort’s and Carie’s daughter’s eyes, so also she sees through Clem’s—and he also becomes her means of focussing her views of the wider world. For the Millers are ‘placed’ not only by the comic American missionary wives; the first pages of the novel describe a fight between the thin, ragged American child and a Chinese boy who calls Paul Miller a beggar (loc. 166). Buck intently explores what it means to be the child of a man like Paul Miller who follows Jesus to the extent of asking a baker to give him bread because God had told him to (loc. 184), in contrast with the other ‘Jesus people [who] are all rich except this one family who live among our poor’ (loc. 193) and who, in the end, dies with all his family except his son Clem at the hands of the ‘Boxer’ rebels. A more formulaic writer than Buck, narrowly proselytizing for Christianity, might have made the triumphant deaths of two American martyrs and their children at the hands of brutal persecutors the end of the Millers’ story. But by preserving Clem’s life she is able to extend her enquiry into the cost of truly following Jesus and to assess that cost using not only the comically hypocritical (and therefore dismissible) words of the other American missionaries, but also the serious words of Chinese observers which she reports with respectful humour. Two observers stand out. One is the scholar who comments on the uniqueness of the Millers’ poverty among the other followers of Jesus and who tells Clem, as the threat to missionaries intensifies, that his father should take his family to Shanghai, and who, on Clem’s telling him that he won’t because his father believes in God, replies ‘“This is no time to believe in God,[...]Tell him to save his family first.”’ (loc. 606). The other observer is a chance acquaintance Clem meets on his long walk to the sea after discovering his murdered family, an old woman who speaks ‘the wisest [words] he had ever heard’ (loc. 1079): the great fault with Heaven and whatever gods there were was that they had not arranged that food could fall every night from the sky, enough for everybody to eat so that there could be no cause for quarrel (loc. 1079)

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—words which dictate the course of Clem’s future life. For on discovering his dead family Clem, who from a small child had attempted to believe in a loving God, despite having himself ‘no experience of God’ (loc. 558), had given up the attempt. Buck’s description of the discovery is harrowing and shows the irreducible effect of such a trauma on a child, which means on everything the child thinks, feels or believes: Upon the quiet face, though bled white, he saw his father’s old sweet smile, the greeting he gave to all alike who entered this house, to strangers and to his own, and now to his son. Under the half closed lids the blue eyes seemed watching. Clem gazed down at his father, unable to cry out. He knew. He had often seen the dead. In winter people froze upon the streets, beggars, refugees from famine, a witless child, a runaway slave, an unwanted newborn girl. But this was his father. (loc. 801)

On a mind and body withered by such a terrible scene—immediately afterwards there had been ‘no tears in him, in his mouth no spittle. His very bladder was dry and though his loins ached he could make no water’ (loc. 865)—the old woman’s later words fall like rain: “You foreigners,” she said one day, “you grow mad with god-fever. There is something demon in your gods that they drive you so. Our gods are reasonable. They ask of us only a few good works. But for your gods good works are not enough. They must be praised and told they are the only gods and all others are false.” She laughed and said cheerfully, “Heaven is full of gods, even as the earth is full of people, and some are good and some are evil and there is no great One Over All.” (loc. 1073)

Clem cannot argue: ‘Prayers and faith seemed dream stuff now that his father was dead’ (loc. 1016). But the influence of his father remains over Clem for the rest of his life. One of Buck’s distinctions as a religious writer is to show the influence of all that constitutes a parent’s life on the nature or absence of their child’s religious belief, and it is not only by his death that his father influences Clem but by the example of his life. One of the most important features of Clem’s life is his abiding memory of his father’s love for others and of what even as a young child he had intuited as his father’s struggle to believe in the kindness of God in the face of daily evidence to the contrary. For Paul Miller had not shared Absalom Sydenstricker’s rock-like religious certainty: one night kneeling on a Beijing street

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he had ‘stretched his hands towards heaven’, knowing that ‘if evil men killed these for whom he was responsible he could believe no more in God’ (loc. 366), words which Buck could not have given to her father. In Clem’s young mind two forces come together: the words of the old woman attributing to heaven the fault that it had not arranged for food to fall from the sky, and the memory of his father’s love for the poor. Though prayers and faith remain ‘dream stuff’ to him for the rest of his life, Clem’s vision of a world free from hunger, achieved by linking geographical areas of food surplus to those of food shortage, drives him as inexorably as his father was driven to try to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. It is obvious that this vision is Clem’s own way of following Jesus: trying to feed his sheep. Buck’s story of Clem is an imaginative case study of how a child’s mind might be formed not only by the dreadful discovery of what it means to follow Jesus to the end, but also by the daily example of trying to live by faith and love—and of what it means to be the child of parents undistracted by marital unhappiness. The result is a picture of a child who, wittingly or unwittingly, lives to use his memories of his father and mother for the practical benefit of the poor—‘he had been shaped by his parents, from their simple minds and tender hearts, from their believing faith, their fantastic folly, their awful death’ (loc. 6504)—and who, wittingly or unwittingly, follows the pattern of his parents’ relationship by marrying a compatible woman who shares his mission. Buck’s final view of such a life is that in it we see what one of Christianity’s gifts to the world might be if used rightly—its energy: A great deal of character and spiritual energy could be stubbornly bestowed upon something chosen and the chosen substance was changed, transubstantiated, and so deified. (loc. 6853)

But is Clem’s life, even when powered by his own practical version of the Christian message—his faith ‘that people themselves could make a good world if only they were free from simple misery’ (loc. 6878)—a pattern for others? Is this where Buck’s pondering the Christian faith after the deaths of her parents had led her? She might have replied that there is no such thing as one human pattern to be imitated: we have to do what we can with what we are given, and it is not desirable for any child to be exposed to the sight of their murdered parents. Buck uses Clem in God’s Men not as a pattern for others but as a celebration of the creative power of one man’s struggle against terrible odds and to promote Clem’s

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belief—which neither her own father nor Paul Miller shared—that people are innately good if given the right conditions. And the right conditions in Clem’s case, Buck takes pains to show, include the amazing luck of having been born to compatible, loving parents, as great a gift, we may feel by the end of the novel, as being able to bestow spiritual energy ‘upon something chosen’. It is a gift Buck also describes in a short story, ‘The Lesson’, published before her father’s death, where a young Chinese woman learns from her mission school the lesson of love: ‘I learned... that it is lucky when a man and his wife speak together freely and always with kind voices, as though they were friends speaking easily together’ (Buck 1941c, p. 15; quoted Silver, p. 232). But this, Buck might have repeated, is luck. God’s Men contains another, unspoken, proposition—that it may be equal luck for a couple like Clem and Henrietta, his wife, not to have children at all. They ‘never talked of children, each for some unspoken reason’ (loc. 3234), and towards the end of the novel Clem’s wife reports to the doctor who diagnoses his untreatable stomach cancer that he ‘simply takes the whole world as his own responsibility. He starves with every hungry man, woman, and child, he crucifies himself every day’ (loc. 6941)—as though the whole world were his family. In his latest book Don Cupitt recommends the idea not of chastity but ‘of the religious life—perhaps especially for women—without children’ (Cupitt 2016, loc. 1396): an idea which Pearl Buck had certainly taken seriously long before, as the story of Clem and Henrietta shows. In Satan Never Sleeps , a short 1962 novel set in China, she also takes seriously the idea of chastity in male missionaries, as she illustrates in the story of Fr. O’Banion, one of two Irish Roman Catholic priests, who struggles successfully against having fallen in love with a young Chinese woman (in love with him) to her final benefit. In addition Buck gives to the father of the young woman’s baby (a runaway CP soldier, originally brought up by the priests, who apparently reconverts to Christianity shortly before capture by his former comrades) the thought that he owes his child ‘a great debt, an apology for bringing him into this turbulent world’ (Buck 1962, p. 142). Buck attributes to the soldier a meditation on Communism in China: When he had joined the Communist Party it was not idly or selfishly, but from conviction. He had believed that the Communists could bring about quickly what the Church worked so slowly to achieve, a world where men

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were good, unselfish, brotherly to one another, where all were fed, the sick healed, the children taught. He had refused to believe that such ideals were now being lost. Stubborn in his pursuit of what he thought right, he had deceived himself by saying that corruption was only temporary, that tyranny was only discipline necessary for the undisciplined and the ignorant. In his zeal he forgot the power of love. (Buck 1962, loc. 2674)

In Satan Never Sleeps, the power of love is pitted against the power of cruelty, one of the enduring legacies of the kind of ruined childhood which the Communist revolution aimed to eradicate, as exhibited by the priests’ cruellest interrogator, ‘a beggar’s son, accustomed to starvation and stealing’ (Buck 1962, p. 87), who in childhood ‘had not known kindness or heard the teachings of goodness’ (Buck 1962, p. 87), and whom the priests forgive for torturing them. The novel makes clear its support of this proposition: that chastity, as well as childlessness, when practised by those to whom it is a gift, can lead to the genuine practice of love and forgiveness: for those, as for St Paul, ‘it is good…if they abide even as I’ (1 Corinthians 7:8). But there are others for whom it is not good to abide like St. Paul. Clem, the watchful child of the first chapter of God’s Men, was the product of parents who were not chaste and who lived in harmony. The watchful child in the background of The Exile was the product of those who were not chaste and could not live in harmony. She emerges again in another version: the chief character of The Time Is Noon, begun not long after the death of Buck’s father but not published until 1966 (Spurling, p. 248). It is worth asking why Buck might have decided to publish this book so long after she wrote it. The suggestion that she needed money is plausible, as is Conn’s proposal that ‘thirty and forty and even fifty years after the events, she was still angry at her father and her first husband’ (Conn, p. 364). But perhaps, also, as she approached the end of her life Buck found that in no other novel had she so fully expressed the anguish of one for whom the struggle to believe in God and daily sorrow are so deeply connected. In conversation with Theodore Harris, long after the book was written, Buck said that Joan Bishop became the spokeswoman ‘of my thoughts and fears…a woman I had created out of myself’ (quoted Spurling, p. 133) and she shows, more completely than any other of Buck’s fictional characters, the influence of all that constitutes a life on the nature or absence of Christianity in that life. For in contrast to Clem,

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who watches his parents’ marital harmony and replicates it while choosing not to have children, Joan lives in a bleaker world which reprises the great theme of The Exile: the power of death over life. Iris Murdoch once wrote that ‘one forgets the funniness of serious writers sooner than anything’ (Murdoch 2015, p. 407) and this is certainly true of The Time is Noon. A novel may show a person living under the power of death because they are weighed down by fear or illness or addiction or by a daily struggle with grief. But there is another way in which a novel can show the power of death over life, defined as the inability to inhabit the present. This is by showing people living in yearning day-dreams of the past or future—shadows of Carie in The Exile. Sometimes their dreams are highly comic, as Buck shows in two of her characters in The Time Is Noon. In Miss Kinney, the middle-aged only child of an elderly selfish father and a mother ‘who had always been afraid of everything [and who] grew more afraid as the years went on’ (Buck 1966, loc. 625), whose one adventure was being called by God to leave her small American town for five years’ missionary work in Africa before she returned home to look after her parents and for whom that time, in her day-dreams, was more real than anything since. In the same Miss Kinney, who ‘smiled continually and [whose] eyes darted here and there, as restless as pale blue butterflies’ (loc. 210), who spoke with ‘her small nose trembling like a rabbit’s’ (loc. 608). Or in poor Mrs. Parsons, who neglects her family to dream about the day when her devotion to writing unpublishable novels (‘I don’t see how you can expect any publisher to take such drivel as you write’ [loc. 5230] her daughter helpfully tells her) will, in God’s good time, be rewarded: Mrs. Parsons always prayed before she began writing on her novel every day. “I want God’s blessing on all I write,” she used to say. “If I have God’s blessing on all I write, some day a publisher will take my book.” (loc. 4372)

God, however, has no better opinion of Mrs Parson’s work than her daughter, and a regular entertainment for Mrs Parson’s neighbours is to observe the aspiring author trudging back from the post office with ‘a bulky package - a returned manuscript of course’…‘Poor soul, don’t laugh at her. It’s been such a curse in that family, her wanting to write novels’ (loc. 555). Such is the background, fleetingly reminiscent of Jane Austen’s Emma, of Middlehope, the aptly named small American town

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where young Joan Richards lives with her parents, the minister Paul and his wife Mary. Death fights life in this novel not only by preventing living in the present but by inhabiting all that drains joy or love from life. Hilary Spurling emphasizes the extent to which The Time Is Noon reprises the relationship between Buck’s parents in The Exile: Once when she was a little girl and she heard that quarreling in the room next to hers— were they quarreling?— she had got up out of bed, troubled, quivering, to listen at the door, to know what was wrong. She heard her mother say in a small, death-like voice, almost a whisper, “Is this all? Paul, is there nothing more than this?” (loc. 3174)

‘Is there nothing more than this?’ might be an epigraph for the novel, given its evocation of human nullity—not only in the hopeless dreams of a Miss Kinney or a Mrs Parsons, but in the small tawdriness of the lives of so many of the novel’s characters. Joan’s father, for example, thinks he failed God by not answering his call to mission work overseas when young, choosing instead to live out a comfortable life as a Presbyterian minister in small town America and who believes in exacting his wife’s marital ‘duties’—‘His look said, “I have done nothing that is not my right to do”’ (loc. 1305). But Buck’s most memorable evocation of daily nullity returns her briefly to comedy before she confronts the tormenting question of how God, if there is a God, can allow the suffering of a child with a severe disability, whose ‘empty face’ (loc. 5308) with its ‘wandering empty eyes’ (loc. 4135) is only the most extreme example of some of the novel’s other empty faces, including that of the child’s father, the man Joan marries, and whose sexual and other subtleties Buck sums up with his name. Bart Pounder enters Joan’s life with a neck as ‘red as beef’ and a head ‘straight and unshaped, like a block upon his square huge shoulders’, and brings her, on their marriage, to live with his farming parents. There Joan is introduced to a grey world below the level of dream: of fundamentalist joylessness which monotonously expresses itself in words like Bart’s father’s about Bart’s mother: ‘“I hate polite talk,” he said. “It’s not honest. I expect my wife to look right. If she doesn’t, I tell her so”’ (loc. 3206), or in Bart’s telling Joan that as a child he had never had a party: ‘She was afraid of the trouble, and he was afraid of our learning something sinful’ (loc. 3281). But mostly in this world of Van Gogh’s ‘The Potato Eaters’ (‘around the plate was a circle of hands, their hands,

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great, warped, clumsy hands, thick and brutal with animal work’ [loc. 3110]) there is silence, broken by the sound of breathing, chewing and swallowing: ‘in the silence she could hear him breathing as he ate, helping himself to potatoes, to bread, to cold meat, pouring out skim milk to swallow it down in gulps’. Silence broken by the father reading the Bible to the family at the end of the day: “The thirtieth chapter of Isaiah,” he announced, and began to read slowly, hesitating over the long words, “Woe to the rebellious children, saith the Lord.” It was a long chapter, but he read it to the end. They sat, motionless as stone. Were they listening? She looked from face to face, but she did not know. The mother sat with utter emptiness upon her face, lax with the habit of weariness. It was not possible she heard. (loc. 3142)

Such is the home and family in which Joan Richards finds herself after the death of her parents, newly married to a man who with whom she will experience a level of marital unhappiness beyond even that of her parents Paul and Mary Richards, the fictional representatives of Absalom and Carolyn Sydenstricker. It is a kind of death for the bright, passionate young woman and in her evocation of Joan’s loneliness and sadness—a version of her own loneliness after her own marriage and the birth of her daughter—Pearl Buck takes further her reports of the battle between life and death in the biographies of her parents. For at least her own parents and Joan Richards’ parents had areas of compatibility: they valued education and were educated people themselves. But Bart Pounder? ‘How did one talk to an oaf?’ Joan asks herself on first meeting him. What kind of life can such a woman live with such a man? What attitude can she find in herself to life with such a man? Can Christianity help her to discover the right attitude, and to the daily grief of living with her severely disabled child, the product of their marriage? People make stupid marriages and Joan Richards’ is one of them. Buck’s authorial response to it might have been to imitate Jane Austen’s elegant dismissal of Maria Rushworth, at the end of Mansfield Park, to a life sentence of lonely misery after the failure of her stupid marriage to another oaf. But, towards Joan, Buck is not so cruel: she finds her centre of self in Joan Richards in a way that Jane Austen never could have done in Maria Rushworth, the only centre of self available to Austen in that novel being another watcher, Fanny Price. Pursuing the parallel between Fanny Price and Joan Richards for a moment may help to clarify the nature

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of Joan Richards’ (or Pearl Buck’s) self and the problems which face it. Fanny Price also spends long hours alone reading, thinking and watching and is at times almost intolerably lonely, but she is nurtured by a deep religious faith and sense of duty lived in a secure social world which receives its conventional fictional validation by her ‘appropriate’ marriage at the end of the novel. (That the validation is conventional does not invalidate the novel’s commitment to portraying a religious faith like Fanny’s as a guide to life.) Joan Richards’ world is not Fanny Price’s. Fanny’s social world and certainty have long gone, and with it the authorial certainty which condemns a character to life-long misery as a deserved punishment for her offence against religious and social codes. For in Joan Richards’ world (Pearl Buck shows) certainty now only belongs to oafs, which was not so in the world of Mansfield Park, where Fanny’s certainty is thoughtfully endorsed with repentance and sorrow by the great pillar of the novel’s social world, her uncle Sir Thomas Bertram. After the death of the small pillar of Joan’s social world, her father, whose behaviour towards her mother was itself enough to make her question the religious authority on which it was based, Joan is left with an emptiness unassuaged by the social networks of eighteenth-century England or late imperial China and which she tries hopelessly to fill with Bart Pounder’s embrace. The world of Buck’s portrayal in The Time is Noon—1920s America—is fractured and atomized. To return to God’s Men: on arriving in America and becoming an ‘aid’ child with other ‘aid’ children who provide free labour on the farm (now owned by an ‘evil man and woman’) which had belonged to his dead grandfather, Clem Miller compares, with astonishment, the loneliness and anonymity of American with Chinese life: He was stupefied by these human beings among whom he found himself. Who were they? Where were those to whom they were kin? No one came near the farmhouse, neither friends nor relatives. In China all persons had relatives, a clan to which they belonged. These, the evil man and woman, the desolate children, belonged nowhere. (loc. 1532)

Joan Richard’s predicament echoes that of the aid children and Clem in God’s Men, the silence of Bart Pounder’s house like that of the aid children’s: ‘the silence in the house was that of beasts’ (God’s Men, loc. 1535). No one visits the Pounder farm, the family appear to have no living connections, and it is in this solitary world that Joan attempts the heart-breaking task of bringing up her child. One of the distinctions of

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this novel is the unflinching way it describes how the mother tries to accomplish that task, using whatever means are available to her to make it possible, including prayer. For The Time Is Noon meditates deeply on the place of prayer in a life, on how prayer changes as the growing life of the one praying is wounded by the world’s assaults, until in the end prayer becomes impossible. The novel begins with a scene from a Sunday morning in Joan Richard’s young adulthood but as it develops often refers to the religious certainties of childhood’s lost world, where Joan and her brother and sister could believe her father’s reference to Jesus’ description of God as ‘a kind father who did not let even a sparrow in the garden suffer… it seemed true because all the sparrows they saw were plump and busy’ (loc. 251). In this prelapsarian world, the certainty of God’s love and care can be sweetly evoked by a biblical verse—‘And underneath us are the everlasting arms’—idly heard ‘in the careless fullness of her childhood’ (loc. 5016). In the mind of this child God does not have to be petitioned because he has already given her all she needs: As a little girl Joan had looked out of the low window over the roofs of the village to the rolling hills where the sheep grazed, and had chanted, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”. (loc. 516)

But as the assaults of grief begin, so Joan’s attitude to God, and therefore to prayer, changes. As she suffers the slow increments of her first great sorrow, her mother’s dying, prayer becomes not an escape from grief but an addition to it, leading not to union with but separation from God: And so it was after a while with all praying. It became tedious to pray for a woman who steadily grew weaker. It became rebellion against God finally to keep on praying when obviously she would not get well. (loc. 1363)

—the only recourse for Joan, as she comes to this conclusion, being to sink into a lonely, silent identification with her mother, who had long ago given up prayer, in her long wait for death. And Joan’s lonely prayerless wait with her mother is to be replaced, though she does not yet know it, by a much greater loneliness, her slowly dawning knowledge of her small son’s disability. For this, despite her memory of fruitlessly praying for her mother’s recovery, the only solution seems prayer raised to a new level of intensity:

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Once she had really prayed for her mother’s life and her mother died. But then her mother was no longer young and there comes a time to die. Paul was only a child, and death was not for him— not for years upon years. She fell upon her knees by her bed, clenching her hands together, her eyes closed, her whole being pouring and concentrated. She felt a power sweeping up from her feet, through her limbs, her body, soaring upward to the cold starry sky, a shining shape of intense desire. “Oh, God, make Paul well!” […] She would give God time. (loc. 4328)

And Joan does give God time: for Paul to fail to develop as a healthy, laughing, naughty little boy and to be described by Bart’s lumpish mother as no trouble—or, as Joan wearily puts it to herself, ‘only trouble enough to break his mother’s heart’ (loc. 4522). The final assault on Joan’s prayer life is made, however, not by her heartbroken realization of Paul’s condition, but by learning of the fate in China of her sister Rose (in another of Pearl Buck’s rewritings of the end of Jane Eyre), where Rose dies with her missionary husband at the hands of a mob. This news, cruel enough in itself, is compounded by the cruelty committed as if by a cosmic idiot who had hidden from Joan the knowledge of Rose’s death while she believed Rose was safely praying for her and her disabled son. From that knowledge it is a short journey to Joan’s final statement about God to the minister of the church which had been her father’s, who suggests that Joan think about God’s forgiveness: ‘“If there were a God,” she said quietly, “I could not forgive Him”’ (loc. 5199). A just conclusion, one might think: after such knowledge, gained through heartbreak after heartbreak, what forgiveness? What else is there left for Pearl Buck or her representative Joan Richards to say about prayer, or about God? One might ask how such a conclusion differs from despair. A man who knew about despair was C. S. Lewis. He also knew how the memory of unanswered prayers can add to it. After the death of his wife he wrote that ‘what chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H and I offered and all the false hopes we had’ (Lewis 1961, loc. 265). In another book, Buck described ‘two kinds of sorrows: those which can be assuaged [like the expected deaths of elderly parents] and those which cannot be’ (Buck 1950, loc. 326). Lewis’s sorrow at the death of his wife was of the second kind, as was Buck’s at the dawning knowledge of her own daughter’s disability, dramatized in Joan Richard’s knowledge of her son’s. Meditating on different possible descriptions of God in the context of his wife’s death, Lewis produced, among others,

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‘Cosmic Sadist…spiteful imbecile’ (Lewis 1961, loc. 269), an echo of the words Pearl Buck gives Joan Richards at learning of her sister’s fate: ‘as reasonless as idiocy was death’ (Buck 1966, loc. 4505). For some, unassuageable sorrow leads to despair, but in her observation of her grief over her own child and of Joan Richards’ grief over hers in The Time Is Noon, Buck shows how the fight of hope, one manifestation of life, against despair, one manifestation of death, could be taken even into the darkest places. Both Lewis’s and Buck’s fights against despair might be described as those of two different kinds of Christian, although in the end describing Buck as one who believed in God detracts from our understanding of her, while it does not detract from our understanding of Lewis, who wrote that the conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all’, but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer’ (Lewis 1961, loc. 84). Lewis dramatized no longer dreading that conclusion by imagining a conversation with God. In comparison, Buck’s struggle with unassuageable sorrow (to be lived in, not through, as Rowan Williams puts it [Lewis 1961, 2014 ed., loc. 812]) led her not to reimport God into her life (a God whom Lewis too easily lets off the hook, Buck might have thought) but to a slow rediscovery of life outside herself, to moving from feeling that there was no more joy left in anything. All human relationships became meaningless. Everything became meaningless. I took no more pleasure in the things I had enjoyed before; landscapes, flowers, music were empty. (Buck 1950, loc. 314)

to seeing in a sort of wonder that such things went on as they had before, and then a realization that what had happened to me had actually changed nothing except myself. (loc. 346)

This coming home to a self changed after great suffering has been encountered before by readers of English literature, in the kind of homecomings described, for example, by Wordsworth or George Eliot. Both writers, whether they used the word God as a memory or as a presence, were deeply influenced by Christianity. It was the air they breathed. As we have seen, Pearl Buck was also deeply influenced by Christianity. She was an imaginative child who grew into her own identity in the space between her parents’ fundamental oppositions: between faith and doubt and between her father’s way of being a man and her mother’s of being

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a woman, as well as in the space bestowed by their great gift to her, their respect and love for Chinese people. In my examination of Pearl Buck’s conflicted attitude to Christianity I have also stressed the grounding of that attitude in the historical reality of lives lived in China during the end of the Qing dynasty and after the beginning of the new Republic in 1911, the period when Pearl Buck’s parents’ stories are set, and during one episode in particular of the last days of the Qing: the ‘Boxer’ rebellion of 1900, where the tragedy of Clem Miller’s childhood story begins, a tragedy which the child Pearl Sydenstricker herself only narrowly escaped. And we have also seen, following Buck’s return to America in 1934, she continued her examination of Christianity in post-war America, in the joyless world which is home to Joan Bishop in The Time Is Noon and which becomes home to the uprooted teenage Clem Miller of God’s Men, astonished by the emotional frigidity of that home in contrast to the China of his childhood. In the next chapter I will examine Pearl Buck’s exploration of ways of being and becoming in her fictions about Chinese people living inside and outside China—that huge, humane, beautiful, cultured, civilized, chaotic and cruel world of her representation—which had bestowed on its people (Buck often implies) the blessing of living far away from the Christian world. For centuries people in China had developed other approaches to the human world, all promoted by the great traditional thought systems of their ancient country—Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism—approaches inscribed in Pearl Buck’s thought as much as Christianity was. But she also knew that it was her task to approach this great world not only with the reverence of a philosopher but with the realism of a novelist: to ask what would be lost if ancient China and its thought systems were to disappear for ever. Her most important novels asking this question were written during the 1930s, when resolute attempts to destroy the culture and thought of ancient China lay still in the future, although for those who had eyes to see perhaps not too far in the future: East Wind: West Wind (1930), The Good Earth (1931), Sons (1932), The Mother (1934), A House Divided (1935), although she also returned to the question in later novels about China, particularly in Pavilion of Women (1946) and Kinfolk (1950). My point is that Buck’s examination of the theme of the survival of ancient China and its thought systems was undertaken during a historically precise and brutal period, China of the 1930s, and it is to this historically rooted examination that I will now turn, after using as an introduction to this period the work of Pearl Buck’s friend, the brilliant polymath Lin Yutang.

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References Buck, P.S. 1935. Advice to Unborn Novelists. Saturday Review of Literature 11 (13). Buck, P.S. 1936a. The Exile. February, 1938 ed. New York: Triangle Books. Buck, P.S. 1936b. Fighting Angel. 1937, Methuen and Co. ed. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. Buck, P.S. 1941a. Dragon Seed. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1941b. Of Men and Women: How to Be for Each Other. 2017, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1941c. Today and Forever. Macmillan and Co. Ltd ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1950. The Child Who Never Grew. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1951. God’s Men. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1962. Satan Never Sleeps. New York: Pocket Books. Buck, P.S. 1966. The Time Is Noon. 2013, Open Road Integrated. Media. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1971. The Story Bible. 1984 ed. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co. Conn, P. 1996. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cupitt, D. 2016. Ethics in the Last Days of Humanity. Salem, Oregon: Polebridge Harris, T.F. 1969. Pearl S. Buck: A Biography. 1970, Methuen ed. New York: John Day. Hughes, T. 1992. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. London: Faber and Faber Ltd. Lewis, C. 1961. A Grief Observed. 2014 ebook ed. London: Faber and Faber. Murdoch, I. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995. London: Chatto & Windus. Silver, C., Summer. 1973. Evangelism and Works of Love: Images of the Missionary in Fiction. Journal of Presbyterian History (1962–1985) 51 (2): 216–234. Evangelism and Christian Experience (Summer 1973).

CHAPTER 2

‘Better to Be a Dog’? Pearl Buck’s Reflections on Chinese Life and Thought in Troubled Times

According to Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People described by Pearl Buck in her Introduction to that book as ‘the truest, the most profound, the most complete, the most important book yet written [in English] about China’, the Chinese react to crisis by saying that ‘it is better to be a dog in peaceful times than a man in times of unrest’ (Lin 1935, loc. 5509)—a statement Lin follows with a searing commentary on the ills then facing his country, including ‘complete and unmitigated disillusionment’, ‘the death of the heart’, ‘essential hopelessness’, ‘tumult and chaos of the spirit’ plus subjection to a level of official corruption insane almost beyond belief, enforced by legal instruments such as ‘the pig-intercourse tax, the pig-birth tax, the young-pig tax, the pig-trough tax, the pigweighing tax, the pig-butchery tax, and the pork-in-the-restaurant tax and finally the pork-after-the-digestion-and-in-the-toilet taxes’ (loc. 5537). Lin despairingly concludes his book by advocating shooting China’s myriad corrupt officials before somehow changing the national character from ‘family-minded Chinese’ to ‘social-minded Chinese’ and enthroning Justice by the power of the sword in the temple of the goddesses of ‘Face, Fate and Favour’ (loc. 5701). Such, he suggests, ‘is my faith…won from long and weary thoughts’ (loc. 5714), which have considered and rejected the alternative remedies for national salvation on offer and which he lists with satiric aplomb: frugality, sandal-wearing, dancing, reintroducing compulsory school teaching of the Confucian classics, intoning Buddhist © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Hardy, Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3556-4_2

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masses, boxing, learning Esperanto or finally ‘throwing the classics into the toilet for thirty years’ (loc. 5585). Lin’s book was published by Richard Walsh, Pearl Buck’s second husband, in 1935, inaugurating a long friendship between Lin and Buck. The point of using Lin in the context of a study of Pearl Buck is to contextualize her writing about ethics and religion in China as these manifested in the devastating years between the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, years which included the disintegration of central authority with the splitting of the country into rival regions ruled by militarist leaders (‘warlords’) from 1916 onwards (Mitter 2008, p. 31), the despair-inducing atmosphere described by Lin following the establishment of the corrupt and brutal Guomindang (Nationalist) government in 1927, the ongoing conflicts between it and the Chinese Communist Party, and the overshadowing threat of Japan culminating in the full Japanese invasion in 1937. Lin starkly summarized the effects of living in such times on ordinary Chinese people, those who were members not of the China of blue porcelain bowls and exquisite silk scrolls, but [of] a China in the midst of pangs and throes of labour, a China facing the collapse of an empire and a civilization, a China of living millions of toiling humanity, with a desire to work and to live, struggling against floods and famines and bandit-soldiers and a bandit-gentry, and living in a state of chaos without meaning, turmoil without direction, unrest without change, verbiage without conviction, action without purpose, and misery without hope. (loc. 5500)

The American journalist Edgar Snow, in his description of ‘the break-up of the world’s oldest continuous culture, the collapse of a many-walled fortress of old values’ (Snow, p. 11) in 1936 asked, of contemporary Chinese people, ‘what provides them with purpose in life, now that Confucius and Mencius…and other once-sacred names no longer invoke piety in them? (p. 12). How, in other words, was one to live at such a time? Could thinking about how men and women had lived in earlier periods give any guidance to those living through times when it would have been better to be a dog? Or were such times so new, so discontinuous with the rest of history, that the old world could no longer guide?

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If he had been convinced that the old world could no longer guide, Lin Yutang would not have included in his first book, My Country and My People and another written forty-odd years later, From Pagan to Christian, lengthy meditations on Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, in which he leaves desperate contemporary reality to contemplate another world where ‘the once-sacred names’, in Snow’s words, still invoked piety. In these books Lin wrote as though there were lasting qualities in human nature to which the great religious and ethical systems of the past would always call. The human nature he describes is summarized by Buck in her introduction to My Country and My People as ‘that of a proud people, proud enough to be frank and unashamed of themselves and their ways’ (loc. 78), with ‘deep, mellow, kindly humour, founded upon the tragic knowledge and acceptance of life’ (loc. 80), and for whom what they see as the Christian obsession with creeds, sin and death is incomprehensible. More than once Lin quotes Confucius’ words ‘Don’t know life - how know death?’ (loc. 1722) and he suggests that ‘the Chinese are in love with life, in love with this earth, and will not forsake it for an invisible heaven. They are in love with life, which is so sad and yet so beautiful, and in which moments of happiness are so precious because they are so transient’ (loc. 1737). To be in love with life means not only indifference to heaven but also to religious identity: ‘most Chinese people would be puzzled and would not know how to answer if asked what their religion was’ (Lin, 1959, p. 149). That Lin uses the historic present tense here does suggests that he is remembering and appealing to a permanent substrate of what he calls ‘common sense’. It was the ‘common sense’ humanist ethics of ancient Chinese men which rejected metaphysical speculation as pointless, which embraced Confucianism because of its rootedness in this life, this earth, and which occupied the middle ground between ‘the other-worldliness of religion and the materialism of the modern world’ (Lin 1935, loc.1710). And perhaps the greatest achievement of the ancient Chinese world, which had continued up to living memory, was its tolerance of religious diversity: members of that world had quietly embraced a wide spectrum of belief and practice, including Daoism and Buddhism, both of which, in addition to Confucianism, had made such important contributions to Chinese life and thought. One might expect a man of Lin’s sophistication to consign Daoism to an imaginary exhibition of pre-scientific absurdity: describing its descent from its towering philosophical peak to a cult practising ‘magic incantations and the exorcism of demons’, he remembers observing as a child, ‘in my

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village…the cure of stomach ache by drinking a bowl of “charm water”, which was plain water with a piece of paper with occult signs scribbled on it’ (Lin 1959, p. 149). But Lin does not dismiss Daoism: in fact, he suggests, Confucian humanism never satisfied men’s wilder yearnings: ‘Man has a deeper nature in him which Confucianism does not quite touch’ (Lin 1935, loc.1916), which ‘wants to wander in the realm of nowhere’ (Lin 1959, p. 111), which yearns for gods, magic and mystery, elements of folk religion, all of which Daoism embraced and refined as it developed from its early beginnings in the austere teachings attributed to Lao Zi: Starting out with the dualistic notion of yin (female) and yang (male) principles, already current in the period of the Warring Kingdoms, Taoism soon added to its territory the fairies of the ancient Shantung barbarians, who dreamed of a fairyland out on the high seas, to which place the first emperor of Ch’in actually started out with five hundred boys and virgins to seek his immortality. (Lin 1935, loc. 2012)

Lin suggests that while Confucianism was China’s classicism, Daoism was her romanticism, standing—as well as for ‘the world of fancy and wonder’—for the return to nature and to the rural ideal (Lin 1935, loc. 1937). And if Daoism expressed the perennial longing of the human spirit to discover the wild world within and beyond the self, Buddhism, imported into China during the first century CE and adapted by her culture, came to mean ‘to the Chinese people what religion means to people in other countries, namely, something that comes to the rescue when human reason falters or fails’ (Lin 1935, loc. 2037) and, scarcely surprising ‘in a chaotic country’, which ‘declares the vanity of the world and offers a refuge from the pains and vicissitudes of this earthly life’ (loc. 2070). Moreover, ‘Buddhist temples, rather than those of Confucius, are the centre of the town and village life, where the elders gather to decide on village matters and annual celebrations’ (loc. 2033). Such was the traditional Chinese world Lin describes with such affection, a world which seemed, from the standpoint of his tormented present, to be vanishing forever, but still available in memory as a guide to those ‘men of simple sense, that simple common sense for which ancient China was so distinguished, but which is so rare today.’ It was, he said. ‘to these people who have not lost their sense of ultimate human values, to them alone I speak’ (Lin 1935, loc. 104).

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Lin was a distinguished satirist whose thought could not rest in satire. Thought beginning but not ending in satire is a trajectory with which readers of English novels are familiar. Dickens’ satiric attack on the selfpreservingly useless Circumlocution Office is replaced at the end of Little Dorrit with his writing movingly about a man and woman, both deeply wounded by life, going ‘down into the roaring streets inseparable and blessed’ to devote themselves ‘to a modest life of usefulness and happiness’. Indeed, both Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit might be taken as examples of what Lin meant by those ‘who [had] not lost their sense of ultimate human values’ in the ‘tumult and chaos of the spirit’ of Victorian England. I am not arguing for an exact parallel between Lin’s 1930s China and Dickens’ 1850s England, which saw the publication of Little Dorrit, two more of Dickens’ great satiric novels attacking English institutions plus a searing account of a European country in the grip of violent revolution, as well as Darwin’s The Origin of Species. But it is worth imagining where such a parallel might lead. Both were decades whose events led eventually to disruption of the old order: the establishment of CCP government and thought in China and the post-Darwinian disintegration of Christian faith in Britain, which led in turn to culturally dispossessed post-Maoist China and post-Christian Britain. Imagining his characters going into self-protective internal exile from the moronic roar of the world and dedicating themselves to modest lives of usefulness and, if they were lucky, happiness (Amy and Clennam in Little Dorrit, Esther and Woodcourt in Bleak House, Sissy in Hard Times ) or even laying down their lives for their friends (Carton in A Tale of Two Cities ) was Dickens’ response to the English 1850s; a response nurtured by his own version of Christianity, the imitation of ‘the life of our Lord’ he had earlier recommended to his children in his book of that name. In this respect Dickens’ response to his English world shared something with Lin’s eventual response, in external exile, to his Chinese world a hundred years later. This was finally to embrace Christianity after [dwelling] in the mansion of Confucian humanism, and [climbing] the peaks of Mount Tao and [beholding] its glories, and [glimpsing] the dissolving mist of Buddhism hanging over a terrifying void [...] only after doing so have I ascended the Jungfrau of Christian belief and reached the world of sunlight above the clouds. (Lin 1959, p. 64)

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—a response which reminds us that Lin, like Buck, was the child of a Christian pastor. This was not, however, Pearl Buck’s response to the Chinese world of the 1930s. Nor was it or could it ever be the response of most Chinese people. But placing Buck in the context described by Lin nonetheless reinforces this proposition: that Buck’s China, like Lin’s, was emphatically not some never-land of Oriental tranquillity. And for Buck, no more than for Lin, there was no Chinese ‘other’. Buck’s childhood Confucian teacher Mr Kung had taught her that under heaven all men are one. For Buck the important questions were how Chinese civilization, manifested in its ethical and religious practices, had helped its people, who were one with all people on this earth, confront the disasters and sorrows of human life (intensified now in the ways described by Lin) as well as celebrate its joys, and what would happen to this civilization if it became preserved in the memory of only the few remaining ‘men of simple common sense’—though she did not use this phrase— to whom Lin imagined himself speaking. One can imagine Pearl Buck asking, who were these men? Farmers? Scholars? What comprised the ‘common sense’ which guided them: traditional folk religion? Confucian ethics? Buddhism?—all combining to promote (in another of Lin’s phrases, which she might have used) a ‘sense of ultimate human values’? And (one can imagine her asking despairingly) if such common sense, or sense of values, proved to be no use in helping such men—or, particularly, their children—adapt to the new events shaping their world, would it not be better if they vanished quietly into history to sleep the long sleep of their ancestors, to be replaced by the new men, exponents of Western science and values or followers of Communism, rather than be preserved in her fiction like museum exhibits from China’s rural past? In her most famous novel, The Good Earth, published in 1931 and a descriptive prelude to 1930s China, Buck emphasized the new events shaping her characters’ lives. Wang Lung the northern farmer, in order to escape one of the terrible famines that periodically afflict his home province of Anhui, as a young man takes his family to the great southern city in the monstrous ‘fire-wagon’ (literal translation from Chinese, not amusing archaism) none of them has ever seen before. His stay in the city, identified by Buck elsewhere as Nanjing, includes witnessing in the street a young man distributing papers with a cartoon of a ‘great fat’ capitalist stabbing to death a ragged worker with which he illustrates his Communism-inspired speech to his audience:

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And so Wang Lung listened, and what he heard was what he had never heard before. “The dead man is yourselves,” proclaimed the young teacher, “and the murderous one who stabs you when you are dead and do not know it are the rich and the capitalists, who would stab you even after you are dead. You are poor and downtrodden and it is because the rich seize everything.” (Buck 1931, p. 86)

And when Wang Lung is an old man grey-clad soldiers, perhaps from the Nationalist army on their way north and in Wang Lung’s mind indistinguishable from warlord armies and bandits, forcibly occupy his house. This would place The Good Earth as concluding around the time of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Northern Expedition, more than fifteen years after Sun Yat Sen’s revolution which overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911 and founded the Republic of China (not to be confused with the People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949); certainly Wang Lung’s grandchildren, when he asks them whether they still study the Four Books of the Confucian canon, mock the idea as prehistoric: Then they laughed with clear young scorn at a man so old as this and they said, “No, grandfather, and no one studies the Four Books since the Revolution.” (p. 246)

The important point is that the focus of Pearl Buck’s interest here is the effect of historic events on the lives and thoughts of individual men. It is one thing to ask—as the young Communist revolutionary would have asked—whether it would not be better if a particular class of men, like farmers or scholars from the old China, hopelessly stuck in patriarchal history, should not vanish along with their prehistoric views. It is another to ask the question about an individual man. That Pearl Buck could indeed answer that question affirmatively (and humorously) when it concerned a class, not an individual man, one only has to read her Nobel lecture on the Chinese novel to discover. Her portrait of the scholars of the old China, like Yeats’ poem of that name, is full of caricatures of that mercifully disappearing class: Here he is, composite, as the people see him: a small shrunken figure with a bulging forehead, a pursed mouth...small inconspicuous eyes behind spectacles, a high pedantic voice, always announcing rules that do not matter to anyone but himself, a boundless self-conceit, a complete scorn not only of the common people but of all other scholars, a figure in long shabby robes, moving with a swaying haughty walk, when he walked at all. (Buck 1939)

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The figure whom she juxtaposed in her Nobel lecture to that desiccated specimen was the writer of fiction, who in her account was indistinguishable from the storyteller who in turn was only a member of the common people whose lives he shared, and their products were as free and wild as the earth’s: The Chinese novel was free. It grew as it liked out of its own soil, the common people, nurtured by that heartiest of sunshine, popular approval, and untouched by the cold and frosty winds of the scholar’s art. (Buck 1939)

Buck’s metaphor of the soil, applied to both people and novel, combines the meanings of nurture and individual growth in the rural world. In this world, whether of the Chinese novel or village, what was valued were not men as a class but man as an individual: [The Chinese] have always demanded of their novel character above all else. Shui Hu Chuan they have considered one of their three greatest novels, not primarily because it is full of the flash and fire of action, but because it portrays so distinctly one hundred and eight characters that each is to be seen separate from the others. Often I have heard it said of that novel in tones of delight, “When anyone of the hundred and eight begin to speak, we do not need to be told his name. By the way the words come out of his mouth, we know his name.” (Buck 1939)

Similar delight might be recorded by the reader of The Good Earth in Wang Lung, who becomes increasingly differentiated from other characters as the novel progresses, not least because of his continuing to live, even in this time of great change, by the primary values of his life: independence from gods and men, care for his family and reverence towards the land and the ancestors from whom he has inherited it. One criticism of Buck suggests the failure of humour in her writing (Spurling, p. 264), but the truth is that The Good Earth overflows with it, often rising from the same source as her loving portrayal of Wang Lung, for example in her appreciative description of his thoughts, on his return from Nanjing, about the two diminutive earth gods who have permitted the terrible famine: Wang Lung thought of the two small gods in the temple to the earth and on his way home he went and peered in at them, and they were piteous

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to behold, their features washed from their faces with rain and the clay of their bodies naked and sticking through the tatters of their paper clothes

—a fit repayment for their behaviour during ‘this dreadful year’: Wang Lung looked at them grimly and with content and he said aloud, as one might speak to a punished child, “Thus it is with gods who do evil to men!” (p. 143)

For Wang Lung, Buck enables us to see, as with a character out of Aristophanes, the gods are no more than manifestations of the malign cosmos and their chief, the jealous ‘Old Man in Heaven’, must be soothed with incense or tricked into believing that a boy baby is a girl; or, should both trickery and soothing fail, as in times of famine, shouted at as Wang Lung does earlier, when the rains fail and the famine starts: There was such anger in him now as he often could not express. At times it seized him like a frenzy so that he rushed out upon his barren threshing floor and shook his arms at the foolish sky that shone above him, eternally blue and clear and cold and cloudless. “Oh, you are too wicked, you Old Man in Heaven!” he would cry recklessly. (p. 76)

But if the reader, believing that Buck intends such thoughts (since they belong to an uneducated farmer) to be treated as no more than comic and deserving relegation to history, they should remember that they are not very different from those of Buck’s alter-ego in The Time is Noon, the suffering mother calling to the empty sky while she grieves over her disabled child. Under heaven all men are one. Buck’s writing might be described as an elaboration on what the two words ‘all men’ mean, plus this teaching: that there is no man from whom other men, even the most sophisticated, cannot learn. Her developing portrait of Wang Lung is a heartfelt protective cry of anger and love directed at those who would question the value and therefore the values of such a man in the world of the advancing new China, at those who have never seen a man such as Wang Lung, however much they think they know him. In this respect Buck is not very different from another writer closer to the British reader’s home. Thomas Hardy also wrote lovingly of those voiceless rural ones whom the roar of the world had passed by. Imagining, in 1883, a visitor from London living for six months with the man behind the cosmopolitan caricature of

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the Dorset labourer (the grunting, perpetually baffled ‘Hodge’), Hardy suggests that Hodge, the dull, unvarying, joyless one, has ceased to exist for him. He has become disintegrated into a number of dissimilar fellow-creatures, men of many minds, infinite in difference; some happy, many serene, a few depressed; some clever, even to genius, some stupid, some wanton, some austere; some mutely Miltonic, some Cromwellian; into men who have private views of each other, as he has of his friends; who applaud or condemn each other; amuse or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each other’s foibles or vices; and each of whom walks in his own way the road to dusty death. (Hardy 1884, p. 3)

—underlining the fact that Pearl Buck’s ‘disintegration’ of the caricature ‘peasants’ represented by Wang Lung into ‘dissimilar fellow-creatures’ is a mark of her creative empathy as a novelist, as it was a mark of Hardy’s. One of the most touching of Wang Lung’s fellow creatures, who enables him to reveal most clearly the nature of his values-grounded identity, is his profoundly learning-disabled daughter, his ‘poor fool’: The girl child never even sat alone, although the time was past for this, but lay uncomplaining hour after hour wrapped in an old quilt. At first the angry insistence of her crying had filled the house, but she had come to be quiet, sucking feebly at whatever was put into her mouth and never lifting up her voice. Her little hollowed face peered out at them all, little sunken blue lips like a toothless old woman’s lips, and hollow black eyes peering. This persistence of the small life in some way won her father’s affection, although if she had been round and merry as the others had been at her age he would have been careless of her for a girl. Sometimes, looking at her he whispered softly, “Poor fool— poor little fool—” And once when she essayed a weak smile with her toothless gums showing, he broke into tears and took into his lean hard hand her small claw and held the tiny grasp of her fingers over his forefinger. (p. 77)

This is the child who grows into the woman Wang Lung looks after all his life despite a character declaring that ‘such an one should not be alive at all’ (p. 295). Another touching fellow creature is Wang Lung’s old father, whose treatment by his son during the famine shows the real meaning behind the Confucian value of ‘filial piety’:

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As for the old man, he fared better than any, for if there was anything to eat he was given it, even though the children were without. Wang Lung said to himself proudly that none should say in the hour of death he had forgotten his father. Even if his own flesh went to feed him the old man should eat. (p. 78)

But if this represented the whole truth about Wang Lung, Pearl Buck would not have needed to write another two novels showing the development of his sons and grandsons. Because the question: what of the values, and value of a man like this, in the emerging new Chinese world, would not, for her, go away. Wang Lung’s value as an individual man, and his stubborn brave endurance, his care for his family and his land are not in question, even by the end of the trilogy of which The Good Earth is the first volume. Buck leaves us in no doubt of her belief that a world without a man such as Wang Lung will be diminished. But that does not mean that she unquestioningly validates him or the world to which he belongs. Raymond Williams recorded of Thomas Hardy that he wrote more consistently and more deeply than any of our novelists about something that is still very close to us wherever we may be living: something that can be put, in abstraction, as the problem of the relation between customary and educated life; between customary and educated feeling and thought. (Williams 1973, p. 197)

This articulates acutely the problem of the relation between Wang Lung and those who come after him. To take only one example of this problem: how his sons are to spend their lives. Having demonstrated customary piety by unquestioningly following his own father’s wishes for his path in life, Wang Lung expects his three sons to do the same. In fact to attribute will or choice to either Wang Lung or his father in this respect is scarcely plausible. What path other than his father’s would have been possible for the impoverished, custom-bound young farmer we meet at the beginning of the novel? But, with Wang Lung’s growing prosperity, choice becomes a reality for his sons: choice enabled, precisely, by their journeys away from customary to educated lives. For all three sons, following their father into the custom-and-horizon-bound life of a small farmer is unthinkable. Thomas Hardy again helps us to understand the trajectories of these three sons’ lives, six thousand miles from his Wessex though they are:

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In passing from the bucolic to the intellectual life the intermediate stages are usually two at least, frequently many more; and one of these stages is sure to be worldly advance. (The Return of the Native; Book Third, ch. ii., quoted Williams, p. 201)

—which is certainly true of the two oldest sons, whom we never see progressing beyond the stage of conventional worldly advance. The more interesting cases are those of the third son and his own son, Wang Lung’s grandson, who illustrate more than conventional worldly progress in their journeys from customary to educated lives. Wang Lung’s third son, passionately not wanting to follow his father in working the ancestral land, chooses to leave it to become a soldier and then warlord, the education he acquired as a child having enabled him to live inside the worlds of the great Chinese classic novels and dream of a wider, wilder life than his father’s. Buck shows with loving realism what ‘reading as if for life’, in Dickens’s phrase, has done for this young man: he begged novels of his old tutor, stories of the wars of the three kingdoms and of the bandits who lived in ancient times about the Swei Lake, and his head was full of dreams. So now he went to his father and he said, “I know what I will do. I will be a soldier and I will go forth to wars.” (p. 235)

—a profound challenge to the traditional teaching of the proverb Wang Lung quotes in reply: ‘My son, it is said from ancient times that men do not take good iron to make a nail nor a good man to make a soldier’ (p. 235). But when it becomes the turn of Wang Lung’s third son (now known as Wang the Tiger) to allow his own son, Wang Yuan, to choose his path in life, he cannot bear to do so. Thus Buck shows the conflict between the customary and the educated in the life of one man, caught in transition between the old China, a story-inspired dream as much as a reality for Wang the Tiger, and the new, the world in which his own son Wang Yuan, Wang Lung’s grandson, will have to live. With her detailed story of the life of Wang Yuan, hero of the third novel of The Good Earth trilogy, which I will consider in the second part of this chapter, we will see Pearl Buck’s compelling vision of the forces conflicting this ‘new’ young Chinese man, caught more than any other of the trilogy’s characters between a customary and educated life—where (in Wang Yuan’s case) ‘educated’ includes lengthy study at an American

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university. But first it is relevant to Wang Yuan’s story to consider what Wang the Tiger, hero of the second volume of the trilogy and Wang Yuan’s father, represents for Buck, because while Wang the Tiger’s education may not have challenged his ‘customary’ approach to women or the gods or the duties of his own son this does not mean that Buck thinks the life of a man like Wang the Tiger has no value. A charismatic figure of great physical bravery, Wang the Tiger starts his warlord career determined not to let himself and his eight thousand men degenerate into a lawless robber band but instead to bring justice to the poor, vividly instanced when he takes the side of a poor farmer in debt to a cruelly unscrupulous moneylender who wishes to take the farmer’s land because he has defaulted on his debt. The incident illustrates the Confucian view of the ruler’s duty to protect the weak, which Lau describes in his introduction to the Analects: Confucius may not have had too high an opinion of the intellectual and moral capacities of the common people, but it is emphatically not true that he played down their importance in the scheme of things. Perhaps, it is precisely because the people are incapable of securing their own welfare unaided that the ruler’s supreme duty is to work on their behalf in bringing about what is good for them. The common people should be treated with the same loving care given to babies who cannot fend for themselves. (Lau 1979, loc. 584)

This is the incident involving Wang the Tiger and the poor farmer, from which I will quote brief excerpts: At last the old magistrate asked him, “Why did you borrow and why do you not pay?” Then the farmer looked up a little and he fixed his eyes on the magistrate’s footstool, and he continued to kneel, and he said anxiously, “Sir, I am a very common man and poor, and I do not know how to speak to such as you, honored Sir.” (Buck 1932, loc. 3053)

Speak he does, however, describing the cause of his borrowing from the moneylender ten silver coins to pay for his daughter’s wedding, which with interest have now increased to forty: Sir, I had a little land from my fathers. It is very poor land and it has never fed us full. But my parents died early and there were only I and my wife, and if we starved we did it and that was all. But she bore a child, a son,

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and then after years another, a girl. When they were little it was still not so hard. But they grew and we had to wed the son and his wife had a child. Sir, think of it, the land was not enough for my wife and me and now we have these. The girl was long too young to be wed and I had her to feed somehow. Two years ago I had a chance to betroth her to an old man in a village near us, for his wife was dead and he needed one to mend his household. But I had to give her a wedding garment. Sir, I had nothing so I borrowed a little money— only ten pieces of silver, to most men nothing, but to me very much and more than I had. I borrowed it from this usurer. (Buck 1932, loc. 3063)

As the farmer recounts his story, Wang the Tiger stares at the face of one who had never been ‘full fed since he was born’ but finds himself inexplicably drawn to his feet rather than his face: There was something eloquent in this man’s two bare feet, knotted and gnarled in the toes, and the soles like the dried hide of a water buffalo. Yes, looking at the man’s feet Wang the Tiger felt something welling up in him. Nevertheless, he waited to see what the old magistrate would say. (Buck 1932, loc. 3072)

The magistrate, after taking advice, judges that the full debt must be repaid with the farmer’s land—a judgement Wang the Tiger does not see: He only saw the man’s two old bare feet curl upon each other in an agony, and suddenly he could not bear it. His immense anger rushed forth and he stood up. He clapped his hands together hard and he roared in a great voice, “I say the poor man shall have his land!” (loc 3082)

As well as its Confucian resonance—Buck’s description of the poor farmer’s pitiful naked feet indeed make him sound like the helpless baby whom it is a ruler’s duty to care for—Buck’s awakening of Biblical echoes will not be lost on some readers, particularly Christ’s cleansing of the Temple (Matthew 21:12–13), although for Wang the Tiger temples are only places for women who worry about gods. But his Confucian mercy does not prevent Wang the Tiger reserving for himself the belief as old as the ego itself of having been placed on a special path: ‘it seemed to him that heaven itself set its seal upon him…and he would achieve his greatness, for greatness was his destiny’ (loc. 1956), a belief which Buck

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gently satirizes (as she had praised his mercy) in her developing portrait of this warlord becoming, in old age, no more than a lonely deluded alcoholic dreaming of pursuing former glories once again—not now, but in the spring. And, despite his charisma, bravery and kindness, in the end Buck powerfully shows the limitations of this decrepit elderly patriarch from old China: which raises the inevitable question of whether the life of a woman from old China was worth more. This chapter so far has listened to Buck’s male characters’ voices while her women have remained mute in the background, to the imaginary approval, perhaps, of Confucius, recorded as saying that ‘in one’s household it is the women and the small men that are difficult to deal with. If you let them get too close, they become insolent. If you keep them at a distance, they complain’ (Lau 1979, loc. 2213). Assuming that Confucius did say this, what, Pearl Buck asked, was the effect of traditional Chinese thought on the lives of Chinese women? If the human world would be diminished by the loss of a man from old China like Wang Lung, less diminished by the loss of a man like his son Wang the Tiger, and not at all diminished by the loss of the likes of the money lender, what of the loss of a woman from old China like Wang Lung’s wife, O-lan; or of another character, the nameless woman protagonist, known only as the wife of Li, of The Mother? What if they and the culture which nourished them should also vanish into the soil with their ancestors, to be replaced by the lives, beliefs and values of women of the new China (it is not just boys in Pearl Buck’s fiction who call out ‘Down with Confucius’): would that be nothing but good? One way of answering these questions is to say that the lives of women in old China were unspeakable, as the opening pages of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior record. Kingston’s aunt, another woman ‘with no name’, her mother tells her, was erased from family history because—abandoned for years by her husband—she had given birth to a child by another man. This erasure was paralleled by her family’s neighbours’ attempt to raze their home from the face of the earth: ‘At first they threw mud and rocks at the house. Then they threw eggs and began slaughtering our stock. We could hear the animals scream their deaths – the roosters, the pigs, a last great roar from the ox’ (Kingston 1976, loc. 115). Everything the family owned was destroyed by their neighbours who included women. The latter’s volcanic anger over the nameless aunt’s taboo-breaking would not have been lessened, the mother’s story implies, had they known the truth, indeed perhaps they did know the

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truth, that the young woman was far from being ‘the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex. Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil’, had probably ‘masked himself when he joined the raid on her family’ and—to save his own skin, the narrator implies—had himself organized this raid (Kingston 1976, loc. 158). The nameless young woman had drowned herself and her baby when the villagers attacked. This searing story is not paralleled by anything quite as hideous in Pearl Buck’s fiction except her account of the rape of Nanjing in the novel Dragon Seed. But outside her fiction Buck described atrocities committed against young women, often by other women. As a teenage girl in Shanghai she had tried to help, in the refuge next door to her boarding school, wretched children, bought young in some time of famine and reared to serve in a rich household. We had only the ones from evil households, of course, for a bondmaid in a kindly family received good treatment as someone less than a daughter but more than a hired servant, and at the age of eighteen she was freed and given in marriage to some lowly good man. But these who ran away were the ones beaten with whips and burned by cruel and bad-tempered mistresses with live coals from pipes and cigarettes (Buck 1954, loc. 1235)

and she records elsewhere finding a young woman friend having hanged herself because she could no longer bear her mother-in-law’s treatment. That such cruelties were inflicted on women by women is perhaps what shocks the modern reader most. Both Buck and Kingston explain the roots of the cruelty they describe: Buck suggests that Such slavery was an old system and perhaps no one was entirely to blame for it. In famine times the desperate starving families sold their daughters not only to buy a little food for themselves but often, too, to save the daughter’s life. It seemed better to allow the child to go into a rich and hopefully friendly family rather than certainly to die of starvation (Buck, 1954, loc. 1241)

and Kingston writes that ‘to be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough’ (Kingston 1976, loc. 149). Pearl Buck explores the strategies available to women to assert their worth in her fictional writings about Chinese women: O-Lan of The Good Earth, sold as a slave in childhood; the abandoned nameless protagonist of The Mother; the

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wives of Wang Lung’s three sons in Sons and A House Divided plus Wang Lung’s two concubines; the ancient mother of East Wind, West Wind; Madame Wu of the later Pavilion of Women. What strategies were available to these women to live and breathe, far separated from each other socially as some of them were, if living should mean more than treading out one’s days like an ox or breathing more than inhaling as timeless truths the words of a man, whether a Wang Lung, a Wang the Tiger or even, one might add, a Confucius? One of Wang the Tiger’s two wives— a gifted, educated woman, with some choices open to her—goes to live in Shanghai with her daughter rather than remain breathing the opinions of a man with no interest in her now that his other wife has produced a son, and whose views on marriage are that ‘one woman is truly much like another’ (Buck 1935b, loc. 1585). Other strategies available to these women we will see in a moment, but it should be remembered that even the most gifted and adventurous of them would have had to travel far to avoid thoughts such as these, offered as being inoffensive as the air: While I regard the increased knowledge and education as an improvement and approaching the ideal of womanhood, I wager that we are not going to find, as we have not yet found, a world-renowned lady pianist or lady painter. I feel confident that her soup will still be better than her poetry and that her real masterpiece will be her chubby-faced boy (Lin 1935, loc 2487)

—the thoughts of that prodigiously gifted but in this case entirely representative patriarch, Lin Yutang. Pearl Buck’s final response to the question, would it not be better that subjugated poor farming women like O-Lan should not disappear together with their values and beliefs, would have been that of course it is better that cruelty and hideous restriction of life, whatever its source, should disappear, but she also believed this proposition: that ‘the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members’ (Buck 1954, loc. 6241). Her women such as O-Lan, or Wang Lung’s concubine Pear Blossom, or the young mother of The Mother, are marked by how they care for their helpless, including their animals, so that they themselves acquire a kind of sacred resonance, as though they are the true goddesses instead of the diminutive figures they worship in wayside shrines (see especially Breslin’s chapter ‘Gateways into The Good Earth’

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in Cole and Haddad 2019). Thinking about this is difficult. It is difficult to think about what happened to Kingston’s aunt with no name and her family side by side with another incident, from Buck’s The Mother, where the pregnant anonymous young woman is helped by her kindly cousin to secretly abort her baby. The incident of the enraged villagers in Kingston’s novel could be a stark illustration of the proposition that offended traditional culture will always avenge itself by sacrificing the individual to the mob. We remember that in another time and place Jane Austen’s Sir Thomas Bertram exiles his daughter Maria, another marital transgressor, because, as he ‘very solemnly assured’ Mrs Norris, ‘he would never have offered so great an insult to the neighbourhood as to expect it to notice her’ (Austen 1814, p. 365), ‘neighbourhood’ being a polite word for mob. But the incident from The Mother could also illustrate another proposition: that in both poor and rich societies, worlds and times apart, the brave individual has existed. Mrs Norris at the end of Mansfield Park stands by her niece rather than with the mob. The cousin of the nameless wife of Li in Buck’s The Mother helps the latter in her extremity. O-Lan, Wang Lung’s wife in The Good Earth, sold as a child into the great house where she is beaten daily, revisits her aged employer to exhibit her first son and bring the small dainties she has cooked, the first conscious display of herself as an individual, not as a slave, in her life. Of course, arguing that O-Lan develops as an individual during the course of her novel is misleading if this suggests that she grows out of the feudal customary life into which she was born. Her growing ‘as an individual’ simply means that the customary roles of mother, wife and daughter-inlaw and the kindnesses and daily tasks they entail offer opportunities for less restricted expression of the self than the beaten life of a kitchen slave. A possibly useful construct here is consciousness versus unconsciousness, without privileging the first over the second. There is a sense in which OLan never rises to consciousness, if by this one means the consciousness displayed by her creator, for whom the meaning of O-Lan’s life is more than it could be for O-Lan herself. For Pearl Buck, O-Lan’s life acquires an almost sacred dimension, as if from the Hebrew Bible; it becomes a story of the lives of all women from the ancient world who knew it to be their greatest achievement to bear sons. And as Buck’s portrayal of Wang Lung was as if accompanied by a protective cry against all who would denigrate such a man, so her conscious protective love accompanies O-Lan, sometimes seeing in her, as if from a great distance, a sacred instance of a scarcely conscious life; while at other times trying to imagine,

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by empathically approaching her, how one such as O-Lan might see the world. Buck conveys O-Lan’s life as scarcely imaginable because it has consisted since early childhood of loss and abuse and silence has been its protection. To imagine such a mind means trying to construct the world with its few words, and this Buck does triumphantly, persuading that OLan’s sacred dimension consists not only in her unconsciously illustrating the story of all women of the ancient world, but also in her rising to consciousness at crucial moments in her story, in her capacity for renewed pain and—though the word seems strange applied to O-Lan—joy. Buck combines both perspectives—seeing O-Lan as if from a great distance, plus seeing through her own eyes—in the incident of the two pearl earrings. The pearls are all that remains of the bag of jewels she had stolen from the great house in Nanjing and kept next to her heart, and which were later taken from her by Wang Lung and given to another, as she was given away as a child by her mother. In the pearls it is as if O-Lan’s consciousness and the narrator’s meet, together creating a new sacred story. The resonances of ‘pearl’ heard by the writer include, perhaps, the biblical pearl of great price which, when one had found it, he sold all that he had to possess (Matthew 13:46); Othello’s ‘base Indian’ who threw a pearl away ‘richer than all his tribe’ (Wang Lung carelessly sacrificing the treasure of O-Lan as Othello threw away his own); the medieval English poem ‘Pearl’ where the narrator, distraught at the loss of his greatest possession, dreams that he sees her in Paradise, on the other side of a stream; perhaps Pearl Buck also heard her own name and the ongoing story of her own grief, some sources of which we have already met in this study. To O-Lan the pearl ear-rings seem to represent a substitute satisfaction of a great longing, no less great for never being articulated. Buck leaves it open to us to imagine who the longing is for: the mother O-Lan lost so young. That O-Lan has been able to care for others—her husband, children and old father-in-law, while having scarcely received any love in her own life—that Buck represents this as plausible is a significant achievement in realist fiction. But more so is Buck’s endowing O-Lan with resonance as a goddess figure herself, quietly making room in the novel for the sacred while external representations of the sacred—like the little paper earth gods—wither and die in the heat or drown in the rains. And we would not have responded to this resonance had O-Lan been really as unconsciously ox-like as Buck sometimes represents her, a representation which shows both how others perceive her and her defence against that perception. Even this woman, Buck seems to say, is conscious

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enough to weep. In the next chapter I will approach, from the perspective of Pearl Buck’s reading, the novel I have already mentioned, The Mother, which also represents the sacred dimension of the life of a woman subsistence farmer, stoical like O-Lan, but more conscious than she. But before that I will return to the question of Pearl Buck’s consideration of how men (including Wang Lung’s grandson, Wang Yuan) and women less firmly fixed in old China than a Wang Lung or an O-Lan were to live and maintain identity in the chaotic and cruel deracination of the emerging new China.

ii Old and New China are misleading terms if they suggest a neat boundary between the two. They might uneasily coexist. Pavilion of Women, published in 1946, twelve years after Pearl Buck left China forever, continues the theme of the novels published in the 1930s: how to live during such a time, and, in particular, how to live as a woman at such a time. One of Pavilion of Women’s most telling conversations is between Madame Wu and her young Shanghainese daughter-in-law Rulan who, objecting to the former’s proposal to employ a concubine in order to free her, Madame Wu, from the marital bed, protests that it was against concubines that she with others had marched under the scorching Shanghai summer sky: a protest Madame Wu discounts by silkily conveying ‘that it did not matter at all what Shanghai people thought’ (Buck 1946, loc. 849). Although Madame Wu had been sufficiently a beneficiary of Western influence to avoid the full horror of foot binding—her father had ordered his little daughter’s feet be unbound on his return from European travels—those feet still stand firmly at the head of a feudal family whose extended household of more than sixty people (bondmaids, wet nurses, cooks, servants, sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren) Madame Wu protects from the growing shadow of the new world as well as from the chaos and hopelessness we earlier heard described by Lin Yutang. But the death in a plane crash (symbolically close to his mother’s home) of one of Madame Wu’s sons reinforces Buck’s view that this protection is fragile. Pavilion of Women refers to ‘the enemy’ (the Japanese) having taken Shanghai and another of Madame Wu’s daughters-in-law, Linyi, had been obliged, before her marriage, to return discontentedly from her year in a Shanghai school to the ‘small provincial city’ (loc. 433), where Madame Wu however still feels safe because ‘there were no great

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cities near here, and it was not likely that the ignorant East Ocean people would know the name of one family above another’ (loc. 4683). But to the borders of this and many other small inland provincial cities, Buck shows, the shadows of war and chaos are advancing during this decade of the 1930s when Pavilion of Women is set (the Japanese had occupied parts of Shanghai in 1932), and according to the thinking Buck attributes to Rulan, they are only outliers of a longer shadow: Mother, the East Ocean people have long been afraid, centuries afraid. And of what? Of foreign attack. They have seen one country after another attacked and possessed. Out of the West have the conquerors come. Even when Genghis Khan came and conquered our nation, the East Ocean people began to be afraid. Then men came out of Portugal and Spain, out of Holland and France, and took countries for themselves. And England took India, and we have been all but taken, too, again and again, by these greedy Westerners. ‘Why,’ thus the East Ocean people reason, ‘should we be spared?’ So out of fear they have set out to seize lands and peoples for their own, and we are their nearest neighbor. (loc. 4891)

Buck’s report of Madame Wu’s default traditional reaction to this analysis (this was ‘monstrous talk for a young woman’ (loc. 4891) shows her, rather than Rulan’s, ignorance and is another instance of the conflict between inhabitants of the old and emerging new China which this time opens a window onto a world from which the unfilial Wang the Tiger, the only other representative we have met of the emerging new China (because of this one fact: that he did not follow his father) would have turned away as beyond the boundaries of the knowable. Those in Buck’s fiction who most suffer the conflict between East and West are those who have to put to the test in their own lives the lasting value of the Confucian culture in which they were raised. ‘Down with Confucius’, the young may shout, including those encountered by Wang Yuan, Wang the Tiger’s son, on the boat returning him from America to China: but Buck leaves it open to us to ask whether they should not rather be shouting ‘Down with greedy Westerners’ who, in Madame Wu’s daughter-in-law’s words, have all but taken China, ‘again and again’ and whom the Japanese are now imitating. It is inevitable that those who feel this conflict most acutely are the exiles among Buck’s characters including those returning home, since she makes us ask whether such can ever really return to the selves they were or to the people they once knew, given their burden of memories

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acquired among ‘greedy Westerners’. This theme of exile, as we saw in the first chapter, touched Pearl Buck deeply because of her own and her mother’s lives, but that is not the only reason: she knew from observation the dislocations young Chinese people suffered travelling between different worlds. Wang Yuan of A House Divided is her most detailed study, from the inside, of a young man’s struggle to find and maintain, both abroad and at home, a core Chinese identity but he is not her only study of this struggle: in the returned sons and daughters of the insufferable Confucian Dr Liang in the 1950 novel Kinfolk, who would rather remain living comfortably in New York far from the dangers of new China, Buck also explores the phenomenon of those young Chinese men and women who had never known China except in their parents’ accounts. In this respect as in others Buck anticipates the work of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. The differences between her accounts of the thoughts and experiences of young people in the last volume of The Good Earth trilogy, A House Divided (1935), compared with those in Kinfolk (1948) may be the result of Buck’s own growing temporal distance from China after 1934, but that is not the only explanation: the historical developments of the time provide another. For during the time separating the writing of The Good Earth trilogy from Kinfolk it appeared to Buck—from the evidence of her fiction—that the options open to those wanting to be good Chinese men and women (in both senses of that phrase) had narrowed to a Candide-like attempt simply to find, in that embattled country of the countless poor, some small safe spots where they could cultivate a few minds and heal a few bodies. In the later novel, for example, James, the brilliant surgeon and eldest son of Dr Liang, leaving New York for his rural ancestral village, starts a medical practice among the village poor while also enacting the fantasy of living in a traditional Chinese marriage to an uneducated woman he has never met chosen for him by his mother—all this occurring between the end of the war with Japan and the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949. We have seen one or two of Buck’s portraits of the hideous conditions of the poor in these years after the end of the Qing dynasty: they are worth revisiting if only to underscore the proposition that her China was Lin Yutang’s, not Dr Liang’s never-never land of Confucian mists and mellow fruitfulness. In Buck’s China the shivering houseless poor fall off dykes into floodwaters to drown (Sons ) or have their starved dead bodies collected like litter from Shanghai streets at dawn (A House Divided) or get beaten for trying to snatch a few scraps from under the tables of the rich (A House

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Divided). James’ response to these horrors may be only a mixture of good intentions and escapist fantasy, but Buck’s worry about the only other apparently humane response to them increased after A House Divided. In The Good Earth we met a scornful young man in Nanjing who gave his gaping onlookers an illustrated lecture about rich fat capitalists stabbing poor thin workers—which Wang Lung ignored, thinking it had nothing to do with him. But by the time of Kinfolk the Wang Lungs of this world can no longer ignore such young men (and women): Liu Chen, friend of the Liang children and a doctor himself, tells of the taking of his parents’ village by ‘the Communists’: My parents owned no land. They were tenants before the Communists came. Now they are landowners. Their landlord was the usual sort, shorttempered, greedy, but not more than many others. When the Communists came they did not kill him, for the people pleaded for him. They only strung him up by the thumbs and gave him a good beating and then allowed him as much land as he could work himself— no more.

—but it was not because of their treatment of the landlord that Liu Chen declined to join the Communists himself but because, he tells James, they wanted me to dip my hand in blood and swear something. Swear what? Nothing much— loyalty, brotherhood, eternal faith— all the usual oaths of a gang. But I have sworn my loyalties to all humanity and not to any part of it. I told them so and they wanted to shoot me. So I left by night. Now you see why I have no home. (Buck 1948, loc. 2024)

—another illustration of Buck’s proposition we saw illustrated in her accounts of lonely Chinese women’s lives in her biography of her mother that it is not necessary to go abroad to live in exile. At least, Buck suggests, in Liu Chen’s self-imposed exile in James’ ancestral village, he can—for a time anyway—escape the roar of Communist young men and women demanding allegiance to their cause, or boasting of killing their parents to show their own allegiance to it, or swearing, as Meng, Wang Yuan’s cousin does in A House Divided, that ‘I could kill these stupid folk for bearing their oppression so patiently’ (loc.1115). Desperate times provoke desperate reactions. James’ wish, in Kinfolk, to enter into a traditional Chinese marriage is an instance of such, the result also of his weariness with any longer trying to heal in himself the

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wound of being both American and Chinese: easier to deny being American. His brother Peter denies both the traditional Chinese identity his father wishes for him as well as his American identity and tries to become a revolutionary. And far from them, in Shanghai or abroad, live those who would have regarded the choices made by James, and Liu Chen, let alone Peter, with hilarity—those indistinguishable, glittering young men who also exhibit a kind of desperation in the intensity of their pursuit of pleasure. One is the young man who marries Wang Yuan’s half-sister and who, importuned by a Shanghai beggar as he is about to drive off in his beautiful expensive foreign car ‘reached down and slipped from his foot his shoe, his western shoe, hard and leathern, and with its heel…struck down upon the beggar’s clutching fingers and he struck with all his force’ (Buck 1935b, loc. 3278); another is Charlie Ting, son of the next Ambassador to the Court of St. James, who ‘thought nothing was too bad for anybody to do, if it was fun’, and for whom ‘the two words, good and evil, did not exist…except for diplomatic use’ (Buck 1948, loc. 6108). With men such as these Buck revisits the question whether Communism was really the impossible option swiftly dismissed in Kinfolk by Liu Chen. Buck invites us to ask again whether, if enough young men such as Wang Yuan in A House Divided could have been persuaded to become Communists, they might have broken another path for those caught between East and West, between Old and New China—a path where they could have moderated the excesses of their comrades and indeed become once more good Chinese. Wang Yuan does, in fact, briefly follow the Communist cause, and the reasons for his journey into and away from that cause Pearl Buck details in a case study whose abstract, as it were, she was later to provide in her brief account in Kinfolk of the path taken by Liu Chen. Buck takes us early into the forces shaping Wang Yuan. Sent at the age of fifteen by his father to an institution identifiable as the southern military training school at Whampoa, Guangdong province (at a time when CCP and Nationalist soldiers trained together in the army of the revolution) Wang Yuan returns home four years later, having finally escaped the military world his warlord father had decreed for him since childhood. In Wang Yuan’s decision to escape this world Pearl Buck locates a subtle, ironic and entirely credible psychological analysis of the consequences of Yuan’s fear of his father, the burden of which he had carried from the age of six when Wang the Tiger as a traditional patriarch had removed him from his mother and small sister to prevent his becoming ‘soft’. Wang Yuan had left the army,

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not because (at that stage) he had disagreed with its revolutionary aims, but because of his sense of filial disloyalty—his father being a warlord and therefore the Nationalists’ enemy: In that hour when youth after youth[...]swore [to wage revolutionary war] Wang Yuan drew apart, held by fear and love of his father, who was such a lord of war as these cried against. His heart was with his comrades. (Buck 1935b, loc. 53)

The subsequent history of Wang Yuan’s involvement with the revolutionary cause can briefly be told against its historical background. Fear of disloyalty to his father drives Wang Yuan back to his house; anger with his father then drives him away again, to Shanghai where his cousin Meng introduces him to the strike-supporting young men and women who will die at the hands of the thugs in the pay of the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek, soon to arrive in Shanghai at the end of the first phase of the Northern March: Nanjing was taken in March 1927 and Shanghai, already paralysed by a general strike organised by the CCP-dominated trade unions, welcomed the Nationalists later the same month. The strikers, and the CCP, then became the victims of a flagrant and never-to-be forgotten betrayal[...]the CCP was now an embarrassment. Moving all but his most reliable troops out of the city, and availing himself of the services of the Green Gang, an underworld organisation of well-armed thugs used by industrialists to intimidate strikers, Chiang Kai-shek launched an all-out assault on the labour unions. (Keay 2008, loc. 9765)

—and on the students who supported them. Buck’s accounts of the latter waiting in prison darkness for their executions the next day are among the most moving she wrote: Wang Yuan, having joined their cause because only by doing so, he thinks, could he free himself from his father’s control, is himself captured and pushed into a crowded cell: Then night fell, when none could see another’s face, and the darkness seemed to shut each into his own cell, and a first voice cried softly, “Oh, my mother— oh, my mother—” and broke into desperate weeping. (Buck 1935b, loc. 1898)

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—from which Wang Yuan is rescued only by the power of his uncle’s money. Almost the next thing we hear of him is that the same money has bought him safety on a ship bound for America, leaving the place of terror and suffering which Shanghai has become and where his young impoverished cell mates await beheading or worse. There is a question about how one should interpret Buck’s rescue of Wang Yuan, an entirely plausible instance of the power of money in corrupt Nationalist-controlled Shanghai. One might argue that having raised, in Wang Yuan, the question of whether becoming a Communist was compatible with becoming a good Chinese, Buck dodged the question by sending him to America, thus saving herself from facing the painful truth that individual integrity and allegiance to Communism might indeed be compatible. But that argument fails to acknowledge the pain Buck made herself face at other times when she thought about Chinese Communism, pain caused because she knew of the courage of some of those who espoused it. The youth weeping for his mother was one of her brave young men, and she also knew of the courage of Communist young women. In the novel The Mother an onlooker tells of one going to her execution singing ‘to the end and when her head rolled off I swear she sang on a second, did she not?’ (Buck 1934, loc. 2914), and in A House Divided she presents the pitiful scene where a young woman student who loves Wang Yuan is taken out of class to certain death, looking back at him imploringly while he fearfully does nothing. But finally, Buck argues, it is not fear which deters Wang Yuan from rejoining the revolutionary, specifically the Communist cause on his return from America. Meeting, in Nanjing, his cousin Meng again, now an officer in the Nationalist army, the chaotic political changes of the six years of Wang Yuan’s absence having enabled Meng’s transformation from student fugitive to revolutionary soldier, Wang Yuan learns of Meng’s determination to join a purer cause: The truth is within this revolution there grows now another— a better, truer one, Yuan— a new revolution! And I and four of my fellows are determined to go and join it— we shall take our loyal men, and go into the west where the thing is shaping. (Buck 1935b, loc. 4856)

—a clear reference to Mao Zedong’s shaping the might of the Chinese Communist Party in the Western remoteness of Shaanxi province. What prevents Wang Yuan from rejoining this cause is that in the depths of his

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being he cannot become the kind of man he believes he would have to become were he to join it, with its indifference to the individual except as an unimportant instance of the many. This kind of man is, so Wang Yuan thinks, represented by his cousin Meng: not, again Buck is at pains to point out, a bad man—‘not wholly hard in heart’ (loc. 4981)—but a man who hits a rickshaw driver because the latter can see the funny side after being beaten by a drunk American; a man who weeps with fury because such as the rickshaw driver ‘will not even hate the ones who oppress them’ (loc. 4541); a man who says the revolution must clear out not only the rich but also the ancient festivals and patterns of life of the poor: ‘so whether they will or not the people must be taught and forced out of old superstitious ways!’ (loc. 4562). Wang Yuan’s path to and away from Communism may have begun by wanting to escape the power of his father; while on this path he exhorts himself to ‘learn now to be hard as Meng was hard, and not waste himself on feeling for the useless poor’ (loc. 4280), but his discovery that he cannot be such a man, that he cannot suppress (as Meng would easily, he thinks, be able to suppress) the yearning love and duty that wells up in him on learning of his father’s imminent death—this discovery confirms his exit from the revolutionary path as fear of his father had led him onto it in the beginning. Wang Yuan of A House Divided would have been middle-aged by the time of the Cultural Revolution. His early exit from the path which led to it is emphasized at the end of the novel by his impending marriage to a young woman, Mei-ling, who, like James in Kinfolk, wants to be a doctor among the poor. With this marriage Buck concludes, in A House Divided, her investigation into how a young man such as Wang Yuan, sensitive, highly intelligent, deeply and patriotically attuned to traditional Chinese thinking, might live in the developing new China (Buck’s portrayal of his rejection of Christianity, while in America, is finely done). Her investigation of how he might live leads her to some heart-breaking places: not only into the Nationalist prison cell which might have spurred Wang Yuan into joining the CCP but did not, but to a tiny representative instance of lives from old China vanishing never to return, those of the old Shanghai farmer, his wife and their buffalo whom Wang Yuan had worked beside before he went to America: And suddenly he bethought himself of that old farmer whom he once knew, who had taught him how to wield a hoe. He would go there and see that man and feel his own kind. (loc. 4116)

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But after Yuan’s eight years in America the farmer has disappeared and ‘there on the earth which only a few years ago had borne so fertilely, where the farmer had been proud to say his family had lived for a hundred years, now stood a factory for weaving silk’ (loc. 4124). In what is almost a poem, echoing Vachel Lindsay’s lament for the flowers, buffalos and native Americans ‘lying low’ in their vanished country, Wang Yuan imagines that the farmer had gone elsewhere. He and his old wife and their old buffalo had gone to other lands. Of course they had, Yuan told himself. Somewhere they lived their own life, stoutly as they ever had. (loc. 4131)

Pearl Buck and her readers knowing better, the old farmer’s story becomes just one more of the countless many vanishing into the silence of history, as the stories of an O-Lan or a Wang Lung or a Wang Yuan would have done had Pearl Buck not told them. This and the previous chapter have reflected on a few of the stories Buck drew on to tell those of her parents and her fictional characters. Among these have been some from the Bible, but in the background we have also heard fragments of other stories which Buck had read. In the next chapter I will look more closely at these stories and what Buck made of them in her representations of China and, particularly, reprising some of the ground covered in this chapter, her stories of China’s women and children living the rural lives of old China, as well as those living on the cusp between old and new China. I will also return explicitly to the theme of the first chapter: the battle between life and death in her writing.

References Austen, J. 1814 (2008). Mansfield Park. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buck, P.S. 1931. The Good Earth. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1932. Sons. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1934. The Mother. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1935b. A House Divided. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. Buck, P.S. 1939. The Chinese Novel: Nobel Lecture Delivered before the Swedish Academy at Stockholm, December 12, 1938. New York: John Day.

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Buck, P.S. 1946. Pavilion of Women. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1948. The Living Reed. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1954. My Several Worlds: A Personal Record. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Cole, J., and J. Haddad. 2019. Beyond the Good Earth: Transnational Perspectives on Pearl S. Buck. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. Hardy, T. 1884. The Dorsetshire Labourer. Dorchester, Dorset: Dorset Agricultural Workers’ Union. Hong Kingston, M. 1976. The Woman Warrior. 2015, Picador ed. New York: Vintage. Keay, J. 2008. China: A History. 2010, ebook. ed. London: HarperCollins. Lau, D. 1979. Confucius: The Analects. ebook ed. London: Penguin Books. Lin, Yutang. 1935. My Country and My People. 2008, ebook ed. Hong Kong: Hesperides Press. Lin, Yutang. 1959. From Pagan to Christian. New York: World Publishing Company. Mitter, R. 2008. Modern China: A Very Short Introduction. ebook ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. 1973. The Country and the City. 1993, Hogarth Press. London: Chatto & Windus.

CHAPTER 3

Pearl Buck’s Reading: ‘As If for Life’

Pearl Buck did not believe that one became a novelist by reading novels, nor by deliberately looking for something to write about. Instead, she said, ‘life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake’ (Buck 1954, loc. 2000)—after which it might provide material for fiction. She said more: that no one should attempt a novel before the age of thirty, ‘and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life’ (loc. 1992). Returning to China in 1914 in her early twenties after college in America, Buck knew she was not ready to write: she later reported feeling ‘empty’ at that time (loc. 1998), to which she added ‘emptiness is the normal state of youth’—a statement with which the reader might disagree, just as they might find strange the two words Buck selected to describe how to involve oneself in life: ‘hopelessly and helplessly’. It is a description of enduring chronic depression. Eight years later, however, Buck (she afterwards recorded) suddenly knew ‘at last’ (Buck 1954, loc. 2948) that she was ready to write, which meant, for her, being ready to attempt publication, and— aged thirty—produced her first published work as an adult, a magazine article about life in China. The reason why Buck knew that August afternoon in 1922 that she was at last ready to write for publication may be as mysterious to the outsider as it was to herself; another way of putting it is to ask how anyone recovers from depression. In Buck’s case one might

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Hardy, Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3556-4_3

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follow the lead given by ‘hopelessly and helplessly’: from life’s endurer she became, on that August afternoon in Guling, life’s agent. She became it by thinking of herself as a writer, the paradox being that becoming a writer did not detach her from life, it proclaimed her connection to it, although the act of writing necessarily involved her guarding her own solitary space. In this space she read as well as wrote. Visitors to her Nanjing home remembered seeing her ‘hunched over a book every morning in a corner by the window’ (Spurling, loc. 2150), with other books ‘crammed into the big, comfortable, untidy living room…a practical working library’ (loc. 2150). Like the young David Copperfield, like the young and not so young Charles Dickens, Pearl Buck read ‘as if for life’, a kind of reading aimed not just at escaping the present but at making bearable the past: a kind of reading more like grasping a lifebelt when drowning than passing a dreary hour. Hilary Spurling (loc. 2154) suggests that the foundation of this library dated back precisely to that August 1922 moment when Buck knew herself ready to write, a suggestion which (whether literally true or not) captures the developing inseparable relation between reading and writing in Buck’s life and which fixes both as central to Buck’s developing sense of herself as life’s agent rather than sufferer—the result, since early childhood, of having had to carry a burden too great for her. I described in the first chapter elements of that burden, mentioning the deaths in childhood of Buck’s siblings. Whether or not there is a clinical name for the transferred parental grief suffered by a child, there is no doubt of the reality of this grief, which may include mourning for the child’s dead brothers or sisters whom she never knew. Pearl Buck, her parents’ fifth child, had to witness and share her mother’s mourning for her dead children: for the three who had died before Buck’s birth in 1892—Maude, who died of dysentery in 1884 aged eighteen months; Arthur, who died of malaria in 1890 also aged eighteen months; Edith, aged three, who died of cholera a fortnight after Arthur; as well as for the little boy Clyde, born two years after Pearl, who died of diphtheria five years later in 1899 when Pearl was six. (She also had to witness her beloved fifteen-year-old brother Edgar being sent back to America when she was aged four; she did not see him again for five years [Spurling loc. 77].) Hilary Spurling suggests that some time after Pearl’s seventh birthday her mother told her the story for the first time of how Maude had died on board ship—a story which affected Buck so deeply that she retold it three times over thirty years, ‘expanding and elaborating on a

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scenario conceived in the operatic terms of a Gothic novel to match the horror and pathos of the event’ (Spurling loc. 497)—an image to add to Spurling’s description of Buck as a little girl peopling ‘the house with her dead siblings. ‘These three who came before I was born, and went away too soon, somehow seemed alive to me’ (Buck 1965, p. 8, quoted Spurling, loc. 79). The scene of Maude’s death was indeed one of horror and pathos—the mother’s hideous seasickness on the small passenger boat returning to China from Japan during a typhoon, the child dying in a stranger’s arms because she refused to let her father hold her; the mother cradling her dead body on deck as the sea raged about her—and Spurling rightly points to gothic as the literary mode which Buck appropriated to describe it. This happens to be a mode in which Charles Dickens shone. Dickens additionally excelled in describing the lives and premature deaths of children, and it is not an accident that once Buck, aged seven, discovered him, she reread Dickens ‘each year complete from cover to cover’ for ten years (Buck 1954, loc. 1346). That August 1922 afternoon had been prepared for not only by Pearl Buck’s earlier excursions into writing— most notably the life of her mother which she wrote at high speed with no thought of publication immediately after her death the previous year— but also by her long secret visits to the world of Dickens’ novels, which she had appropriated as her own, just as she had kept from her parents the secret house peopled with her dead sisters and brothers or the Chinese world which she shared with her Chinese friends. It seems important that her visits to Dickens’ world was a secret she kept from her parents. She described the game of hide and seek she played all through childhood, when her mother—the ‘religious feelings’ of both parents making them consider ‘novel-reading a mere pastime’—would hide ‘the novels I read and I hunted for them until I found them’ (Buck 1954, loc. 1355). And in her account of the influence Dickens had on her it is his child characters who stand out: ‘my first Dickens book was Oliver Twist which I read through twice without delay’; she cried ‘quietly [my italics] over the death of little Nell and the cruelty of Hard Times . Sissy Jukes has remained with me always as a part of myself’ (Buck 1954, loc. 1346)— because Sissy, a fact which connects with the last chapter, represented the voice of the small powerless individual lifted hopelessly against the moronic background drone of Thomas Gradgrind’s England. The nearest Buck gets to representing the well intentioned cruelty of a Gradgrind in her novels about China is in her versions of the agents of the new China, whether a Nationalist (soon to be Communist) officer

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like Wang Meng in A House Divided or a Communist soldier like Ho-San in Satan Never Sleeps . But, as we have seen, Buck was too much of a realist to portray pre-revolutionary China as a romantic land of patrilinear kindness. O-Lan in The Good Earth was beaten and mocked throughout her childhood, and though she does not owe her existence to one of the archetypes given life by Dickens, other of Buck’s child characters do. As well as Clem in Kinfolk, a figure a little like Oliver Twist, plus all Buck’s lonely young women, reminders of Sissy or Louisa in Hard Times, we find among Buck’s novels ‘the poor fool’ of The Good Earth trilogy—the severely learning-disabled child who grows into a woman, foreshadowed by Maggie of Little Dorrit ; the pitiful physically disabled small boy in the same trilogy, reminiscent of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol ; the tragic little blind girl in The Mother; an echo of the blind daughter in The Cricket on the Hearth, who herself recalls the blind and deaf child Dickens met during his first visit to America. Emerging from the pages of Charles Dickens to be reincarnated in the pages of Pearl Buck’s writing about old China, these children are used by both writers to illustrate their worlds’ cruel death dealing and to ask how these worlds might be looked at without despair. How this cruelty might be stopped Dickens also suggests: through compassion and imagination exercised not only by individuals but also by governments. That both qualities—plus knowledge, energy, efficiency, determination, whatever informs good and responsible government—were necessary to a civilized society, Dickens did not doubt, and said so in novel after novel, most succinctly in A Christmas Carol. ‘Are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?’ Marley’s ghost echoes Scrooge’s question back to him as he begins his journey into human sympathy, ironically articulating the novel’s message that a civilized country requires more than prisons or workhouses. The child Pearl Buck, having absorbed this teaching, as an adult adapted it to a Chinese context in her picture of the horrors of rural and city life when family networks—the great providers of civilized life in China—were breaking down under burdens too great for them. In this respect, Pearl Buck’s Shanghai, transitioning from old to new China, was not very different from Charles Dickens’ nightmare sprawling midland city of The Old Curiosity Shop, also transitioning from a rural to an industrial economy, and the attitude of both Dickens and Buck was the same: the evils of both cities could have been remedied by large scale human intervention. Medicine, clean water, shelter, clothing and food—all could have prevented death in those terrible cities. But the idea that human suffering

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and the suffering of children in particular could be prevented completely by human intervention was as foreign to Buck as it was to Dickens. And for Buck though perhaps not for Dickens the question of divine intervention became unbearable. We saw in Chapter 1 how Pearl Buck’s grief at her daughter’s disability, thinly disguised in Joan Richard’s grief at her son’s in The Time Is Noon, led to Joan’s abandonment of prayer and of God. And, additionally, Joan, Pearl Buck’s fictional incarnation, was appalled by God (if there were a God) because of the effect belief in him had on his followers: her solitary suffering as a member of her husband’s emotionally starved American fundamentalist Christian family was exacerbated by that family’s inability to offer her (or each other) the smallest psychological comfort, an inability (Buck presents it as) rooted in their fundamentalism. To recover from the depths of suffering she had to wait for the natural rhythm of a God-free life to lead her to the realization that ‘landscapes, flowers, music were [not] empty’ (Buck 1966, loc. 314) and to seeing, ‘in a sort of wonder’, as Pearl Buck put it in the struggle she described of coming to accept her own daughter’s severe disability, that such things went on as they had before, and then a realization that what had happened to me had actually changed nothing except myself. (Buck 1950, loc 346)

But this solution was for Joan alone to find, in a country where families had become isolated nuclear units and the outside rural world was a hostile wasteland—such is Buck’s depiction of it in novels like The Time Is Noon and God’s Men. In her rural China, in contrast, and in Dickens’ rural England—neverland though the latter may be—we can read of versions of human society where people are still able to support each other when times are not too terrible and where both writers’ responses to death and suffering are not the outraged indignation of Bleak House or A House Divided but are quieter, more meditative because both writers have come to a place where people have exhausted their power to prevent or ameliorate pain and what is left is the unavoidable tragedy of life. The physical disability of the little boy in The Good Earth trilogy was caused by being dropped as a baby: Pearl Buck does not suggest that this was anything other than an accident, nor that all accidents in our world can be prevented. Neither does she consider the cause of Wang Lung’s daughter’s severe learning disability: it is one of those tragic human givens. But what she does consider, deeply influenced by Dickens, is how these

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inevitable as distinguished from preventable human tragedies might be responded to—in life-promoting rather than death-promoting ways. Dickens’ main response to them was his creation of the figure of the compassionate child/woman who cares for children and old men virtually indistinguishable from children. Amy Dorrit cares for learningdisabled Maggie and her own broken father; Esther Summerson cares for many in Bleak House including children and an older man who wants to marry her; Little Nell mothers her child-like grandfather as they reenact Dickens’ version of Christian’s journey in The Pilgrim’s Progress towards the Celestial City. Thinking about what Pearl Buck does with this child/woman/mother figure helps us think about what Buck takes from Dickens (and, in her case, as in Dickens’, from The Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress ) in her portrayal of the social and spiritual dimensions of her rural pre-revolutionary Chinese world. In Dickens’ version, in The Old Curiosity Shop, of Nell’s last resting place before she crosses to the Celestial City, the idyllic pre-industrial English village with its kindly schoolmaster and Wordsworthian pupils, Nell’s dying is like a coming home. Dickens does not exclaim against the tragedy of this death; for him it is located in the Christian narrative of the ennobling of the soul through suffering, so that at the end the sanctified soul becomes one with the angels: Sorrow was dead indeed in her, but peace and perfect happiness were born; imaged in her tranquil beauty and profound repose..... at the still bedside of the dying boy, there had been the same mild lovely look. So shall we know the angels in their majesty, after death. (Dickens 1841, p. 540)

Perhaps the figure nearest to Little Nell in Buck’s writing about old China is the young woman Pear Blossom of The Good Earth trilogy, bought by Wang Lung ‘in a famine year when she was small and piteous and half-starved’ (Buck 1931, p. 326), who becomes, though she is the same age as his grandchildren, his concubine, whose ‘light youth’ he presses ‘against his heavy old flesh’ (p. 341)—an act Buck perhaps manages to make some readers feel is not simply obscene. It is an act to which the young woman, a slave, is compelled to submit, but a submission which perhaps belongs to a world, so far away from Dickens’ and yet also so close, which contains the non-sexual agency of the angelic little Nell; in

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other words Pear Blossom’s submission also seems—as Buck presents it— to be an act of kindness to an old man who wondered to find the love ‘of old age so fond and so easily satisfied’ (p. 239). And it is one among other kindnesses enacted by this child figure, who would have died had not Wang Lung bought her from her parents as a very little girl. We have seen that one part of the burden Pearl Buck carried from childhood was surviving the deaths of her sisters and brother and sharing her mother’s mourning for those children. If she read and reread Little Nell’s narrative after the age of seven (the age when her mother told her about how Maude had died) because it gave meaning to the deaths of her siblings, she perhaps created Pear Blossom, who grew from childhood to womanhood and became a Buddhist nun, because she lived Pearl’s dream of what might have been had one of those children lived. For in contrast to Buck’s father’s life-denying dedication to Christianity (as she presents it in The Exile) Pear Blossom comes for Buck to embody all that is good and life-promoting in religion, whatever its name. Caring for the two disabled children, Wang Lung’s daughter and grandson, as they grow up, Pear Blossom gathers around her not only a grieving writer’s dream of what might have been, but Buck’s meditation on the constituents of the religious life, which meditation develops to differ greatly not only from her father’s version but also from Dickens’, at least the Dickens of The Old Curiosity Shop. For although Pear Blossom resembles Little Nell, she departs from her in this: in Buck’s version of the progress towards the Celestial City there is no Celestial City. Those who live as though there is—like her father, whom she described on the last page of his biography as having ‘never touched the fringe of human life’ or her Buddhist version of those who want to ensure their place in heaven by buying indulgences (like the wife of Wang Lung’s eldest son) are mistaken. In Buck’s world there are no angels, only people, and Pear Blossom’s kindness towards the two disabled children is directed not towards future rewards but is an act of grace recognizing the old man Wang Lung’s love for her. Addressing the disabled daughter who ‘only ate her cake, for she neither spoke nor understood any who spoke to her’, Pear Blossom tells her that ‘you are all I have left of the only one who was ever kind to me or saw me for more than slave’ (Buck 1932, loc. 152). In some ways like the youthful heroine of a Dickens or Charlotte Bronte novel, in the end Pear Blossom is nearer in spirit to two characters in another English novel, the great pagan Wuthering Heights , except that

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the spectral world of Cathy and Heathcliff has become in the Good Earth trilogy an everyday world of the fields and winds: For although Wang Lung was dead, he lived on for Pear Blossom and, to her, his soul was always hovering about these fields...Yes, whenever a small chill breeze smote her suddenly on the face by day or by night, or a little whirling wind wheeled along the roadway, such winds as others fear because these winds are so strange it is said they must be souls flying past, Pear Blossom lifted her face and smiled when such a wind smote her, and this because she believed it might be the soul of the old man who had been like a father to her and dearer than the father who sold her to him. (Buck 1932, loc. 1373)

It is a world, like that of the old woman Clem meets in God’s Men, mercifully uncontaminated by obsession with God or the gods, where kindness is practised with no hope of reward, and where sex—in contrast to Dickens’ world—is part of life. In creating this world, and its gentle inhabitant Pear Blossom, Buck took what she needed from Dickens and moved on. But the limitations of this world of old China, I repeat, are obvious, the product of Buck’s clear-eyed understanding of the reality of nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese rural life. In Pear Blossom’s mind, only one had been kind to her, the same man who had once been kind to O-Lan but who withdrew his kindness as O-Lan grew old. It is a world where, apparently, sexual feeling belongs exclusively to men. But only apparently, because in one of her finest novels representing Chinese rural life Buck shows her heroine longing for sex. Peter Conn describes The Mother as ‘filled with Lawrentian talk of heat and hunger and thundering blood’ and suggests that Buck ‘superimposes a Westernized sexuality on a Chinese subject’ (p. 167), but this is close to saying that Western women of the time possessed sexual feelings while Chinese women did not. I suggest, in contrast to Conn, that Lawrence was an important beneficial influence on Buck both in developing her own emotional education and on two novels in particular—The Mother and the later Pavilion of Women. I propose this: that if, in the Good Earth trilogy, Pearl Buck gave her version of a Dickens heroine a transformed life in China, in The Mother she does the same with a D.H. Lawrence character and in this respect Conn is right to say that the novel displays Lawrentian overtones. (He might have added that Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is also a presence.) The result is a novel whose background of Chinese rural life

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shares the spirit of a novel about English rural life and whose heroine, like Lawrence’s, makes her life journey and faces her sexual feelings alone. By entering the mind of the heroine of The Mother, or to give her the only name she is known by, the wife of Liu, Buck goes beyond her portrayal of the remarkable women incarnated in O-Lan or in Pear Blossom. In the progress of the wife of Liu, Buck enacts—what is at the beginning anyway—a happier story: of a young woman who had not been sold as a child, in love with her young husband, good and kind mother to her children, patiently caring for her husband’s old mother as well as for the small family’s few animals—buffalo, pig, hens—who share their one-roomed house at night: However impatient she might be in the day, however filled with little sudden angers, at night she was all tenderness— passionate tenderness to the man when he turned to her in need, tender to the children as they lay helpless in sleep, tender to the old woman if she coughed in the night and rising to fetch a little water for her, tender even to the beasts if they stirred and frightened each other with their own stirring, and she called out to them, “Be still,— sleep— day is a long way off yet—” and hearing her rough kind voice even they were quieted and slept again. (Buck 1934, loc. 174)

Such is the beginning of the progress of this woman from old China, fully involved in the rhythms of her rural life-promoting world. The question for Buck becomes: A progress towards what? What happens when the life-promoting conditions of that world change? This is also the question faced by Ursula in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. The scope of The Rainbow is far larger than of The Mother, as Buck would have been the first to agree: that she had read Lawrence as well as Dickens and admired him is clear from a 1940s speech where she described Lawrence as a ‘very great writer’ (Harris 1972, p. 193). And also like Dickens, Lawrence was deeply influenced by the Bible. In an early essay, ‘The Rainbow as Bible’, George H. Ford outlines the way in which that novel incorporates Biblical themes, particularly from Genesis: whereas ‘in Women in Love the setting is of crumbling contemporary civilizations, Cities of the Plain from which the hero and heroine must make their hard-won escape’ (Ford 1965, p. 115), in The Rainbow ‘the setting is predominantly one of farm and village, a world of the past whose unchanging cycles represent the way mankind has lived from his

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beginning’ (p. 116)—a way of living of which many stories in the Bible also tell. Ford’s words could be applied to Buck’s The Mother, as could some of his other thoughts on the influence of the Bible on The Rainbow: Eden as a reference point to describe the life of the Brangwen farmers (p. 118); Anna’s voice in Lincoln cathedral scoffing at Will’s rhapsody ‘as the voice of the serpent in his Eden’ (p. 123); the novel’s description of decline from the past into modern progress so that we might ‘conclude with Milton that the taste of that forbidden tree, with loss of Eden, is indeed the source of all our woe’ (p. 124). In The Mother these Biblical references also occur, whether or not mediated by The Rainbow: the prelapsarian happiness of the young couple (the man singing coming home); the intrusion into their Eden of the serpent in the shape of the pedlar who persuades the young husband to clothe himself in a ‘sky blue robe’ (the colour of Aaron’s costly priestly robe: Exodus 28:31) which they cannot afford; the great modern city, representing the progress of new China which lures the man (now wearing his new robe) away from Eden and in which he is lost forever to his wife and children. One might argue that Buck’s references to the Bible in The Mother are uninfluenced by The Rainbow’s inclusion of them, but there are times when Buck does seem to be remembering scenes from Lawrence’s novel: the husband’s escape to the great distant city in Buck’s novel recalls Will Brangwen’s temporary escape from bucolic boredom to the city in search of sexual adventure; the mother’s care for her children and husband and animals echoing the early generations of Brangwen women’s ‘drowse of bloodintimacy’, although the difference between the two novels is that whereas in Lawrence’s it is chiefly the women who start to look outside the narrow circle of their lives wanting more, in Buck’s it is the man. But this difference is unimportant compared with the one great theme both novels share: their heroines’ resemblance ‘to a prophet from the Bible whose life-story is told as if it were of mythic or epic-scale significance’ (Ford 1965, p. 133). Ford is thinking of Ursula Brangwen, but his words could equally apply to the wife of Liu. For in the life of this illiterate, proud, rough, gentle, kind, faithful, passionate woman Buck also channels her memory of Biblical heroes and heroines. Ford does not say which Biblical figure he has in mind with whom to compare Ursula but in the case of the wife of Liu we have evidence from another book by Buck which hints at the Biblical narrative she drew from. In The Story Bible, her selection of Bible stories for children, Buck retells the Book of Ruth, emphasizing the heroine’s kindness to her mother-in-law, the broken-heartedness of the

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women who have lost their husbands, the lives always lived at the edge of penury with the poor gleaning grain at harvest time, the eventual finding of happiness: Ruth and Boaz named their boy Obed, and in great happiness they watched him becoming a sturdy lad who walked in the ways of the Lord. Obed grew to manhood and had a son named Jesse. Jesse, when he became a man, married and had several sons. One of them was David, the singing shepherd boy, who was to be a mighty king of Israel. And from David´s family came the savior of mankind, a baby born in Bethlehem. (Buck 1971, p. 280)

Thus the story of Ruth as Buck retells it: at the end of Ruth’s journey the great happiness of giving birth to a son, from whom will spring more sons. Compare it with this from the end of The Mother: the old mother held the child for the other one to see and forgetting all the roomful she cried aloud, laughing as she cried, her eyes all swelled with her past weeping, “See, cousin! I doubt I was so full of sin as once I thought I was, cousin— you see my grandson!” (loc. 2953)

For the wife of Liu as well, after all her suffering following the departure of her husband, the end of the journey is the birth of a son. That is not the end of Ursula Brangwen’s journey. In contrast to Buck’s description of the wife of Liu, Ursula in The Rainbow is Lawrence’s portrait of a young woman growing to maturity in a society changing from rural to urban where a woman having an independent life has become—almost—thinkable. (Ursula’s father derides her when she says she wants to become a school teacher and live independently but is silent when he learns what her salary will be.) As Ursula grows away from her parents her struggle to attain a sense of self-worth and her grief over the loneliness of that struggle dominate her life. But at the end of The Rainbow Ursula, having survived a major collapse and what she at first thought was pregnancy has reached a new, fragile peace, where her own individual struggle and the religious beliefs of her childhood have, despite her great suffering, brought her to hope, not hopelessness, to life not death. At the end of the novel, she can still, reverently, use the word God. But getting to this point has been a great journey: Ursula regards her pregnancy as a kind of judgement for being ‘arrogant and wicked’ (Lawrence 1915, p. 329) to think it was ‘not enough that she had her

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man, her children, her place of shelter under the sun…Was it not enough for her, as it had been enough for her mother?’ (p. 329). The world of the late nineteenth-century English midlands was many miles away from the world of late nineteenth-century central China but as well as resembling Ursula in the discovery of her own aching sexual need and (in her case real) pregnancy the wife of Liu resembles Ursula in this: her journey takes place within a rural society where religion, even the gentle version of it followed by most of Buck’s Chinese women characters, can be used to promote a woman’s life-denying judgement of herself as, to use Ursula’s word, ‘wicked’. But Buck does not end The Mother with that judgement, showing that even the morally rigid world of old China could, as the result of an individual’s act of secret transgressive kindness, support such a suffering woman. (The wife of Liu’s cousin with great kindness and at risk to herself helps her abort her baby, the product of her brief liaison with an unscrupulous land agent years after her husband had left her. The alternative would have been her death, as it was for the unnamed aunt in Maxine Hong Kingston’s story.) Ursula does not suffer as the wife of Liu suffers, but they resemble each other in that both respond to what they take as signs: Ursula to the Biblical sign of hope, the rainbow, which she sees from her sickroom window at the end of the novel, and the wife of Liu to the grandson who carries for her the hope that after all she is ‘not so full of sin as once I thought’. In both novels the heroines, having passed through the slough of despond which has nearly drowned them in grief, are returned by their authors, at the end, to hope. The hope that the wife of Liu embraces—that the birth of her grandson might be the Goddess’s judgement that she is not after all so full of sin as she once thought—is not the hope embraced by Ursula, though her belief that the rainbow is God’s sign emotionally resembles it. Ursula is on a different path, in Raymond Williams’ terms the path of educated as opposed to customary life. But that difference between the two characters is less important than what they share: they are the creations of two writers who use them to focus their explorations into how to live with purpose and integrity during a time before the eradication of their religions. In a time after the end of religion, Ursula would not have taken the rainbow as a sign, nor the wife of Liu the birth of her grandson. Both Lawrence and Buck present these two women’s acceptance of the signs as indicating that their long, lonely, heart-breaking individual struggles have at last been recognized by voices answering from deep within them and conferring value on them: in the case of the wife of Liu, as well, voices answering from within her

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own tiny hamlet which, like the ancient rural communities of the Bible, praised a woman at the birth of a son. This created balance between the suffering individual and the context against which she has to struggle but which in the end nourishes her (Ursula returns to school teaching, taking a respected place in her community: we can imagine the wife of Liu living out the rest of her life as an honoured member of her village) is a major achievement by both writers and it is hard to imagine Buck accomplishing it without her memory of The Rainbow, just as The Old Curiosity Shop was behind her creation of Pear Blossom in The Good Earth trilogy. Both of Buck’s characters are the products of creative reading as well as writing: reading which enabled Buck without sentimentality to endow them with a grace the other side of suffering; it was also reading which enabled her to locate the wife of Liu’s epiphany at the end of The Mother as an experience from the heart of old China which only the shallowest readers would denigrate. The wife of Liu’s experience joins others we have seen— O-Lan’s giving gifts to her ex-employer on the birth of her own son, for example. Such experiences prompted Buck to meditate on this question: when the world of O-Lan and the wife of Liu has been swept away, how will women be able to demonstrate their worth, in what ways will women be able to incarnate and experience life in the ways that those two women did? What will happen when women increase in consciousness and become aware that they cannot return to the lives in old China lived by their mothers and grandmothers? Ford said that Women in Love was set in ‘Cities of the Plain from which the hero and heroine must make their hard-won escape’; in that novel the religious and social supports available to the creative individual have diminished to the point of extinction. Lawrence’s progress after The Rainbow was to create characters who try to survive alone without these supports or alone with one other person: survivors of the death of old England in the first world war. Ursula and later Birkin in Women in Love are both transitional figures: unable to live in the old pre-war world or in the new world they try to escape both and Women in Love ends with their fragile futures only hazily intuited. This was also true of Pearl Buck’s sense of her own future after she left China, and of her powerful account of the life of a woman, to which I referred in the last chapter, transitioning from old China to new before retreat back to old China was made impossible by history. In Pavilion of Women the unexpected force which erupts in Madame Wu’s daily world enabling her to start her transition had been prepared for, Buck leaves us in no doubt, by her good fortune in

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possessing both an enlightened father who had protested, when she was a little girl, against her foot-binding, plus a father-in-law who recognized in her a kindred spirit whose thirst for the knowledge to be gained from books equalled his and who, unlike most men of his time, was prepared to share his reading with a woman. In the penultimate chapter of A Pavilion of Women Madame Wu is assailed by this memory: She remembered well the day. They had been reading together, for he had sent for her, and she found him with his finger in a book. He had pointed to the lines when she came in and she had read: “To lift a soul above its natural level is a dangerous act. Souls, like springs, have their natural sources, and to force them beyond is against nature and therefore a dangerous act. For when the soul is forced, it seeks its own level again and disintegrates, being torn between upper and lower levels, and this is also dangerous. True wisdom it is to weigh and judge the measure of a soul and let it live where it belongs” (Buck 1946, loc. 5653)

and, as is the way of such memories, it is available as a teaching only now because at the time Madame Wu had not been able to receive it: the teaching that obedience to the law of duty, which had comprised her life, had forced her soul to live in a desert. This law had dictated that she should provide her husband with sons and that she should manage her household with the expertness of a traditional Chinese woman; the same law had also allowed her to invoke custom and substitute for herself in her husband’s bed a much younger woman. But although she had not at the time been able to receive the words she had read in her father-inlaw’s book, they had taken their place unconsciously among all the other good influences on her life, all of which had led her to the point where she had become ready to receive other words: those of a teacher, recently dead, who had told her of another way of living, words possible for a woman to hear only in new China because only an educated woman of new China with unbound feet able to walk to a meeting with a man not her husband would have been able to hear them or read them. But the words themselves are old, from many religious sources. Around this teacher, the monk-like Brother André, cluster Buck’s preoccupations not only with words but also with men, and in this she again takes us back to D.H. Lawrence who in his short novel about the first world war, The Ladybird, also created a faintly monk-like figure erupting into a woman’s life, the German prisoner-of-war, Count Psanek,

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meaning outlaw. For Lawrence, as for Buck, the questions of what constituted a true man and the relations between men and women were central all his life, and like Buck he was led towards men who were outside the law, looking for other ways to live. In The Ladybird and Pavilion of Women, each man offers to the woman whose life he pierces something quite different from what she had known before in a man, above all the prospect of being treated as an equal, not as a mother or goddess. Thus Lady Daphne’s husband, returning from the war, treats her as his goddess, as does Madame Wu’s husband treat her, and the latter takes his place among the list of unimpressive men catalogued by Buck in her fiction, so many of whom recall the men children of the great eighteenth-century Chinese novel Dream of Red Mansions . An emotionally educated man is as rare as a phoenix, Lawrence once wrote (Lawrence 1936, p. 539), a statement with which Buck would have agreed; and Madame Wu’s reluctant admission to herself that she had never loved that limited man her husband, whom she had always left far behind in her longing for knowledge of other worlds, is another revelation which is the result of Brother André’s intervention in her life. Perhaps what is most compelling about this physically and spiritually gigantic figure is the way in which Brother André constellates so many of Buck’s thoughts, feelings and experiences which had led her to this point in 1946: her rootlessness (her life in China already twelve years behind her); her memory of her childhood with her emotionally unavailable father; her memory of failed marriage to a man she had sorrowfully learned could share none of her other-worldly yearnings. For to describe Pearl Buck as possessing such yearnings is not far from the truth, however much she had been compelled to supress them in her daily life. In contrast, Madame Wu, Buck’s Chinese alter-ego as Joan Richards had been her American alter-ego, was under no such compulsion and her soul journeys into the stars after Brother André’s lessons, in the lonely darkness of her courtyard, recall Lady Daphne’s night visits to the room of Count Psanek to receive his teachings about their becoming king and queen in the kingdom of death, since in the daytime world he has no power. And in carrying this theme from The Ladybird through into her own novel it is as though Buck—through Madame Wu—takes the battle between life and death into the enemy´s territory. There she discovers that there might be a state of mind—as Lawrence had discovered through Count Psanek—where death has lost its sting, because some people are greater than death. Taught by Brother André’s life and death as much as by his words Madame Wu comes, at the end of the novel, into

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possession of a pearl of great price, as had O-Lan in The Good Earth. The pearl which Madame Wu comes to possess is the conviction that Brother André had been led to her, and she had opened her gates and he had come in, and with him he had brought to her eternal life. Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless. She knew she was immortal. (loc. 6068)

Some readers scoffing at the inappropriateness of words such as ‘believed’ and ‘knew’ to represent such a state of mind might like to consider how else Pearl Buck was to represent it; and also this: what should be made of Madame Wu’s reception of Brother André’s teachings that all men and women are brothers and sisters under the sun (all men are brothers, Confucius taught); that God does not care if one believes in him or not since his patience is infinite; of the identity of all gods; of the unimportance of religious words other than those which lead to action—‘feed my sheep’ being his last words to Madame Wu after his murderous beating by a gang of robbers. Peter Conn suggests that ‘after a provocative beginning, the novel declines into a mystical haze’ (p. 303). In contrast I propose that the novel, a deeply thoughtful redaction of Lawrence’s The Ladybird, attempts to capture an almost uncapturable state of mind and avoids haziness because of its grounding in the unmystical presence of the many young girl children Madame Wu inherits from André—rejected and left to starve by impoverished, desperate parents. The coexistence of the fiercely practical problem of what to do with these cast-offs (to whom Buck gives names like a collection of Dickens child characters) with Madame Wu’s ‘soul-journeying’ represents Buck’s attempt to reconcile the antithetical energies transmitted to her by two of the most influential men in her life: her father’s other-worldliness and her first husband’s thisworld practicality. Like Lawrence’s Count Psanek, Brother André journeys into the kingdom of death; but unlike Psanek he leaves his woman disciple with the injunction not to follow him there but to rescue those in whom life is still to be lived: to rescue them from death. Thus did Buck, while showing the deep attraction of death to one who had been through as

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much suffering as Madame Wu, as Buck herself—thus did she in this novel nevertheless use her reading and writing for life, not death, showing how her Chinese alter-ego ‘had opened her gates’ to life through the teachings of one man.

*** This man’s teachings were from more than one source, evident in his grounding in the great Chinese spiritual classics and perhaps also in the great Chinese novels. The reader who leaves Pavilion of Women with the impression that André’s only real source of wisdom was the Bible would be as mistaken as one who thinks that the literary origins of Buck’s suffering women and girls are only to be found in Lawrence or Dickens. Buck’s reading of Chinese philosophy and fiction, as well as of British and American literature, was extensive. It helped form her extraordinary mind, which some male authors were too threatened by to appreciate. From the reception of The Good Earth by Jiang Kanghu as containing characters who were ‘not typical Chinese’ (Conn, p. 126) to William Faulkner’s suggestion that he would rather not accept the Nobel Prize than find himself in the company of ‘Mrs. Chinahand Buck’ (Conn, p. 210), they criticized her because they said she didn’t know what she was talking about (Jiang Kanghu mistakenly suggested that Buck was unable to read the Chinese classics); she had taken an unorthodox route to literary success because the general public, not the critics, had discovered her; and most of all (unspoken though this thought might be) because she was a woman. One is reminded of Jane Eyre’s reception by critics when it first appeared: according to Gilbert and Gubar, Elizabeth Rigby’s animosity was provoked not because it had ‘pleased God [the ultimate patriarch] to make [Jane] an orphan, friendless, and penniless’ (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, p. 338) but because Rigby had intuited Jane’s (and Bronte’s) passionate protest against that fact. ‘The occasional woman who has a weakness for black-browed Byronic heroes can be accommodated in novels and even in some drawing rooms; the woman who yearns to escape entirely from drawing rooms and patriarchal mansions obviously cannot’ (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, p. 338). In my father’s house there may be many mansions but Pearl Buck didn’t want to stay in any of them, preferring the company of those who lived in the free air. One difference between Chinese and American Pearl Buck was that, for the latter, reading was a solitary addiction to be hidden from

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her parents (though this was not of course the only means through which she absorbed Western culture: her mother reading Bible stories aloud remained a lifelong memory, but one wonders whether those stories were also contaminated for her by sad associations—with her parents’ unhappy marriage, with the ignorant mediocrity of some missionaries). In contrast she gained her love of Chinese philosophy and stories through associations filled with human warmth: from Mr Kung, the teacher who taught her to revere Confucian philosophy, at whose funeral she wept and before whose coffin she bowed (Buck 1954, loc. 1056), and from her neighbours. She records her interest, from childhood, not ‘in gossip, but only in story. I was entangled in every human story going on about me, and could and did spend hours listening to anyone who would talk to me’ (Buck 1954, loc. 1080) and in an important 1930 article published as China in the Mirror of Her Fiction she describes the storytellers encircled by their audiences (of whom she had also been one) of everyday people: You may go into any village in China today and there they sit listening. Thus their ancestors sat, also, a packed crowd of brown-skinned, bluecoated men and women of the earth, listening with strained faces and sober eyes to the slender whip of a figure in their midst. To his halfchanting voice and to the constant movements of his wraith-like body they respond as trees to the wind, weeping when he weeps, and, when at the unendurable moment of heart-break his eyes flash and he gives the sign, laughing with the tears yet upon their sun-dried cheeks. The tales he tells are of people like themselves, inextricably mingled as they believe themselves to be, with the strange forces of nature which they have explained by gods, good and evil as men are. (Buck 1930, p. 158)

Focussing on this image—of the American child sitting in the middle of an entranced Chinese crowd, one gets nearer to the wild Pearl Buck—the woman who had created the outlaw figure of Brother André, excommunicated by his own Church for heresy—and who chose to translate, out of all the Chinese classics, that populated with outlaws, thieves and murderers and treated by Mao Zedong as a military training manual in guerrilla warfare. In China in the Mirror of Her Fiction Buck claimed to read Chinese cultural history from the perspective of those whom Mao called its masses and it is a foundation text for understanding Buck’s own fiction. Distinguishing between ‘the ice-pure pages of [China’s] wisdom literature’, where ‘the lonely figures of Confucius and Mencius and Laotse [pass] in stately isolation and… clear perfection’, Buck suggests that

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those pages record China as she wants to be seen by herself and others, while the real China is to be found not in those ‘figures of cold rectitude’, but in the ‘other mirror[,] of her fiction’. With loving attention and admiration Buck describes the stories she had been reading for the previous ten years: some mythical or half mythical—’the gods and the half-gods of Chou, a thousand years before Christ’ (Buck 1930, p. 158), others based on history, but all ‘coming out of the people and…created for the people’ (p. 158). In writing this alternative Chinese cultural history Buck did not devalue fiction of identifiable origin: ‘many an exquisite and poignant tale, particularly in the early centuries[…] in perfection of style and sensitive delicacy of thought and self-revelation reveal a trained mind and hand. None but the scholar and thinker could have written them’ (p. 158), most of the other stories reflect the unidentifiable provenance of the folk tale. But whatever their origin, the cultural products of this other China had in common a fascination with the supernatural— we say with truth that the Chinese are a people naturally atheistic; they are, and yet here are these centuries of stories filled with sayings and doings of gods and devils and creatures half-men, half-spirit. Gods become men, men become gods, animals are devil-filled, women are evil animals, foxes and weasels with human forms (p. 159)

—as well as a fascination with their two other overwhelmingly important themes: sexual love, and hate. Both of which were to be found, together with the supernatural, in The Dream of Red Mansions , the novel I cited earlier as one source for Pavilion of Women. In her Nobel lecture Buck described the popularity of that book (published in Beijing in about 1765) being the result of its accurately portraying a society patriarchal in the public sphere, matriarchal in the private, which ‘kept men children, and protected them from hardship and effort when they should not have been so protected’—an analysis obviously reflected in Buck’s portrayal of the many ‘half men’ in her own fiction including Madame Wu’s husband. If the future of China was to rest with men like these, Buck suggested in her fiction, it would be dire indeed: hence perhaps the impression Chiang Kai-Shek made on her which she memorably recorded after watching him unobserved on the day of Sun Yat-sen’s funeral: his face

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so strangely like that of a tiger, the high forehead sloping, the ears flaring backward, the wide mouth seeming always ready to smile and yet always cruel. But his eyes were the most arresting feature. They were large, intensely black, and utterly fearless. It was not the fearlessness of composure or of intelligence, but the fearlessness, again, of the tiger, who sees no reason to be afraid of any other beast because of its own power. (Buck 1954, loc. 4593)

From the same source as this unwilling admiration came also her troubled respect for Mao Zedong’s energy, for his iron grip on the truth (never understood by Chiang) that if he was to succeed he would have to gain the support of the rural poor. And if one had asked Buck which kind of man she respected more—the young ruthless hate-filled Meng of A House Divided, soon to leave Chiang’s failed revolution for the real thing with Mao in the West, or the cowardly Confucian scholar Dr Liang in Kinfolk, one can imagine her reply: that the one represented life, although a ruthless life, the other squalid comfort and death. Buck’s reading of the Bible was education enough for her to learn that hatred and life are not necessarily opposed terms. Jesus—whose life, according to the author of St. John’s Gospel, was the light of men (John 1:4)—did not scourge the temple money lenders because he loved them (John 2:13–16). The centrality of the word life to describe Chinese fiction is a theme of both China in the Mirror of Her Fiction and Buck’s later Nobel lecture. It had always been the duty of the Chinese novelist not only to tell stories but ‘to sort life as it flow[ed] through him’ (Buck 1939) and those qualified to respond to this were not critics but common readers, those sufficiently alive themselves to judge whether a novelist’s energy was ‘producing more of that life’, (Buck 1939) even if it was bitter or coarse or brutal or motivated by hate. Conceding that one of China’s great novels—The Three Kingdoms —’was only a killing back and forth’, Buck’s interlocutor had added this: ‘truly speaking, above all else we Chinese admire physical bravery and prowess in war’ (Buck 1930, p. 164)—a statement Buck reported with neither ‘praise or…blame. After all, one asks of a mirror only that it reflect the truth’ (p. 164), including the truth about sexual love. I have described the influence of Dickens on Pearl Buck, but whatever else Dickens was good at it wasn’t describing sex, and to learn how to write about this Buck had to go elsewhere in English literature—above all, as I’ve argued apropos of The Mother, to D.H. Lawrence. ‘How does one talk to an oaf?’, the heroine of The Time Is Noon asks about her future

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husband; she might also have asked how a woman is supposed to make love to an oaf, a question Lawrence’s women frequently ask in different ways, as did Cao Xueqin, author of Dream of Red Mansions. But, as we have also seen, Buck did not portray all men as oafs (no more did Cao Xueqin) and the influence of Chinese fiction as well as of Lawrence shows in Buck’s unashamed celebration of sex as one of the world’s great joys if entered into gladly—as with the young married couple in The Mother. Chinese fiction, Buck wrote, frankly put the relation of the sexes upon sex and sex alone. Lust [was] a glory, not abnormal or out of a diseased imagination, but robust and with open delight in the body and its acts (Buck 1930, p. 162)

—as when, in The Dream of Red Mansions, Bao Yu dreams of being initiated into sex by Ke-qing, who ‘led him by predictable stages to that act which boys and girls perform together’ after which they lay ‘locked in blissful tenderness’ with each other (Cao Xueqin and Hawkes 1973, p. 66), or as when, in another eighteenth century classic, the writer records that on his wedding night we sat up making jokes, like two close friends meeting after a long separation. I playfully felt her breast and found her heart was beating as fast as mine. I pulled her to me and whispered in her ear, “Why is your heart beating so fast?” She answered with a bewitching smile that made me feel a love so endless it shook my soul. I held her close as I parted the curtains and led her into bed. We never noticed what time the sun rose in the morning. (Shen Fu et al. 1983, p. 29)

Buck, to sum up, learned to write about sex not only from Lawrence but also from Chinese fiction, and she knew from both sources how close sex is not only to love but also to hate. At first sight it is puzzling why, out of the great Chinese novels, Pearl Buck chose to translate the classic late Ming period Shui Hu Zhuan, Water Margin, the ultimate bandit novel. Richard Jean So has argued cogently for Buck’s attraction to the novel because in it ‘Buck perceived an indigenous tradition of Chinese democracy […] As such, natural democracy embodied a powerful linkage between American and Chinese literary histories, as well as forms of politics and social knowledge’ (So 2010). Another answer may be that it was precisely the hatred and brutality in that novel which fascinated her: the anarchic hatred felt by

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its victims of corruption and which was an inseparable part of the novel’s version of the Confucian code of absolute loyalty to a friend and absolute detestation of an enemy. C.T. Hsia argues that the novel’s power lies precisely in its anarchy, which he distinguishes from the disciplined moral code of the Norse sagas: several prominent heroes and the band itself must be seen as instruments of anarchy in their apparent delight in violence and sadism. Theirs is not so much the enlightened force for revolution as the unleashed energy of the unconscious which every civilization must hold in check if it is to survive. (Hsia 1968, p. 99)

It is plausible that it was ‘the unleashed energy’ of this novel compared with her father’s caged-in-iron ascetic energy which attracted Buck; its heroes’ delight in eating and drinking matched only by the zeal with which they kill those they think worthy of death. So far so Robin Hoodlike: but the truth is that this is also one of the world’s most brutal books, recording the torture of women who have offended against primitive sexual morality (woman as man’s possession) by men who value lust only when it precedes blood. Hsia suggests that in the last analysis, they are punished for being women, for being such helpless creatures of lust. A psychological chasm divides them from the self-disciplined heroes. Precisely because of their sexual puritanism, these heroes harbor a subconscious hatred of women as their worst enemy, as a teasing reminder of the unnaturalness of their heroic self-sufficiency (p. 98)

Absalom Sydenstricker, Buck’s father, was not a Song dynasty Chinese bandit but the line from his puritanical iron devotion to his cause, to save men’s souls, plus his indifference (according to his daughter’s biography of her mother) to the needs of his wife: this line proceeds straight back to the primitive male-oriented morality of the Liangshan bandits. In her translation of Shui Hu Zhuan, Pearl Buck was able to display men’s hatred of women for what it was, undisguised by Christian piety. A husband might be ‘the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church’ (Ephesians 5:23), but Pearl Buck, as we saw in Chapter One, knew too well women’s emotional misery and men’s sense of superiority licensed by this teaching. It is possible to imagine that Buck decided to call her version of Shui Hu Zhuan All Men Are Brothers out of unconscious irony—the Confucian teaching embodied in the title undercut

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throughout by the book’s brutal contents. A few men, rigidly identified, may be brothers. But all other men and most women are enemies. Perhaps in the end there is room for no more than one hundred and eight brothers in the world—the number of outlaws congregated on Mt. Lu at the end of the novel—also the number of followers of Wang the Tiger, the warlord son of Wang Lung in the second volume of The Good Earth Trilogy, Buck’s own bandit novel, increasingly given to satire as it progresses, and written at the same time as her translation. Pearl Buck’s satirical gift is best seen in her representation of the relation between men and women—in The Good Earth trilogy, or The Time Is Noon, or, as we shall see, in her later American novels, particularly the last ‘John Sedges’ novel, Voices in the House. And had she been given to permanent despair she might have followed the great Lu Xun’s path and channelled her energy into writing additional biting satirical stories and essays about old and post-Qing China. Buck’s first novel, East Wind, West Wind certainly has satirical (as well as tragic) features, foregrounding two modern young men against the background of old China: the newly married young narrator’s husband, who ‘has crossed the Four Seas to the other and outer countries, and […] has learned in those remote places to love new things and new ways’ (loc. 20), and her brother, newly married to an American woman, who has also turned his back on the ways of old China after studying medicine abroad (America in his case; Japan in Lu Xun’s), believing (as Lu Xun briefly did, and—as we have seen—other of Buck’s male Chinese characters did) that Western medicine was one way of rescuing China’s benighted inhabitants from their feudal torpor. But Buck did not become a satirical writer and nothing else, as Lu Xun did not either: his stories of the lives of women in the last days of old China are both satirical and heart-breaking because of their desperation—in Medicine for example, where Hua Dama, the mother of the dying tubercular boy Hua Xiaoshuan, pays a fortune to the executioner of another boy, the Communist martyr Xia Yu (inspired by the woman martyr Qiu Jin) for a steamed bun soaked in the latter’s blood and which, if her son eats it, the executioner assures the mother, will cure his tuberculosis: the name not only of the disease but also a metaphor for the illness suffered by China herself. (The multiple layers of this wonderful story, which, like Buck’s East Wind, West Wind, also enacts the incomprehension of old China faced with new China, are outside the scope of this book: interested readers should consult Jeremy Tambling’s (2007) brilliant analysis.)

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Lu Xun himself died of tuberculosis in Shanghai in 1936 having quarrelled with that city’s Communist literary leadership (Lovell 2009, p. xiii) and was not to know the full extent of what would happen to his country and its intellectuals in the years after his death: according to Julia Lovell ‘Mao himself is said to have admitted, in one of his flashes of honesty, that Lu Xun would “either have gone silent, or gone to prison” if he had lived on through the political violence that the Great Helmsman unleashed from the 1950s onwards’ (Lovell 2009, p. xxxv). That Pearl Buck read Lu Xun there is no doubt, but how far he influenced her other than in his portrayal of the women of old China and because he had followed medical training in Japan (possibly giving her the idea of making doctors of some of her young men characters) is dubious. Lu Xun’s remarks about Pearl Buck were disparaging. But there were other May Fourth influences on Buck (shorthand for the New Culture movement which originally emerged with the publication in 1915 of the radical new journal New Youth; May Fourth itself marking the date in 1919 when Beijing students protested against the punitive terms imposed on China by the Treaty of Versailles). These influences determined Buck’s portrayal of the emerging New China in general and its women in particular. One scholar has recently suggested that Buck’s portrayal of different women in Pavilion of Women was strongly influenced by early twentieth century Chinese feminist writing which ‘can help us think about the way social upheaval led to a proliferation of conceptions of “women” in China during the first half of the twentieth century’ (Larson, M. 2019). I will describe below the influence of one May Fourth Chinese feminist writer— Ding Ling—on Pearl Buck, but before that I stress that this period of ferment in Chinese history—the later stages of which we partly saw in the last chapter through the eyes of Lin Yutang—was lived through by Pearl Buck not as a foreign academic but as one who suffered China’s struggles in her soul. Her sudden translation in 1920 from the rural Northern province of Anhui, where she had thought she would live for the rest of her life (MSW loc. 2767 to Nanjing (on her first husband’s appointment to an academic post) was not only a geographical dislocation but also a deep cultural one, and her descriptions in My Several Worlds contrasting her ‘quiet and intensely interesting’ Anhui years (MSW loc. 2756), in what was still essentially old China, with her life in Nanjing’s emerging new China are among the finest pieces she wrote. The woman who had travelled around Anhui with her husband John Lossing: ‘he on bicycle and I in the usual sedan chair’, the only possible transport for a woman,

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(loc. 2588), often preceded by ‘some one who might pass me, walking or donkeyback, and who, reaching a town ahead of us, would cry out on the streets or in a teashop that a strange sight was soon to arrive’; the woman who ‘used to visit in families where no white person had even been, proud old families who had lived in remote walled towns and in the same houses for many hundreds of years’ (MSW loc. 2605), found herself confronted by young people of the emerging New China who attended her class at Nanjing National University. These were as different as might be from (for example) the recently married young woman befriended by Buck in Anhui who, compelled to follow the ways of Old China in the house of her parents-in-law, was amazed to find that John Lossing spoke to Buck in the presence of other people; who did not dare to speak to her own husband until they were finally alone in their bedroom at night ‘since duty compelled him to spend hours with his parents and it was always late when he came to bed, and she was afraid to ask him for too much talk’ (loc. 2627); whom ‘custom forbade to speak to the older women unless she was spoken to’ (loc. 2632); and who had ‘never once spoken to my father-in-law. I bow to him if we meet and then I must leave the room. He does not notice me’ (2621). In burning contrast are Buck’s evocations of her National University students, young women as well as men—‘most of them had not much to eat and they wore a sort of blue cotton garb later known as the Sun Yat-sen uniform. In winter they were bitterly cold, and so was I, for we had no heat in the buildings’. Teaching these living embodiments of China’s new youth entranced Pearl Buck: They were young men and women, thinking and questioning and alive, and I learned far more from them than from the suave and acquiescent men students in the Christian university. I came away frozen with cold in my body but warm in my heart and stimulated in mind because between me and those eager young students, so thinly clad and badly fed, there were no barriers. They wanted to talk about everything in the world, and we talked. (loc. 3240)

One can’t help being reminded of the retrospectively heart-breaking words of another writer, present at the beginning of another revolution: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven’. As with Wordsworth and his revolution, Buck’s faith in the political and cultural revolution whose early years she had witnessed was to

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be broken. Immediately after recording the excitement of teaching her National University students, she gives a harrowing retrospective detail about what was to happen to these young women and men: ‘most of them are dead in the wars and revolutions that have swept over us all’ (MSW loc. 3240). That was in 1954, late enough for the long dark years of China’s suffering to have obliterated the memory of those extraordinary young people, although a few whom we have already met continue to live in Buck’s fiction. The young woman who goes singing to her death at the end of The Mother or the young man waiting, weeping, for dawn execution in A House Divided were victims of an earlier, pre-Mao, era but they could equally stand for those countless ones who suffered at the hands of those whom Buck was to call ‘the new Magi’. But, teaching at Nanjing National University only a few years after the publication of New Youth, Buck was not to know what lay ahead. She was still secure enough in her life in China (despite the birth, in 1920, of her baby, whose profound learning disabilities would soon become so distressingly evident, and the death of her beloved mother the following year) not only to share the excitement of her intellectually insatiable young students (who also read ‘as if for life’) but also to witness the unfolding literary revolution which fed it. In My Several Worlds Buck distinguishes between literary and political revolution—stating, with what now looks like naivety, ‘that my own interest has never been in politics but in the thoughts of men and women and so I continued to be deeply concerned with the literary revolution’, her freedom to distinguish between the two kinds of revolution certainly diminishing as her own and China’s life progressed. But in the early 1920s the same short-lived political conditions which allowed Buck and her students to ‘talk about everything in the world’ also facilitated China’s literary revolution in which so much energy was spent defending or attacking one or other of a pair of opposed propositions. Literary vs. demotic language was the foundation pair: The question was, could real works of literature be written in the vernacular? Older scholars still insisted that it could never express allusive meanings as did the wen-li, or classical style of writing. The young scholars, Western-trained, had to prove that it could. Hitherto it had been used only for magazine and newspaper writing. Here […] Hu Shih was the leader of the new school, for he now began to write his monumental work, Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy. It was never finished, alas, but the first volume proved again that the Chinese spoken language could also be a

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beautifully clear and graceful written language, flexible and alive, expressing the most profound meaning and thought. Once Hu Shih had shown the value of the new written language, young Chinese writers rushed to follow his example, and a mass of experimental material got into print (loc. 3257)

—such ‘experimental material’, as Buck puts it, also exemplifying the battle between defenders of China’s literary past and iconoclastic heralds of its literary future. On the side of the young iconoclasts were those who shouted down with Confucius, with the Four Books, with the Five Classics, with Chinese customs; up with Western science, Western education, Western houses, Western furniture, versions of which slogans were followed so memorably by some characters in Buck’s first novel, East Wind, West Wind. The battle for who and what should be the subjects of Chinese fiction particularly mattered to Buck, and My Several Worlds records her disappointment at finding that so many of the ‘new’ vernacular novels she read in the 1920s turned out to be recycled versions of Western novels—‘how wearisome it was in those days to open one much-praised Chinese novel after another only to discover that it was all but plagiarized from a Western one!’ (MSW loc. 3261)—though she also records that as new Chinese writing developed ‘the strongest minds began to return to their own people’ (loc. 3274), leaving behind a retrospectively tragic and representative figure. This was the young man proud to be called the ‘Chinese Shelley’ (given no other name by Buck) who sat for hours talking to her waving about his beautiful manicured hands, innocent of all manual labour, ‘in exquisite and descriptive gestures’ (loc. 3274): the still revered Xu Zhimo, the first and last lines of whose poem ‘Second Farewell to Cambridge’ are carved into his memorial stone in the grounds of King’s College, Cambridge. Xu was to become a tragic figure in Buck’s eyes because had he ‘outgrown the Shelley phase he might have become himself’ (loc. 3270), but before that he died in an air crash aged thirty-four, an episode which haunted Buck for the rest of her life. Some of the men and women who did become themselves in their brave battles to found a new vernacular writing Buck invokes by name: as well as the great Hu Shi and Lu Xun, she calls on three others, one man, Guo Moruo—‘that brilliant mind, whose habit was the utmost candor and whose passion was truth’ (loc. 3278)—and two women: Ding Ling and Bing Xin. In My Several Worlds, Buck refers to Ding Ling as one of ‘two intrepid and fearless women writers who used to make me so proud’ (Buck 1954,

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loc. 3281) and asks whether she too can have changed, like others who have ‘succumbed […] to writing the extravaganzas of convulsive and surely compelled adoration of the new Magi?’ (loc. 3277)—a question she answers with another: ‘who can tell me? It is another world and one that I do not know’ (loc. 3282). Which texts by Ding Ling Buck read after her return to America in 1934 is less clear than those which it is fairly certain she read before she left, and I will now state the hypothesis that Ding Ling’s stories of disempowered women trying to find power were in Pearl Buck’s mind when she was writing her novels set in China. This fact is salient: that from the declining years of the Qing dynasty the question of what China needed to do to survive as an independent un-carved-up country—not just part of ‘the Rest’ after ‘the West’ had finished with it—was increasingly urgent, and Pearl Buck was one of those who felt its urgency. If The Good Earth trilogy lamented the passing of old China, with the vanishing of its Wang Lungs, of its O-Lans, of the nameless old farmer and his wife at the end of A House Divided—all very different from Ah Q, Lu Xun’s satirical stereotype of a man from old China, a feudal inheritor who lives on gloating and self-deception—East Wind, West Wind, Buck’s first novel, had asked what would happen to China if such people did not vanish. What would be not only the historical cost of preserving old China unchanged, what would be the human cost? Who would judge the human cost? Ding Ling’s writing suggested that the question had become meaningless, because the women of emerging new China could not be repressed, though the pain of their emergence could indeed be recorded. In Miss Sophia’s Diary (1927), published before Buck left China, Ding used the metaphor of a TB ward to describe the loneliness and isolation of a modern young woman exiled from all human companionship other than fleeting visits from men she cannot relate to; A Woman and a Man (1928) juxtaposes a young woman’s determination to live life to the full with a male (supposedly socialist) writer who ‘loved his melancholy state of mind far more deeply’ (Ding Ling et al. 1989, p. 98) than he could love any woman and who, after publishing a poem about impoverished rickshaw pullers, cheers himself up by thinking that only a poet like himself could properly value them since ‘the rickshaw men themselves could not possibly know how magnificent they were’ (p. 98). The figures of Ding’s two brave lonely young women plus that of the melancholic poet may have made their way into Buck’s writing to complement her memories of actual women and men she had met (such as the

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desperately lonely women mentioned in The Exile or the ‘Chinese Shelley’ of My Several Worlds ); the effete young poet, brother of Meng the revolutionary in A House Divided (1935) might well be a composite of both Xu Zhimo and Ou Waiou, Ding Ling’s self-proclaimed fictional rickshaw poet. Although Buck needed no encouragement to laugh at men, it’s cheering to think that her laughter might also have been inspired by Ding Ling who, on the evidence of those two stories alone, created fine laughter-evoking male characters: Weidi, in love with Sophia, recompensed for his efforts by Sophia’s enjoyment in making him cry; or Ou Waiou, who cannot see rickshaw pullers except as subjects for poems or imagine himself in love with a woman unless she is represented by a Western literary figure such as the heroine of La Dame aux Camelias . But behind both Ding’s and Buck’s male-directed laughter is the fact of women’s displacement: having left old China they now had nowhere to call home, especially if they had to share it with effete poetic updates of the figure of the Chinese scholar we heard Pearl Buck laugh at in an earlier chapter. This is true especially of the heroine of Mother (1932, in Ding Ling et al. 1989), Ding’s novel—not to be confused with Pearl Buck’s novel of the same name—about her own mother’s heroic journey into women’s higher education involving enormous personal courage, greater than that of Madame Wu of Buck’s Pavilion of Women. This theme: of women, as Barlow puts it, living ‘inside the tension between feminism and the feminine’ (p. 26) concerned both writers for the rest of their lives, however their attitudes to both words might change (in Ding’s case did change—see Barlow’s discussion in her introduction to I Myself Am a Woman)—beyond recognition. Buck’s life, though full of suffering, did not contain the extremity of suffering of Ding’s life, which included the execution of the father of her little boy; kidnap by the Nationalist secret police; excommunication by powerful Communist colleagues and stripping of Party membership; internal exile in Manchuria; torment by Red Guards; years in solitary confinement: all these before her reappearance in Beijing in 1978 where ‘she immediately became a symbol of the unresolved guilt and horror of the government’s thirty-year policy toward intellectuals’ (Barlow 1989, p. 44). By that time Buck was dead but she would not have condemned Ding for her final position, which was to identify herself with the history of the Chinese Communist Party in her late text Du Wanxiang , where ‘through the determined effort of one good woman, who would rather light a candle than curse in the dark, the

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modern Everywoman of People’s China shapes herself’ (Barlow 1989, p. 329). This brief consideration of Ding and earlier Chinese writers, aiming to show Buck’s acquaintance with literature written in Chinese as well as in English, finishes with Buck’s final relocation to America, and in the next chapter I will consider what she made of that transition. One strategy: she wrote novels about China drawn from memory: Pavilion of Women (1946); Peony (1948); Kinfolk (1950); God’s Men (1951), three of which I have discussed. But writing from memory was not the only strategy she used to adapt to her new life—had it been she might have become like one of Dickens’ men-boys, unable to live in the present. Of Pearl Buck this was emphatically not true.

References Buck, P.S. 1930. China in the Mirror of her Fiction. Pacific Affairs 3(2, February): 155–164. Buck, P.S. 1931. The Good Earth. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1932. Sons. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1934. The Mother. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S., and P.S. Buck. 1939. The Chinese Novel: Nobel Lecture Delivered before the Swedish Academy at Stockholm, December 12, 1938. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1946. Pavilion of Women. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1950. The Child Who Never Grew. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1954. My Several Worlds: A Personal Record. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1965. My Mother’s House. Richwood, West Virginia: Appalachian Press. Buck, P.S. 1966. The Time Is Noon. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1971. The Story Bible, 1984 ed. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co. Cao Xueqin, Hawkes, D. 1973. The Story of the Stone: The Golden Days. London: Penguin. Dickens, C. 1841. The Old Curiosity Shop. 2000. Penguin. London: Chapman and Hall. Ding Ling, T.E. Barlow, and G.J. Bjorge. 1989. I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling. 2001 ed. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Ford, G.H. 1965. Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Gilbert, S.M., and S. Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 1984 ed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Harris, T.F. 1972. Pearl S. Buck: A Biography. Vol. 2. London: Eyre Methuen. Hsia, C.T. 1968. The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction. 2015, The Chinese University of Hong Kong ed. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Larson, M. 2019. Pearl S. Buck, Pavilion of Women, and Early TwentiethCentury Chinese Feminism. Japan: Journal of Jissen English Department 71: 29–47, 2019–03. Lawrence, D.H. 1915. The Rainbow. New York: Random House. Lawrence, D.H. 1936. John Galsworthy’, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, 1970 ed. London: Henemann. Lovell, J. 2009. The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun. London: Penguin. Shen Fu, Chiang Su-Hui, Pratt, and Leonard. 1983. Six Records of a Floating Life. London: Penguin. So, R.J. 2010. Fictions of Natural Democracy: Pearl Buck, The Good Earth, and the Asian American Subject. Representations 112 (1): 87–111. Spurling, H. 2010. Burying the Bones, 2011th ed. London: Profile Books Ltd. Tambling, J. 2007. Madmen and Other Survivors: Reading Lu Xun’s Fiction. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

CHAPTER 4

‘If a Way to the Better There Be, It Exacts a Full Look at the Worst’: Pearl Buck’s American Search After 1934

We have seen that Buck continued to write about China after leaving that country, not knowing when she sailed for America from Shanghai on that day in May 1934 that she would never return. But that departure nonetheless did mark the end of an era for her. Harris, Buck’s friend and biographer, suggested that she was inclined to write ‘“the end”… [under chapters] of her life and to declare the setting of the stage for the next chapter’ (Harris 1969, p. 314), Certainly, the publication of her biographies of her parents in 1936 marked the establishment of Buck as a mature adult who had achieved separation from the two who had influenced her so deeply: the father ‘who never touched the fringe of human life…never knew its stuff…never felt its doubt nor shared its pain’ (Buck 1936b, p. 273), and the mother who had given to her children ‘in the midst of the most remote and alien environment…and who knows at what cost, sometimes, an American background, making them truly citizens of their own country and giving them a love of it which is deathless’ (Buck 1936a, p. 315). Moreover, according to Buck’s testimony, ‘to the thousands of Chinese whom she touched in every sort of way she [also] was America. How often have I heard them say, “Americans are good, because they are kind. She was an American”’ (Buck 1936b, p. 315). Buck had written those words about her mother immediately after her death fifteen years earlier and she was not then to know how much she would in the future have to exclude from her love of America, including © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Hardy, Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3556-4_4

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its multiple acts of cruelty, called racism, documented in victims’ stories she heard after her return. Reading her articles and letters one can’t but be struck by Buck’s ferocious anger at what she discovered about the country her mother had so idolized. Seeing links between British imperialism and American racism she was angered also by the American press ‘lopsidedly endors[ing] Britain’s colonial rule’, and she declared ‘that the British treatment of India was comparable to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. She wrote that in India Great Britain was responsible for ‘one of the longest and cruelest tyrannies in human history’ (Conn, p. 173), she saluted the Indian leader Nehru as ‘a genuinely great leader, a visionary and revolutionist who opposed British madness with courage, integrity and sanity’ (Conn, p. 173) and she explicitly linked British imperialism to American racism in a letter to President Roosevelt in January 1941 where ‘she asked Roosevelt [both] to call on Nehru’s release as a proof of the West’s commitment to democracy [and] publicly demand the equal treatment of the Negro American’ (Conn, p. 241); she also asked Roosevelt ‘how a democratic society could authorize imperialism or ‘ignore the oppression by stupid prejudice of a whole race of our nation’ (Conn, p. 241). And if Buck (in her own mind, if not in many other American minds) linked imperialism to racism, she also linked both—in the form of fascism—to sexism. In 1940 she had fearfully compared America with Europe and Asia, [and had] proposed that “there are tides of fascism in our country...which will unless they are checked swell to meet foreign fascism,” and [had] concluded by referring darkly to “what has happened to women in fascist countries”. (Conn, p. 236)

What had happened to women in fascist countries, Buck argued, had been their ‘systematic subjugation’, and ‘Americans who call[ed] for the domestication of women [were], whatever their intentions, tools of a home-grown fascist mentality’ (Conn, p. 236). The supreme exponent of the doctrines of racism, imperialism and sexism was of course Adolph Hitler who knowingly pursued them by means of total war (Hitler’s racism and imperialism scarcely needing description; his sexism starting from the premise that while what Nazis called non-Aryan women were subhuman, Aryan women were machines made to service Aryan men and breed and service Aryan babies); and while, Conn reports, Buck abhorred war, she ‘concluded that fascism, whose particular targets

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included women, could only be halted by war’ (Conn, p. 236), Hitler being ‘“a mad dog” who needed to be caught and killed’ (Conn, p. 236). This, then, was the new world waiting for Buck beyond the mid-1930s: of American racism and sexism, British imperialism and Japanese and European fascism, with wars past and future their interlinking thread: the American Civil War; the first War of Indian Independence; the wars in Europe; the wars in Asia. How was a highly intelligent, articulate and sensitive observer, daughter of two countries which were, to her great grief, to become enemies where they had been friends—how was such an observer to respond to this new world and understand the sources not only of America’s inhuman cruelty but of human cruelty in general? A fundamental question: as one of Shakespeare’s more pitiful recipients of cruelty put it, ‘Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’ (King Lear, Act 3 Scene 6). In her post-1934 novels, Pearl Buck attempted to answer this question. For her, the worst of which humans were capable, the time when their hearts were hardest, was when they subdued their individuality to the thinking and cruelty of the mob, irrespective of which country the mob belonged to, and she explored the theme of mob thought and mob cruelty in four novels, one of which was set in America, one in both China and America and the other two in China. Her 1951 novel God’s Men, set in China and America, showed the mob thinking and actions of the Chinese Yihetuan movement (known in Britain as the Boxer rebellion) at the beginning of the twentieth century and was followed nearly twenty years later by her 1969 novel The Three Daughters of Madame Liang , which showed how mob thought and cruelty could be engineered and used in post-liberation China. The most graphic of her novels of mob cruelty was the 1941 Dragon Seed, which portrayed Japanese soldiers, four years before the novel was published, pursuing the mass rape, torture and murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing. Buck might have stopped with Joseph Conrad’s ‘the horror, the horror’ before this, the indescribable or, as Lear wanted to, escaped to prison, so that in the remote quiet of her Pennsylvania farmhouse she could forget about the horrors being perpetrated in China, in Europe, in America, in the whole world. But she did not, and the text which better summarizes her attitude to her new world is Thomas Hardy’s: if a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst (In Tenebris II). She could not give up. She wanted to find a way to the better. As her mother had fought for life while incarcerated in the prison of marriage to Buck’s father, as she herself had fought

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for life and escaped the prison of her own marriage, she could not rest in despair. And while her answer to King Lear’s question—what causes these hard hearts—named mob thinking as one cause, it was only part of the answer and itself posed another question: what causes mob thinking and brutality in the first place. Buck tried to begin to answer this question by imagining, in Dragon Seed, witnesses’ words attempting to describe the causes of such brutality. Ling Tan, the novel’s farmer hero, ascribes the principal cause (in silent words to himself before he has seen any atrocity) to the degradation of men in war: when Japanese soldiers enter his village near Nanjing demanding women, he tells himself ‘that a man embattled [by which he also means part of a mob] is no longer himself but a creature with his mind gone and only the lowest part of his body left’ (Buck 1941a, loc. 1886). For those in the novel who do witness the Nanjing atrocities, the only words available are comparisons with the acts of wild beasts, no, and worse, for beasts would have eaten men and women, and these killed only the men and took the women. Whether a woman was old or young was nothing. Young were taken first and then old. (loc. 2086)

These were the witnesses who could still speak: one described the death by gang rape of her sister and the killing of her sister’s baby: he was but five months old, and he was so hearty and strong and cried so loud, because they snatched him from her breast, and then the enemy who had hold of her was angry and strangled the little thing with her own garments, and she lay bound and not able even to cry out, and when he and thirty others were done with her she was dead, too. (loc. 2089)

But in addition to those who could still speak ‘there were many who said nothing to any one because what they had suffered was beyond telling’ (loc. 2106). And if ‘worse than wild beasts’ are among the few words available to those witnesses not made mute to describe the perpetrators, their analysis of the atrocities’ causes stops as statement before it can be turned into Lear’s question. ‘These [men] were more than evil. There was no human heart in them’ (loc. 2019). Thus, to the eternal dishonour of the Japanese army, does Buck record its mob brutality in Nanjing beginning in December 1937. But if her white American readers

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believed smugly that Buck showed mob cruelty to be committed only in far distant countries by incomprehensible benighted non-white nonChristian Orientals, they were to be disappointed. For in another novel, published three years after Dragon Seed, Pearl Buck, disguised as the male writer ‘John Sedges’, showed her readers just what white Christian Americans were capable of. In the United States, ‘lynchings [of African Americans by white Americans] still occurred at the average rate of twenty-five every year during the 1920s and early 1930s’ (Conn, p. 165), a fact which had inspired Buck to pronounce contemptuously shortly before she returned to the United States, that she had lost confidence in China’s ‘schemes of democracy’, because I see that my own country, where the democratic theory has been most adequately put into practice, can yet allow, year after year, such recrudescence of the lowest, least democratic, least intelligent form of tyranny, the tyranny of the beast over the brain...Sitting here at my desk in my quiet home, pausing to look over peaceful Chinese hills and fields, I am degraded. (Harris 1969, p. 157)

In her 1945 novel The Townsman, Buck illustrates the self-degradation of other white Americans by visiting in imagination the city of New Orleans to observe the lynching of a young African American man. The image of the mob as animal, in this case a silent animal waiting for the kill, is the one which comes to the mind of a young white woman observer, as it had come to the minds of the witnesses in the Nanjing massacre. At the moment the African American prisoner appears with the white sheriff between two white guards the young woman ‘saw [the white mob] spring, fasten upon [its] prey, and move away with him’ (Buck 1945, p. 146). And what in its own way is as unsettling as the frozen reactions of the pitiful mute observers in Nanjing is the young white American woman’s reaction to what she has observed. The men in the New Orleans mob have, she tells herself, ‘something like the will of God in them. Everything was God’s will, and there was nothing to do about it’ (p. 146). So here we have another ascription by a Buck character of the cause of men’s hardness of heart when members of a mob. It joins Ling Tan’s ascription of the cause in Dragon Seed—a man in a mob being nothing but ‘a creature with his mind gone and only the lowest part of his body left’—and the ascription of the cause by those Nanjing witnesses not left

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mute: the men in the Japanese army were possessed by worse than evil. And in its own way the smug self-excusing certainty of the young white Christian woman’s ascription of the cause of hardness of heart—God’s will—is more chilling still, excusing all who hold such a belief from any action whatever. Pearl Buck found the thinking of her imaginary representative young white American woman observer unspeakably frivolous, and she devoted a non-fiction book she had published in 1941—Of Men and Women: How to Be for Each Other—to attempt to analyse seriously the causes of human social dysfunction, of which mob cruelty was only one example. Of Men and Women made two simple propositions. War, human dysfunction at its most extreme, was the result of the meeting of a powerful ‘atavistic individual’ with ‘an environment of general surrounding discontent’ (Buck 1941b, loc. 1463)—such as Hitler and post first-world war Germany—and women as well as men were responsible for it: Women’s sons stand at this very moment behind the machines of aggressive war and kill millions of innocent people. Women’s sons are murdering and looting on a scale never before known in history. Is this not colossal proof of the failure of woman to create moral character in her sons while they are in the home? If woman cannot create moral character in her sons while they are in the home, then she must help man to control evil character outside. For clearly it is beyond man alone to cope with evil, now that the will to evil of even a single man can be so magnified by modern weapons of war. (loc. 1440)

The imbecile situation facing the world in 1941, she argued, was that ‘women [were] fulfill[ing] themselves in having…babies, and men [were] fulfilling themselves in destroying them’ (loc. 1649). Buck’s second proposition in Of Men and Women, focussing explicitly on the United States, was this: white American women were one cause of the continuum starting with the personal crudity and ending with the mob cruelty of white American men because these women reinforced the brutal script that little girls cry but little boys don’t; the other cause being the fantasy maintained by both genders that women are the more ‘spiritual’ of the two—a fiction which excused men’s aggression—and encouraged women in the lazy passivity which excused them from all effort (evidenced by the young woman observer in The Townsman). And if white American women’s passive toleration of the continuum of white American men’s

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brutishness was one cause of the dysfunction of American society, men’s deep reactions to these women was another cause. American men, despite appearances to the contrary, Buck said, hated women: using a rough conceptual framework derived from psychoanalysis she asserted that from birth a man was ‘so entwined, or so entangled with [a woman], that to a degree he is helpless without her and helpless with her, and so what can he do but hate her for this?’ (loc.1750)—an instance of which she reported during a dinner conversation with ‘an unusually intelligent congressman [who had said] “The truth is, we give women what they think they want. They want to be babied so we baby them.” The depth of contempt in his voice, of which I am sure he was unconscious, made me cringe’ (loc. 439). But before the reader of Of Men and Women expostulates at the simplicity of Buck’s approach in it—stupidity and cruelty in America to be laid at the door of the relation between individual white men and white women with particular responsibility to be attributed to women— they might pause for two reasons. Firstly, while Buck did say that she had never seen, in any country in the world, ‘such an unsatisfactory relationship between men and women as there is in America’ (loc. 634) she did not claim that there were not unhappy relations between women and men in other countries, and it is relevant to her argument about the connections between sexism, imperialism and fascism that she wrote that what a Japanese man wanted was a woman not by his side but under his feet or that what an English colonial husband demanded of his wife was that she should ship her small children back to English boarding schools, thus ensuring their acute childhood suffering followed by lifetimes of chronic aching psychological emptiness—a small price, no doubt, to pay for the glory of the British Empire. (Buck concisely reports in Come My Beloved what the Governor General’s wife is and is not allowed to say about her children, originally sent to England from India when they were five and eight and whom she has not seen for three years. On her showing to her interlocutor a photograph of her sons her husband ‘rather sharp[ly]’ pronounced on the impossibility of bringing up English children in India, an intervention which, Buck reports, ‘served some sort of notice upon his lady and she said no more’ (Buck 1953a, loc. 292).) Secondly, despite her contempt for some white American women: for their imperiousness, their peevishness, their headstrongness, their utter selfishness, their smallness of mind and outlook, their lack of any sense of responsibility toward society, even to be pleasant (Buck 1941b, loc. 620)

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—she also argued for the victimhood of all American women at the hands of American men ‘for not seeing what women could be’, and at one point painted a pitiful sketch of the ‘pathetic [full of pathos] effort of American women to improve their minds by reading and clubs’… ‘which [has] only heightened the ridicule and contempt in which their men hold them’ (loc. 671). This situation Buck contrasted with the growing equality between women and men in China during the war, after which, she believed, ‘Chinese men and women will pause and look at each other and remember what life was like between them for four thousand years. “Anything but that”, they will say, and they will go on together to face the future that none today can see’ (loc. 275). In 1941, therefore, when Of Men and Women was published, it seems that Buck was even more pessimistic about the future of the United States than about the future of China, although as the future of China became gradually clearer to her after 1949 her sorrow as well as her admiration for that country increased. But for the future of China she could do nothing. The only action she could now take—both in her writing and outside it—was to try to educate the people of her own country—to return to the central thread of her life and work— of what makes for life not death in the broadest sense of those two words, or to put it another way, for creative not destructive living. While Of Men and Women ascribed one cause of destructive living in the world as a whole and in America in particular to the relation between women and men, a relation deeply implicated for Buck in the causes of war, her subsequent novels tried to imagine alternative, creative ways of living by women and men, creative partnerships between them, in America, her new home. If her Chinese Good Earth trilogy had asked what possibilities for living were available in the new world of post-imperial China to men and women like Wang Lung or O-Lan in The Good Earth and their children and grandchildren, all formed by thousands of years of Chinese history, her American novels asked the same question of white Americans, distinguished from their Chinese counterparts by one salient belief: that only with the coming of people like themselves in the recent past had the history of their country begun. How, Pearl Buck wanted to know, might men and women believing this create a country with a history which celebrated the best qualities of all its inhabitants and which might be remembered with pride by those who came after? She was to ask that question in The Townsman, as well as presenting the image of the lynch mob in that novel, and she was also to ask it two years later in 1947, in her second ‘John Sedges’ novel The Angry Wife—focussing steadily

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in both novels on the relation between white men and women, demonstrating her contention in the nonfictional Of Men and Women that how these two groups conceived of each other was among those factors central to America’s creativity or destructiveness, including the way in which it approached relations between those people it defined as white and those it defined as non-white. Buck took pains to be historically accurate in these two novels, demonstrating her belief that ‘a people without history is not redeemed from time’ as T.S Eliot put it and that in fact there is no such thing as a people without history: that even if one’s life were to start at some unimaginable history-less point zero one would be still be open from that moment onwards, if anything more than a brute, to ‘the rending pain of re-enactment/Of all that you have done, and been’—of all that one’s people had done, and been. Both novels are focalized through characters who believe that the present moment in which they live is a new start in America’s brief history which will be judged by those not yet born: each also contains those who believe that there is no such thing as a new start, the proper relation between blacks and whites, for example, having been fixed in primordial time. The Angry Wife, set immediately after the conclusion of the American Civil War, that great conflict between those in America who proposed a new start to the relations between African and European Americans and those who didn’t, draws on Buck’s mother’s memories of being a small child (she was born in 1857) in the part of Virginia which went with the North and became West Virginia—when the Civil War broke out in 1861. In her biography of her mother, Buck captured vividly the conflict her mother’s parents had suffered, caught as they were between the North and South: ‘their loyalties were enough to the South so that it was intolerable to think of fighting against Virginia’ yet her father had refused to buy slaves: ‘some insistence on freedom, inherent in his blood, cried out to abstain from buying human beings’ (Buck 1936a, p. 47); and Buck reproduces the family story of one of her uncles being saved from conscription by his brave mother (Buck’s grandmother) desperately clinging onto the cantering horse on which the Confederate soldiers had tied her son until their commanding officer released him—one of the more merciful conclusions to the Civil War stories which the little girl Pearl Buck heard from her mother in China during the ‘long, hot summer of 1900’ when white people in China lived under the threat of death at the hands of the Boxer rebellion. The American Civil War was not, for Buck, a history lesson to be absorbed

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from books: ‘afterwards when I had to study this period in history, it was already learned from her [Buck’s mother], immeasurably more vivid, more full, than any book could make it for me’ (Buck 1936a, p. 43) and among the lasting lessons she, Pearl Buck, wished to teach about that hideous war and the period preceding and immediately following it were these: that cruelty is ingenious in the ways in which it destroys lives but that even in its darkness courage and creativity can sometimes shine. The Angry Wife opens with the return of a young white Union soldier, now aged twenty-three, only nineteen when he had enlisted, to his West Virginia home, and of whom his brother, who had fought on the Confederate side, on first seeing him asks: ‘could this be a human creature, this tall stick, this gangling monkey, this handful of bones, loose in a bag of skin…with a dark skeleton face’ and ‘fleshless lips…drawn back from his teeth, fixed in a grin of agony’ (Buck 1947, loc. 103); one of the lucky ones who had just avoided being among the ‘fifteen thousand men starved to death’ in Confederate prisons; one of the lucky ones who had just avoided being ‘taken out of the prison in the dead cart when they were alive and knowing, but too weak to protest against their own burial’ (loc. 227); but not one of the ones lucky enough to avoid being tortured with burning ‘pine sticks lit into coals at the end’ (loc. 432). Another time, another country, but, to Pearl Buck, such satanic cruelty only presented one more weary time the question raised also by the rapists, torturers and murderers of Nanjing: after another full look at the worst of which human beings were capable, how on earth was she or anyone to imagine a realistic way to the better? Courage and creativity may be enlisted against huge odds to battle against cruelty, but history, as Buck knew too well, was full of the stories of the defeats and vanishings of those who had battled, history being written by the survivors. From her 1947 vantage point, having greatly increased her knowledge of recent American history and looking back to October 1865 when The Angry Wife opened, she could judge how little progress towards ‘the better’ there had been—a vantage point which the novel’s courageous characters mercifully did not have. They were not to know then the further history of horror awaiting their country after the end of Reconstruction in 1877; according to the historian Leon F. Litwack, nearly five thousand African Americans were murdered by white lynch mobs between 1882 and 1968 in the South of the United States (Litwack 2000, p. 12) and both Litwack and Smith quote a contemporary report from one Atlanta newspaper after the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose, exhorting its readers to remember that ‘the people

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of Georgia are orderly and conservative, the descendants of ancestors who have been trained in America for 150 years. They are a people[…]home loving and just’ (quoted Smith 2015, p. 50). Hose’s lynching, not the worst example of mob cruelty, had included his castration and mutilation before being burned to death in front of a crowd of more than two thousand white Georgians, some of whom had arrived on a special excursion train from Atlanta which they had rushed to catch after church that Sunday morning. Extolling the virtues of the white people of Georgia watching Hose’s protracted murder the newspaper report had added one more detail: they were ‘intensely religious’. The place of religion in the past and future of the laughably named ‘United’ States of America after the Civil War was not the least of Buck’s preoccupations in The Angry Wife and she would have known that some in the lynch mobs had been women. The Angry Wife does not include descriptions of lynching, although one character reports that she had ‘seen men hang another man and burn him before he died’ (loc. 432), and it does not escape attention that Buck’s New Orleans lynch mob in The Townsman is apparently more restrained than some of the historical lynch mobs of the southern states. Perhaps Buck just could not stomach describing the full horrors which American white lynch mobs were capable of. The preoccupation of The Angry Wife, in fact, is focussed less on the horrors of past or future but on what might be done in the present in order, depending on a man’s perspective, to bring back or to introduce for the first time, civilized living in the post-Civil War borderland state of West Virginia. It is appropriate for Buck’s purpose that the action of the novel largely took place in a borderland, where different outcomes to the question of what constituted civilized living were conceivable. To the young man Tom who had fought on the Union side the only life deserving the name civilized was one where skin colour was irrelevant. To his older brother Pierce Delaney, Confederate commander and landowner, it was a historical truth that the civilized peace of old Virginia depended on amicable but clearly defined relations between those of different skin colour. To Pierce’s wife Lucinda, and to another Confederate white patrician, John MacBain, the amicability of relations between black and white was unimportant: what mattered, as MacBain replied to Pierce when the latter told him they lost the war, was that ‘“so far as I’m concerned, the war is goin’ on forever”’(loc. 515).

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One of the features of The Angry Wife is the effort Pearl Buck takes to juxtapose the racist discourse of Lucinda Delaney and John MacBain with the reality that discourse claimed to describe. Both characters would have been glad to know that after their deaths an act entitled ‘Colored persons and Indians defined’ would describe ‘as black a person who [had] even a trace of African American ancestry…[a] way of defining whiteness as a kind of purity in bloodline [which] became known as the ‘one drop rule’ (Wolfe 2015). Such a way of defining whiteness was to legitimize the thinking of a white woman like Lucinda Delaney, contemplating in the 1860s the fact that while ‘her own father had taken mistresses as a matter of course, from among his slaves… [she] had never considered her father’s children by slaves as her kin, by the remotest drop of blood’ (loc. 3385). The reality Buck places next to this to-become-legitimized discourse is that of the lives of two young women, daughters of an old white landowning father and ‘a stranger he had bought in New Orleans’ (loc. 269), who after the death of their father (their mother having died when they were small children) became slaves: working initially in the household of the inheritor of their father’s estate and subsequently passed to Lucinda’s father as payment for a gambling debt. The relations of these two women, Bettina and Georgia, with the union soldier Tom, with the confederate commander Pierce and with the ‘southern belle’ Lucinda become the nexus for The Angry Wife’s themes of religion, racism, sexuality and what constitutes civilized and creative living. For Tom, who establishes a household based on love with Bettina and their children and who eventually takes his family to the North (where they marry, their marriage being impermissible in West Virginia), the only path to creative and civilized living is for two of his children to become respectively a writer and a doctor, and another, stunningly beautiful, stunningly bright, to be taken by her aunt Georgia to Paris to train as a singer in order to fulfil the talent which she, Georgia, had fruitlessly possessed in America— France seeming to be, for Buck, the only country where creative living was truly possible (her alter ego in her 1938 novel This Proud Heart had practised her art in Paris). Georgia’s dream of her niece’s future—’She’ll sing, maybe even in Washington. That’s her dream—to sing in Washington, where Lincoln was. Maybe she’ll sing in the White House—some day’ (loc. 3867) was a dream which would prefigure the day Buck would never see. That was the day another American, child of an African father and a white American mother, would occupy that building as President of the United States, itself years after another American had proclaimed

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his dream for America, the day when ‘all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, [would] be able to join hands’ and thank God Almighty they were free at last. The author of that speech was to proclaim his dream nearly one hundred years after the end of the American Civil War, nearly one hundred years after the opening of The Angry Wife, and another feature of the discourse Pearl Buck attributes to the white racist Lucinda Delaney is its relation to Christianity, especially when compared with the discourses of those in the novel who would have seen (had they been able to imagine him) Martin Luther King Jr. as their future leader. Even Lucinda’s husband Pierce is ‘bewildered by her genuine reverence for all the conventions of religion and her extraordinary ability to act swiftly with complete disregard for common morals when she felt inclined’ (loc. 1169), especially when this disregard is combined with her use of the Bible as a religious totem: “There’s a time for all things, as the Bible says, Pierce!” she would cry at him. Once he had exclaimed with violence, “Hang the Bible, Luce—you’re always bringing it up against me!” She was then genuinely and deeply shocked. “Pierce! You aren’t a fit father for our children if you speak so about the Holy Bible!” (loc. 1163)

—these being the words of someone who believes her servants are still no more than objects to be bought and sold. Buck compares Pierce’s with Lucinda’s position towards religion, for whom it isn’t relevant to everyday life, and finds him as capable of inhabiting two mutually inconsistent positions as she is: ‘War was cruel and unjust—as cruel and unjust as God, who gave down rain on the good and evil’ (loc. 761), yet ...yesterday, in church, Pierce had given thanks to God sincerely for all good things, including health and peace in his time. The glorious summer sunshine had slanted down through the stained glass windows of the Presbyterian church of his fathers. Here he and Tom had sat as small boys, sighing and wriggling. Here his children had been christened. He had thanked God frankly for wealth—well, why not for wealth? (loc. 2466)

Pierce however finds his belief in the relevance to his life of this selectively beneficent deity challenged again by the irruption into his post-Civil War world of the 1877 Baltimore railroad strike, challenging him to ask why his family and he should suffer ‘because a horde of ignorant and

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dirty workingmen were dissatisfied with steady wages and good jobs’— Pierce’s world now consisting not only of his West Virginia lands but also of his wealth accrued as a director of the railroad company of which John MacBain is vice president. Buck’s representation of this strike, one of many, symptom of the great unrest known as the Long Depression, is another example of her foregrounding historical fact in her writing, the history she foregrounds now having introduced an additional ‘other’ to disturb Pierce Delaney’s fragile West Virginia peace: the spectre of the Communist agitator, echoing back to Wang Lung’s perplexity at the cartoon of a fat capitalist handed to him by another Communist, in The Good Earth. In fact God is not the only item of value threatened by the Communist spectre: so also are ‘family life, the land, healthy amusements, educated children, civilized ways of living—all were threatened’ (loc. 2509)—including, Buck does not neglect to mention, Pierce’s racing stable which is proving particularly costly. He sits down to write a letter of commendation to a magazine that printed a cartoon showing a skeleton disguised as a union rabble rouser, wearing a ribbon which was printed “Communist”

and quickly locates the source of this spectre’s power in the ultimate other: ‘“it’s this stinking European fellow that’s behind everything!” By now Pierce had read enough to feel that he had found the source of evil’ (loc. 2523)—the source’s name being Karl Marx (loc. 2520). And with the invocation of this name Buck embarks on a serious consideration of what, for a representative Southern male inheritor of wealth and status like Pierce Delaney, moral living to create a better America might consist; and whether, if it is not to include communism, it might be of any relevance to the rest of America especially its poor. For Buck is prepared to grant Pierce Delaney the possibility of moral living. The agents of whatever change he is capable are four: his brother Tom, his daughter Sally, his son John and his ex-slave Georgia, sister of Tom’s wife Bettina. Buck carefully shows which of Pierce’s attitudes are amenable to change and which are not, it being unsurprising that those which are not coincide with Buck’s own. We have already seen Conn’s comment on her disinterested praise of Mao Zedong: loathing communism Buck had nonetheless admired the CCP for its ability to identify with the cause of the Chinese rural poor. Her attitudes to American communism and the American poor of the 1870s were little different: John

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MacBain accurately expressing Buck’s opinion that ‘“no foreigner could make headway here if we didn’t have four million unemployed…that’s a tenth of our population, pretty nearly!”’ (loc. 2522). But while understanding the conditions that had given rise to communism in China and how it might take root in America, Buck emphatically did not want this to happen. The theme of moral living of what makes for creative not destructive life works itself again and again in her writing into the small actions of individuals: of those like the children of Dr Liang in Kinfolk who return to their rural Chinese roots as teachers or doctors or, as in this novel, the actions of a white American like Pierce’s brother Tom who, when Pierce had accused Tom of being as selfish in his own way as he was, had retorted ‘my life in itself has been a revolution—yours hasn’t’ (loc. 3234). That Tom’s life has been a revolution Buck doesn’t doubt, if only—but only is the wrong word—especially—in its attitude to the one hideous word more implicated in the horror of American history than any other: race. For the racist discourse of the Lucinda Delaneys and John MacBains starts from the belief articulated by Pierce to his daughter Sally—that “Tom has done something, which if many men did it, could destroy our whole nation… “we are a white nation—and we must stay white—” (loc. 2976) to which his daughter replies with the only civilized response possible: laughter. But the change started in Pierce by his brother does not end with pompous racist cliche. It is Tom who persuades Pierce to take the suffering of his employees seriously—“their good is so small—their bad so nearly—nothing” (loc. 2889) when Pierce argues that they should learn to ‘take the bad with the good’ (loc. 2884)—with the result that Pierce manages to persuade his fellow directors to start a relief department in their company, ‘within the first five months almost six hundred people’ [being] helped in one way or another (loc. 3073). And the third agent of Pierce’s change, his son John, articulates scornfully with the brutal insight of the young his opinion of his mother and all women like her: Poor Mama, she’s hanging on by her fingernails to the old romance— pretty white ladies living in lovely houses, protected by white men! But we’ve betrayed them—we’ve sneaked out of the back doors, after making sure they were quite comfortable, their little slippered feet on satin footstools. (loc. 3719)

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—and declares, after saying how much he honours his Uncle Tom, that he intends to become a brain surgeon so that he can find out for himself ‘that men’s brains vary from the imbecile to the brilliant, but not from white to black’ (loc. 3731). Thus Pierce watches the best members of his family vanish from him: his brother; his daughter who breaks his heart by marrying a Brazilian man and moving to that country; his son who leaves for the North. What Pierce is left with is an increasingly desperate sense of loneliness: faced with his uncomprehending wife trying to cling onto the old romance he finds no one in his world he can talk to: the one exception being ‘his’ ex-slave, Georgia. In analysing Pierce’s relation to Georgia, Pearl Buck exercised all the compassionate understanding of which she was capable. I said earlier that the relation of Bettina and Georgia to The Angry Wife’s major white characters becomes the nexus for its interlinked themes of religion, racism, sexuality and civilized and creative living. We have seen Pierce’s use and abuse of the word God and his wife’s primitive use of the Bible as a clan totem. We have not heard, because of the enforced silence of their lives, the few spare words Buck uses to describe Bettina and Georgia and those which they themselves produce—words which might, if attended to, allow the reader to respond to this novel as a quietly religious text beneath the bluster of most of its white characters’ words. The image of the two young women growing up alone neither slaves nor free, hearts deeply troubled because of what will happen to them, is captured in the pitiful scene where Pierce remembers buying them as slaves on his marriage to Lucinda: ‘he had not heard them speak when he bought them. They had simply stood hand in hand, their heads downcast’ (loc. 97), an image to be placed next to any pieta. And on contemplating the central image of the Christian faith, the cross—held by a young white girl in a portrait in Tom’s sick room on his return from the war—Bettina asks herself ‘why did a white girl hold a cross? What did she know about the meaning of a cross?’ (loc. 441). Neither Pierce nor Tom know of Bettina’s silent words yet, in a conversation late in the novel with Georgia, Pierce comes as close as he is able to an understanding, which might be described as religious, of life: the absence of easily producible religious words in the conversation ensuring, for Buck, the authenticity of whatever understanding Pierce achieves. If a wisdom deserving the name religious partakes of the knowledge of one’s own and all people’s vulnerability, then Georgia articulates for Pierce his own vulnerability, his attraction to her arising from a forgotten memory of being breast-fed as a baby by his

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African American wet nurse Maum Tessie, a fact which Pierce, product of his ‘manly’ upbringing, blushes to hear. What Georgia does not articulate, but Pierce intuits, is her own journey in and beyond the suffering of which her life has consisted: ‘She had thought through everything as he had never dared to do, had reached the end of herself, had grown to the height of womanhood’ (loc. 3334). Pierce at least achieves the wisdom to know that Georgia as an admirable and truly human being has travelled further than he has, her suffering having been infinitely greater than his, and he can also accept in silence her blessing on the relationship in which they could both have flourished but which is not possible in this world: ‘“We are born out of time,” she said quietly. He took her words and pondered them and could not reply to them’ (loc. 3323). The reader will note how far Pierce has travelled from the day when he shouted at Lucinda that he wished he could take Bettina and her ‘brats’ (Tom’s children) and sell them down the river, as he could have done before the war (loc. 2011). The only woman’s words to which Pierce is left able to reply are his wife Lucinda’s, and in her analysis of that relationship, as with Pierce’s and Georgia’s, Buck also exercises her compassion, a significant feat given that Lucinda stands for everything Buck loathed about white American women. But in the same way that George Eliot found it possible to locate a human heart in Middlemarch’s Rosamund Vincy, Pearl Buck also finds it possible to locate the source of Lucinda Delaney’s distress: her fear that after the defeat of the Confederacy women like her will have no worth: I do not think of myself, Pierce Delaney! I think of all—all of us white women fending off those niggras that men like you love so much—trying to keep them out of our homes—to keep them from robbing us of all we have left— (loc. 3647)

—a fear which her husband finds ‘so absurd, so melodramatic’ that he laughs in her face. But Pierce’s judgement of his wife is not Buck’s: she, looking on them both as if they were her children can see the source of Lucinda’s distress arising not only from the so-called emancipation of her slaves, but from her fear for her future and those of women like her. Without any task in life except to be a pretty white lady living in a lovely house, protected by a white man, to slightly misquote her son John, what is her future if that man ceases to care about her? ‘They want to be babied, so we baby them’, the congressman had said contemptuously

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of white women to Pearl Buck, and the comparison of the West Virginian couple with Lydgate and Rosamund in Middlemarch extends to the future Eliot saw for her two characters: Lydgate dedicating himself faithfully to protect his feeble wife until relieved of the duty by his death, and Pierce dedicating himself to the same task with Lucinda. And Buck does not condemn such dedication any more than does Eliot. She takes pains to stress the value of Pierce’s conventional morality, illustrating it with his refusal to sleep with John Macbain’s wife Molly, though Macbain—made impotent by a war wound—asks him to do so in order to replace his dead children (Molly making it amply clear she would welcome Pierce’s attentions). But the paradox Buck can’t avoid is this: despite Pierce’s personal morality much more will be required of men like him if they are to make an American future worthy of all of God’s children, a fact he recognizes in his sad words to Lucinda towards the end of the novel: “I think we’ve been taught wrongly, you and I—we can’t change now. We belong to the past. But the future—” He shook his head. He must not try to change her, for she could not change. He must not enter into that future, for he would not be alive when it came, and neither would she. (loc. 3844)

∗ ∗ ∗ I have examined The Angry Wife in some detail in order to justify my claim (a) that Pearl Buck used the novel to explore the important question, for her, of how white men and women, believing that only with their arrival had American history begun, might create a country which celebrated the best qualities of all its inhabitants and (b) that how white men and women conceived of each other was among those factors central to America’s creativity or destructiveness, including how it approached relations between those people it defined as white and those it defined as non-white. The argument of Buck’s non-fiction polemic: Of Men and Women: How To Be For Each Other becomes less contentious when given fictional life in the relation to each other of white men and women like Pierce and Lucinda Delaney. How can a civilized country be built around the proposition that women are children and must be ‘babied’? Buck took this question and explored it as far as she could in The Angry Wife, concluding that it was misguided to see it as irrelevant to America’s

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ills. Her exploration produced certain recurring images: smoky womanless rooms full of hard-faced white men in expensive suits discussing the best way to drive railroads across the unspoiled prairies; other glittering luxurious rooms inhabited by white women scarcely distinguishable from their elegant furniture; both groups secretly despising each other and displacing their contempt onto the nearest available other, in this novel African Americans. Buck’s bleak conclusion was that a state like West Virginia had possessed little to contribute to the emergence of a new, civilized America, its original white patrician racist and sexist culture being too embedded, as her in-depth analysis of the psychology of a white patrician marriage attempted to show. Those from West Virginia who could contribute to a new America would have to leave it. But The Angry Wife was only one novel, and in its predecessor—The Townsman, published two years earlier—Buck set out to show that given different conditions a state’s inhabitants might not have to leave it in order to contribute to a new world. Her choice of Kansas was not an accident— site of bitter struggles between proslavery invaders and abolitionists led by the legendary John Brown, Kansas had only been open to settlement since 1854 and had entered the union as a free state in 1861, five years before the novel’s opening. So it was a place where fresh starts were possible. A casual reader might describe the main differences between The Townsman and The Angry Wife as those between a sociological and a psychological study, in that the first novel, with its large cast of representative characters, appears to be more concerned than the second with the general rather than the individual forces that made up Kansas and, indeed, America itself: according to Carl Becker, Kansas was ‘a new grafted product of American individualism, American idealism, American intolerance. Kansas is America in microcosm’ (Becker 1910, pp. 85–111). But to describe The Townsman as primarily sociology would be no more sensible than so to describe Middlemarch. With Buck, as with Eliot, we come back to the stark fact that ordinary people may have extraordinary lives, however powerful the forces that conspire to erase their individuality or however glad they may be—as in lynch mobs—to relinquish it. Background forces such as racism or sexism constrict lives, and The Townsman shows the result. But the novel also shows the effect on lives of different kinds of backgrounds and in fact becomes a sustained enquiry into which kinds of background lead ordinary people to creative and which to destructive living—Buck’s overriding theme. And the background the novel begins with is the experience and memory of being English as represented by its

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hero Jonathan Goodliffe, an ordinary decent young Englishman who, like Tom in The Angry Wife, wants nothing more in life than to be a school teacher. I started this chapter with Buck’s fulminations against British imperialism, but as we know from her devoted reading of Dickens, England also had other dimensions for her: of the country church of The Old Curiosity Shop, represented in The Townsman by the parish church of Dentwater, Jonathan’s home village; of England’s notable eccentrics, represented by Dentwater’s parish priest erupting into life the few times he is interested in his own sermon; of the solidity of the Liverpool hotel and its furniture contrasted with the flimsiness of equivalent structures in America. The most important theme Buck took from Dickens into her own life was his evocation of loss, and in The Townsman what more than anything distinguishes from each other the English emigrating to Kansas at the beginning of the novel is how they experience the loss of England. In the eyes of Clyde, Jonathan’s father, losing England means no more than losing constrictions on space and opportunity. But for his wife and son England represents the possibility of cultivation on a human scale, both of their few acres of land and of whatever they can make beautiful in their own and others’ lives through education and art, where the latter might mean no more than how a room is ordered and decorated. One of the reasons, perhaps, why Sons and Lovers is also such an important presence in Buck’s novel is because in it Lawrence embodied an England which Buck wanted to evoke in contrast to imperial Great Britain: an England which the titled Governor General of India in Come My Beloved would not have known existed. The ‘Englishness’ of the lives, home and values of Jonathan and his mother, Mary, remains a point of reference throughout the novel up to the last few pages where, looking back over his life Jonathan, now in late middle age and his mother dead, having revisited the land of his birth for the only time since he left it, finally answers for himself the question which has haunted him all his life: whether his father had been wrong to have uprooted his young family all those years before and brought them to this vast country so different from their own. And the answer, he concludes, was that in a queer way his father had been right about life and his mother wrong. No, they had both been right in their own ways. But they had never been fused. Not all their passion towards one another had fused their eternal difference, he the wanderer and she the homekeeper. (Buck 1945, p. 343)

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—four sentences which summarize (minus the reference to passion) Buck’s lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between her own mother and father as well as her obsession with the effect on a person’s life of leaving one country to live in another. England, the adult Jonathan tells himself, was ‘made and finished…A man can’t do anything here but live out his time and die’ (p. 345)—a conclusion D.H. Lawrence had also arrived at. Reaching it Jonathan is freed from the burden of memory which bowed down both his own and Buck’s mother, meaning that their respective countries of origin were always more real to them than the countries in which they lived. Thus Jonathan’s ailing mother, wistfully trying to recreate her English home in whatever wild American spot her husband brought her to, echoed Buck’s own mother’s attempts to recreate her American home wherever she could in China. But Jonathan’s epiphany is to realize that his life’s work was not simply to recreate in Kansas a small English market town under the name, which Buck not quite contemptuously gives it, of ‘Median’: it has been to create a new town different from any ancient English original. England was a museum, America is not. And having endorsed Jonathan’s realization, Buck also encourages her readers to look back over the novel which records his life and ask again which elements of the Englishness Jonathan and his mother brought with them had been rightly or wrongly preserved in America. Sometimes it is not easy to tell apart the worthwhile from the worthless in Jonathan’s imports from England. An instance is his elitist attitude to vocational education (he objects to having craft subjects taught in the school he founds) and indeed to his students generally, and one only has to go a short way outside the novel into biography to suppose that Buck, with her profoundly learning-disabled daughter, at least opens to question whether Jonathan’s attitude is suited to the country where he now lives. On the other hand, Buck also poignantly records the world Jonathan cherishes in his memory (an instance of memory’s vivifying rather than destructive power in the novel); instead of using violence he recites the opening words of Virgil’s Aeneid to subdue an aggressive student; he recalls with respect the English schoolmaster who had taught him to love learning, value intellectual modesty and cherish high standards; and most of all he uses his perception of what he thinks is English education’s greatest gift, its refusal to discriminate against students on grounds of creed or colour, in order to admit to his school, against white parents’ opposition, a family of African Americans, children of Exodusters who had come to Kansas to escape the racist prison of America’s post-civil war

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south. (That Jonathan’s perception of the freedom of English education is naïve is beside the point.) The lesson of modesty before high standards Jonathan puts into fruitful practice in his treatment of one of his African American students whom he perceives early as greatly more talented than himself, eventually arranging for him (via an unlikely subplot, as Conn points out) to visit Paris and fulfil his dream of training to be a brain surgeon; a version of the story Buck was to retell in The Angry Wife. There is one other small sad detail about Jonathan’s English inheritance that illustrates the tension in a sensitive immigrant’s soul which Buck is so expert at creating. This is that in Median’s store, where Jonathan works for a while, there is one class of goods he can never sell: books, especially Dickens’ novels, reminding him of how much his mother had loved reading Dickens and how popular the writer had been in his English past. Dickens’ novels lie unopened other than by him, ‘dead upon his shelf in Median’, testimony to the strictly practical nature of his American customers’ requirements, leaving Jonathan to wonder ‘why he had spent so much of his life in teaching people to read’ (p. 317). It’s a small episode in the novel, no more than a few lines, and not produced by Buck to show Jonathan calcifying his past in the way his mother did. Indeed it contrasts with Jonathan’s earlier response to Kansas on leaving England— ‘a man’s life must have more substance than he had in Median…He saw nothing except the long, unchanging slope of the prairie. There were no sources for him here’ (p. 104)—the Dickens episode contrasting with this earlier response in that it adds detail to the picture of how far Jonathan has travelled by the end of the novel in finding sources in the new rather than burying himself in the old. By the end of the novel Jonathan has become creator and sustainer of the town of Median, loved and respected by the population who welcome him back from his visit to England in a great crowd, compelling him to lay the cornerstone of what, its name plaque announces, will become the ‘Jonathan Goodliffe High School’: the recognition of Jonathan’s lifetime work in shaping Median from its tiny prairie settlement origins (‘Median was mud’ an early sentence announces) to its current form as a home for families and children: He was glad that Median would never grow into a city. He had protected her from the ravages of cattlemen and had forbidden her to the coarse men who might have spoiled her with gambling dens and racecourses. Median was now what he had planned she should be, the seat of a prosperous

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farming county, a town where laws were made and enforced without cruelty, a center for homes and a place of rest for the old. (p. 345)

—the product of English individualism, idealism and civilization newly grafted onto the American tree, to misquote Carl Becker: ‘Median’, capital of middle America, the most representative town of America’s most representative state. And Buck does make this reader, at any rate, feel that Jonathan’s achievement was genuinely worthwhile. Having taken and continuing to take a full look at the worst, Buck indirectly states by the end of the novel (with two if not three cheers) that ‘Median’ represents a small stopping point on the way to the better, if not the destination. With, however, two large qualifications. One, that establishing the town came at a large personal cost to Jonathan, which paradoxically, however, Buck leads us to think was necessary for the development of Median’s character. Because of his timidity Jonathan had abandoned the hope of finding real love in his life, settling instead for marriage to a young woman he found neither attractive nor intellectually compatible. Sons and Lovers’ presence in the novel helps to explain Jonathan’s timidity: like Paul Morel, Buck implies, and Jonathan has been made psychologically impotent in his search for a mate by his psychological mating for life to his own mother. The plus side of this is his aversion to replicating the behaviour of his profligate father because he ensures that his wife throughout their married life does not become serially pregnant unlike his own poor mother. In an important piece of free indirect narration Buck records Jonathan thinking ‘But it was a marriage. It had become a marriage. Love was a single bond, but marriage could be a web woven of a thousand threads, none strong enough alone, but together as strong in time as love could be. He had come to believe that’ (p. 260). Jonathan might have been lonely throughout his life, the deafening silences between him and his wife recreating Buck’s memories of her own parents’ marriage, but in the marriage they had shown to the world: child rearing, home making, business partnership and their marriage was what the town of Median and all towns like Median needed, Buck implies. Katie, Jonathan’s wife, is far from being the pretty piece of furniture that Lucinda in The Angry Wife is: had she been, Median might never have been built. Thus Buck again illustrates the thesis she had proposed in Of Men and Women: that the nature of the relations between men and women are deeply implicated in a country’s character. The downside to Jonathan’s psychological frigidity, however, is just this: it morphs into a respectability emphasized

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by the novel’s ending (which Sons and Lovers avoids with the possibility of Paul Morel also leaving England to an open destination). That ‘respectability’ was one of the great temptations to young men in smalltown America one can briefly leave The Townsman to confirm: to another novel with a similar subject—Willa Cather’s magnificent My Antonia. In Black Hawk, Nebraska, Cather’s narrator remarks, mothers needed to have no fear of the wandering desires of their sons: ‘the respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth’ (Cather 1918, p. 131), thus ensuring the sons’ avoidance of those menaces to the social order, ‘the country girls… [whose] beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background’ (p. 131). The equivalent of one of the ‘country girls’ in The Townsman also represents, in this growing town of ‘family values’, a threat to its order: and, like Antonia or Lena Lingard in Cather’s novel, a threat not only to family values but to Median’s conventionally inhibited responses to beauty. Buck brilliantly writes of the young woman Jonathan is hugely attracted to but too inhibited to pursue moving through the clear summer light like fire springing along out of prairie grass. He looked away from her and went on. Fire, that was what she was. He could not play with her, for she would go on alive, but he would be ashes. Let her go into the West and burn it up if she would. (p. 90)

—also establishing that the phrase engraved as a spell of power on the American psyche—the West—is home to everything Median is not. And it is in the West that Jonathan’s own wandering father, his polar opposite, meets and marries the same young woman—a particularly bitter pill for Jonathan to swallow as he settles further into his Median conventionality. Thus Buck establishes the first qualification to my proposition that at the end of the novel Median represents a small stopping point on the way to the better: the qualification that in dedicating his life to building Median Jonathan had lost the chance of finding or creating something wilder, richer, more beautiful. Buck’s second qualification is this: that the Medians of this world could not have been established without its white men and women sharing attitudes towards those they defined as non-white. True, the range of attitudes among the white population to the Parry family, which it defines as ‘colored’, is varied: Jonathan’s insistent tolerance contrasting with his future father-in-law’s aversion to ‘educatin’ colored people… and females’

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(p. 112), but apparently close in spirit to the view of the magnificent Bill White: The school opened on the first day of October, and [Jonathan] was tolerably contented because before that day he went to every house and argued out, whenever it was necessary, the matter of the Parry children. To some it meant nothing. Bill White, drowsing in the Autumn sunshine, woke up to laugh. “Hell, I don’t care,” he said. “Some likes ‘em black, some likes ’em white. Myself I like ’em brown. My squaw satisfies me. It don’t worry me none when she has a papoose what it’ll be. I figure in a country like this, give ‘em time, we’ll all be mixed anyway. There’s yeller men from China over at the Gold Coast, they tell me. Hey there!” he yelled at the Indian woman who was cutting pumpkins into long strips, “you don’t care what color your ol’ man is, do ye?” She shook her head and laughed and showed big white teeth. “Naw, she don’t care,” he grunted. (p. 111)

But Jonathan’s view is only apparently close in spirit to Bill White’s, and it more than anything else in the novel shows the cost at which towns like Median had been constructed. It is as though we can hear, for the second time in this study, Vachel Lindsay’s poem ‘The Flower Fed Buffaloes of the Spring’, a memory of the animals and people of vanished America ‘lying low’, waiting for the day when they will one day return. But men like Jonathan were determined they would not return. Buck gives him the following words to say to a young pastor wanting to work as a missionary among indigenous people: “I never took much stock in Indians,” [Jonathan] now said. “It was a good sensible thing to get them herded together so they can be taken care of. Every human deserves to live once he’s born. But so long as there’s the souls of folk like we’ve got in Median, it’s folly to bother about Indians. Why, these people here are what the country’s made of!” (p. 266)

—thus enabling Jonathan to voice the belief on which small-town white Christian America’s rewriting of American history was based: that only with the coming of white Europeans had men arrived on that continent. How this belief originated and was maintained was outside the scope of Buck’s subsequent fiction, but the way it surfaces in Jonathan’s unwitting perception of indigenous Americans as children resembles the way

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a belief about Chinese men surfaces in Charles Dickens’ last unfinished novel, Edwin Drood, in the opening scene where an opium smoking Chinese man is viewed by Dickens’ narrator as looking like a woman. Jonathan grudgingly admits that Indians are human but as for the suggestion that they might be adults or possess souls—‘it’s folly!’ So Jonathan’s words—‘herd[ing] them together so they can be taken care of’ (out of sight, of course, in order not to disrupt the European American narrative of God’s mercy to his chosen people)—unwittingly introduces the repressed nightmare beneath the American dream, of forcedly homeless people, whether because their homelands had been taken from them, or because they had been ejected from their maternal homes, as were the unacknowledged children of American servicemen in Asia. In the second chapter of this study, we met, with Wang Yuan, an old Shanghai farmer working his land; but returning to Shanghai after his sojourn in America Wang Yuan finds that the farmer has disappeared and ‘there on the earth which only a few years ago had borne so fertilely, where the farmer had been proud to say his family had lived for a hundred years, now stood a factory for weaving silk’ (Buck 1935b, loc. 4124)—the farmer, his wife and old buffalo having disappeared into history with the countless other dispossessed of the world. Bringing the homeless home, both literally and metaphorically, became the burning passion of Buck’s final years, as we will see in the last chapter.

References Becker, C.L. 1910. Kansas. In Essays in American History Dedicated to Frederick Jackson Turner, 85–111. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Buck, P.S. 1935b. A House Divided. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. Buck, P.S. 1936a. The Exile. February, 1938 ed. New York: Triangle Books. Buck, P.S. 1936b. Fighting Angel. 1937, Methuen and Co. ed. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. Buck, P.S. 1941a. Dragon Seed. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1941b. Of Men and Women: How to Be for Each Other. 2017, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1945. The Townsman. 1958, American Tryptich: Three ‘John Sedges’ Novels ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1947. The Angry Wife. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day.

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Buck, P.S. 1953a. Come My Beloved. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Cather, W. 1918. My Antonia. 2018, Penguin Classics ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Harris, T.F. 1969. Pearl S. Buck: A Biography. 1970, Methuen ed. New York: John Day. Litwack, L.F. 2000. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms. Smith, R.N. 2015. An Evil Day in Georgia: The Killing of Coleman Osborn and the Death Penalty in the Progressive-Era South. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. Wolfe, B. 2015. Racial Integrity Laws (1924–1930). Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, Issue 4 November.

CHAPTER 5

In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions

In 1953, twenty years before her death, Richard Walsh, Pearl Buck’s second husband, suffered the first of many strokes. That event was to inaugurate the final phase of Buck’s life, marked by her increasing loneliness both before and after Walsh’s death in May 1960, shortly before her sixty-eighth birthday. Margaret Oliphant, another prodigiously productive writer, ended her autobiography with the words ‘And now here I am all alone/I cannot write anymore’ (Oliphant and Jay 2002, p. 221); in contrast, Buck was not left alone—the lives of her seven adopted children (as well as that of her birth daughter, Carol) continued to mingle with hers until her own death, and she continued to write every day almost it seems until she died. But it is one thing to be in the company of young dear ones who will die, all being well, in the far future—if one is young oneself. It is another to be in their company in grieving old age knowing that one’s death is drawing near, and that those loved ones truly able to understand what that knowledge means have already died and live now only in memory. Perhaps the greatest poem in English arising from that knowledge is Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, which crosses the sea from youth in a green island to eternal life/death as a singing artificial bird in a holy city. That poem is one of the great tragic images of the human journey. But it takes its place beside another more hopeful one: the journey towards a house. Asking them not to let their hearts be troubled, Jesus told his disciples that in his father’s house are many mansions © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Hardy, Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3556-4_5

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(AV); other translations of John 14.2 prefer ‘dwelling places’ (NRSV), ‘homes’ (World English Bible) or ‘rooms’—the word Buck uses in The Story Bible, published two years before her death. Although the traveller has not seen this house, at least she can imagine it and can perhaps travel towards it filled with hope—it was clearly Jesus’ intention to give his auditors hope in this farewell discourse—since if she is lucky she may be able to bring with her a happy first memory of entering another house where a dear person lived. In another book written much nearer her death than her birth, Pearl Buck expressed her conviction that in her case this was literally true…‘I remember when I was born…’, before proceeding deliberately to misquote from Jesus’s farewell, adding further metaphorical weight to what is already a metaphor for the end of the human journey. Not only were their rooms already reserved in his father’s house, Jesus told his disciples, but he would go ahead to get them ready. To which Pearl Buck, life-long disciple, life-long rebel, seems to reply: thank you, but please do not bother. The house into which I was born, which has haunted my earliest memories and to which I have always longed to return was not my, or your, father’s. ‘I remember when I was born. I am sure I remember. How else can I account for the intimate knowledge I have always had of my mother’s house?’ (Harris 1969, p. 18). Leaving the realm of the mother for that of the father is a familiar psychoanalytic journey, but less familiar are emotionally faithful, detailed descriptions of the objects the traveller brings from the mother’s realm. Charles Dickens left one of the most compelling accounts in English of their psychological work and had David Copperfield writing that ‘the first objects that assume a distinct presence before me, as I look far back, into the blank of my infancy’ are his mother and the Demeter figure Peggotty, followed, ‘out of the cloud, [by] our house—not new to me, but quite familiar, in its earliest remembrance’—the house with Peggotty’s kitchen, the ‘dark store-room’, the every day parlour and the ‘best parlour’ and, above all, ‘my little bed in a closet within my mother’s room, from which, ‘early in the morning’, the small child could see in the garden ‘the red light shining on the sun-dial’. And at the centre of the house danced the figure who brought it to life: my mother with her pretty hair and youthful shape...dancing about the parlour. When my mother is out of breath and rests herself in an elbowchair, I watch her winding her bright curls round her fingers, and

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straitening her waist, and nobody knows better than I do that she likes to look so well, and is proud of being so pretty. (Dickens 1850, loc. 53576)

Given the deep influence Charles Dickens exerted on the young child Pearl Sydenstricker, it is not surprising that the woman Pearl Buck also described the emotionally weighted objects present at her birth in words reflecting Dickens’. ‘I see the wide old-fashioned bedstead. I see the dressing table between the windows - there was a dressing table…And I remember some sort of chest at the foot of the bed and two easy chairs. There were white ruffled curtains at the windows…from those windows one sees the broad lawn and the big maple tree. When I was born, there were other trees too’ (Harris 1969, p. 19). And for Pearl Buck, as for David Copperfield, at the centre of the house moved mother: I cannot account for the birth of memories, but they are in me and they center about the room where I was born. I distinctly see my mother as she looked when I first saw her. I feel myself in her arms, looking up into her dark eyes. She had a vivid, pretty face. Only last year, when I visited West Virginia again, an old lady patted my arm. “I remember your mother because she was so pretty,” she told me. It is how I remember her too. (Harris 1969, p. 19)

Buck memorializes the realm of the mother many times in her directly autobiographical writings, sometimes with the boundary between family stories the child Pearl herself remembered and those she remembered her mother having told her becoming blurred, indicating the importance of the mother in enabling the growth of empathy in a child’s, or at least that child’s, mind. An example is of an event which happened before Pearl was born: her mother, in Hilary Spurling’s summary, threatened by a mob of farmers with knives and cudgels who blamed an unprecedented drought on malevolent local gods provoked beyond bearing by the presence of foreign intruders [responded by staging a] tea party, sweeping the floor, baking cakes, and laying out her best cups and plates. When her uninvited guests arrived at dead of night they found the door flung wide on a lamplit American dream of home-sweet-home, with the three small children waked from sleep and playing peacefully at their mother’s knee (Spurling 2010, loc. 182)

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—a wonderful image of the divine mother sheltering her little ones from the storms of the world. But, as readers of Spurling’s biography know, Buck’s house was threatened not only from without but from within—by the father. Enemy of the body, this man, when Pearl Buck as an adult tried to introduce ‘feminine touches’ into his room, proceeded to throw out ‘curtains, cushions, and soft furnishings, together with his wife’s picture and every other personal memento intended to make him feel at home, ending up with an iron bedstead in a small bare monk-like cell’ (Spurling 2010, loc. 2463)—exact representation of Absalom Sydenstricker’s soul and archetypal image of the realm of the father in Pearl Buck’s autobiographical and fictional writings. I contend in this chapter that this recollection of her mother’s house, refracted through her memory of reading David Copperfield, became for Pearl Buck an archetypal image repeated by different houses in different novels, each house a metaphor for a human soul living at some point on a continuum between happiness and extreme misery, each house a repetition of or deviation from the early blissfully safe maternal house. Her fiction contains many figures whose extreme sadness is associated with either ejection from or incarceration in a house. They are many, these desolate figures: the ejected, such as the pitiful second son of Wang the Elder in Sons, ‘so very small and slight now he was dead’ (loc. 1933) who hanged himself rather than be forced to leave his father’s house a second time and rejoin his warlord uncle’s army; or the blind young daughter in The Mother, ejected from her mother’s house to marry a young man with severe learning disabilities among whose relatives she dies of neglect. Then there are the self-ejecting: the young women who hang themselves in the houses of their mothers-in-law rather than continue life on the terms offered, as was the case with the daughter-in-law of one of Buck’s friends (Spurling 2010, loc. 1806) and, as Spurling points out, was also the case with the central characters in two tales in Buck’s early collection The First Wife and Other Stories, who kill themselves rather than remain in loveless marriages (Spurling 2010, loc. 2397). Then there are the incarcerated: the elderly mother of the first-person narrator of East Wind, West Wind who dies after a long life imprisoned in a cage of duty only made bearable by opium; or Moti, the wife of Jagat (in Mandala, set in India), living in luxury in a vast marble palace who at times experiences ‘a primeval depth to her…misery, as though a part of her own being were gone, as though she now no longer had her own self. In the whole world she had none to whom she could speak. Surrounded by people, she was solitary and no

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god was near’ (Buck 1970, p. 91). Or, her life more incredible than any fiction, there is Ci Xi, who rose from concubine to imperial consort but at the monstrous cost, according to Buck’s biography, of passing her life without the man she loved (Buck 1956). All these characters are ejected from the realm of the mother, if that realm is figured as a protective, loving place, to be incarcerated in either the iron realm of the father or the brutal realm of the terrible mother. But it became clear to Buck after her second husband’s death that she wanted to do more than create scene after pitiful scene of the neglected and abused locked in terrible homes or ejected from or never knowing loving homes; she wanted to do more, too, than create scenes with moderately happy endings featuring either people with conventionally successful lives like that of home town creator Jonathan Goodliffe (good life) in The Townsman, or people with heroically brave lives like Georgia and Bettina in The Angry Wife, both of whom had been ejected from the realm of the loving mother (a mother who had no house of her own) but whose lives, thanks to Tom’s rescue, promised peace at the end. For what Buck appears increasingly to have wanted to do in the last twenty years of her life was write novels which thought even more deeply than her previous fiction had done about the power of love. For convenience we can divide these novels into three categories. The dominant characters in the first category were what she called ‘world children’, by which she meant the thousands of children straddling continents in their genetic inheritance. Buck became obsessed by the image of these homeless, hopeless children ejected at birth or soon afterwards from the realm of the mother, who attended no school, lived in no house and belonged to no family. This image, the reality she encountered in many children rejected because of their Asian-American parentage, became before but especially after Walsh’s death the driving force behind her project to improve these children’s lives. Harris reports how during Christmas 1947 Buck and Walsh had taken into their home two unadoptable American babies: one the grandchild of American missionaries to India, product of their daughter and the father’s Indian assistant and rejected by both sets of grandparents; the other the child of a Chinese surgeon and an American nurse. Harris continues: I have heard her tell the story: “I knew my husband and I were too old to take infants so I called adoption agencies and told them of these two beautiful children. Everywhere I was faced with the same answer. They

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would not place these children because they could not match parents. I was indignant so I started my own damned agency!” (Harris 1969, p. 299)

Thus started Welcome House and thus Buck also set out on the route to founding the humanitarian organization ‘Pearl Buck International’. But, while she incorporated harrowing factual details of the suffering of these children into her writing in order to promote American public awareness of their plight, what marked two novels written less than ten years before her death was that their world children characters also became change agents. Thus the son produced by a brief liaison between an American soldier and a Korean mother in Buck’s 1968 novel The New World radiates, through his clamorous pursuit of his vanished father, the energy which powers the latter’s coming home to his own forgotten value of compassion, long defeated by the superior fire power of ambition: after the army the father’s career follows a stellar trajectory likely to lead to the biggest earthly mansion of all: the White House. Buck describes the cycle of the son’s homelessness in Korea, where, like thousands of other Korean-American children born during the Korean war, he was rejected by his maternal family and ignored by his paternal: self-ejected from the cruelty of home to become a street child; returning; self-ejected to the street again (the difference here between self-ejection and ejection being moot). And once joining his father, a stranger, in the United States, the boy is ejected again, this time to that convenient repository for unwanted children, a boarding school. The father’s change of heart is perhaps as unlikely as Scrooge’s, but to quarrel with Buck’s New Year story because its conclusion strays outside realist fiction is as silly as to quarrel with the conclusion of Dickens’ Christmas story for the same reason. The Biblical resonance in Buck’s novel of the son who was lost, found again and finally expansively welcomed home by his father resonates through the boy’s journey from homelessness to home, and on his way home (he is called Kim Christopher, the latter his father’s Christian name: etymology: ‘bearing Christ’) Buck uses him (or he uses Buck she might equally have said) to release the greatest energy of all: love. As Dickens did in A Christmas Carol. And perhaps because Pearl Buck’s and Richard Walsh’s hope for these world children was so great her novels about them also radiate hope. Kim Christopher is a special child who changes the lives of those he touches, as are the four homeless American-Korean boys in her story Matthew, Mark Luke and John. In these two novels, Buck invites her audience, as another had done before her, to ponder the identity of

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their neighbour. The fact that Buck’s story ends with American families adopting these four ‘mixed race’ children is a sign that Buck had faith that her readers would meet other such world-changing children with love in action, another word for which is charity. The danger of writing like this about Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck is that it makes her sound like supreme champion in the contest to be named America’s most wholesome provider of motherhood and apple pie. After remembering that Dickens wept over the death of Little Nell we may recall that Oscar Wilde—who had also been a special child— is reputed to have said that ‘one would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears…of laughter’. Children special because especially unloved do not always radiate innocent love-provoking energy. Their energy can be satanically cruel, provoking observers’ embarrassed unwilling laughter at their knowing precisely how to maximize their victims’ suffering. Iago, one imagines, was a special (and especially unloved) child; one of the great witty sadists of English literature, as his career as a psychological torturer develops he would rather devote his ferocious energy to the torment of everyone in the world including himself than allow anyone, including himself, a moment’s peace. Shakespeare tosses off briefly the proximate cause (a rival promoted in his place) of Iago’s devotion to tormenting Othello, inviting his readers to reflect on the gross disproportion between cause and effect. Whatever motivated Iago it was not just a career setback. The reflection Shakespeare leaves us with at the end of Othello is again a variation on Lear’s question: What cause in nature makes these hard hearts—with the supplementary question, how can the operation in the world of such hard hearts—when they are lodged in men and women with brilliant minds—be sometimes the subject not only of tragedy but of comedy? I suggest that this is a question we can ask about Buck’s second category of novels: those featuring tormented ‘strange’ little girls who grow into tormented ‘strange’ young women: the two I have in mind are Voices in the House (published the year of Richard Walsh’s stroke) and her posthumously published novel The Rainbow. But—unlike Shakespeare with Othello—in these novels Pearl Buck wanted to show precisely the causes of hardness of heart; to show both the original and recent causes of these young women’s torment of themselves and others. And in addition she—as spokesperson for all such women (as Shakespeare was spokesperson for all the Iagos of the world)—wanted to show how they might fight back against the patriarchal enemy using every weapon at

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their disposal including comedy. ‘How does one talk to an oaf?’ The brilliant heroine’s question ringing through Buck’s early novel The Time Is Noon is repeated with variations in these two novels: How does one talk to an oaf, how does one prevent or use for one’s own purposes an oaf’s advances and, most importantly, how does one treat an oaf who thinks he isn’t one? Buck had asked these questions in novels after The Time is Noon (completed in 1935, thirty years before publication, where she satirically portrayed the sexual behaviour of her first husband and her own father): in the American context of Other Gods (1940) and Portrait of a Marriage (1945) and in the Chinese context of Pavilion of Women (1946). In Voices in the House and The Rainbow, Pearl Buck distils the comedy and rage infusing those three books and adds another ingredient: the game she (as female author) plays with the male protagonists of both novels, whose blindness to the causes of the assaults made by young women on their patriarchal comfort zones in their (literal) mansions is each novel’s richest source of comedy. Buck’s focus is similar in both books: encouraged by the female author a powerless young woman, engaging the attention of an older ‘dignified’ rich and powerful man, seizes power for herself by establishing the man as unwittingly comic (as the powerless Iago does with the dignified and powerful Othello). One example is from The Rainbow. Henry, the older man, having raped Elena, a young, brilliant actor herself sexually penetrated at the age of fourteen by her father and subsequently by many other men before Henry, receives a phone call from Elena in the middle of the night to ask him to guess who she is in bed with. Henry’s jealousy is as consuming as Othello’s: In the darkness he fought against a self he did not know. Yes, he knew, but he thought it vanquished. Here it was again, a monster, an animal jealousy, fury of the flesh, inhuman forces in his blood, atavism hateful to his reason. His glands swelled against his will, and he could not sleep for seeing Elena, as she must look at this moment (Buck 1974, p. 234)

—the precise outcome the delighted Elena had anticipated: ‘he hung up from her laughter’ (p. 234). In the earlier Voices in the House Buck’s emphasis was also on a young woman’s sexual power, in her case achieved by steadfastly refusing her oafish husband marital sex, and again this power produces considerable comedy at the expense of a man. The two parallel narratives unfolding in Voices in the House concern a child of

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Jamesian ethereal beauty and artistic talent, daughter of stolidly unimaginative parents, both servants in the large house of the novel’s title. As the child Jessica grows into a young woman the third-person narrator invites the reader to see her either through the eyes of her mother Bertha, or of her husband Herbert (also a servant) or of her parents’ employer and the house’s owner, William (quintessential patriarchal male through whom much of the narrative is focussed)—or through Jessica’s own eyes. Bertha and Herbert think that Jessica is an ungrateful, compulsive liar. According to alternative information we are given about Jessica, however, sometimes directly by the third-person narrator, sometimes by herself, sometimes in conversations about her, she had been subject for years to brutal beatings by her mother who stifled the child’s screams by placing her large hand over her mouth so that the family ‘upstairs’ would not hear them. Never allowed to play with the children ‘upstairs’ the little girl compensated for her loneliness by talking to a mirror, herself sole actor and audience (except when spied on by the ‘upstairs’ children for their amusement). At the age of seven Jessica had been sent by her mother to a Canadian convent notable for the strictness of its English nuns, where she spent most of her vacations. Aged ten, after her father’s death, she spent all her vacations there, her mother still finding her ‘troublesome’ (Buck 1953a, b, p. 353). Having returned from the convent to work in William’s house as a maid she, Jessica, now aged twenty-four, out of sheer weariness agrees, after refusing for seven years, to marry the ponderous Teutonic chauffeur-cum-butler Herbert. Married, Jessica rejects Herbert’s nocturnal advances by placing between their beds a kennel inhabited by a dog larger and more ferocious than the hound of the Baskervilles. The comedy of this is accentuated when Herbert’s snivelling report to William of Jessica’s denial of his ‘rights’ leaves even the stolidly patriarchal William thinking that Herbert’s sexual-economic model is not without flaws: “What for does a man marry?” Herbert asked astonished. “A man pays, don’t he? He gives her bed and board, so to speak, and everything else beside. I’ve give Jessica everything she ast for” He ticked off again on his stubby fingers what he had given her, the Beautyrest mattresses, the washing machine, the two vacuum cleaners, the almost antique furniture, the gold-edged mirror, the new blankets, the refrigerator, the electric stove, at last the carpet, yes and carpet even on the stairs.

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“What do I ast back? Just my rights,” Herbert said. His humility passed from him suddenly. William saw a man remembering his wife whom he was determined to possess. “What’s more, I’m goin’ to have my rights,” Herbert said, heavily (p. 424)

—an intention which the temporary alliance between female author and uncomfortable male interlocutor (William) does not prevent. The dog having met an untimely death, Herbert brutally extracts his ‘rights’ from Jessica by marital rape. Moreover, adding to the comedy of William’s situation, the female author clearly delights in satirizing his self-congratulatory view of himself. He, William, believes that, unlike the Herberts of this world, he would never inflict unwelcome attention on his wife—a view the latter casually contests with devastating comic effect: “What was I about to say?” he enquired with purposeful mildness. “You were about to say that after all Herbert is her husband, that it is right and natural that he should expect to have sexual intercourse, and what does a man marry for?” He was too honest to manufacture anything else. It was true that he had been about to say this, although certainly not in such bold words. “You put it very crudely,” he said with dignity. “I put it as it is,” Elinor said. “It is a crude business.” (p. 393)

Elinor’s revelation to Herbert that he is not the restrained sexual sophisticate he had supposed is one teaching which might have led to his education; another is Jessica’s mother’s confession that she had indeed beaten her small daughter because of her role-playing a member of the ‘upstairs’ family: This then was the explanation of Jessica posing before the mirrors. Even as a child she had begun to live the dream of herself in the big house[...]She was somebody else, a lovely girl, somebody perhaps even belonging to the family who really lived in the big house, who owned it, certainly as she could not except through dreams (p. 402)

—and although it is now too late for William to do anything for that rejected and abused child he, in a fleeting moment of identification with his female creator, ‘was warm with pity for the little child beaten for her dreams, incurable dreams which she still wove’ (p. 402). In my father’s

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house there may be many mansions: but the small Jessica, her story channelled not through the perceptions of a New Testament mystic but through those of a wealthy, self-important twentieth-century American lawyer, ends up as a detained murderer in a mansion of another kind: a large closed psychiatric hospital. It is not clear at the end of Jessica’s story whether her detention for murder is justified, the two narratives running through the novel mirroring the power balance between those from whom the narratives originate. Pearl Buck leaves open the possibility of the justice (in the narrow legal sense) of the story’s ending while allowing the ending of other canonical stories of women’s oppression to resonate. Maggie O’Farrell’s summary of the relevance of those stories to the end of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper applies to the end of Pearl Buck’s Voices in the House: The mad woman has been used as a trope for centuries by writers, but more often as a walk-on part: we are allowed short, horrifying glimpses of the mad Ophelia and the hallucinating Lady Macbeth before they are hurried to their deaths; Bertha Rochester escapes her attic prison to cause fires and havoc, and is then put back before she, too, is sent to death. What ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ does is give the mad woman pen and paper, and ultimately a voice of her own. We hear from her, directly and in detail. (Gilman and O’Farrell 1892, loc. 125)

In Voices in the House, Pearl Buck does not give Jessica pen and paper but does give her a presence—as Charlotte Bronte had given another woman (called, coincidentally (?) Bertha) a presence while apparently endorsing her male protagonist’s conviction that ‘his’ Bertha was simply mad. Readers of Gilbert and Gubar know better. Rochester’s indifference to his responsibility for his wife’s mental state is paralleled in Pearl Buck’s novel by William’s final conviction (despite his fleeting moments of sympathy with her) that he is not implicated in Jessica’s ‘madness’. The game between deluded male protagonist and perspicacious female author is also played in Iris Murdoch’s first-person novels, with the resulting deflation of the male narrator’s ego possibly leading to his enlightenment. But at the end of Voices in the House no one has achieved enlightenment, certainly not William, who would rather retreat into the safety of his own mansion than face up to the cosmic injustice (the irony that William is a lawyer is not accidental) meted out to all the Jessicas of this world: bright, imaginative, special children, condemned to live even more barren and

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blighted lives than the heroine of this novel; lives where their acquaintance with ‘love’ is that of the rejected homeless child daily selling it to men. These two neglected novels—The Rainbow and Voices in the House—by Pearl Buck deserve a place in the canon of feminist writings mentioned by Maggie O’Farrell: their satirical references to the minds and behaviours of powerful twentieth-century American patriarchs as brilliantly comic as Virginia Woolf’s earlier references to powerful English men in A Room of One’s Own, the comic energy of both Woolf and Buck not obscuring how close this energy is to death. Woolf committed suicide; Buck did not but, as we know, she had understood why some young Chinese women killed themselves rather than drag out unbearable lives in the houses of their mothers-in-law; and in these two satirical novels set in America she showed she understood why some American women leading equally intolerable lives went ‘mad’ or chose to live in the safety of a kind of living death, as Jessica does (she refuses the chance to leave her hospital home and return to the outside world). Although Pearl Buck did not commit suicide, the subject of death, as we will see, also became one of her increasing preoccupations in her last years. I have described so far in this chapter two categories of novel preoccupying Pearl Buck during the last twenty years of her life, with the theme of home vs. homelessness running through both. Both categories of novel were the product of her determination to think further about the power of love, including degraded love, over human life. (A character in a novel we have not encountered yet says that ‘the very power of love—the most powerful force in life—makes love produce, when it is warped, or perverted, or even misplaced, the greatest suffering in life’. [Buck 1972, loc. 1766]) Novels in the first category, featuring trans-continental ‘world children’, showed how those pitiful cast-offs might wake the transformative power of love in American adults producing genuine adherence rather than lip service to ‘American values’, so that (e.g.) a man who aspired to enter the White House might rather risk that aspiration than deny the existence of his son. Novels in the second category were concerned with what happened to young women early expelled from childhood and their love made a commodity to be bought cash down or with items like those on her husband Herbert’s list. Buck’s novels in both categories give the impression of great energy released or restrained. Released, the energy powers love, as in the father’s acceptance of his son in The New Year; constrained, it powers love’s shadow, hate, straining like a ferocious chained dog. This energy devours heart and life; the energy of real love makes both strong. In two novels of the third category—The

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Goddess Abides and The Eternal Wonder—Pearl Buck described the lives of two American boys transitioning from childhood to adulthood, special because of their extraordinary talents which made them, too, world children. In these two novels, also, Buck pursued further the subject of the life-destroying power of love degraded—love demanded by a woman or man of a young boy, scenarios to add to those described in Voices in the House and The Rainbow. But in this third category Buck also showed how even such degraded love might, by a few, be survived and the mysterious power of real love released in their lives and thus into the lives of others: a power which transcended its degradation. And Buck asked whether it was possible that the energy of this real love was greater still: whether it might survive the degradation of death, so that one perhaps indeed might finally enter one’s own previously prepared mansion with the door opened by the figure nearest one’s heart—mother for some; father for others; or lover or spouse or child. And the word I emphasize in relation to The Goddess Abides and The Eternal Wonder, as well as the word love, is mystery, and two additional books by Buck which we can also place in this third category will help us to approach both words. One is a serious examination of Indian mysticism, the novel Mandala (also featuring a young American, a woman), and the other, from A Bridge for Passing , describes a brief episode from Buck’s own life. This I will approach first. Mourning the death of the beloved attached to one’s heart is to fight for survival. In The Goddess Abides and The Eternal Wonder Buck, as part of her creation of the lives of two extraordinary young men, described how the deaths of those they dearly loved had affected them, descriptions which were informed by her autobiographical account, in A Bridge for Passing, of her own reaction to the death of her husband. Admirable in its refusal to accept soothing false consolation it deserves comparison with C.S. Lewis’s classic account of his response to his wife’s death, A Grief Observed, which I considered in the first chapter of this study. (Lewis’s wife died in May 1960, Buck’s husband shortly afterwards; both accounts were published in 1961.) A comparison of how Lewis (a practising Christian) grieved with how Buck (not a practising Christian) also grieved helps us to appreciate that good aspect of the Christian protestant heritage— its toughness—which still influenced Buck towards the end of her life. The toughness of both accounts did not preclude their longing search for consolation and Buck recorded her belief that perhaps not only mysticism but also science itself might one day offer hope in the face of the greatest sorrow anyone can know:

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On the day when the message comes through from over the far horizon where dwells “that great majority,” the dead, the proof will reach us, not as a host of angels in the sky but as a wave length recorded in a laboratory, a wave length as indisputable and personal as the fingerprint belonging to someone whose body is dust. Then the scientist, recognizing the wave length, will exclaim, “But that’s someone I know! I took his wave length before he died.” (Buck 1961, loc. 2682)

In addition both memoirs share this: despite knowing that their loved ones were terminally ill, their authors were left stricken and bewildered by their deaths. For Lewis his wife’s death posed this question: Where was God? Was the mansion Jesus promised to prepare really only a dreadful, dark, locked house? Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. (loc. 80)

And where and who was she now? I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn? (loc. 154) What pitiable cant to say “She will live forever in my memory!” Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What’s left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead. (loc. 188)

Lewis’s consolation, if that is what it was, eventually arose from his pondering the possibility that his imagining the locked house and the silence of God had led him away from not towards the truth: when he asked God ‘can I meet H again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not?’ (loc. 554), he was met by a slightly different response—

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a rather special sort of “No answer”. It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, “Peace, child; you don’t understand” (loc. 560)

—a response which seemed necessary before he was able to receive another visit: It’s the quality of last night’s experience – not what it proves but what it was – that makes it worth putting down. It was quite incredibly unemotional. Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own. Mind, not ‘soul’ as we tend to think of soul. Certainly the reverse of what is called ‘soulful’. Not at all like a rapturous re-union of lovers. Much more like getting a telephone call or a wire from her about some practical arrangement (loc. 585) -

—after which the book ends. Well, not quite ends, because its final words in English—’How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, “I am at peace with God.” She smiled, but not at me’ (loc. 608)—are the brave record of a Christian’s attempt to reconcile his belief in a personal loving God with his unsparing record of the pain of a woman knowingly suffering death by cancer and of his own grief before and after her death, plus the record of his acquiring the knowledge that his grief was of little importance compared to her journey towards God. ‘She smiled, but not at me’. A brave record because of the dreadful temptation facing the bereaved to soften the hard truth of death: that the beloved has—indeed—died. What to make of that brute fact was the question Buck also unflinchingly faced. For despite her hope-filled appeal to what she called science at the end of that book, Buck was as stalwart as Lewis. Whatever might happen in the far future of science, she faced alone the certain knowledge of the finality of her beloved’s death with Lewis’s steeliness. ‘In that moment I realized what before I had only known. He was dead. There was to be no further communication’ (Buck 1961, loc. 2350). But—to emphasize her difference from Lewis—on that road she was not preoccupied by her husband’s or her own relation to God. That word was not available to her as the name of the supernatural agent who at the time of one’s greatest distress slammed shut in one’s face the front door of one’s longed-for house and locked and double bolted it from the inside—while apparently at another time edging it open a few centimetres to gaze out at one. It

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was not available to her, as Lewis thought it had been to him, as the name of a personal friend and master. If the word God was still available to Buck at all (and we have seen how another great sorrow, her growing awareness of her child’s severe disability, had led to her silence before it) it was as an impersonal name made beautiful through the timeless invocations of men and women all over the earth: ‘the scene was one of ineffable and eternal peace, the moon riding high over the treetops as it had for unnumbered years. God send that we may watch it ride the same path across the sky for centuries ahead!’ (Buck 1961, loc. 418). Her consolation came from elsewhere. For as well as deriving quietness from her hope that one day science would show that the dead survive Buck also derived peace from a strange coincidence following her purchase of a New York apartment: The choice [of apartment] was haphazard, I would have said, a chancy thing. But I am beginning to believe that there is no such thing as pure chance in this world. For here is the preliminary to this closing story: When I was a child and often reluctant to do my duty, my father used to say to me firmly but gently, “If you will not do it because it is right, then do it for the greater glory of God.” For the greater glory of God then, and for my father’s sake, though still reluctant, I did do what had to be done, at least as often as possible. Now to return to the apartment. I did not once see it while it was being decorated. When all was finished I opened the door and went straight to the big window. It was a bright day, I remember, one of New York’s best, the air fresh from the sea and the sky blue. And facing me, across the building, under the eaves and along the roof, I saw these words carved in huge stone letters: AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM They face me now as I write. To the greater glory of God! What does it mean, this voice from the grave, my father’s grave? He lies buried on a mountaintop in the very heart of a China lost to me. I am here and alive and thousands of miles away. Are we in communication, he and I, through my father? It is not possible. How dare I say it is not? Some day we shall know. (Buck 1961, loc. 2674)

Peace of a kind, one might say…but more deluded or falsely comforting than Lewis’s fragile peace on imagining that he had perhaps been held briefly by God’s ‘silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze’? Whatever name this strange coincidence deserved it reinforced her conviction that for the rest of her life she would follow one school of thought rather than another:

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There are two schools in the approach. One is to believe the impossible an absolute unless and until it is proved the possible. The other is to believe the possible an absolute unless and until it is proved the impossible. I belong to the latter school (Buck 1961, loc. 2674)

—which meant being open to new data about the mystery of the universe and the possible centrality of love in that mystery, data to be provided not only by science, but by special children, including those who had survived degraded love. Her being open to new data would be encouraged by her examination of Indian mysticism. It was also to be fostered by her brief relationship with an extraordinary man, a distinguished Harvard philosopher who wrote that ‘to love is to treat the loved being as worthy of permanence…to hold that being forever above the accidents of time and death’ and that in thus being ‘willing to confer immortality on another mortal, the self is in that moment reaching a deeper self-consciousness, an intimation of its own destiny’ (Hocking 1937, p. 247). William Ernest Hocking’s exchange of letters with Buck towards the end of his long life plus his sending her his book Thoughts on Death and Life after Walsh’s death reveal his longing to involve her in his own last great intellectual adventure: to show the interconnection between love, death and immortality: So if, in death, some fragment of the beatific vision should be our lot, arresting [...] one who had already known love in its truthfulness - it would be indeed a glimpse of eternity [...] It would be at once self-recovery, remembrance, and the continued lure to create through love in ongoing time [...]in partnership with him that continually labors and creates, world without end… (Hocking 1937, p. 255)

—a longing reinforced not only by his unashamed physical adoration of Buck despite their age difference but by his belief that she of all people would respond to this adventure. And from the evidence of The Goddess Abides he was right. The protagonist Edith Chardman (a widow and a version of Pearl Buck herself) welcomes Hocking (barely disguised as the aged Dr. Edwin Steadley) into her mind, heart and bed and when he finally dies she tells his son ‘I don’t want to think of him as dead. For me he lives—forever’ (Buck 1972, loc. 1014), before reading the fictional Hocking’s farewell words to her:

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To me, about to die—perhaps before we meet again, my darling, though God forbid—it has become essential to define the problem of death before I can hope to solve it. Are those who have died ahead of me conscious of anything? For this answer I must wait. Yet I dare hope, for else why should I feel in these days a curious readiness to die, amounting almost to a welcoming of death, as though I wished to rid myself of this body of mine, which has served its final purpose, my beloved, in our love. Without love I must have believed death final; with love, my hope becomes even more than faith. It becomes belief. (loc. 1023)

And perhaps because Buck’s grief over Ernest Hocking’s death was ameliorated by the latter’s openness (since he had experienced supreme love on earth) to the possibility of his ongoing loving co-creation of the universe after his death—perhaps, because of this, the end of the fictional Hocking’s life in The Goddess Abides is not felt by the fictional Pearl Buck with the severity of grief the real Pearl Buck suffered at the death of her atheist husband Richard Walsh. Enough to make one think that the attitude of the dying to what happens to them after death might influence the grief of their survivors. The struggle with death and life of The Goddess Abides is only partially that of A Bridge for Passing. The death of Edwin Steadley closes the first part of the novel and is succeeded in the second by Edith Chardman’s long self-interrogation at what to do about a second male who had intruded into her forty-two-year-old solitary life, an amazing young man aged twenty-four in contrast to Steadley’s seventy-six. (In reality Hocking was ninety-two and Buck seventy-three when he died.) With this figure, Jared Barnow, Buck added a variation to the special children she had created in earlier novels: those we have met, like the Korean-American Kim Christopher in The New World (1968) as well as those preceding Kim Christopher whom we have not: the little boy born of an American father and Japanese mother in The Hidden Flower (1952) rescued from a trash heap otherwise known as an orphanage of unwanted babies by the Jewish-American doctor who had delivered and then adopted him. The child becomes, for this doctor, a concentration camp survivor, living representative of all murdered world children—’little dead babies, starved, killed, bayoneted, tossed into heaps, babies who died because of what their parents were: Jews, Catholics, rebels, the hated, the feared, the despised’ (Buck 1952, loc. 3508)—and a representative not only of all the dead innocents but also of the new age, where children would

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be ‘born in spite of all laws and hatreds, a bold child, creator of a new world’ (loc. 3129). ‘Among all who were lost, this child she had saved’ (loc. 3512). Or, Jared’s predecessor as well, there had been Liang, the extraordinary child of The Living Reed, Buck’s novel set in Korea, who ‘with that love of truth and goodness natural to those born with wisdom, absorbed into his being these qualities wherever they were to be found and he was enlightened from within’ (Buck 1963, loc. 4965). Two special children, both of whom had seemed to Buck to demand a place in the world story she had imbibed with her own mother’s milk. Telling the story of Lenny, the Japanese-American baby in The Hidden Flower, Buck had called his first week with his adoptive mother (which was also his only week with his Japanese birth mother) ‘the holy week’ (loc. 3266); the tragic young Japanese woman (obliged, she believed, to surrender her baby in the absence of his father) Buck had described as ‘stretched upon a cross of love and loss’ (loc. 3302). And the resemblance of Liang, the Korean boy in The Living Reed, to the young Jesus learning wisdom at the feet of teachers, is obvious—a detail given poignancy by Buck’s twist in the novel to the end of the Christian gospel narrative—Liang surviving to become a distinguished doctor and healer, his Christian parents having been horribly murdered during the Japanese occupation of Korea. And to return to The Goddess Abides and reinforce this point: Jared Barnow was the successor of these two special children, Lenny and Liang, not only because of his early suffering but also because Buck’s reference to the narrative of the life of Christ as a way of telling their lives was succeeded in The Goddess Abides by her reference to a specific incident in that life told in the synoptic gospels: the temptation in the desert. Jared is tempted to surrender his work for the world in order to pursue a life of obsessive sexual love with Edith Chardman (a life she also greatly desires)—a temptation both resist, in Edith’s case because she is convinced that otherwise she will fatally hinder Jared’s determination to become a great scientistengineer, healer of broken bodies with not yet known technologies he will create. Jared’s account to Edith of his being orphaned as a child, of his upbringing by a kind but emotionally distant uncle and sexual seduction at the age of thirteen by a teacher’s wife, of his horror, as a soldier in Vietnam, at seeing a small boy’s shredded brain exposed on an operating table and a mother and her two babies shot in front of him: all these things lead Edith to ask herself ‘how could she comfort this young and stricken man?’ (loc. 1063). Her answer—to depart from his life so that he can live unencumbered by his obsession with her and marry a

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young woman of his own age—is a resolution as steely as Buck’s determination not to call the death of her husband by any other name. Tempted to replay the seduction of the thirteen-year-old boy (she knows too well how she could do that) she departs as a (kind of) goddess or at least not a devil: leaving her enormous marital mansion, a gloomy castle surrounded by dark trees, she escapes to the dead Edwin Steadley’s house and his enormous library (based on the extraordinary Hocking library) to read, to think and to accept that the next phase of her life, perhaps until her death, will be lived in solitude: Not to be fulfilled in [her marital] house, nor in any other in which she had ever lived! The knowledge came with the suddenness of conviction. She must build herself a house of her own, in the place which she had chosen so blindly, a place by the sea (loc. 2460)

—a resolution in keeping with the mind of the increasingly solitary and spiritual writer Pearl Buck, who was increasingly compelled by the archetypes of orphan, sea, lake and house as she approached her final crossing. Crossing the sea is an image of our end and bathing in a sheltered safe deep cave an image of our beginning. This Buck evoked in her detailed descriptions of a baby’s life in the warm waters of the womb (our first home) in the novel found after her death, The Eternal Wonder, which also recalls her earlier vivid story for children using the archetypes of house and water (but this time water as a fearsome destroyer) set in Japan (The Big Wave, 1948). In that story another orphaned young man (his family swept away by a tidal wave when he was a child) returned to the shore and built on it a new house whose windows (unlike those of the old house) faced not the land, but the sea. This had been the second narrative which Buck retold in A Bridge for Passing in parallel with that of her grief and it indicated the final direction of her gaze: towards nature, symbolized by an implacable ocean no more concerned about a child’s life than a limpet’s. But her gaze was also directed towards men’s and women’s courageous creativity in the face of nature’s cruelty: better to build a house that confronts rather than turns its back to the sea; certainly better to devote one’s life to lessening suffering whether as a creative medical scientist or as a teacher, or as a writer. Better, too, to let one’s gaze wander from time to time to the distant horizon and wonder what lies beyond for those who have passed over it, holding to one’s choice,

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as Buck did, ‘to believe the possible an absolute unless and until it is proved the impossible’ rather than calcify one’s mind by believing ‘the impossible an absolute unless and until it is proved the possible’ (Buck 1961, loc. 1896). And for her the possible included not only (as we have seen) a scientist one day picking up a communication from the dead, but the extension of science so that it would one day justify those who have argued that the world is much more mysterious than we know: There are no miracles, of that I am sure. If one walks on water and heals the sick and raises the dead to life again, it is not a matter of magic but a matter of knowing how to do it. There is no supernatural; there is only the supremely natural, the purely scientific. Science and religion, religion and science, put it as I may, they are two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until these two, focusing together, reveal the truth (Buck 1961, loc. 2678)

—a kind of peace-making with her enemy St. Paul that she could not have achieved all those years before when she had written her biography of her mother who, Buck believed, had indirectly suffered so much at his hands. In Buck’s preface to her book for children, The Story Bible, published the year before she died, she tried to make another kind of peace: between the two worlds of East and West which had emotionally divided her life: ...as I write it occurs to me that the Bible has another meaning. It is an Asian book, for Christianity came out of the East. It seems a contradiction that today the West, facing conflict with the East, should nevertheless find its own source of spiritual life in a volume of Asia[...]. It may be that in this very fact we shall find the means of a common understanding, a basic agreement on the constitution for a peaceful world (xi)

—and it seems appropriate that The Eternal Wonder was to feature the relationship between another extraordinary young American man, Rann Colfax and Stephanie Kung, an equally extraordinary half Chinese, half American young woman. But before that Buck had set herself another task: to consider, in the novel Mandala, what Eastern philosophy might offer those whose minds were not immovably stuck in Western rationalism (as Rann’s was not); and, especially, what it might offer to those devastated by the deaths of their beloveds—as Rann was, both by the death of his father when he was a child and by Stephanie’s suicide at the end of The Eternal Wonder—she having been left without a mother when she

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was a little girl. And in this task Buck was helped by the young fictional American woman through whose eyes much of Mandala is focussed, who had come to India the day after her grandmother’s funeral in order ‘to find her own being, who had all her life been lost, for she had no home’ (Buck 1970, p. 162). For while physical homelessness had always been the periodic condition, in Pearl Buck’s novels, of the very poor—like the refugees living on the Nanjing wall in The Good Earth—it is clear as one surveys her vast output that it was the psychological condition with which she herself most identified, child of China and America and belonging to neither. Even the grandest palace is not a home if within it one endures enforced spiritual and psychological solitude—as Buck makes the empress dowager Ci Xi learn in Imperial Woman—and as she also represents Mandala’s Brooke Westley, another solitary orphan, as having learned in the mansion of the grandmother who brought her up after her parents’ deaths. Pearl Buck’s division of herself among her characters was not determined by their gender, age or affect and her representation of Brooke’s grandmother as a distant figure whose influence on Brooke was intellectual rather than emotional seems to reflect something of Buck’s style of relating to her own children, while Brooke herself is also a character with whom Buck, independent traveller and observer of people that she was, as Brooke is, also identifies. Mandala also adds this dimension: the ubiquitous observers who people Buck’s novels—Chinese who observe other Chinese and Americans, Americans who observe other Americans and Chinese— have in this novel become narrowed down to one young woman who is an outsider from another country and endowed by her author with the sensitivity and intelligence to know her own blindnesses as a foreign observer, where her task—though she does not know this when she first arrives—is to become more than an observer of her new country. It is to befriend and learn from those into whose world she enters, who come to realize that Brooke is American only because of the accident of her birth. It would be truer to say that Brooke belongs nowhere and because of that her Indian friends take her into their world, which they do not do with the novel’s other main American character: nice, friendly but for whom the whole world, even India, will never be more than a business opportunity. And the world into which they take her is also in danger of losing its identity—perhaps why Brooke, who has never found hers, finds it

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so congenial. One reason why Mandala—as well as a serious consideration of an Eastern approach to death—seems so like a summary of Buck’s life’s work is its feeling of being a retrospective (set in India rather than China though it is) and representing Buck’s attempt as she came to the end of her own long, rootless life to make peace with her searing, personally suffered themes of women’s loneliness, men’s arrogant ignorance amounting to oafishness (even among the best of them), the imbecility of war, the vanishing of old worlds under the onslaught of new—as well as homelessness. In Mandala we meet Moti, a deeply distressed version of Madame Wu of Pavilion of Women, mother of a dead son killed by Chinese soldiers, lonely inhabitant of her vast marble isolated lake palace and disciple of another western priest (as Madame Wu had been the disciple of Brother André) to whom, in her misery, she declares her love; we also meet her husband, ‘the Maharana of Amarpur’ (a title we soon learn is now meaningless)—Oxford educated Jagat. As Buck’s early novels were historically set in China’s upheavals following the fall of the Qing dynasty, so this novel is set in the changes faced by postindependence India, where the staggering disparities between rich and poor look set to continue, but without the historic responsibility felt by Jagat’s princely antecedents towards their subjects. Stripped of power and wealth by central government, Jagat finds himself caught between two worlds: the old India of his father and grandfather to which he still feels allegiance; the other being the new world promised by tourist dollars, his ancestral palaces to be made into hotels for rich Americans (hence his employment of the American hotel developer). Perhaps because of her own rootlessness Brooke Westley quickly develops an attachment to Jagat, the purpose of which Pearl Buck uses in order to meditate yet again on what basis a happy, creative relationship between an educated man and a woman might be established at a time of such change, when the traditional supports of family and religion are falling like autumn leaves. Moti can find no sustenance any more in her Hindu gods—’she longed for a single god such as Christians had, for among the multiple godhood of the Hindu it was difficult to find the central identity she craved’ (p. 88), a dilemma she is self-aware enough to attribute to the fact that before she met Fr. Francis Paul ‘she had not thought of herself as solitary. She had not thought of herself very much as anything, merely one who had her place in the complexity of palace life’ (p. 89). The still-born love affairs between Moti and Fr. Francis Paul and Moti’s daughter Veera with the American hotel developer show Buck’s conclusion that there

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are indeed limits in this world to the degree of uprooting human beings can tolerate in their lives. Jagat could not be happy living away from the new version of his traditional princely responsibilities to his impoverished people; Veera would be singularly unhappy living in the hotel developer’s small American town, and Moti’s proposed relationship with Fr. Francis Paul is fantasy. Better to know one’s limitations, in the end, Buck says; better to know that not everyone can be a world child; as Stephanie, Rann’s psychological twin in The Eternal Wonder knew in the end that she could not be, leaving Rann to recycle his terrible grief for his dead father and wonder what future there might be for him in this world. That Rann ends The Eternal Wonder voicing that question to his mother takes us back to the beginning of Pearl Buck’s adult writing life—to her dear mother’s house, inhabited by the woman who all her life longed for America, her first home. Rann’s wondering encompasses two meanings of the word. Knowing his own astonishing gifts, potentially equal to those of the historical world child Nicola Tesla, he wonders how he should spend the rest of his life; the word also suggests that to live at all is to be compelled to wonder—about everything, including whether or not this life ends with death. To his mother Rann says ‘perhaps one day I shall look back on this entire life as but a page out of the whole of my existence’ (loc. 3691)—the implication being that indeed there is a life beyond this one, a possibility he learned from his grandfather, convinced of the reality of his dead wife’s visits, and reinforced by his mother’s words long after his father’s death: ‘ “Your father is approaching his next life,” his mother had told him. “Is there another life?” he had asked. “I want to believe there is,” she had said firmly (loc. 2541).’ In Mandala, Buck’s representation of the grounds for believing there is another life is added to her description in The Goddess Abides of Ernest Hocking’s belief in immortality; they are added also to her apparent reference to Thomas Edison’s research into making a spirit telephone to communicate with the dead in A Bridge for Passing (‘on the day when the message comes through from over the far horizon where dwells “that great majority,” the dead, the proof will reach us…’); and they are added as well to her description of the mental state of one communicating with the dead in The Eternal Wonder—’ordinarily this might be called trance. I learned in India how to enter into nothingness…I know that Serena [his dead wife] cannot communicate with me otherwise’ (loc. 1540), as Rann’s grandfather tells him. Rann’s grandfather’s reference to what he had learned in India had been anticipated in Mandala by Brooke Westley (accompanied

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by Jagat) being taught by a young lama (believed to be ‘the reincarnation of a famous lama in Tibet’ [p. 277]) that after passing through the three stages of death, Jagat’s son will find a new body to inhabit. ‘The first stage of death is to die…to know that one is dead’ (p. 279)—which Brooke hears ‘as though she were in a trance’ (p. 279). The second stage ‘is one of great melancholy and fear’ (p. 279)—a ‘loneliness…too heavy to bear and yet he must bear it’ (p. 280). But only ‘for a time - for a time’—for shortly before Jagat’s son enters the third stage he will hear ‘words of comfort’: Whether these words come from within himself or from others he does not know. But the voices comfort him. “Be not afraid,” the voices tell him, “for, lo, we are with you always. Take comfort, for your sorrow is over.” (p. 280)

And then will come his great choice—either ‘to be born again’ or to ‘proceed on the eternal way toward the godhead’. And Jagat’s son Jai having died so young, the lama is sure that he ‘will come back, he will be impatient to live again, and so he will not wander. He will enter the first union that he finds, in a hut or in a palace’ (p. 281) and he is also sure that Jagat will be able to identify the reincarnated baby through ‘talismans’ that Jai had possessed, or by Jagat finding the baby in places where Jai had liked to play. That, according to the lama, is the path waiting for Jagat’s dead son: a teaching which Brooke and Jagat receive in a small new temple on the outskirts of a village at the foot of the Himalayas. Over those mountains the lama had walked with his fellow lamas and their people to find refuge from the Chinese who were seizing Tibet. Men, women, and little children, they had come over high and dangerous passes, already deep in snow and ice. With them, their leader and their inspiration, was the young Dalai Lama himself (p. 277)

—whose mention by Buck here supports the seriousness with which she wishes the young lama’s words to be taken. Words which leave Western educated Jagat and supposedly Western educated Brooke with a dilemma. How to react to them? Of the two it is Brooke who takes them seriously, Jagat telling Brooke that ‘he is disgusted with himself’ for listening to ‘the lama and all that mysticism’, adding ‘It’s too Indian of me’ (p. 283). And so in a moment of tender comedy Jagat decides to clear his head by visiting the headmaster of his son’s school—who just happens to be an

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Englishman, that most prosaic of human specimens, and therefore well defended against Indian mystical nonsense. That even the English headmaster cannot wholly reassure Jagat of the lama’s absurdity is, however, another indication that in Mandala Pearl Buck illustrates her view that it is better ‘to believe the possible an absolute unless and until it is proved the impossible’ rather than vice-versa. For the headmaster not only tells Jagat that his son was ‘older than he seemed, and while he was full of life[…]he looked death in the face while he yet lived, and to him the two were one’ (p. 289); he also quotes from memory a passage from the Katha Upanishad stating that ‘the knower is never born nor dies…Unborn, eternal, immemorial, this ancient is not slain when the body is slain’ (p. 289). And so as this tenderest of all Buck’s novels comes to an end Brooke, still haunted by the lama’s words, takes with her into the city Jai’s talismans, including a tiger’s dried forepaw: she sought companionship among the people, though she did not speak their language nor they hers. Yes, even from the birds and beasts she sought companionship. A flock of pigeons, hundreds upon hundreds, swept her into the sky upon their way, swallows in their mud nests upon an ancient wall in some village, a favorite cow decorated with spots of gold paint, tiny donkeys, their slender legs trembling beneath too heavy loads, a village lad, squatting beside a calf and patiently finding it grass he had pulled from some damp spot in the desert, all such small sights assuaged her loneliness (p. 350)

—and ‘on one such day she paused at a doorway in a village outside the city where a mother sat nursing her little son’ (p. 351). The boy recognizes Brooke (according to his mother) and, on Brooke presenting him with Jai’s talismans, chooses the tiger’s paw. And having done so Brooke soon departs from India, with the possibility of a future relationship with yet another orphan (an American Buck introduces right at the end of the novel) having left a note to Jagat saying that if he goes to such and such a village he will find a little boy…, etc. But what makes the ending of the novel beautiful (which it is) is not just that fairy tale ending, but Jagat’s thoughts when he does find the baby and the baby’s mother, which so express Pearl Buck’s own thoughts about the mystery of life and death: “Have you seen my son before, High One?” [the mother] asked. Believing and unbelieving, he gave a great sigh. “I do not know,” he said, and believing and unbelieving, he went his way (p. 361)

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—as Pearl Buck also went her way at the end of her long life, believing and unbelieving, embarking on that journey from yet another house that was neither her Chinese nor American home but which she made her own by asking to have spread around her, on the bed where she was dying of cancer, her childhood volumes of the novels of Charles Dickens: an indication, according to her sister, that she was ‘trying to get back to the source’ (Conn, p. 376). Back perhaps, also, to the house and garden above China’s Long River which her mother had tried to recreate in the image of her American home and where the child Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker had learned from her literary master how to write down the sorrows and joys of the world.

References Buck, P.S. 1952. The Hidden Flower. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1953a. Come, My Beloved. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1953b. Voices in the House. 1958, American Triptych ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1956. Imperial Woman. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1961. A Bridge for Passing: A Meditation on Love, Loss and Faith. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1963. The Living Reed. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1970. Mandala. Paperback ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1972. The Goddess Abides. 2013, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1974. The Rainbow. 1976, Eyre Methuen Ltd. ed. New York: John Day. Dickens, C. 1850. David Copperfield. 2002 ed. London: Bradbury and Evans. Gilman, C.P., and M. O’Farrell. 1892. The Yellow Wallpaper. 2009, Hachette Digital ed. Boston: The New England Magazine. Harris, T.F. 1969. Pearl S. Buck: A Biography. 1970, Methuen ed. New York: John Day. Hocking, W.E. 1937. Thoughts on Death and Life. 1957 ed. New York: Harper and Bros. Oliphant, M., and E. Jay. 2002. The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press Inc. Spurling, H. 2010. Burying the Bones. 2011 ed. London: Profile Books Ltd.

Afterword

The identity of Pearl Buck’s ideal reader has perplexed me while writing this book. I have thought that at least it should be someone who has recognized the relation between Buck’s writing and life which Forster recognized in Dickens: ‘though Dickens bore outwardly so little of the impress of his writings, they formed the whole of that inner life which essentially constituted the man’. F. R. and Q. D. Leavis who used the quotation as an epigraph in their book on Dickens also used, as another epigraph, the words of the writer featured in Henry James’s story ‘The Figure in the Carpet’—‘they’ being the writer’s reviewers, but equally standing for his general readers. ‘It always struck me they missed my little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when they patted me on the back as when they kicked me in the shins. By my little point I mean[…]the particular thing I’ve written my books most for’. The thing Pearl Buck wrote her books most for can be given several names: a dedication to awakening love for the loveless and to memorializing the faceless being two. Another: she wrote to touch people. That she did so in ways they had not expected is recorded: Peter Conn adopted his daughter through the Pearl S. Buck foundation and later was to ask his reader if he ‘dare confess’ that during his many hours researching and writing about Buck at Green Hills Farm (her American home) he had tried ‘to make some sort of contact with the woman who spent so many years here’ (p. 377), and Hilary Spurling reports the words of one of Buck’s old friends meeting her again after many years: ‘then at the dramatic moment she came in: very ancient, very dramatic, very immobile. Very oriental, © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 R. Hardy, Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3556-4

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inscrutable’ (279). But, the latter speaker also stated, ‘she was there, and very gracious, and yet she was not there’ (279)—another version perhaps of Conn’s experience of being touched by something like loneliness in Buck’s archive which made him wish to ‘make some sort of contact’ with the woman herself, who was certainly not there at the time. These two accounts of not quite meeting Pearl Buck lead me back to the question of her ideal reader, should such a specimen be conceivable. As well as recognizing the relation between Buck’s writing and her inner life, this person should be one who knows that Pearl Buck not only read for life but also wrote for life. Such a compulsion might be described as a prison sentence: it is not accidental that Spurling also records Buck’s friend as saying ‘you couldn’t be quite sure that she wasn’t captive’ (p. 279). In being compelled to write Buck was a captive, as Dickens also had been—see, for example, his letter to a correspondent describing how his writing left him ‘the most restless of created Beings. I am the modern embodiment of the old Enchanters, whose Familiars tore them to pieces’ (Johnson, p. 490). This paradoxical dimension of both Dickens and Buck—both recipients of a life sentence to be torn to pieces by their writing but only by writing finding relief from being torn to pieces—leads me to suppose that Buck, in addition, demands to be read by one who has recognized that she was compelled to write and live in such a way that the distress of that inner battle should be disguised from others, thus giving the impression of not quite being present. This recognition demands a kind of reading which the discriminations of the traditional literary academic are not likely to foster. Paul A. Doyle, for example, although clearly a brave spirit who undertook the first and unfashionable book-length study of Buck in the 1960s, could nonetheless write a sentence like this: ‘the thesis of the need for love and caring, kindness and generosity and the optimistic belief that every cloud has a silver lining overwhelms the book and finally reduces it to a farfetched soap-opera level’ (142). What is curious (to me) about such a judgement is the (unconscious?) motive behind it: faced with the unknown the scholar tries to tame it by assimilating it to the smooth phrases of the known, to misquote Edward Said. And that, with Pearl Buck, they are faced with what is not so easily assimilable to the known should be recognized by Western readers including scholars. Vereker’s response in ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ to the narrator’s attempt to assimilate the thing he most wrote for to the categories of the known was first laughter and then boredom, a reaction one can also imagine Pearl Buck having. Because what the Western reader is unlikely to know anything

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about when they first encounter Buck’s fiction is a great deal. Buck’s knowledge of the spirit of Chinese life unsullied by contact with Christianity is an example. For someone in the West brought up within Pauline Christianity, or even minimally exposed to it, it is almost impossible to imagine a cultured and ethical way of life innocent of Pauline Christianity’s central teachings, in particular its worldwide proselytizing mission to which St Paul’s doctrine of the atonement is central (see Romans 3:23–26 plus 5:6–10), but long exposure to Pearl Buck can make one fleetingly imagine what such a life might be like. Perhaps what Pearl Buck most wrote for was to promote a spirituality recognizing and nurturing, without wishing to convert to Christianity, all world children, two words she originally used to describe the small destitute products of Asian mothers and American fathers but which she expanded to include all the world. So: Pearl Buck’s ideal reader, or to put it in more palatable terms, the qualifications demanded of Pearl Buck’s best readers. Those who surmise, as Forster did of Dickens, that although ‘[she] bore outwardly so little of the impress of [her] writings, they formed the whole of that inner life which essentially constituted the [wo]man’; those capable of recognizing that Buck wrote ‘for life’, as the young David Copperfield had read ‘for life’; that Buck’s writing was the product of an inner battle—a battle of life—where her ‘familiars’, her demons, were always threatening to tear her to pieces. Those able to recognize the spiritual isolation which this battle imposed on her. Those who understand how little they know the spirit of old China evoked by her books. And, preferably, those speaking both Chinese and English: in order to gain access to the rhythms of the writing particularly of her early books; in order to understand the many Chinese texts she was formed by; and also in order to enter fully into the world of Water Margin, the literal and inadequate rendition into English of the title of the ancient Chinese text which profoundly influenced Chinese culture, translated by Buck as All Men are Brothers. And, above all, one who has experienced the terrors and sadness and loneliness which Buck experienced, leading to empathy with Buck and her project. Why should one discount such a desirable quality—of empathy with the author—in Buck’s readers? One reader who has manifested this quality is Anchee Min who, like Pearl Buck, also left for America after spending her turbulent formative years in China and who, like Buck, has spent her life attempting to reconcile her Chinese and American identities. Min’s Pearl of China, a work of historical fiction to be taken as seriously as (say) the historical fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Popescu 2020) is an act of

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homage, reparation and gratitude to her great predecessor and a worthy successor to her work.

Bibliography

Austen, J. 1814 (2008). Mansfield Park. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Becker, C.L. 1910. Kansas. In Essays in American History Dedicated to Frederick Jackson Turner, 85–111. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Bentley, P. 1935. The Art of Pearl S. Buck. The English Journal 24 (10): 791– 800. Buck, P.S. 1930. China in the Mirror of Her Fiction. Pacific Affairs 3 (2, February): 155–164. Buck, P.S. 1931. The Good Earth. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1932. Sons. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1934. The Mother. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1935a. Advice to Unborn Novelists. Saturday Review of Literature 11 (13). Buck, P.S. 1935b. A House Divided. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. Buck, P.S. 1936a. The Exile. February, 1938 ed. New York: Triangle Books. Buck, P.S. 1936b. Fighting Angel. 1937, Methuen and Co. ed. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. Buck, P.S. 1939. The Chinese Novel: Nobel Lecture Delivered before the Swedish Academy at Stockholm, December 12, 1938. New York: John Day. Buck, P.S. 1941a. Dragon Seed. 2012, Open Road Integrated Media ed. New York: John Day.

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Index

A America, xix American Civil War, 103 American men, 101 Anhui, 38 Austen, Jane, 23 Emma, 23 Mansfield Park, 25 B Baltimore railroad strike, 107 Becker, Carl, 113 Bentley, Phyllis, xiv Bible, The, 68 Book of Ruth, 72 Bing Xin, xiv, 89 Bleak House, 67 Breslin, Carol, xviii Bronte, Charlotte, 69 Jane Eyre, 12, 79 Brown, John, 113 Buck, John Lossing, x Buck, Pearl S. Angry Wife, The, 102 Big Wave, The, 142

Bridge for Passing, A, 135 China in the Mirror of her Fiction, 80 Come My Beloved, 101 Dragon Seed, 97 East Wind, West Wind, 49 Eternal Wonder, The, 135, 142 Exile, The, 6 Fighting Angel , 18 God’s Men, 17, 67 Goddess Abides, The, 135, 139 Good Earth, The, 7 Hidden Flower, The, 140 House Divided, A, 12 Imperial Woman, 144 John Sedges, 99 Townsman, The, 99 Voices in the House, 85, 129 Kinfolk, 30, 54 Ladybird, The, 77 Letter from Peking , xiii Living Reed, The, xiii, 141 Mandala, 126 Matthew, Mark Luke and John, 128 My Several Worlds , 89

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 R. Hardy, Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3556-4

161

162

INDEX

New World, The, 128 Of Men and Women: How to Be for Each Other, 100 Pavilion of Women, 30 Peony, 92 Portrait of a Marriage, 130 Rainbow, The, 71, 129 Satan Never Sleeps , 21, 66 Shui Hu Zhuan, 84 All Men Are Brothers , 84 Sons , 11 Story Bible, The, 72 ‘The Lesson’, 21 The Mother, 70 Three Daughters of Madame Liang, The, 97 Time Is Noon, The, 22, 67 Buddhism, 30, 38

C Cao Xueqin Dream of Red Mansions, The, 77, 81 Cather, Willa, 118 My Antonia, 118 Celestial City, 68 Chiang Kai-Shek, 39 Chinese life and thought, xix Chinese Recorder, The, 10 Christianity, xix, 1 Christie, Stuart, xvii Ci Xi, 127 Cole, John and Haddad, John R., viii Communist Party, 21 Confucianism, 30 Confucius, 34, 80 Conn, Peter, ix Conrad, Joseph, 97 Cupitt, Don, 21

D Daoism, 30 Davis, Philip, xviii Death, 25 Deathbed experience, 5 Dickens, Charles, x Battle of Life, The, x Bleak House, 37 Christmas Carol, A, 66 Cricket on the Hearth, The, 66 Edwin Drood, 120 Hard Times , 37, 65 Little Dorrit , 37, 66 Old Curiosity Shop, The, 66 Oliver Twist , 65 Tale of Two Cities, A, 37 Ding Ling, 86 Du Wanxiang , 91 I Myself Am a Woman, 91 Miss Sophia’s Diary, 90 Woman and a Man, A, 90 Disabled children, 69 Doyle, Paul A., xvi

E Edison, Thomas, 146 Eliot, George, 17, 111 Middlemarch, 111 Eliot, T.S, 103 Exodusters, 115

F Faulkner, William, 79 First War of Indian Independence, 97 Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, xv Five Classics, The, 89 Foot binding, 52 Ford, George H., 71 Four Books, The, 89

INDEX

G Gao Xiongya, xviii Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan, viii, 79 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 133 God’s will, 99 Gothic, 65 Great Britain, 96 Guo Moruo, 89 Guo Yingjian, xvii H Hardy, Thomas, 41 Return of the Native, The, 44 Tess of the D’Urbervilles , 70 Harris, Theodore, 22 Hebrew Bible, 50 Hitler, Adolf, 96 Hocking, William Ernest, 139 Thoughts on Death and Life, 139 Hsia, C.T., viii, 84 Hughes, Ted, 1 Hu Shih, 89 I Imperialism, 96 India, 96 J James, Henry, 151 Japan, 54, 65 Japanese army, 98 Jean So, Richard, xvii, 83 Jesus, 7 Jiang Kanghu, 79 Jiang Qing, xii Jung, C.G., 6 K Kang Liao, xvii

Kansas, 113 Katha Upanishad, 148 King-Kok Cheung, xvii Kingston, Maxine Hong, 47

L La Dame aux Camelias , 91 Lao She, xiv Lao-tse, 80 Lawrence, D.H., 71 Sons and Lovers , 114 Women in Love, 71 Lawrence, Jennifer, 71 Leavis, F.R., 151 Leavis, Q.D., 151 Leong, Karen, xvii Lewis, C.S., 28, 135 Grief Observed, A, 135 Lindsay, Vachel, 60 Lin Yutang, 30, 33 Litwack, Leon F., 104 Loneliness, 25 Lonely Chinese women, 55 Lossing, John, 86 Lovell, Julia, 86 Lu Xun, 85 Ah Q, 90 Medicine, 85 Lynchings, 99 Lynch mob, 102 Lyngdoh, Gayreen, xviii

M Mao Zedong, xii, 58 Mencius, 34, 80 Min, Anchee, xii, 153 Pearl of China, 153 Miracles, 143 Mo Yan, xiv Murdoch, Iris, 23

163

164

INDEX

N Nanjing, 38, 51 Nanjing atrocities, 98 Nanjing incident, x Nanjing National University, 87 Nanjing Normal University, xii Nanxuzhou, 10 Nationalist Party, xii Nehru, Jawaharlal, 96 New Culture movement, 86 New Orleans, 99 Nobel Prize, x Northern March, The, 57 O O’Farrell, Maggie, viii, 133 Old and New China, 52 Oliphant, Margaret, 123 One drop rule, 106 P Pearl Buck International, 128 Pennsylvania, 97 People’s Republic, 34 Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 68 Presbyterian missionaries, 9 Psychoanalysis, 101 Q Qing dynasty, 34 Qiu Jin, 85 R Racism, 96 Red Guards, 91 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 96 S Said, Edward, xviii

Sam Hose, 104 Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck, The, xvii Sexism, 96 Shakespeare, William, 97 Othello, 129 Winter’s Tale, The, 7 Shanghai, 48 Shen Congwen, xiv Shui Hu Zhuan, xvii, 83 Snow, Edgar, 34 Snow, Helen Foster, xviii Southern military training school, 56 Southern Presbyterian Church, 4 Spurling, Hilary, ix St. John’s Gospel, 82 St. Paul, 3, 143 Subterranean horror zone, xix Sun Yat-sen, 39, 81 Sydenstricker, Absalom, ix Sydenstricker, Caroline, ix T Tambling, Jeremy, 85 Tang Yangfang, xiv Tesla, Nicola, 146 Three Kingdoms, The, 82 Tibet, 147 Treaty of Versailles, 86 W Walsh, Richard, 34, 123 Wang Yingguo, xiv Welcome House, 128 West Virginia, 103 White American women, 100 White patrician marriage, 113 Wilde, Oscar, 129 Williams, Raymond, 43 Williams, Rowan, 29 Wordsworth, William, 87

INDEX

Wuthering Heights , 69 X Xu Zhimo, 89 Y Yao Junwei, xii

Yihetuan (‘Boxer’) uprising, x

Z Zhang Chunlei, xiii Zhang Ziqing, xiii Zhenjiang, xiii Zhou Haipeng, xviii

165