American Philosophy (27 page)

Buck couldn't have agreed more. “I am weary unto death of this incessant preaching,” she wrote in a glowing review of Hocking's book in
The Christian Century
, “[it] deadens all thought, it confuses all issues, it is producing in our Chinese churches a horde of hypocrites.” For Buck, preparing
The Good Earth
for publication in 1931, the issues of mainland China were perfectly clear: People were dying of starvation and disease in unprecedented numbers, Western imperialism had undermined local political authority, and modern economic inequalities heightened the effects of traditional Chinese hierarchies. All the while, Christian missions attempted to do their “good works” in saving the godless millions.
The Good Earth
was arguably the first book to bring average Americans into close contact with rural Chinese, and its social realism was jarring to an American public and a Protestant clergy that had grown accustomed to either exoticizing or patronizing foreign populations. It also shocked Chinese officials, who in 1937 refused to release the original MGM production of the film owing to its depiction of crime, poverty, and the treatment of refugees by the Chinese Republican Army. Pearl was just sticking to the facts, but sometimes the facts get you in a passel of trouble. In a stern rebuke, Courtenay Fenn, executive secretary for China of the Overseas Missionary Board, wrote to Buck after the book was published: “[T]he fact that a thing is ‘true to life' is not a sufficient reason for its publication.” When Buck gave the book to her father, he thanked her kindly and then told her he'd be too busy with his missionary work to read it. These were the first signs of what would become a large-scale dispute between Buck and the Presbyterian Church that eventually forced her to part company with its Overseas Missionary Board.

Hocking and Buck were kindred intellectual spirits, much more similar than Buck and the spouse with whom she had chosen to spend her life: John Lossing Buck, whom Pearl had married in 1917, who expected her to play the part of the good wife, a role this feminist writer was never particularly able to fill. When
The Good Earth
won the Pulitzer in 1932 and Buck received the attendant professional accolades, the marriage went from bad to worse. Three years later they were divorced. My guess was that Pearl and Ernest might have dallied around in the early 1930s, but as their letters had been redacted, there were no traces of any impropriety. It seemed that Ernest was happy with Agnes, and Pearl, from all appearances, remained loyal to her soon-to-be ex-husband. Ernest sent Buck a single letter during the early years of their friendship, a note of support on April 30, 1933, when Pearl left the Presbyterian Mission Committee. “I am writing to lend you a helping hand during this time,” Hocking had written. According to the letters at Houghton, it would be another three decades before he received one from her. In the interim, Hocking became almost as famous as Buck, a true presence in American philosophy. He delivered two of the world's most prestigious lecture series—the Gifford Lectures in 1938 and, in the following year, the Hibbert Lectures, entitled “Living Religions and a World Faith.” During these years Hocking constructed a systematic philosophy of religion to ground the liberal theology of
Re-thinking Missions
. It was, as philosophical systems go, wildly popular. On one of my first trips to the Hocking library I'd flipped through a
Life
magazine from 1944 only to find a full-page picture of a seventy-year-old Hocking peering out from his desk at West Wind. A five-page article followed, in which this elderly idealist set out “America's World Purpose.” His bio from the
Life
article was telling: “Professor Hocking is one of those rare men who combine an ability to think with a practical knowledge of the world … One of his many intellectual achievements has been to grasp the essential character of all the world's great religions and to distinguish in his books (notably
Living Religions and a World Faith
) between the things that really divide members of mankind, and the things that really link them.”

By this point American pragmatism was in decline. Academic philosophy had begun to make its unfortunate ascent to the penthouse of the ivory tower. The idea that philosophers might have something useful to say about foreign policy or religion or even life was slowly going out of fashion. Hocking sensed this trend and fought the dying of philosophy's light for more than half a century. From a little library in the White Mountains he corresponded with virtually every major American political figure of his day: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, Henry Luce, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and so many more. There were 7,236 correspondents in total. On one sad afternoon several years earlier I'd tried to count the folders of Hocking's letters, and I gave up at 17,895. Many of these letters were from the twilight of Hocking's life, from the last two decades he'd spent at West Wind. This was the case with his letters to Pearl S. Buck.

*   *   *

Henry James's “The Middle Years” is not about the middle years at all. It is a short story about the end of life. An ailing writer, not unlike Hocking or the James brothers, comes to realize that his many books—some quite popular—were just the prelude to books that he'll never have the time to write. He'll be snuffed out, silenced, just as he is on the verge of acquiring an artistic voice that is actually worth listening to. When you come to the end of life, all you have are the middle years, those fallible middle years that you haven't spent altogether wisely. In the last passages of the story, James's hero, Dencombe, exclaims, “A second chance—that's the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” What we call a “second chance” is really just working in the dark, hand over hand, to make good on our first and only one. We give what we have, nothing more, nothing less. And we get to do this right up until the very end.

*   *   *

Ernest wrote to Pearl in 1960, five years after Agnes's death. He was eighty-seven, she was sixty-eight. Buck's second husband, Richard Walsh, had died earlier that year. This might not have been a second chance at love, but it was as close as either would come. The correspondence started out on a formal footing: Hocking wrote to pass along his condolences and at the end of the note suggested that Buck come to West Wind on her next trip to Vermont, where she frequently vacationed. Pearl accepted, and in September, Hocking thanked her for her company, closing the note, “Bless you, dear: I love you.” When I first read the letter, I thought that this was probably just a turn of phrase. But the letters continued and became increasingly passionate.

In October 1961 Hocking informed Buck of a recent visit he'd had from the religious studies scholar Huston Smith and the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel; he explained that Marcel wanted to meet Buck when he came to her hometown of Philadelphia. Hocking also told her that he missed her terribly. The feeling was mutual. She confided that she'd always admired Hocking's philosophical work, but “now to the respect and admiration is added—the immeasurable.” The immeasurable? Really? In March 1962 she wrote to the ancient Hocking as if he were a young man. At the end, she exclaimed, “Well if this sounds like a love letter—
well it is!
”

Between 1962 and 1964 Pearl (who was still very mobile) took every opportunity to see Ernest, often visiting while his family was at the estate. She came on the pretext of working in the library, but admitted that she really just wanted to be close to him. In late September 1962, as the leaves were changing, she hatched a “mad idea” to take Ernest, on the brink of his ninetieth birthday, to Vermont, “just you and I.” She was crystal clear about the isolation of her house: “[T]he chauffeur stays in Manchester on call.” There is nothing titillating or shocking about this. It is simply a matter of two people—one at death's door—deciding to linger a bit longer in each other's company. Hocking was extremely careful not to make the mistakes of Pearl's former partners. He didn't try to control her. In fact, when he wrote “my darling” in a letter, he also wrote “(‘my,' not in the sense of ownership, but of companionship).” On February 5, 1964, Pearl wrote to Ernest: “I love you and you love me and
that
is wonderful.”

Wonderful enough that their love ended up being immortalized in that “madness of art” that we call fiction. Buck wrote
The Goddess Abides
in 1972, six years after Ernest's death, a story about a widow from Vermont and her decision to either love a young man named Arnold or a philosopher thirty years her senior, named Edwin. She ends up loving both of them. It is also, by Buck's own admission, autobiographical. Arnold is a young dance instructor she fancied. Edwin is of course Hocking. Edith, the widow in question, was a student of Edwin's when they both were still married. Now that they both are free, Edwin pursues her as aggressively as any octogenarian can. And Edith loves him in return and eventually invites him into her bed.

“Each experience of love,” Edwin had said one night in the darkness, “is a life in itself. Each has nothing to do with what has taken place before or will take place again. Love is born, it pursues its separate way, world without end, transmuted into life energy.”

“I doubt I shall ever love anyone else,” she had replied in the darkness. At that moment she had deeply loved the beautiful old man. Never had she known such a mind as his, crystalline in purity. That was the amazing quality. Even when he held her against him, the quality was not changed.

I couldn't remember the rest of the story. Perhaps I didn't need to. I heard Carol sneak up behind me and realized that I was still looking dumbly at the unopened file cabinet.

“Are you going to look inside?” she asked.

I shrugged as I followed her out the door into the afternoon sun. I wasn't sure. It was one of those known unknowns, a mystery that seemed to invite further consideration. But as the voice of the appraiser faded away, it struck me as a rather lovely mystery that might be best kept that way.

 

THE MYSTERY OF BEING

Carol and I set out for the upper field above West Wind. We'd been inside all day with the appraiser, so we decided to spend the night in the open air. I'd often camped on the upper field, the place where Bunn once told me he'd learned how to downhill ski, where I'd picked up Lyme disease and decided to get a divorce. In the autumn the grasses turned dry and brittle, but in late August they were still green and smelled fresh, which I only later realized was the smell of dead things turning over.

On July 7, 1895, when William James wrote his brother Henry from Chocorua announcing that he'd read “The Middle Years,” he asked Henry why it was bound in a collection that he'd titled
Terminations
. Having spent the summer hiking around these New England mountains, the elder James seems to already have had some inkling. “I know nothing more redolent of poetic sentiment,” he wrote to his brother, “than this little chary New Hampshire nature with its aromatic elements. All tender and pathetic and suggestive of dead things.” “But that is all over,” he continued, “and a small amount daily of muscular exercise has set me up wonderfully.” In the twilight of his life, William James had turned almost Whitmanesque.

Carol had been a Girl Guide back in Canada and had plenty of experience camping. We reached the very top of the field, overlooking the Sandwich Range, and I proudly presented our supplies: food, wine, firewood, sleeping bags, sleeping mats, pillows (two of them), toothbrushes, organic toothpaste, bug repellent, water, more water, and a tent. I'd remembered everything, except tent poles. Carol assured me that we'd be fine, that it wasn't a big deal, we would just sleep under the stars. It would be romantic, and I couldn't have agreed more. I remembered Gabriel Marcel's comment that “[l]ife is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be experienced,” and I was almost positive that Marcel had come to this position on his famous trip to West Wind.

He and Hocking had been in correspondence for nearly four decades, but they met for the first time at West Wind in 1959, two years before Marcel came to Harvard to give the William James Lectures. One of the founders of modern existentialism, Marcel had read
The Meaning of God in Human Experience
when it first came out in 1913 and was immediately taken by Hocking's understanding of freedom and human meaning. In Marcel's words, “It is no exaggeration to say that Hocking gave me the key to a prison in which I was afraid I would suffocate.” At first it was difficult for me to believe that Marcel, a French existentialist, came to understand freedom through the writings of an American midwesterner—just about as hard as believing that Jean-Paul Sartre,
the
French existentialist, was an avid reader of William James and George Santayana. But all of this was true, and Hocking's philosophy was decisive for Marcel. “For this reason,” Marcel admitted, “perhaps no meeting in my entire life has ever been happier and more moving than the one which I had with him … at his beautiful woodland home in Madison … [T]he presence of this older man to whom I owed so much gave me a distinctly filial feeling—indeed, it was even more than that, so that I dare to believe that we shall be companions for eternity.”

In the 1930s Marcel organized a Saturday-night reading group—some might accurately call it a soiree—of young, up-and-coming philosophers at his home in Paris. Young philosophical giants such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur came to chat with a middle-aged Marcel about the future of freedom in an age of dehumanization and totalitarianism. Marcel loved these little gatherings, but he loved his visit to West Wind, to see a ninety-one-year-old Hocking, even more. Marcel and Hocking shared the sense that contemporary philosophy—defined by its hyper-analytic technicalities—had sold itself short. The love of wisdom was not bound in academic journals that no one read; it rather permeated all aspects of human existence. After meeting Hocking at West Wind, Marcel wrote, “The problem I consider essential is that of the relationship between philosophical research and life.” Hocking was the product of a philosophical age that embraced this problem and inspired Marcel to hold out against the professionalization of philosophy in the middle years of the twentieth century. This was, at least in part, what made the trip to West Wind so memorable for Marcel.