Pearl Buck in China (37 page)

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Authors: Hilary Spurling

BOOK: Pearl Buck in China
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Pearl Buck raised too many awkward questions, exposed too much unpalatable reality, remained essentially too skeptical to suit doctrinaires on the Left or Right. 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. By this time she was used to attack from both ends of the ideological spectrum.
“Nothing in Communist theory
enrages me more than Trotsky’s callous remark that peasants are the ‘packhorses’ of a nation,” she wrote. “Who made them packhorses?… in all my years in China I never ceased to feel intolerable pain and anger when I looked into the thin intelligent face of some Chinese peasant twisted into sheer physical agony because on his back he bore a burden too much even for a beast.”

Pearl retained to the end the view of China laid out at the start of her career in her Messenger prize essay of 1925:
“as the inevitable future leader
of Asia, and as a monumental force in herself with her unmeasured resources, both human and material, she will exert a tremendous influence upon the future of the world.” She spent the greater part of her life thinking about and speaking for the common man, exploited successively in China by Western capitalism, by the bureaucratic inefficiency and military brutality of the Nationalist regime, and by the Communists’ overriding drive for power. Her stance was never ideological. She had known too much too young about ideological campaigns to reeducate other people for their own good, and all such attempts filled her with revulsion.
“Yesterday in New York
a young Chinese woman… told me breathlessly of the great and marvellous changes that the Communists are making in China,” she wrote in her memoirs in 1954, remembering perhaps the glorious changes once envisaged by her father and his colleagues. “And in her words, too, I caught the old stink of condescension.”

POSTSCRIPT
Paper People

W
HEN
P
EARL FINALLY
left China to settle in the United States in 1934, she marked this last great uprooting of her life with a burst of autobiographical writing, looking backward and forward in the two biographies of her parents and in the three fictional books she wrote immediately before and after:
The Time Is Noon, This Proud Heart,
and
Other Gods
. These were her first novels set in America, and in them she rewrote her past and shaped her future, clearing the ground, establishing control, and getting rid of the heavy, cumbersome, potentially toxic baggage she carried with her.

Storytelling had been an escape for Pearl ever since, as a small child, she found she could forget her troubles by reading and rereading the collected works of Charles Dickens. She said that every one of her own novels included
a character who was a version
of herself, and that her imaginary world of dreams, projections, and fictional presences came to seem to her as substantial as the real world. Writing occupied a special compartment in her mind, the mental equivalent of the attic at the top of her Nanjing house, a safe place
“where she could go
and be alone with her people.” There she re-created as an adult the kind of virtual reality she had entered as a child through other people’s stories: “more and more it came about that her only companionship was in the attic with her people.”

This Proud Heart,
published in 1938, was for Pearl herself as well as for those closest to her the nearest she ever came to
a deliberate self-portrait
. Its heroine, Susan Gaylord, marries a local college boy and sets out with high hopes to become a model wife and mother in a small house exactly like all the others in the small town where she grew up.
Class president and valedictorian of her school year, she sings, plays the piano, and dismays her contemporaries by cooking, cleaning, sewing, and bringing up babies effortlessly, and far more expertly than they can themselves. But Susan’s marriage is shadowed from the start by a craving neither her husband nor his suburban world can satisfy. She too leads a secret life in an improvised workroom under the roof of her suburban home:
“desire stirred in her
, deep and blind, the intolerable, sweet, dark, solitary desire which she knew so well, which she could share with no one else. She rose to her feet and she went slowly upstairs, past the bedroom door, up to the attic.”

Susan appeases her blind urge by modeling a clay child. “Up in the attic the thing she had made remained a presence. It was there, a part of herself and yet separate from her.” Looking back at the end of her long life, Pearl described the people she created out of words in similar terms:
“when I speak the names
of my characters, they stand here before me as though they were in this room…. Perhaps being surrounded by the people I have created, I don’t need other people…. They seem real to me…. I just don’t distinguish between the people in my books and the people outside my books. One is as real as the other to me.” On the birth of her first baby, Susan (like her creator) turns away from an activity she sees as dangerously compulsive. For months the attic door remains locked, and dust gathers on the work inside. In the end, overcome by desire in spite of her best efforts to resist, she goes back to the abandoned attic. Working at top speed in a trancelike state without training or preparation, she models a woman out of clay, probing, groping, gouging, feeling the figure take shape and grow beneath her fingers.
“Each day when she opened
the attic door it was to open it to ecstasy, and when she shut the attic door behind her, it was as upon that secret ecstasy.”

Technically speaking, this is absurd. It is not possible to make a freestanding, life-size clay figure on impulse with no kind of external support or internal armature, any more than it would be feasible for a provincial housewife without funding or formal training to carry off a major New York hospital commission and leave for Paris on the proceeds, as Susan Gaylord does, in a bid to turn professional. She studies
in the studio of a prize-winning American sculptor—“Beauty was his soul’s food”—currently making statues of what he calls his Titans, twenty-one massive males ranging from Galileo, Leonardo, and Napoleon to Thomas Edison, “a gallery of history in stone.” In Paris in the era of Brancusi and the young Giacometti, at a time when the aims and means of sculpture itself had been redefined in abstract terms by works in plaster, papier-mâché and wire from Matisse, Picasso, and Julio Gonzalez, Susan Gaylord becomes an academic practitioner, dreaming of monuments in bronze and stone, taking it as a personal slight when told that only very few great men still sculpt in marble. “Her proud heart reared its head like a lion in her woman’s body. ‘How do you know I am not great?’ it demanded.”

Susan represents in highly stylized form the hopes and aspirations of a generation of housewives who found any prospect of pursuing a professional career extinguished by domesticity: “She had not enough to do. However busy she was, she knew there was an energy in her still unused, a primary function unperformed.” Potential problems—child care, financial dependence, the doubts of family and friends, her husband’s lethal feelings of inferiority, Susan’s own sense of being a cut above everyone else she has ever met—evaporate as if by magic. Her central dilemma resolves itself when her husband conveniently dies young of typhoid, contracted on the day she receives news of her first major commission. After a brief second marriage to a far more sophisticated New Yorker, she opts for independence and a single life, winning national acclaim for her
American Procession,
a patriotic sequence starting with an enormous black marble statue of her cleaning lady. Like its heroine’s most famous work,
This Proud Heart
spoke to and for American womanhood, using an old-fashioned and reassuringly familiar narrative format to convey a new and timely message. It was, by Pearl’s own account, a dream come true.

“The book told of the difficulty
of being a superior person,” her official biographer put it. So did her next American novel. Serialized like
This Proud Heart
in
Good Housekeeping,
and published in January 1940,
Other Gods
explores the penalties of instant fame through its lovely, shy, sensitive, book-loving heroine, the suggestively named
Kit Tallant. Like the central characters of both
The Time Is Noon
and
This Proud Heart,
Kit marries a dull, coarse-grained, well-meaning but thick-witted farmer’s son, distantly derived from Lossing Buck. An amateur mountaineer, Bert Holm becomes an international celebrity overnight after accidentally scaling an unclimbed Himalayan peak. Pearl said that her own sudden unexpected
fame dehumanized her
and made people treat her as an object, a sensation she had known and dreaded as a white child in Zhenjiang, surrounded on the street by Chinese crowds calling out insults about the foreign devil’s fair skin, yellow hair, and “wild-beast eyes.”

Old terrors resurfaced in these years between the lines of her books. Memories of casual abuse, of being shouted and spat at on the streets after the Revolution, of being forced to flee from murderous looters in 1927—“all that I had purposely forgotten”—lie behind passages like the one in
Other Gods
where Bert finds himself pursued by the press and mobbed by screaming fans at the head of a brass band tickertape parade down Broadway that terrifies his wife:
“Madness was about her
—something mad and uncontrolled. Her knees began to shake… she wet her lips… the noise rose into a high wild howling.” Kit takes refuge in the peaceful book-lined library of her family’s country home. “At once her mind stripped itself…. She sat in a long fruitful daydream, shaping her own mood, holding fast her own feeling, until at last she began to feel slowly words in a rhythm, two lines, then another and another. And once this progress began it went on to a completion, whether final or not she could not tell now, but at least to some sort of end, because she felt released and full of ease.”

This seems to be a pretty accurate account of the way Pearl worked at Green Hills Farm, where she increasingly retreated from the glare of publicity. As a writer she relied on the knack she had perfected as a child of removing herself from time and place: “once more I found myself withdrawing into my secret habitation. There I am alone. No other enters.” She spent every morning at her desk, emerging exhausted, dazed, and stupefied from these sessions with what she called her book people, or sometimes her real people. She wrote in longhand without revision or correction, seldom pausing, covering
page after page at phenomenal speed in a small compact script, producing on average 2,500 words at a sitting.
“Then I never look
at the papers again,” she told Helen Foster Snow. “My secretary types them out and my husband edits them. I never have anything more to do with the book until it is published…. I cannot stand to read over anything I write. My husband takes care of everything for me except the first draft. He works in the other half of the house.”

It was Richard, working with two typists in the next-door office, who applied the critical intelligence Pearl increasingly withheld from the dreamworld of her fiction. He edited her books heavily, and her agent, David Lloyd, did the same for the short stories. “It took two anchors to hold her,” said Lloyd’s daughter, Andrea. “Father and Walsh… It took two men, one couldn’t hold her…. Her work was always pouring out of her.” For four decades she published a book or two a year as well as keeping up a steady flow of magazine stories, articles, and speeches. Her earning power was prodigious. For ten years or more she could count on up to five thousand dollars for a story in magazines like
Cosmopolitan,
the
Saturday Evening Post,
or
Woman’s Home Companion,
which meant that, with royalties, translations, and serialization fees, her total income came to $60,000 to $100,000 a year. But her production rate inevitably precluded firsthand contact with the world she wrote about. Pearl had little intrinsic understanding of American idiom or thought patterns. She didn’t know how ordinary people behaved, and she had never heard them talking casually among themselves. In Shanghai in 1928 she had been mystified by a stranger who said, pointing at Carol,
“The kid is nuts.”
A decade later in Pennsylvania she depended on Richard to interpret for her (
“he said it was fun
to be married to me because I was so ignorant that he could tell me all the old American jokes, and they were new to me”).

She was isolated in public as a celebrity and secluded at home by the demands of her profession. What little time she did not spend writing was taken up with campaigning, lecturing, traveling, and fund-raising for the many causes she vigorously supported. Pearl had long feared the outbreak of World War II, and she expended much energy trying to communicate Asian points of view at all levels both before
and after American intervention following the bombing at Pearl Harbor. In 1941 she and Richard set up and ran for the next decade from the John Day offices the East and West Association, a private cross-cultural organization designed to promote friendship, dialogue, and understanding through an extensive program of talks, translations, broadcasts, workshops, and performances. Pearl organized Chinese relief funds and contributed a regular column of book reviews to
Asia
magazine until it closed in 1946. One of the great good turns she did the Chinese people was to help bring about the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which had penalized immigrants since before she was born, and which were finally dismantled in wartime after more than sixty years, thanks to another campaign mounted from John Day headquarters.

The day-to-day running of her household at Green Hills was taken care of by secretaries, typists, hired help of one sort or another, and after the first few years by a registered nurse to look after the brood of growing children. She had no intimate friends. Her children found her conscientious and affectionate but as undemonstrative as her own mother had been before her. Sing-alongs at the piano and bedtime stories around the fire took the place of individual contact. Pearl loved and needed the lively presence of young people, the sound of their voices, the energy and clatter they brought into the house, but there were so many of them so close in age that each had to wait in turn for a private interview, by which time the reason for it had often been forgotten or blanked out.
“No one really got close
to her,” said her daughter Janice. “I never really got to know her.”

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