Pearl Buck in China (39 page)

Like her father before her, she found intermittent consolation in the company of the various handsome, hopeful, talented young men who circled around her in these years, acting as her escorts, accompanying her on her travels, and involving her in projects that came to nothing much in spite of her sponsorship. None of these entanglements seems to have involved more than mild flirtation on either side. She even conducted
a platonic romance
in his final years with her old friend Ernest Hocking, who said she reminded him of both Aristotle and Homer, and whose ardent love letters make him sound more like a wistful adolescent than a distinguished philosopher in his nineties. Pearl maintained that sex took place between them only in the head. She was beginning to imitate her own fiction, taking a leaf out of her book about Madame Wu, who celebrated the onset of middle age in
Pavilion of Women
by retiring from active service in her husband’s bed, providing a concubine to take her place, and embarking on an intimate relationship with an unworldly monkish intellectual (he turns out to be a defrocked Catholic priest), an affair consummated only on the astral plane after her lover’s death.
“She loses her grip
on reality,” the
New Yorker
said severely of Pearl’s handling of this episode, “even Oriental reality.”

Her humor and perception, her sharp eye and balanced judgment were increasingly restricted to nonfiction works like
The Child Who Never Grew,
the little book about herself and Carol published in 1950 in aid of the Vineland School. Pearl was one of very few American
celebrities prepared to admit publicly in those days to a family member’s mental disability, and the book had an impact out of all proportion to its size. It is a concise and lucid plea, at once passionate and marvelously dispassionate, for a ruthless facing of the facts, the opposite of the process that drained the blood out of her fiction. She followed it four years later with
My Several Worlds,
a volume of memoirs that cuts fluently between the author’s American present and her Asian past, painting a clear, bright, elegiac, and unsentimental picture of a life inextricably bound up with the turbulent history of twentieth-century China.

Memory for Pearl was an intensely creative faculty. It opened and closed like quicksand over fragments of the past, absorbing and transforming them, sucking them down only to disgorge them once again as much as ten or twenty years later in fictional or nonfictional form, sometimes in both one after the other. During the transitional period marking the collapse of each of her two marriages, the treacherous sands of memory became especially active, swallowing and regurgitating the past as if in readiness for an uncertain future.
“I have to make all I do
out of my own life,” says Susan Gaylord in
This Proud Heart.
“It’s my only material.” The same was true of Pearl. Even
Imperial Woman,
the fictionalized biography of the dowager empress that occupied her in the first uneasy years of Richard’s illness, drew as much on her own personal experience as on the historical and biographical sources she consulted. Like all other portraits of the empress at the time, it relied heavily on a hostile account by J. O. Bland and Edmund Backhouse, whose supposed authenticity was shown to be spurious only after Pearl’s death. Her novel paints a relatively reliable picture largely thanks to intuition. “
You could see Pearl
all through that book,” said Andrea Lloyd, “the way she pictured herself anyhow.” “She was very much like the old empress,” said Sarah Rowe, Pearl’s secretary at Green Hills. “Nothing happened there that she didn’t know and approve of…. when you’ve had all the success she’d had, maybe your imagination spills over into fact, and I think it became more and more difficult to discern the difference between actuality and the wish.”

of all the bright young men who charmed Pearl and dispelled her loneliness, the most persistent and persuasive was her red-haired dancing master, Theodore Harris. He was a natural courtier, eager, assiduous, and deferential. Pearl said he had the looks of a Greek god together with the glamour of the young President Kennedy. Born Fred L. Hair in rural South Carolina in 1931, he was a school dropout who worked his way up to become an instructor at the Arthur Murray Dance Studios in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. Pearl hired him in July 1963 to teach her two youngest daughters. They disliked him, but from the first day he captivated their mother, becoming a constant visitor at Green Hills. Within three months he had organized a charity ball in Pearl’s barn to raise money for Welcome House. It was the first step in an ambitious nationwide campaign built around grand fund-raising balls held in twenty-one different cities.
“Mr. Harris was presenting
Pearl just as Richard Walsh had done thirty years before,” said Richard’s daughter Natalie. Pearl was thrilled by the possibilities he opened up. Harris felt comfortable, as she did, in a world where fantasy merged easily with fact. When his irrepressible energy, lavish spending, and big ideas failed to persuade the Welcome House board members to offer him a job for which he had neither training nor experience, she sidestepped their objections by setting up the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in January 1964, with herself in the chair and Ted Harris as president.

Its aim was to house and educate destitute Amerasian children in their own homelands, starting in Korea, and its staff consisted largely of dance instructors. Ted and his young friends,
“the Arthur Murray crew,”
infiltrated Pearl’s personal and professional life at all levels from then on. Financed initially from her own pocket, the Foundation had a star-studded board whose names headed the begging letters circulated in an extensive mailing program. Pearl roped in everyone she could persuade to sign on, from Joan Crawford to Dwight D. Eisenhower and Robert Kennedy. Harris devised a plan for Pearl to sign over her copyrights to the Foundation, which would bank her royalties and provide her in return with whatever income she required.
She also made a will
leaving her entire estate, including Green Hills Farm,
to the Foundation, which meant that (apart from the Amerasian children) Harris was her principal beneficiary. At Pearl’s request the board voted him a massive annual salary of forty-five thousand dollars in perpetuity, regardless of whether or not he remained in their employ.

Harris reinvented Pearl by treating her like royalty.
“She imagined herself a queen
, an empress,” said one of her young men, who watched her transformation at Harris’s hands into a character from her own fiction. For years Pearl had tended to assume what Margaret Thomson, her tart-tongued old friend from Nanjing, called
“aspects of imperial grandeur
.” Now she had found a trusty henchman who made her feel like the heroine of
Imperial Woman,
“the true ruler
, the beautiful powerful woman who feared no one and by whose charm and strength all were subdued.” The fund-raising balls became ceremonial occasions, opened by Pearl taking the floor in Ted’s arms in elaborate jewels and a full-length pink, white, or silver ball gown. She had a white mink coat with snap-on white fox-fur trim and a Chrysler limousine with her monogram in silver on the door (Ted had a matching one marked with his own initials). Together they installed the Foundation’s headquarters in a handsome Philadelphia townhouse with luxury suites on different floors for him and her, and a state room filled with trophies, starting with Pearl’s Nobel insignia. Margaret’s son, James Thomson, working as assistant to Chester Bowles, the undersecretary of state in Kennedy’s first administration, was amazed when Pearl came to call in a personalized limo
“that seemed… twice as long
as the Secretary of State’s.” He saw Pearl’s Philadelphia setup as an unlikely re-creation of the Manchu court, centering round a figure gifted, like the empress in her book, with innate authority, imagination, courage, ambition, and a tiger heart.
“Magnificence became her
, as always.”

Part of Harris’s remit was to rewrite Pearl’s image. She herself had authorized and edited a short biography,
The Exile’s Daughter,
written by her sister and published in 1944 under the name Cornelia Spencer as part of an attempt to launch Grace as a writer. Partly perhaps because of its subject’s constant intervention, the book is admiring and insipid, chiefly interesting in retrospect for occasional independent insight into their parents’ lives. More problematic are the three
books put together by Harris with Pearl’s collaboration:
For Spacious Skies,
much of it dictated on their trips together in the back of one or other chauffeur-driven limo, and the two strange, scrappy, confessional volumes of
Pearl S. Buck: A Biography.
Their coverage is uncoordinated and unreliable, especially in passages where Harris attempts to strengthen his own position by denigrating Pearl’s second marriage. She was already well into her seventies by the time these books came out, and her memories drift and waver in the disconcerting time warps of old age, clouding over in some areas but startlingly clear in others. Many of her disclosures have the pristine freshness of authentic recollection. Harris’s prompting was not malicious or exploitive, but soothing and reassuring. If he was unscrupulous, it is in the sense that he tried to release the locks and censors that controlled Pearl’s access to the past, and to console her by relieving its sometimes intolerable emotional pressure. His style was naïvely ingratiating, his judgment biased, and his understanding limited, but his sense of what distressed her was acute.

The first volume of his life of Pearl was published by John Day in 1969, which turned out to be a dreadful year for both of them. An FBI inquiry into Harris’s running of the Foundation had been shelved a couple of years earlier, but newspaper allegations now resurfaced, first in Korea, then in the United States.
“The Dancing Master,”
a well-documented, detailed, and damning piece of investigative journalism published in the July number of the monthly magazine
Philadelphia,
accused Harris of mishandling charitable funds and making sexual advances to Korean boys in the Foundation’s care. He promptly resigned his post, denied the charges, and disappeared. At least one board member had already left in protest, and more now resigned. Feeling deceived, betrayed, and publicly humiliated like her father before her, Pearl rallied in furious defense, briefly taking charge of the organization herself, flatly rejecting every allegation, and threatening the press with lawsuits. Shortly before her seventy-seventh birthday she decamped, leaving behind everything that had rooted her life in Pennsylvania for more than three decades—her family, her house, garden, farm, and barn, her books and possessions, her beloved stands
of sycamore and ash—to settle in Vermont with Ted.
“Destiny compelled her
onward, and her own she must leave behind,” she had written of one of the empress’s many flights in
Imperial Woman
.

Pearl spent the last years of her life in self-imposed exile in Vermont, keeping up a certain state in isolation but not obscurity. “She lived alone, this Empress, the walls of her courtesy impregnable and inviolate, and through that wall there was no gate.” She and Ted had initially taken refuge in the summer house built by her sons in the Green Mountains, which reminded Pearl of Kuling’s Mount Lu. Later they moved into the little neighboring town of Danby, where Pearl bought several rundown properties, setting up Ted and his former dance-instructor friends as antique dealers with a sideline in local crafts, while she lived in rooms over the shop. Their high hopes for the business dwindled in the end, and so did their even more optimistic schemes for transforming the future of Danby and its people. The outfit ended up more like a junkshop selling curios and copies of Buck books, with Pearl herself often seen seated at a window in Chinese silk robes, drawing five or six thousand people each summer as the town’s sole tourist attraction.
“I take my prestige
with me,” she had said grandly many years before to a woman who protested that wealthy charitable patrons would never attend balls in unfashionable locations like Philadelphia’s Convention Hall. Pearl remained largely cut off from her children, who were liable to find their visits curtailed or barred altogether by their mother’s entourage. Ugly disputes about money and access simmered beneath the surface. As Pearl approached her eighties, still in full command but growing frailer, it became hard to get through to her even on the telephone.

She followed, indeed sometimes almost seemed to be directing, world affairs from exile in Danby, emerging occasionally with a small train of attendants for meetings at the Philadelphia offices of her Foundation (now effectively reconstituted after its drastic shake-up, working better than before, and moving toward eventual merger with Welcome House). She gave interviews, wrote articles, and fronted a TV show as guest host for a week in Boston.
She told a journalist
that she had never gotten used to America and still could not feel at home
there. Her longing to return to her roots, to revisit the country that had shaped her and to see her parents’ graves again, intensified as the U.S. government seemed to draw closer to the People’s Republic.
“By birth and ancestry
I am American,” she said, “… but by sympathy and feeling, I am Chinese.” In February 1972, when President Richard Nixon announced his intention to visit Beijing, Pearl planned to go with him, or alternatively to follow in his wake. Proposals were drawn up for fiction and nonfiction books on the trip, syndicated newspaper coverage, and a TV documentary. She sent telegrams and letters to anyone who might assist her, from the president himself to the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai, who came from Tsingkiangpu, where Pearl grew up. It was a bitter shock when, after months of waiting, a curt note from a junior Chinese diplomat in Canada turned down her visa application on the grounds that her works had for years
“taken an attitude of distortion
, smear and vilification towards the people of new China and its leaders.” Nixon brought her back a set of nesting lacquer boxes as a consolation. Long after her death it turned out that Zhou had personally signed the memo banning her return.