‘The Good Earth’ sold millions of copies and transformed the West’s understanding of China.
When she was a little girl in China at the turn of the 20th century, Pearl Buck used to play by herself in a cemetery near her missionary parents’ home. She carried with her a string bag and a sharp stick. The bag was for collecting the human remains that she found sticking out of shallow graves or lying scattered on the ground. The stick was to push the bones back into their original graves or dig new ones. Some of the bones were tiny, those of children, usually girls who had been smothered or strangled at birth by mothers who were disappointed that they hadn’t given birth to sons.
This is one of the anecdotes with which Hilary Spurling begins “Pearl Buck in China,” her vivid biography of the early years of the now mostly forgotten novelist who was once America’s most celebrated writer. Buck’s heyday was in the 1930s. Those whose memories don’t stretch back that far can be forgiven if they ask: Pearl who? Her books are little read today—though an endorsement from Oprah Winfrey spawned a recent mini-revival.
In 1931, the year “The Good Earth” was published, there was hardly an American who hadn’t heard of her. “The Good Earth” sold tens of millions of copies and won a Pulitzer Prize. A Nobel Prize in literature followed in 1938, when Buck was praised for, among other things, “her rich and epic descriptions of peasant life in China.”
Buck grew up speaking both Chinese and English. But she was more than bilingual. She liked to say that she was “mentally bifocal,” at home in both China and the U.S. “When I was in the Chinese world,” Buck wrote, “I was Chinese, I spoke Chinese and behaved as a Chinese and ate as a Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings. When I was in the American world, I shut the door between.” In Ms. Spurling’s words, Buck cultivated “two distinct personalities.”
Buck’s Chinese personality was closely formed by the peasants in whose communities she had grown up. Much of the power of her fiction lay in her ability to give voice to these voiceless people. Chinese scholars of the day considered the lives of illiterate peasants and laborers unworthy of notice. Buck, by contrast, wrote about flood, famine, drought, pestilence and other intractable realities of rural life. She was scornful of the celebrity culture of Shanghai of the late 1920s and 1930s and of the “rootless young Chinese, educated abroad, who did not want to involve themselves in anything more trying than art and literature.” She said at the time that she felt she was living in France just before the revolution.
The Good Earth” was Buck’s second book, and Ms. Spurling correctly calls its impact “phenomenal.” Depression-era readers identified with Buck’s characters despite their alien habits and thought patterns. Readers recognized the “cycle of prosperity and destitution” that overtook her characters no matter how hard they worked and saved. In Ms. Spurling’s analysis, Buck’s books eroded the wall of ignorance and prejudice that blocked Americans’ views of China. She “did for the working people of twentieth-century China something of what Dickens had done for London’s nineteenth-century poor.”
Among Buck’s books are frank biographies of both of her parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker. Ms. Spurling re-creates the strained family relationships in colorful detail. Caroline, who lost four of her seven children to sickness, was unhappy in her marriage and disillusioned with China, and she regaled the young Pearl with stories of “home” in West Virginia. Absalom was a strict Presbyterian, more interested in converting the “heathen” Chinese than in raising his family.
Ms. Spurling devotes scant attention to the author’s first husband, John Lossing Buck, except to say that he was captive to his work as an agricultural economist and ignored his wife. Buck’s second marriage—to her publisher, Richard Walsh—was a long and happy one. That relationship, as well as Buck’s late-life devotion to a handsome ballroom dancer to whom she entrusted most of her affairs after Walsh’s death, occurred mostly after Buck had come to live in the U.S. and are treated only briefly in Ms. Spurling’s China-centered narrative.
Ms. Spurling is an exquisite writer, and “Pearl Buck in China” is beautifully paced. One unfortunate omission, however, is a discussion of the effect of Buck’s Christianity on her life and work. Ms. Spurling is quick to describe Buck’s contempt for missionaries who, in Buck’s words, are “lacking in sympathy for the people they were supposed to be saving.” But she fails to explore how the author’s Christian upbringing may have influenced her views in any positive way. Buck’s compassion for the poor was not exactly an un-Christian sentiment. Ms. Spurling is more interested in psychoanalyzing Buck’s relations with her parents and cheering her feminist break-out from her first marriage.
Buck left China in 1934 in part to escape her marriage and in part to be close to her severely disabled daughter, who was at school in the U.S. Because of her commercial success, Buck had the means to live independently, and in the decades to come she would publish novels, biographies, memoirs and translations, although she would never again enjoy the popularity of “The Good Earth.” In 1972, when President Richard Nixon announced his intention to visit China, Buck applied for a visa.
It is ironical that the author of the book that accurately depicted the lives of China’s rural poor—whose conditions energized support for the Communist revolution that followed—was rejected by the revolutionaries themselves. China’s leaders at the time could not overcome their suspicion of the missionary’s daughter who had exposed the truth about their country. Prime Minister Chou Enlai, who had been born in the town where Buck grew up, personally signed the memo turning down her visa application. Buck died the following year, denied the opportunity to return to the country she loved.
Ms. Kirkpatrick is a former deputy editor of the Journal’s editorial page.
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