by Nancy Moses
In Pearl Buck’s China, being born female either killed you—literally—or made you strong. The birth of a girl child was cause for mourning, and many who lived were crippled for life, their feet bound and broken from age three so that bone and flesh could be molded into the tiny “golden lilies” that future husbands expected. Later, the author filled her books with the Chinese women she knew: noble ladies and farm wives; courtesans and prostitutes; newborn girls strangled by their mothers; traditional women struggling to keep up with their educated, modern husbands; young wives driven to suicide by their mothers-in-law. These vivid portraits, and Pearl’s strong voice, are what drew so many women to her fiction.
Pearl Buck spent her Chinese years channeling through cycles of prosperity, poverty, floods, and famines. Her stories from these wild times stretch the bounds of credulity: her mother facing down a band of bandits by politely inviting them in for tea; her father bound to a stake and forced to watch the torture and murder of a Chinese convert; lepers, their flesh eaten away from their bones; and dead children abandoned on hillsides with wild dogs gnawing their bodies. The family fled China not once but many times, each time returning to rebuild their lives under increasingly perilous circumstances.
In 1910, when Pearl was eighteen years old, the family traveled to America to enroll her in Randolph Macon Women’s College, the first women’s college in the South. It was here that she experienced her first successes: election as senior class president and an impressive academic record that led to job offers. Her plan was to remain in the United States after graduation, but her beloved mother was gravely ill, so she returned to China and assumed Carie’s missionary duties: managing the household, teaching Bible classes, leading a teacher training class, and operating a clinic for Chinese women. You might imagine that a young woman who had tasted sweet freedom would resent returning to the tradition-bound world of colonial China, but that’s not how Pearl Buck remembered it. “It was a wonderful time to be in China,” she remembered, “and I was at the right age for it.”[5]
Soon after her return, she fell for John Lossing Buck, a tall, strong, and handsome Cornell-trained agriculturalist whose mission and passion was to revolutionize farming in China. Seduced by his confidence, pragmatism, and lack of religiosity, the enamored young woman ignored her parents’ warning that Lossing might not be a sympathetic partner. There’s a photograph from 1917 of the wedding party in Carie’s lovely garden, the couple dressed in white, surrounded by family, colleagues, and three little girls carrying flower baskets.
With all of the exuberance of secular missionaries, the newlyweds set off to transform Chinese agriculture. The first stop was Nanzuxhou, a remote village on the arid plains of Northern China where farmers relied on cultivation practices dating back millennia. The area was regularly subjected to droughts, floods, high winds, locusts, and famine. Pearl Buck happily came along as Lossing traveled the countryside, translating his questions to the farmers and their answers back to him, and later transcribing her husband’s meticulous observations. She also roamed on her own, befriending Chinese women, learning their hardships and joys, absorbing their lives; for many she was the first white woman they had ever seen. By the time the couple left Nanzuxhou two and a half years later, Lossing had acquired the data for his two landmark studies of Chinese cultivation practices, and Pearl Buck had absorbed the sights, smells, tastes, and sounds that would suffuse her most famous book, The Good Earth.
Pearl was elated when she discovered that she was pregnant, around the time Lossing accepted a position at the newly established college of Agriculture and Forestry at the University of Nanjing. The couple settled into faculty housing, a lively social life, and teaching positions. Their daughter, Carol Grace Buck, was born in March 1920. A few weeks later, Pearl’s doctor found a tumor in her womb, so the young family traveled to the United States for Pearl’s medical care. As the surgeon cut out the tumor, he also removed her uterus, a loss Pearl mourned for the rest of her life. When the Buck family returned to China, Pearl Buck found her mother very ill, and when Carie died in October 1921, her daughter poured her grief into a memoir of her mother, which she put away for fifteen years before it was published as The Exile.
Carie’s death freed something in her daughter: “I remember quite clearly one August afternoon,” Pearl wrote, “that I said suddenly, ‘this very day I am going to begin to write.’”[6] She began with an essay about the forces of modernization sweeping across the world, titled “In China Too,” which was published in The Atlantic in January 1924. That led to a commission by the editor of Forum and that led to the essay “Beauty in China.”
A couple of years later, the Bucks traveled to the United States to attend Cornell University. By this time, they knew that their daughter Carol had failed to develop properly, though none of the doctors could tell them why. It was later learned that she suffered from phenylketonuria, an inherited metabolic disease, which, if not treated, could lead to profound and permanent mental retardation. As if to compensate for the loss of their dreams for Carol, the couple adopted a pale, abandoned infant whom they named Janice Buck. Soon after that, something happened that permanently broke the bond between husband and wife. Their marriage began to unravel; Pearl decided to take full responsibility for her disabled child.
Early in the marriage, Pearl Buck had devoted herself to helping Lossing with his scholarship. She evidenced little interest in pursuing a writing career. That now changed permanently. Pearl Buck needed money for a private facility in the United States, or Carol would spend the rest of her life in a public institution. Writing was the only way she knew to earn money, so Pearl began to write. Out of despair she became dogged, unstoppable, and mercenary. For the rest of her life, Pearl Buck used her writing and the sums it generated to do exactly what she wanted.
When the family returned to China in 1925, Pearl Buck remained with her daughter Janice in Shanghai, because the family home in Nanjing was under siege. She then set about securing the accoutrements of a writer: a preowned portable Royal typewriter and a literary agent, David Lloyd of the Paget Agency, whose advertisement she found in a directory in a Shanghai bookstore.[7] Pearl Buck began to mail him short stories, essays, and the manuscript for a book that was eventually titled East Wind: West Wind. Lloyd secured commissions for the articles and shopped the book to publishers. After more than two dozen rejections, he secured a contract from a small, new publishing house: John Day and Company, owned by Richard Walsh.
Four years later, the Bucks were back in the United States, and Pearl spent her time finding a permanent home for Carol, eventually selecting Vineland Training School in New Jersey for its humane treatment of its mentally disabled residents. The fee was one thousand dollars a year, well beyond the resources of an academic family. She borrowed two thousand dollars from a member of the Mission Board in New York to cover Carol’s first two years, with no prospects of repayment.
After a wrenching departure from Carol, the family returned to Nanjing and Pearl Buck began to write. Every morning after Janice left for nursery school, Pearl Buck climbed the stairs to her office, pulled her Chinese rosewood chair up to her Chinese rosewood desk, and began typing on her portable Royal typewriter. Three months later, the typescript for The Good Earth was done.
“It was all on the tips of my fingers,” she recalled, “what I had to say, and it went very fast . . . in spite of the fact that I was in an environment that did not and could not take novel-writing or novels very seriously and even I myself came to consider it a secret indulgence.”[8]
She typed two copies, only one of which has ever been located. She carefully packed up its pages and mailed it to her literary agent, who took it to Richard Walsh, the publisher, at John Day and Company. She named the book Wang Lung after its main character, and the only major change Walsh requested was a change of title, writing that it needed “a good deal of sweep and romance, something like the Good Earth.” The name stuck.
From her perch in Nanjing
, some ten thousand miles away from her publisher, Pearl Buck waited for news. In early 1931, an ecstatic and somewhat perplexing letter arrived: The Good Earth had become a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection. Living so far away, she had never heard of the wildly popular Book-of-the-Month Club or its power to transform an obscure author into an overnight sensation. More good news followed: all the leading newspapers in the United States had alerted their readers to publication of The Good Earth, and it had garnered glowing reviews. Sales were so strong that John Day Publishing Company could not keep up with demand.
“It is a curious feeling writing to you at so great a distance about these matters,” wrote Richard Walsh in one of his many letters to Pearl. “We sit here in a genuine whirl of excitement about the book which you have written and you the author are completely detached from it.”[9] The author’s own excitement was tempered by her naiveté and fear that someone would learn about her mentally disabled daughter. She constantly worried about keeping Carol a secret and having enough money to support her.
In September of 1931, Pearl Buck received a cable announcing that The Good Earth had won the Pulitzer Prize. Film rights had been sold to Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer for fifty thousand dollars, the highest sum ever. Richard Walsh was arranging a major launch, so the Bucks left for North America.
I picture this overweight academic wife in a dated dress, arriving from far-off China and finding herself flooded with interview requests. I see fear in her eyes as she entered the Jade Room of New York City’s famed Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where two hundred handpicked guests—the fashionable intelligentsia—awaited. What did it feel like to be showered with praise and riches—with no notion of how to handle them properly? What did a missionary’s daughter and a missionary’s wife know about motion picture deals, reporters, or investments? First from necessity and soon by preference, Pearl Buck came to rely on her publisher, Richard Walsh. She even placed the original typescript of The Good Earth in his hands. His letter of acceptance said, in part, “But I do wish to say to you that I do not believe that valuable manuscripts should remain in the possession of any individual, or that they should be sold for profit at any time. Therefore, I shall want to provide by some sort of documents, including my will, that the collection should at some proper time in the future be turned over to a library.”[10]
The Good Earth was an instant hit, read by everyone from scholar and statesman to seamstress to society girl. Within the first eighteen months of publication, its author earned well over $100,000—$1.4 million in today’s dollars. It was the bestselling book of both 1931 and 1932, and the second-most popular book of the twentieth century, after Gone with the Wind.
What accounts for this blockbuster popularity? There’s never a single reason. One has to be the narrative: Pearl Buck was a masterful storyteller who understood pace, characterization, and drama. Another is the Biblical cadence of her prose, transforming ordinary people into universal symbols. She was also blessed with good timing: the book came out in the 1930s, when powerful storms drove American farmers from their lands, much like their Chinese counterparts. It is no coincidence that The Good Earth was published around the same time as The Grapes of Wrath and Gone with the Wind, all sweeping novels about man and the land.
Beyond all this, Richard Walsh’s masterful marketing acumen did much to drive sales. He made sure that buzz was out prior to publication. He negotiated The Good Earth’s selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club and its purchase by Warner Brothers Films. He also secured a publishing deal with the new Pocket Books, a British company that produced paperbacks at an especially affordable price. The Good Earth was Pocket Book’s first buy in the United States, and its low price point opened up sales to thousands of readers.
The Good Earth is an important book as well as a wonderful read. It is simply unique and will remain so. This was the first novel that revealed the lives of ordinary Chinese. Real people fill the story, not the caricatures or stereotypes that filled Western popular culture of the time. No one—no Chinese writer, no Western writer—had ever done this before. Today, when China is no farther away than the click of a computer key, it’s easy to forget how distant, exotic, and mysterious it appeared in 1930. Today, we might find it odd, even racist, to have the roles of Chinese peasants played by American movie stars, but it seemed normal in the 1937 film version of The Good Earth. American actress Luise Rainer even won an Academy Award for her portrayal of O-Lan, a reflection of a time when studio moguls thought it took star power to make China good box office. Twenty-four publishers turned down The Good Earth because they thought no one was interested in China. Twenty-four publishers were wrong.
The Good Earth not only transformed American’s view of China, it also transformed the lives of those closest to it. It catapulted this missionary daughter, wife, and worker from obscurity to celebrity and gave her riches beyond even her fertile imagination. It brought author and publisher together—first as business associates, then as lovers. Pearl Buck finally had the resources to create a life of her own design. She even had the power to trade up from an unsupportive husband with whom she had little in common to Walsh, an erudite, romantic prince whose principal wish was to serve her. She could build the family of her dreams in the place of her dreams, advance causes about which she cared deeply, and speak out on the issues of the day. She was free. She was powerful. She was determined to speak her mind.
She fired her first major salvo in front of two thousand guests at a fundraiser for the Presbyterian Church. By now, Pearl Buck was an international celebrity, and the missionaries embraced her as one of their own. When asked to comment on her four decades as child, wife, and teacher, she denounced the entire missionary movement.
I have seen the missionary narrow, uncharitable, unappreciative, ignorant. I have seen missionaries . . . so lacking in sympathy for the people they were supposed to be saving, so scornful of any civilization but their own, so harsh in their judgments upon one another, so coarse and insensitive among a sensitive and cultivated people, that my heart has fairly bled with shame. I can never have done with my apologies to the Chinese people that in the name of a gentle Christ we have sent such people to them.[11]
“How did she have the courage to publically criticize her world?” I asked Peter Conn.
“She was very brave,” he replied. “She picked her fights and waded in: religion, women, and abandoned children. She was isolated from the questions, the brickbats. She didn’t read American newspapers, never had American friends. Richard Walsh kept her safe.”
As it turned out, this speech was the beginning of four decades of pronouncements. It was also the beginning of a love affair. Within a few years, she had left Lossing and traveled back to the United States with her daughter Janice. In 1935, in Reno, Nevada, Pearl and Lossing Buck divorced, on the same day as Richard and Ruby Walsh. The next day Pearl and Richard married. Pearl Sydenstriker Buck Walsh never saw China again.
Once she was committed to a new life in the United States, it was time to get things organized. Pearl’s first project was her husband: although he was charming and connected, finances were not Walsh’s strong suit, and John Day Publishing faced bankruptcy. Pearl sat down at the typewriter and wrote a novel, titled The Mother, which garnered thirty-five thousand dollars from serialization in Cosmopolitan and sold eighty thousand copies within three months of publication. She then moved into the John Day Publishing House and became its principal literary advisor, using her celebrity to attract other top-selling authors. From the piles of invitations for speaking engagements and writing assignments, she cherry-picked the most lucrative ones, determined to earn as much as quickly as she could. Some of her fees were used to purchase Green Hills Farm in rural Bucks County, selected because of its relative proximity to Manhattan, Philadelphia, and Carol’s home in southern New Jersey.
During these years, Pearl Buck turned out work, as one critic put it, “on an industrial scale.”[12] She wrote very quickly—she seldom went back to rewrite—and her o
utput was exceptionally eclectic: bestselling novels, mysteries, serials, poetry, speeches, juvenile books, history books, and books about international relations. She authored newspaper commentaries, speeches, radio shows, and television scripts. She wrote to entertain, to educate, to convince, and, most important, to earn the dollars that bought independence. Walsh served as editor and publisher, opening the right doors, making the best connections, promoting her, and sharing her passions. Their talents meshed perfectly. By the time of her death at age eighty, she had produced a remarkable 1,300 works, including seventy novels. Not all are of equal merit. After The Good Earth, her two best books are the memoirs of her parents: Fighting Angel, about Absalom, and The Exile, about Carie.
Pearl Buck learned she had been awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature from an NBC radio broadcast. Her first words were Chinese, translated as: “I don’t believe it.” Her second were in English: “That’s ridiculous. It should have gone to (American novelist Theodore) Dreiser.” Many critics shared her opinion.
“The Nobel Prize just killed her,” said Peter Conn, shaking his head. “Until the prize, Pearl was treated with respect, even by The New York Times. Then the New York establishment woke up to the Nobel Prize. ‘Really? You’re kidding me,’ were their reaction. The implication of the Nobel Prize is that you’re the best writer in the world. Pearl was seen as a new, an average, a productive writer, but not the best writer in the world.”
But, while her Nobel Prize may not have made sense as a literary choice, it did make sense as a political gesture. In 1938, the Swedish-based Nobel Committee looked out over an increasingly bleak Europe: the Fascists were winning in Spain, and Germany was invading Czechoslovakia. Many interpreted Pearl Buck’s Nobel Prize as a celebration of democracy over fascism, although few imagined a world war was so near.
