The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik

by J. K. Van Dover

  Over the course of the 20th century, the readers of highbrow Modernist literature discovered one China. For literature in English, at least, this was a timeless China of the mandarin elite, a China of poetry and porcelain, a China of millennia of continuous elite culture. China was a resource that could provide cures for the aesthetic decline of the West. The readers of the middlebrow, concerned with the ways things really were, were presented with a China in transition. When the century opened, the moribund Qing dynasty seemed to be the sick man of Asia, with a sclerotic bureaucracy and a population of 400 million that might be seen as oppressed peasants, potential Christians, political revolutionaries, destructive warlords, or unserved customers. At mid-century, when Robert van Gulik began to write his Tang dynasty detective stories, the bureaucracy, now in the hands Mao Zedong’s Communists, seemed to Westerners to have become frighteningly active, upsetting all of the usual structures that had seemed to govern China’s internal and external relations. China had become an explosive problem that needed solving.

  There was, of course, an overlap between the various brows and the various Chinas that they discovered in their readings. Not every highbrow joined Edmund Wilson in not caring who killed Roger Ackroyd. T.S. Eliot embraced Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes; Ludwig Wittgenstein doted on Norbert Davis’s Doan and Carstairs, and few brows can claim to be higher than Eliot’s and Wittgenstein’s. The stolidly middle-brow Saturday Evening Post happily published detective stories such as those by Earl Derr Biggers, scorning only the hardest boiled of the hard-boiled. Hammett, and later, Mickey Spillane were beyond the Post’s pale, but Raymond Chandler had a story (“I’ll Be Waiting”) accepted in 1939, and Erle Stanley Gardner’s semi-hard-boiled Perry Mason novels were serialized in the Post in 1937 and 1942, and then thirteen times in the 1950s and early 1960s. Van Gulik’s Judge Dee stories make the point: the esoterica of Tang dynasty culture may appeal to the higher brows; the Confucian moralism and ratiocinative talents of the Judge may appeal to the middling brows, and the kung fu exploits of Ma Joong and Tai Chiang (and of Dee himself on occasion) suggest that Van Gulik was not indifferent to the expectations of readers raised on Dashiell Hammett or even Mickey Spillane. Still, the brows offer a structure for examining some of the ways that writers presented China to Americans in the first two-thirds of the 20th century.

  Highbrow Chinas

  American highbrow responses to China fall into two categories: the professional China-watchers employed by government, university, and journals; and the amateurs—art collectors, mystics, and above all, in the world of Anglophone literature, poets. The “China Hands” might well appreciate the arts, but their focus was geopolitics. They would be tested when, in the Age of Admiration (1937–1944), America committed itself first to helping China resist the Japanese invasion and then, after 7 December 1941, allying itself to China in a war to defeat Japan. The Chinese resistance had split into anti–Japanese forces, the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, based in Chungking (Chongqing), and the Communists in Yenan (Yan’an), under the leadership of Mao Zedong. Most of the China hands seem to have been left-leaning in their politics, and the corruption of Chiang’s regime did little to make them re-examine their premises. When, in the Ages of Disenchantment and Hostility (1949–1972), China was “lost,” the China Hands were not only discredited; they were persecuted. Any expression of approval for the Communists (and any criticism of the Nationalists) was widely viewed as a betrayal of American values. Time magazine’s star journalist, Theodore White, whose dispatches during the war had been celebrated and whose 1946 book-length report, Thunder Out of China, had been a bestseller, was so frustrated by the rewriting of his dispatches from China by Henry Luce’s pro–Chiang editors, that he left the magazine. Luce’s Time magazine was such an influential journal in America that by 1952, one quarter of the reading population was reading Time (Herzstein 157). Luce, born and raised in China as the child of missionaries, was a consistent and constant advocate for Chiang Kai-shek. Called “Fuey Pi-yu” by Westbrook Pegler, Luce insured that his influential magazines—Time, Life, Fortune—kept American foreign policy focused on China and that that policy did not waver from unconditional opposition to Mao’s regime. As Time declared on 5 March 1956: “There will never be peace—must never be peace—in Communist China” (Herzstein 198).

  Those in government positions who had expressed any degree of doubt about Chiang or sympathy for Mao, especially in the State Department—men such as Owen Lattimore, John Carter Vincent, Oliver Edmund Clubb, John Stewart Service, John Paton Davies, and John Fremont Melby—were pressured into resigning their positions, and those in the academy found their opportunities for research diminished (the Harvard professor and dean of Sinology in the 1950s, John Fairbanks, was denied a visa even to visit Japan). Lattimore’s summons before the Senate Subcommittee Appointed to Investigate Charges of Communism in the Department of State was one of the more spectacular episodes. Accused by Senator McCarthy of being “the top Russian espionage agent in this country” (vii), Lattimore, with the assistance of his attorney, the future Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, made an impassioned defense of himself before the Subcommittee, and then, within weeks completed a book, Ordeal by Slander, that summarized his experience and that spent six weeks on the American best seller list. Lattimore would eventually be indicted on seven counts of perjury; all seven would be dismissed, but Lattimore was compelled to take a paid leave from Johns Hopkins University from 1952 to 1955. He left Hopkins (and America) to take a position at the University of Leeds in 1963 (Simpson).

  The “loss of China” inconvenienced many specialists and cost some of them their careers. But throughout the 20th century, China continued to appeal to collectors. Chinoiserie had first seized the European imagination in the 17th century; it enjoyed a revival in early 20th-century America as artists and collectors continued to be attracted to Chinese objets d’art and Chinese styles and themes more broadly. Isabella Stewart Gardner, Condé Nast, and H.F. DuPont went to considerable expense to create Chinese ballrooms and parlors in their homes and apartments. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, built in 1927, reflected the broadening of the trend into the wider culture (Briceño 50 ff.). At both the elite and the popular level, this appreciation of Chinese art seemed unrelated to contemporary history. Neither Condé Nast nor Sid Grauman, nor any of Grauman’s patrons between 1927 and 1973 (when the name changed to Mann’s Chinese Theatre) were taking a position on Chiang or Mao. And throughout the Ages of Disenchantment and Hostility, connoisseurs of Chinese culture continued to enjoy collecting and studying the artifacts of pre–Communist China.

  EZRA POUND

  Among the writers of highbrow literature in English, China’s principal impact in the 20th century lay in its special place in Modernist poetry. In an often-cited line from his 1928 introduction to The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot identified Ezra Pound as the “inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” Admirers of Arthur Waley might protest, but given the centrality of Pound and Eliot in Anglophone Modernism—which Hugh Kenner has called “The Pound Era”—the judgment seems a fair one, and it was as a culture of poetry that the Modernists viewed China.3 Pound’s engagement with China occurred as he labored in London to reinvent what he took to be a moribund tradition of poetry in English. Through movements such as Imagism (1913–14) and Vorticism (1914–15), he sought to make it new. In 1913, Mary Fenollosa, the widow of the scholar, Ernest Fenellosa, gave her husband’s manuscripts relating to Chinese poetry and Japanese drama to Pound, who studied them carefully, and used them to produce the slim volume of translations (or adaptations) that he titled Cathay (1915). Pound was most interested in Fenollosa’s annotated translations of the Tang dynasty poet, Li Bai (or Li Po, known to Fenollosa and Pound by the Japanese name, Rihaku), which he used to produce his own versions. In 1919 Pound published in Little Review an edited text of Fenollosa’s essay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” This served as the basi
s for the “Ideogrammic Method” that Pound began to espouse in 1927, and which became a crucial element in the composition of his monumental (and for all but the highest of brows, unreadable) Cantos. The influence of the Pound-Fenollosa interpretation of Chinese poetry on English poetics extended far into the 20th century. The editors of a recent edition of “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” list a wide range of schools—Objectivists, Black Mountain, Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance—and individuals—Williams, Zukofsky, Rakosi, Oppen, Reznikoff, Olson, Duncan, Levertov, Creeley, Cage, Ginsburg, Snyder, Silliman, Bernstein—that responded to the Ideogrammic Method (Fenellosa 34). Wallace Stevens, a Modernist working a quite different vein from Ezra Pound and his epigones, was also influenced by Chinese art, especially Chinese visual arts. Stevens’s early interest in the Orient is well-known. Poems such as “Six Significant Landscapes,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and “The Snow Man” indicate the influence. Stevens’s first play, Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise (1916), features three Chinese men who discourse about art while observed by two “negroes.” It was produced by the Provincetown Players in 1920. In “Late Stevens, Nothingness, and the Orient,” Zhaoming Qian argues that Stevens maintained a “sustained interest in the Far East” (164). Amy Lowell, often written out of Anglophone Modernism as the anti–Pound, also responded to the Chinese aesthetic. Using translations produced by Florence Ayscough, Lowell published her versions in a volume titled Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems From the Chinese (1928). But none of these movements or authors (with the possible exception of Amy Lowell) reached a very wide middle or low brow audience, though some did aspire to do so.

  It was not just Chinese poets and the Chinese language that attracted Pound. Having first discovered Confucius in a French translation in 1913, Pound developed a deep commitment to a Confucian view of ethics and politics. In the later decades of his long life, he produced a series of his own translations of Confucian classics, initially from the French, but by the 1940s drawing upon his own studies of Chinese.4 Pound’s understanding of Confucius, like his understanding of the Chinese language, has been criticized, and it is certain that although he was earnest in his study of Chinese texts, Pound’s primary interest lay in using his understanding of the sage as well as of the language as weapons to employ in his radical program to revive Western—and especially American—culture. In 1927, he proclaimed Confucius as the antidote to “the drear horror of American life”: “The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius; it consists in establishing order within oneself” (qtd. in Nolde 48). Pound saw Confucius as the advocate of order, a secular order based upon the correct naming of things and upon self-discipline. The order within a family depends upon order within the individual; order within the state depends upon order within the family (with the reverse being equally true: order within the individual depends upon order within the family, which depends upon order within the state).

  And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:

  If a man have not order within him;

  He can not spread order about him

  And if a man have not order within him;

  His family will not act with due order;

  And if the prince have not order within him

  He can not put order in his dominions [Canto XIII, ll. 44–51].

  When Pound’s alternative remedy for the disorder and degeneration he saw in Western culture—the fascism of Mussolini—failed him in the 1940s, it was to the Confucian model that, with intense concentration, he turned.5

  Unlike his promotion of the ideogrammic method, Pound’s advocacy of Confucian philosophy had a more limited impact, even within his highbrow circles.6 In American popular culture, Confucius was present largely as the occasion of a faux–Chinese aphorism (“Too late to dig well after honorable house is on fire”) or bad joke (Confucius say, “Many men smoke, but few Manchu”). Had he shared T. S. Eliot’s interest in detective fiction, Pound might have applauded van Gulik’s creation of a detective who orders his private life as a husband and his public life as a magistrate explicitly upon Confucian principles.

  I CHING / TAO TE CHING

  Two Chinese classic texts, however, did have a wide circulation among some high brow readers in America, and among some lesser brows as well: the Book of Changes (I Ching; = Yi Jing), a Confucian classic used for divination, and the Book of the Way of Power (Tao Te Ching; =Dao De Jing), the source text of Chinese mysticism, attributed to Laozi. Neither text was of interest to Ezra Pound, who embraced Confucianism precisely because it dispensed with speculation about the supernatural:

  And Kung gave the words “order”

  and “brotherly deference”

  And said nothing of the “life after death” [Canto XIII, ll. 52–54].

  The first two English translations of the I Ching (pinyin Yijing) were by Irish and Scots churchmen, Thomas McClatchie (1876) and James Legge (1882). McClatchie thought the Yih King (his transliteration of the title) had been brought to China by one of Noah’s sons, and that it reflected an idolatrous pagan materialism. Legge, the scholar who provided the standard 19th-century translations of so many of the Chinese classics, had some disdain for the Yi King; his translation has been criticized for straining to introduce Judeo-Christian concepts (Smith 182–85). It was Richard Wilhelm’s 1924 translation of the I Ching into German that launched the text into wide circulation. Wilhelm’s German was translated into English in 1950, with an introduction by Carl Jung, and within a year, the highbrow composer, John Cage, produced a piano piece entitled “Music of Changes,” which he composed in part by using the I Ching to chart the sounds, durations, and tempi of the piece. Cage would continue to draw upon the I Ching, and by the 1960s the text had attracted the interests of a variety of other artists—popular musicians such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, poets such as Allen Ginsburg, novelists such as Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle, 1962), and others (Smith 199). In 1965, John Blofeld, a “self-styled Buddhist ‘missionary’” (Smith 199), produced a simplified translation, designed specifically for divination.7 The I Ching became another tool in the counter-culture’s attempt to discover alternatives to Western ways of knowing.

  The Tao Te Ching also received wide attention in mid–20th-century America. Of nearly two-hundred translations into English, a half-dozen were produced in the 19th century, something over twenty between 1900 and 1949, and at least eleven between 1949 and 1969. Robert Eno, a professor of early Chinese history and thought, writes, “Everyone familiar with the field of Chinese thought knows that Daoism sells in America and Confucianism doesn’t.” Bookstores with one or two translations of the Analects will offer a wide variety of Dao De Jings: cheap reprints, handsome hardcovers, oversized and illustrated editions, pocket-sized mini-editions. The American readership for Daoist philosophy, however small, has clearly been wide.

  ARTHUR WALEY

  One of the important translations of the Tao Te Ching was that of Arthur Waley. Waley’s impact was doubtless greater in Britain than in America (the British edition of Tao Te Ching appeared in 1934 in London, and 1941 in New York), but Waley’s industrious translation of the poetry (and, as well, the fiction, drama, and philosophy) of China and Japan made him an important 20th-century transmitter of Chinese culture to Americans. Waley was not, like Pound, urgently pressing Chinese culture forward as a solution to a Western Wasteland; he was a poet who had mastered the Chinese language (like Pound, largely self-taught), and as Jonathan Spence has observed, while there may be better scholars than Waley and better poets, Waley was virtually unique in combining high performance in both respects (Spence 330–31). An Assistant Keeper of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts at the British Museum from 1913 to 1929, Waley belonged to the fringes of the Bloomsbury group. Between 1918 and 1959, he published several volumes of poems translated from the Chinese (and, as well, other texts from Chinese and Japanese). Where Pound was drawn to the complex poetry of Li Bai (Li Po), Waley responded more to the simpler verse of a
nother Tang dynasty poet, Po-Chü-I (Bai Juyi). Jonathan Spence writes of Waley’s influence “over the fifty years of his creative life, upon a wide circle of artists, intellectuals, teachers, and students”:

  The China and Japan that Waley gave to his readers were humane and balanced. From perusing their newspapers, Westerners knew from 1895 onward that China was a torn and wretched country, with its people in misery from famine and civil war…. Later they could read of the 1911 revolution and the Manchurian crisis, of Tojo, Mao Tse-tung, and Hiroshima. But with Sei Shonagon and Po-Chü-I they were back in a world where courtesy mattered and where good taste was not simply something connected with food [Spence 333, 335–36].

  Waley’s readership—broader than Pound’s certainly, but still rather exclusive—in America as well as in England benefited from his presentation of a humane and balanced China that they could set against the “wretched country” that appeared in newspaper headlines. And in a quite different (and much less exclusive) genre, van Gulik can be seen carrying on Waley’s project through his Judge Dee stories.

  ERNEST BRAMAH

  It is hard to know to whom Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung stories made their appeal. Bramah’s admirers included Hilaire Belloc, Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Quiller-Couch, and J.B. Priestly, suggesting some appeal to the literati. Four volumes of Kai Lung short stories and one Kai Lung novel appeared in Bramah’s lifetime, and after a slow start—the first volume, The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900), was not reprinted until 1926—the volumes were frequently reprinted in England. They seem to have been less popular in America. Seven hundred fifty copies of The Wallet were reserved for sale by “a Boston firm”; it would be twenty-three years until an American omnibus edition would be issued. A New York edition of the third volume, Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, appeared at the same time as the London edition (1928), but the American edition of the novel, The Moon of Much Gladness (1932), did not appear until five years later, and then under the title The Return of Kai Lung. Kai Lung Beneath a Mulberry Tree (1940), the final volume of Kai Lung stories published in Bramah’s lifetime was not published in the U.S. (White, “Kai Lung in America,” 16). Time could observe in 1937 that the Kai Lung stories “have long delighted patient readers on both sides of the Atlantic” (qtd. in Connell), but it seems clear that there was more patient delight on the British side than on the American. Clifton Fadiman, a spokesman of the rising middle brow intellectuals, welcomed Kai Lung in The Nation in 1928: “Is it possible, as rumor runs, that there are those who have no relish for these sly Oriental suavities, these delicate evasions of language, this restrained Gongorism carried to a point of fine art?” (qtd. in White, “Kai Lung in America,” 15). Another reviewer in The Nation, perhaps speaking for a wider American audience, had already answered Fadiman’s question in 1924 in the negative, declaring Kai Lung to be “insidiously soporific” to those immune to what Fadiman calls “sly Oriental suavities.” But for the patient readers in America who did relish Bramah’s mannered impersonation of a Mandarin, Kai Lung expressed in only slightly exaggerated form what passed for typical Chinese circumlocution: