My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

  The result of all this was that somehow I grew up feeling that the writing of novels was a lesser work than it is. Certainly I never felt that novels were literature and I was secretly ashamed of my continued interest in reading them. When The Good Earth took on a life of its own, no one was more astonished than I, and I was even apologetic that my first appearance, so to speak, in the world of literature, should be with a novel. I remember when the publisher of that book gave me a very handsome dinner in New York, at which various notables were present whose names I had only heard from afar, and I was required to make some sort of speech, I could only do so in the words of the ancient Chinese novelist, Shih Nai-an, whose masterpiece of compilation and original writing I had just finished translating under the title of All Men Are Brothers. This Chinese novelist, too, felt humble before his fellow scholars, for his vast work was still only a sort of collective novel, and sharing his feelings, I gave as my own speech the preface to his book, which illustrates the attitude of the Chinese scholars toward novels and the writing of novels. It closes with these sentences: “How can I know what those who come after me and read my book will think of it? I cannot even know what I, myself, born into another incarnation, will think of it. I do not know if I, myself, afterwards can even read this book. Why therefore should I care?”

  All this may explain my own small estimate of my powers, so that one day in the autumn of the year 1938, when I heard that I had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for that year, I did not believe it, nor could I believe it until a telephone call to Stockholm confirmed it. My feelings then were still very confused. I could not understand why it should be given to me and I remember that I exclaimed, “Oh, I wish that it could have been given to Theodore Dreiser instead!”

  I did indeed so wish, for I admired Dreiser greatly as a writer. He was, to my mind, far more than a mere novelist. He had in his deep, ponderous, gigantic fashion got hold of something profoundly American, and if before twenty I read Charles Dickens, after twenty I read Dreiser and after Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and of the two of them I felt Lewis the more brilliant but I knew Dreiser would be the more nearly permanent. And he was getting old, whereas I was still young, young enough to wait for future rewards.

  If I had doubts about myself, they were doubled and tripled by my fellow writers who were men. The gist of such criticisms, and there were more than a few, was that no woman, except possibly the veteran writer, Willa Cather, deserved the Nobel Prize, and that of all women I deserved it the least because I was too young, had written too few books of note, and was scarcely even to be considered an American, since I wrote about the Chinese and had lived only in their remote and outlandish part of the world. With my background and literary education, I was only too ready to agree with all this, and yet I did not know how to refuse the award without seeming even more presumptuous. In real distress, for it made me very unhappy to feel that my fellow writers were against the choice, I could only continue making melancholy preparations to go to Stockholm and accept the award which had been given me so unexpectedly and without any knowledge on my part that I was even considered a candidate.

  It is only honest to say that I am sure the blast from my fellow writers fell upon me with a severity they had scarcely intended. I had for years worked so entirely alone in my writing, in such remote places in Asia, among people who could not understand my yearning to associate with others, especially Americans, who were writers and with whom I could communicate as kindred minds, that I was oversensitive to this American criticism which did indeed fall upon me too soon. And it must be confessed that I have never quite recovered, though years have passed, so that I have been too diffident, ever since, to mingle much with American writers or, perhaps, to undertake my proper responsibilities with them. To go among them even now revives painful memories of that autumn in 1938, when I was still new in my own country, still eager and hopeful and, as I can see now, absurdly worshipful toward my elders in the golden field of American letters.

  And all this leads me to the kindly memory of Sinclair Lewis, himself a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As I said, I met him at a P.E.N. dinner, the only one, I think, which I have ever attended, and he sat next to me. I said very little because I felt reticent before so great a writer, and I listened with appreciation to what he said. He was already sad and disillusioned, and I felt a sort of reckless honesty in his words, his fine homely face turned away from me most of the time so that I had to listen carefully while he talked quickly on. Suddenly my turn came to make a little speech, and I got up, intensely mindful of the criticism from some of the very persons who sat that night before me, and looking back to what I had been taught in my Chinese childhood, I told them somehow, and I cannot remember exactly the words and I did not think them important enough to write down, that I had long ago learned that a mere teller of tales is not to be considered a literary figure, and that my novels were only stories to amuse people and make a heavy hour pass a little more easily, and a few more sentences of the sort. Mr. Kung would have approved all I said.

  Sinclair Lewis, however, did not approve. When I sat down again, he turned to me with an animation sparkling with anger.

  “You must not minimize yourself,” he declared, and I remember every word because they fell like balm upon my wounded spirit. “Neither must you minimize your profession,” he went on. “A novelist has a noble function.” And then, as though he understood all I had been feeling, he went on to speak of that function, and how a writer must not heed what others say. I would weary, he said, of the very name of The Good Earth, for people would act as though it were the only book I had ever written, but never mind people, he said, never mind! He had often wished, he said, that he had never written Main Street, so sick did he get of hearing people speak of it as “your book.”

  “You must write many novels,” he cried with an energy intense and inspiring. “And let people say their little say! They have nothing else to say, damn them!”

  What comfort that was from him, and how warmly I felt toward him ever after! Years later, when I heard that he had died in Italy so alone that he was reduced to playing his beloved chess games with his maidservant—though he said sadly she was so stupid that she could never remember how the knight moves—I wished that I could have known of his loneliness and could have made some return for his kindness to me. But I had supposed that a man so famous and so successful would have been surrounded by old and faithful friends, and I cannot understand how it was that he was not. I had heard of his faults and difficulties, but his genius was a burden heavy enough for him to bear, and because of it all his sins should have been forgiven, certainly by his friends.

  I made this pilgrimage, therefore, to Sauk Centre and today I went about the town, trying to see it as perhaps it had seemed to him. I went into a little grocery store and asked the proprietor, a youngish man, if he knew of Sinclair Lewis. Oh, yes, he said, everybody knew about him here. They hadn’t liked him much after his Main Street, but people got over that and nobody cared now.

  “Is there a monument to him anywhere?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” the man said cheerfully, weighing hamburger meat for a young woman with a fat baby, “there wouldn’t likely be any monument put up to him—not here.”

  “Can you tell me which was his house?” I asked. He told me in an offhand way while he wrapped the meat and the young woman stared at me.

  “It’s not open to the public,” he warned me. “It belongs to other people now.”

  I thanked him and went away and found the house, a sober, comfortable middle-class house with gables and a porch and a neat lawn. And why, I wondered, should that fiery, honest, impatient spirit have come out of such a house? What accidental combination of elements produced him? I could only see him bursting out of those walls, and out of the town and what it stood for, loving it so much that he hated it for not being all he wanted it to be and knew it could be.

  That was the way he loved his whole country, a
nd that, too, I can understand.

  Forest Haunt, Vermont

  Our journey ends here in the Green Mountains of Vermont and across my memory stretch the broad reaches of our country. I am heartened, as always, by its size and its variety. There are many alarming possibilities in the fluid trends of our culture, and when I am oppressed by one shadow or another, as at times every thinking creature must be oppressed in the light of human history, I take to the car and, with as many of the family as possible, make a cross-country tour, sweeping widely and yet slowly enough to talk with people as I find them. Without fail I come home with confidence revived. The mere size of our land is an obstacle to any man who might imagine himself a Hitler or a Stalin. Yet size alone would not be a safeguard without the variety of our people, the many minds, each thinking with extraordinary vitality and independence within his individual limits. This variety is due, I suppose, to the variety of our ancestors and the customs they brought with them when they came here as immigrants to make a new country for themselves. We have not lived long enough together to become unified as the Chinese are, their racial differences all intermingled and melted into a common color, and their habits smoothed into uniformity by centuries of living together.

  The Germans were well educated, far better than we are on the average, nevertheless they succumbed to Hitler, mainly perhaps because Germany is so small as to be physically manageable by one man and his adherents. And yet Russia succumbed to what is now called Communism, although she is so vast. But her people were ignorant and miserable and her intellectuals were persecuted and imprisoned, and when peasants and intellectuals revolt together, revolution is inevitable, although out of revolution invariably there comes chaos or dictatorship, and history is the proof.

  And well I remember that old Russia, although I was very young when I crossed her wilderness of land. We left our home on the Chinese hill, after the night when I heard the temple bell strike for the last time, and we set out for America. Ordinarily, or had we been an ordinary family, we would have gone to Shanghai and taken a ship across the Pacific Ocean. But my mother suffered from a peculiarly virulent and incurable form of seasickness, and since she had during the years developed a tendency to a heart weakness, the doctor decided that she could not face the month of constant sickness which such a journey involved. Moreover, she wanted me to see Europe. She loved Switzerland and France and Italy and England, and she wanted to visit Holland again, whence her own ancestors had come. I think that she had some idea, too, of inducting me into my country for the four years of college by taking me first through the continent of Europe which had produced the new nation. At any rate, she bought a trunkful of books on Europe and we began reading them together the very day we left our Chinese home and settled ourselves in our tiny cabins on a Jardine-Matheson steamer going up the Yangtse River to Hankow, where we would then take the train for Peking, and Harbin in Manchuria. With European art and music we were already fairly familiar, for from the time we were young children our mother had supplied us with reproductions of famous paintings, and with biographies, suited to our ages, of great artists and composers. We had learned to play Bach and Mendelssohn, Handel and Beethoven on our little English-made Moutrie piano, sent from Shanghai, and upon which we practiced faithfully, if not always willingly, under her supervision.

  Our preparation now for Europe was far more serious. My mother was an inspired if uneven teacher. She illuminated by her own enthusiasm any subject in which she was interested, and if she were not interested, she skipped shamelessly and openly. For Europe we could scarcely have had a better teacher. Her own appreciation, not only of art and music but also of history, communicated itself to me, and long before we reached Europe I had quite clearly in mind the differences among the peoples, their characteristics and their achievements. In addition, my mother described to me many of the beautiful places she remembered from her former visits, and I could scarcely wait to see them with my own eyes. Germany she scorned for some reason unknown to me, but my father supplied something for this lack, since he spoke German perfectly, among his other languages, and his religious studies had given him a perspective quite different from my mother’s. Then, too, his own ancestral origins were in southern Germany. In the year 1760, three brothers, his ancestors, the sons of a well-known German scholar, decided to leave their home and the company of men like themselves in order that they could have religious and academic freedom in America. Their father was willing, but required each of them first to have a trade, wisely declaring that a university education would be worth nothing to them in a wilderness. Within a few years after their arrival in the new country the War of Independence began and at least one of them achieved some fame as an aide to George Washington, although he was taken prisoner at Fort Washington, in Pennsylvania. The family traditions were strong in their later home in Virginia, and when my father was growing up there, German was still spoken as a second language in the family.

  Looking back, I find that my memories of China grow suddenly dim on that day when we left our compound on the hill and this must have been because my mind was already turned toward Europe and my own country. At any rate, I remember amazingly little of the long train journey northward, and even of our stay in Peking, a city I learned later to know well and to love very much. I did find a deep interest in The Forbidden City, for my impressions of the Old Empress, that dominating figure of my childhood, had remained vivid. The Imperial Family, now weak and inconsequential, were still in residence, and of the famous Summer Palace we could see only the outside, the pagoda beautifully set against the hills. But it is all vague, very vague, and my true memories of Peking came decades later, in another world, and then The Forbidden City was open to any tourist, the doors swinging and the beautiful rooms empty, and the Summer Palace was a picnic place for pleasure seekers.

  Harbin, our first stop in Manchuria after we left Peking, was not interesting, being but the familiar medley of a crossroads town, a mixture of peoples and buildings, and I remember only odd and outlandish bits, such as a Mongol camel driver walking briskly at the head of his caravan of dingy camels, and he was remarkable to me because as he walked he was knitting with two long bamboo needles, and his yarn was strands of raw wool which he pulled out from the loose mat of the grey and hairy coat which the camel behind him was shedding. The garment looked like a long wide scarf, although how it could be worn I do not know, except by a man who slept and ate with his camels, for the reek of the camel is eternal, and not to be removed by the best of washings. In the First World War a group of patriotic American ladies in Kuling knitted vests for soldiers in Europe and the only plentiful and cheap wool was that spun from camel hair, and although it was carded and spun and done up nicely in skeins, the smell of camel was still in it and so strong that my mother held her nose and dropped all the yarn into a pail of strong carbolic solution to soak for a day or two. When it was taken out and dried, the camel reek was still there, triumphant over the carbolic, and I remembered it from the knitting Mongol.

  Once in Russia itself, my memories grow suddenly strong and clear. The background is vast, endless days of train travel across a flat wooded country, the trees of birch and pine, a weary dreary monotone, with very little change except the intervals, once or twice a day, when we stopped at a station for food and water. Then descending from the train I stared at the strange, wild-looking people, as different from the Chinese as they were from the Europeans I was to meet later. I had seen poverty in China and starvation in famine times and I was later to see poverty in my own country in city slums and in southern towns but never had I, nor have I since, seen poverty to equal that of pre-revolutionary Russia. I saw the poverty, although I was also to see the vast wealth of the nobles and the priests, but at first I thought all Russians were like the savage hungry people in the country, peasants and villagers clad in skins with the fur turned inside and filthy with crusts of aged dirt. Besotted ignorance was on the faces of these poor people, and a terrible despair, as thou
gh it was beyond their memory or their imagination that anyone had ever cared for them or ever could care for them, so that all they could think of was a little coarse food to stuff into their empty mouths. Yet they had their feelings, these wretched ones. They embraced one another, a man seizing his friend warmly in his arms and smacking kisses on his cheeks, and they talked with rough voices and laughed loudly in a childlike eager fashion.

  I remember my father looking very sober indeed and saying to my mother, “Carie, this can’t last. There’ll be a revolution here within the next ten years—mark my words! People can’t live like this and look like this without an explosion ahead.”

  When we reached Moscow we saw a different Russia. Here were plenty of poor people, too, but there were also rich and well-fed ones, wearing handsome furs and satins and English woolens. They rode in carriages or hired droshkies and they talked in French as easily as in Russian, and many of them lived in France or Italy, but especially in France, for most of every year. Moscow was a handsome city, far more interesting to me than Saint Petersburg, but what impressed me, and perhaps depressed me, were the vast cathedrals, those palaces wherein the priests were the ruling princes. The lights, the gold and the silver, the immense and cavernous groined ceilings and in the naves the gilded images and jewelled icons, the smouldering incense and the thousands of candles, were in terrifying contrast to the ceaseless stream of poor people who came in to pray, their sad faces brooding and yearning. And what really broke the heart was the worship of the relics, the bits of dead saints, the fingerbone, the wisp of hair, the fragment of dried skin, which the ignorant pressed to their lips. It made me weep because it was so hopeless, the prayers lost and all the suffering still there. No wonder that a day was to come when the people turned in frightful anger even against the priests. “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.”