Pearl S. Buck

...The great thing Russia has contributed to human history," Buck explained in a 1945 lecture called "American Imperialism in the Making," is "an alternative to empire, empire such as Britain knows it in her colonial system, and empire as we are developing it through our industrial and economic monopolies...

...This was followed by a collection of essays, Of Men and Women, arguing that unless women were fully free, "some day men are going to find that it is cheaper just to keep women in cells and cages or barracks or harems whence they can be summoned when service is wanted or the state needs new recruits...

...JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...

...On the other hand, she "mourned the passing of the old order...

...She began churning out novels at a rapid clip, and most of them became Book-of-the-Month Club selections...

...Buck's thoughts on the Soviet Union, like her tirades against Churchill and her view of the United States as "the world's chief offender, next to Nazi Germany, inthe matter of racial intolerance," did not carry much weight with the American public...

...But according to Peter Conn, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, this view seriously underestimates her...

...S he desperately sought a school where Carol could live happily and be taken care of unable to afford one on a missionary's salary, Buck turned to writing "for the best of motives: she needed the money...

...He brings with him a cluster of liberal ideas, including progressive opinions about the emancipation of An Ignoble Nobel Laureate: Pearl Buck of the Orient 72 March 1997 The American Spectator women...

...A great many "evangelists for equality" today—in the media, the academy, and the Democratic Party—share her delusional approach to reality...

...yet while he describes her life and literary output in considerable detail in this new biography, Conn finds it difficult to explain just why she is so important...

...A theme that obsessed her in the new role of national scold was the degraded status of American women...

...Another subject close to her heart was the "corrupt link" between British colonialism and American racism...

...Despite such grave reservations, in 1917 she married a missionary herself John Lossing Buck, remembered today for his pioneering studies in the field of Chinese agricultural economics...

...But then disaster struck: To demonstrate its opposition to Japan's invasion of China, in 1938 the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize...

...She wouldn't allow Absalom to visit her, "refused the consolation of prayer and removed herself from the ranks of Christian believers...

...As he retreated increasingly into his work, leaving Carol's care entirely to her mother, Pearl's estrangement from Lossing became complete...

...On the one hand, she realized that "change was obligatory" if ordinary Chinese were to enjoy decent lives...

...that] had discovered and invented much of what deserved to be called civilization...

...To her credit, until her death in 1973 Buck was also involved in various humanitarian projects, such as the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to help Amerasian children...

...her career as a Public Nuisance had begun...

...Since the days when I saw all [my mother's] nature dimmed," Buck wrote, "I have hated Saint Paul with all my heart and so must all women hate him, I think, because of what he has done in the past to women like Cafie, proud free-born women, yet damned by their very womanhood...

...Even the dyed-in-the-wool libertarian will find this unworkable...

...Buck became a leading advocate of Indian independence, charging that Britain was responsible "for one of the longest and cruelest tyrannies in human history," and comparing Britain's treatment of Indians to Hitler's treatment of Jews...

...She demanded an end to the arms race, a global disarmament treaty, and America's non-intervention in Europe's war...

...She also engaged in a final fling with one Ted Harris, an Arthur Murray dance instructor and small-time hood forty years her junior...

...Conn suggests that one reason for her success is that Buck sympathized both with the old China and the new...

...Pearl's books could no longer be filed quietly on the lower fictional shelf among numerous other popular romances and `women's novels.' Instead, because singular honors had been conferred on her, she was treated to a singular punishment...

...But Buck was considered one ofAmerica's leading authorities on China...

...The answer is obvious enough: Pearl Buck was one of the earliest of the "BlameAmerica-Firsters," an angry and embittered critic of American society whose views and attitudes enjoy considerable resonance today...

...and in this sense Pearl Buck is an ideal representative of the age...

...Thus, when in 1943 she published an article in Life magazine predicting that the Chinese people would not support Chiang Kai-shek after Japan's defeat, and throwing her support behind Mao and the Communists, it created quite a stir...

...The attacks on Buck's novels did not lead her to stop writing...

...Prior to the award, literary critics pretty much ignored her work, for much the same reasons that, today, the literary establishment is indifferent to the novels of James Michener or Herman Wouk: It's understood that, however estimable their output, these writers are popular entertainers, not serious artists...

...She was born in West Virginia in 1892, while her Presbyterian missionary parents, Absalom and Cane Sydenstricker, were on home leave from China...

...When the Swedish Academy elevated Buck into the ranks of the greats, "the decision represented a challenge, even an insult, to established highbrow opinion...

...Totally immersed in his evangelical mission, Absalom had no time for Carie, who concluded that their marriage had been a terrible mistake...

...Absalom's indifference to his wife and daughter "wounded Pearl in ways that would never heal...

...Though she would continue to write best-sellers, her preoccupation with fiction was over...

...She came to regard her father as a crazed fanatic, and, in her bitterness, turned against all Christian missionaries, whose "coarse and insensitive" behavior, she later wrote, made her heart "bleed with shame...

...The clash between tradition and modernity became an enduring theme in her fiction...

...But if this is where the libertarian compass is pointed, Boaz might at least advance a brief explanation of how the taxless world would function...

...Buck predicted that the Soviet Union would offer non-whites an answer to the Anglo-American alliance that she equated with fascism...

...Buck's anti-war stance attracted favorable attention from fascist sympathizers like Ezra Pound, who wrote her a letter of congratulations for recognizing that the European conflict "was mainly for money lending and three or four metal monopolies...

...Fortunately, there was always the Soviet Union...

...The acclaim turned Buck into a money-making machine...

...Finding a publisher proved difficult, but eventually Richard Walsh, the president of a struggling publishing house called John Day, agreed to publish Buck's portrait of a Chinese peasant family desperately clinging to its traditional way of life despite natural disasters and revolutionary upheavals...

...After World War II, Pearl Buck's anti-Americanism only hardened...

...After a lifetime of deprivation, Buck had finally achieved a measure of success and personal fulfillment...

...Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography Peter Conn Cambridge University Press 468 pages / $34.95 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan N owadays Pearl Buck is remembered as an American novelist whose books about China were very popular during the 1930's and 40's...

...Whether The Good Earth accurately depicts Chinese peasant life is unclear from Conn's account...

...Conn wrote his book, he claims, to enhance Buck's cultural stature, apparently unaware that by documenting her career as a political crank, he has diminished it instead...

...Conn persuasively argues that Buck's views helped promote America's disenchantment with Chiang's Free China...

...Typical of her approach is the short story, "First Wife," which in Conn's summary involves a young husband, Li Yuan, who returns to his wife and parents in their backwater village after seven years of study in the United States...

...When Henry Luce, himself the son of Presbyterian missionaries to China, turned against Buck for her anti-Chiang views, she retaliated by pillorying Luce in her 1951 novel, God's Men...

...Rather, they suggest that Buck was a disturbed woman who mistook the United States for Absalom Sydenstricker, and Winston Churchill for Saint Paul...

...This was America's fault, since the United States used "food as a weapon in exactly the same sense that Hitler did...

...Given her country's multiple moral failings, the idea that America might effectively intervene against fascism in Europe struck Buck as ludicrous...

...After months of mutual frustration, Li Yuan deserts his family, moves to a coastal city, and sends word that he plans to marry a more suitable woman...

...In 1933, Lu Hsun, China's greatest modern writer, dismissed Buck as "an American woman missionary" whose knowledge of China was "superficial," but Conn points out that "Lu Hsun's distaste for Pearl's work may have been based on a bad translation of The Good Earth (he did not read English...

...In 1939 she published an essay in Harper's warning that if American women were not allowed to play a greater role in national life, they would, like gunpowder, explode...

...The moderate success of the stories encouraged Buck to try her hand at novels...

...Throughout the war, she directed much of her polemic energy against the British prime minister...

...To some extent, she even turned against Christianity, especially objecting to Saint Paul, whom she identified as the source of her father'smisogyny...

...As an ironic result, he finds his wife unsatisfactory: she is dutiful, uneducated, and hobbles on bound feet...

...Faced with disgrace for reasons she cannot understand, the first wife hangs herself...

...after all, she and her new family still needed the money...

...To counteract what she saw as the growing militarization of American life, Buck joined the pacifist Women's International League for Peace and Freedom...

...It soon would be...

...The book was called The Good Earth, and its publication in 1931 earned Buck a Pulitzer Prize and transformed her into a celebrity...

...Was the U.S...

...In 1924 her first published work appeared in the Atlantic, an essay called "In China, Too," which argued that, as in the West, the "forces of modernity" were reshaping Chinese public and private life...

...She was transformed into an emblem of unmerited success...

...Buck didn't reply—and when America did enter the war, she directed much of her anger against the man she took to be the real villain: Winston Churchill: [Pearl] believed that Churchill's racist attitudes and his unyielding commitment to the colonial ideal made him a bad ally for Asians and Americans alike...

...Ari ronically," writes Conn, "both [Buck's] reputation and her selfconfidence had been damaged beyond remedy by the Nobel Prize...

...Absalom was a fundamentalist Christian "of high intelligence and unyielding commitment...who had only one motive: For a half-century, he traveled across central China, from one village and market town to another, relentlessly trying to persuade Chinese men and women to accept Jesus...

...The income she earned from her writing enabled her to leave China in 1934 and resettle in America, divorce her husband, institutionalize Carol, marry Walsh and start a new family...

...Buck "had felt the seismic rumblings of an American fascism throughout the war, and she would do so again in the later 1940's as she measured what she considered to be America's Cold War drift toward militarism...

...Was there starvation in the world...

...America's treatment of its black citizens also evoked a comparison with Nazi Germany: "Pearl 0 The American Spectator • March 1997 73 judged America's institutionalized racism to be even more insidious than Hitlerism, which did not disguise itself behind false pretenses of humanity...

...America's "occupation personnel and policies were at fault...

...04 74 March 19 97 The American Spectator...

...Another subject close to her heart was the 'corrupt link' between British colonialism and American racism...

...So alarmed was Buck by this possibility, reports Conn, that she confided to friends in 194o that two subjects, war and the condition of women, "were keeping her awake at night...

...Her essays, stories and novels focused on the Chinese world around her, a society in the midst of revolution...

...Buck's pronouncements do not simply reveal her to have been, as he puts it, an "evangelist for equality...

...After winning the Nobel Prize, she would define herself primarily as a left-wing activist speaking out on the burning issues of the day...

...He argues that Buck is a figure of considerable cultural importance...

...Had war broken out on the Korean peninsula...

...But they did lead to a rechanneling of her energy...

...Though she remained a dutiful wife for forty years, on her deathbed the accumulated resentments of a lifetime boiled over...

...Pearl worried that Churchill's well-publicized devotion to Anglo-Saxon supremacy was "as good as battleships to Japan...

...His imperialism, which seemed inspirational to some of his countrymen and quaintly Victorian to others, consistently hobbled Britain's Asian campaigns...

...Carol suffered from a metabolic disorder that caused profound mental retardation, for which Pearl blamed her husband...

...Be that as it may, novels about struggling farmers held great appeal for American readers during the Great Depression, and The Good Earth, like Gone With the Wind, Tobacco Road, and The Grapes of Wrath, established itself as a popular classic...

...not yet fascist...

...In 1920 their daughter Carol was born...