The not-so-good earth

I have been reading a very interesting book, Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth, by Hilary Spurling. This is a book I ordered for the library, because it got such good reviews, but I am the only person to have checked it out in six months, to my considerable disappointment. I'm always disappointed when one of my book selections falls flat with my patrons. I consider a circulation of five for a nonfiction book good, 2-3 is o.k., none at all is, well, flummoxing. How could I so misread my patrons' reading interests?

I know it's not that no one knows who Pearl S. Buck was -- which is apparently the case in the wider population these days -- because a lot of our patrons are older. They would have heard of The Good Earth, quite possibly read it -- maybe even seen the travesty of a Hollywood film that was made of it -- even if they had never read any other of Buck's books. But apparently no one is interested in the back-ground and experiences that made it possible...one might even say necessary...for Buck to write that at-one-time blockbuster novel, which all but singlehandedly saved the small, struggling publishing house, John Day Company, that published it in 1931, which won the author a Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and was a large part of her winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938 (the first woman to do so).

Well, too bad, my patrons have just missed out on a good book, from which I've learned a great deal, both about this complex, fascinating woman, and about a period of Chinese history most of us are essentially ignorant of (late 1800s, early 1900s). I vaguely knew that Pearl Buck was the daughter of missionaries to China, and spent her childhood there, but I really didn't understand to what extent China formed her. She spent the first half of her life trying to be someone she was not suited to be -- first the docile daughter of a Bible-thumping missionary (who estimated that in ten years he had managed ten converts, which just left millions still to be converted) -- then the equally-docile wife of an equally fanatically-dedicated agricultural specialist, still in China. Although she was born in the United States (in her mother's native West Virginia, which came as a surprise to me), during a holiday home for her missionary parents, she spent all but four years, from toddler-hood to her mid-thirties, living in China. The years 1910-1914 she was attending Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, being miserable and feeling out of place (though, as she put it, "externally I became an American"), dismayed that no one was the least interested in the place she thought of as home.

I don't remember much of The Good Earth, which I read many years ago. Mainly I remember being appalled by the life of the main character's wife (who, for me, was actually the main character). She was not loved by her husband, who only picked her because he thought she would be a hard worker, which she was. O-lan's life was an unrelenting hard, from her days as a slave in a rich man's house, to her days married to Wang Lung, during which she was forever getting pregnant, bearing the children all by herself (the scene of her first solitary childbirth is indelibly imprinted on my brain), and work-work-working. I found it heartbreaking that even when she died, her loss was not much felt by her family.

Having read Spurling's book, I now know that the unfortunate O-lan was based to a large extent on an equally unattractive, but stalwartly loyal servant of Buck's. And that, indeed, much of what happened, virtually all of the conditions of which she wrote, Buck had witnessed, over the years. When the book was published the Chinese literati objected to it vehemently, because it was about rough, lowly peasants. Why would one write about such people? The government also objected to it, because it suggested rampant lawlessness in the countryside, and did not paint a pretty picture of life in China. But what came of Buck's close exposure to "rough, lowly peasants" was a respect and compassion for these people, along with a clear-eyed view of what life was like for them, how it dictated their behavior.

She also, apparently, wrote tellingly of her mother -- trapped in an inappropriate and unsatisfying marriage her entire life (at the time of her death she literally despised her husband, whom she felt, quite rightly, had sacrificed both her and their children to his fanatical missionary work) in a book called The Exile, and about her difficult father, whom she finally came to understand, respect and love, for all his flaws, in Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul. I'd be interested in reading both books, though I fear the former would depress me -- I hate being reminded that, in the good ol' days, so many women were trapped in miserable marriages that deprived them of the opportunity to be truly themselves -- and the latter would make me mad.

I can only say I'm glad Buck finally had her day in the sun, that after over 24 rejections the book that made her was accepted for publication, and that once she moved permanently to the United States, and unburdened herself of a marriage that had been as unsatisfying as her mother's, she was able to find constant, loving support from her publisher, whom she married, and with whom she adopted six children. Apparently much of what she wrote in later years was not, in a literary sense, very good, but she never stopped trying to convey to the rest of the world the "real" China. That was her mission.