Authors: Pearl S. Buck
There was a final pleasant event. It was a visit to William Lyon Phelps and his wife in New Haven. There I went at Commencement to accept an honorary degree from Yale. It was a warm June day, and when I stepped from the train it was to find myself in a crowd of well-dressed and happy parents, relieved and eager to see their sons graduated at last. Not a porter was to be found to carry my rather heavy bag, and when I approached tentatively a large Negro, he brushed me off saying that he had too much to do. I picked up the bag and was staggering off with it when Dr. Phelps himself, in his cream-white suit, came hurrying to meet me with delightful cries of joy, for he had the gift of making every guest feel welcome. The stately porter, observing this, immediately dropped the innumerable bags he was carrying and hastened across the platform to snatch my own and to glare at me with reproachful eyes.
“Whyn’t you tell me you was comin’ to see Mist’ Billy Phelps, lady?” he demanded. “I always tends to his company first.”
I went off in triumph, Dr. Phelps hauling me along by the arm, and we got in his car, the porter delaying to see us go and to lift his cap. Thence down the street we went, Dr. Phelps talking without let and his car dashing and darting about most alarmingly until he pulled up with a jerk before the handsome red brick house which was his home. Inside his wife Annabel waited for us, as cool, as sweetly sharp as usual, and I was sent up to a big square bedroom where the bed was so high that I had to step up on a stool that night when I went to bed.
One never went to bed early, however, if one could help it, in that charming house. The big living room downstairs was also the library and there I spent a fine evening looking at rare books, and saw for the first time the autographs of my favorite English authors, most of them long dead. Thus I saw the handwriting of Charles Dickens and Robert Browning and Thackeray and Lord Byron and George Eliot, and Dr. Phelps recounted to me the wickedness of book thieves and how he had lost valuable books to various persons whom he had supposed honest. And this, he went on, in spite of his keeping a large tableful of books by the door to which anyone could help himself, only they were all modern books and so not precious, sent to him free, he admitted, by publishers who wanted his praise if possible, knowing how generous he was to praise. For William Phelps, if he was too kind to be a critic, was so because he had all but missed being a writer himself. He had the writer’s temperament and understood very well what it is to make a book and see it destroyed in a moment by someone who is unable himself to write so much as a bit of fiction. Writers are usually poor critics, I do not doubt, certainly of themselves, but the vice versa of that is still more true. Yet William Phelps was shrewder than he seemed, and he could gauge very well the final measure of a book, and when he did not like it he ignored it altogether.
It was a glorious evening, I enjoyed all of it, and never did a brilliant restless witty man have a more perfect wife than his Annabel, who loved him and humored him and scolded him mildly and thought him all the while the most attractive man in the world, which he knew. At the dinner table he had mumbled grace at top speed, and had told with relish the anecdote of how his Annabel had complained once that she could not understand a word of what he said at grace, and how he had retorted, “I wasn’t talking to you, my dear!” He ate at top speed, his nervous energy burning up the calories he consumed, and the rest of the evening was spent again at the books and in greeting a few friends who came in and went away again, then he resumed his talk at once exactly where he had left off until it was obviously time to go to bed, what with tomorrow’s events ahead. And on that tomorrow how much I valued walking beside him in the procession and again how proud I was to stand and listen to his all too generous citation on the platform of the assembly hall—proud because I knew and valued his high spirit and his warm heart and all his vast humanity, clothed in the seeming simplicity which is the final sophistication. He could have talked with anyone from any country and found relish in the conversation, for his interests were as wide as the whole world. When he died a few years later, I lost one of my best American friends.
And still another last event of that year was the dinner given me by Chinese students from Columbia University. By this time I knew that some young Chinese intellectuals were not pleased at the success of
The Good Earth.
They reproached me for writing my first successful book about the peasants of China instead of about people like themselves, and while I was in the United States that year one of them even undertook to reproach me through the
New York Times.
His letter was so interesting and expressed so well the feelings of the intellectuals that I give it here below, in part, and do myself the justice of reprinting, too, my reply.
“Chinese pictorial art long ago attained its high stage of development, and the masterpieces of the Sung, the Tang and even as early as the Chin dynasties have been, since their introduction to the West, a source of inspiration to Western artists and art connoisseurs, but Chinese paintings, except wall decorations and lacquer work, are always executed with ink and brush on silk or paper either in black and white or in various colors, and there has never been a painting in oil in China. The ancestral portrait, which is painted when the person is alive but is completed posthumously for the worshiping by future generations, is especially a subject of detailed convention and definite technique. The person represented must be shown full face, with both ears, in ceremonial dress, with the proper official rank indicated, and seated in the position prescribed by tradition.
“Once a Chinese mandarin sat for his portrait by an artist of the Western school. After the work was done he found his official button, which was on the top of his cap, was hidden and, moreover, his face was half black and half white! He was very angry and would never accept the artist’s explanation and apology, so vast was the difference between their conceptions of correct portraiture and the use of perspective.
“It arouses in me almost the same feeling when I read Pearl S. Buck’s novels of Chinese character. Her portrait of China may be quite faithful from her own point of view, but she certainly paints China with a half-black and half-white face, and the official button is missing! Furthermore, she seems to enjoy more depicting certain peculiarities and even defects than presenting ordinary human figures, each in its proper proportions. She capitalizes such points, intensifies them and sometimes ‘dumps’ too many and too much of their kind on one person, making that person almost impossible in real life. In this respect Pearl Buck is more of a caricature cartoonist than a portrait painter.
“I must admit that I never cared much to read Western writers on Chinese subjects and still less their novels about China. After repeated inquiries about Pearl Buck’s works by many of my American and Canadian friends, I picked up
The Good Earth
and glanced over it in one evening. Very often I felt uneasy at her minute descriptions of certain peculiarities and defects of some lowly bred Chinese characters. They are, though not entirely unreal, very uncommon, indeed, in the Chinese life I know.
“She is especially fond of attacking the sore spot of human nature, namely sex. Some of her skillful suggestions make this commonplace affair extraordinarily thrilling to the reader. It is true that life is centred in sex, and it is also true that analytical studies of sex life show it as plain and necessary as food and drink, but nasty suggestions are worse than hideous exposition. This is why thin stockings and short skirts display more sex appeal even than a nude model. I do not wish to uphold any conventional standard of sex morality, but I do believe that the less the sexual emotion is stirred the better it is for individual and social life. A natural, sound and free sex expression is much to be desired for our younger generations but not the pathetic and unhealthy kind that is chiefly presented in Pearl Buck’s works.
“In her works she portrays her own young life in China as much under the influence of Chinese coolies and amahs, who are usually from the poorest families of the lowest class north of the Yangtse-Kiang Valley. There are, of course, among them many honest and good country folk, hard working and faithfully serving as domestic helpers. Their idea of life is inevitably strange and their common knowledge is indeed very limited. They may form the majority of the Chinese population, but they are certainly not representative of the Chinese people.”
My reply to this letter, requested by the
New York Times
and published in the same issue, January 15, 1933, was as follows, again in part:
“I am always interested in any Chinese opinion on my work, however individual it may be, and I have every sympathy with a sincere point of view, whatever it is. In that same spirit of sincerity I will take up some of Professor Kiang’s points.
“In the first place let me say that he is distinctly right in saying that I have painted a picture of Chinese that is not the ordinary portrait, and not like those portraits which are usually not completed until after the death of the subject. Any one who knows those portraits must realize how far from the truth of life they are; the set pose, the arranged fold, the solemn, stately countenance, the official button. I have dealt in lights and shades, I have purposely omitted the official button, I do not ask the subject if he recognizes himself—lest he prefer the portrait with the official button! I only picture him as he is to me. Nor do I apologize….
“But far more interesting to me than matters relating to my books, which are, after all, matters of individual opinion, and not of great importance, is the point of view expressed in Professor Kiang’s letter. It is a point of view I know all too well, and which always makes me sad. When he says ‘They’—meaning the common people of China—‘may form the majority of the population in China, but they certainly are not representative of the Chinese people,’ I cannot but ask, if the majority in any country does not represent the country, then who can?
“But I know what Professor Kiang would have: there are others like him. They want the Chinese people represented by the little handful of her intellectuals, and they want the vast, rich, somber, joyous Chinese life represented solely by history that is long past, by paintings of the dead, by a literature that is ancient and classic. These are valuable and assuredly a part of Chinese civilization, but they form only the official buttons. For shall the people be counted as nothing, the splendid common people of China, living their tremendous lusty life against the odds of a calamitous nature, a war-torn government, a small, indifferent aristocracy of intellectuals? For truth’s sake I can never agree to it.
“I know from a thousand experiences this attitude which is manifest again in this article by Professor Kiang. I have seen it manifest in cruel acts against the working man, in contempt for the honest, illiterate farmer, in a total neglect of the interests of the proletariat, so that no common people in the world have suffered more at the hands of their own civil, military and intellectual leaders than have the Chinese people. The cleavage between the common people and the intellectuals in China is portentous, a gulf that seems impassable. I have lived with the common people, and for the past fifteen years I have lived among the intellectuals, and I know whereof I speak.
“Professor Kiang himself exemplifies this attitude of misunderstanding of his people when he speaks so contemptuously of ‘coolies’ and ‘amahs.’ If he understood ‘coolies’ he would know that to them it is a stinging name. ‘Amah,’ also, is merely a term for a servant. In my childhood home our gardener was a farmer whom we all respected, and we were never allowed to call him a ‘coolie,’ nor are my own children allowed to use the word in our home now. Our nurse we never called ‘amah’ but always ‘foster-mother,’ and she taught us nothing but good, and we loved her devotedly and obeyed her as we did our mother. It is true she was a country woman. But if her idea of life was ‘inevitably strange’ and ‘her common knowledge limited’ I never knew it. To me she was my foster-mother. Today in my home my children so love and respect another country woman, whom they also call, not ‘amah’ but by the same old sweet name, for this woman is not a mere servant but our loyal friend and true foster-mother to my children. I can never feel to her as Professor Kiang does.
“The point that some of China’s intellectuals cannot seem to grasp is that they ought to be proud of their common people, that the common people are China’s strength and glory. The time is past now for thinking the West can be deceived into believing that China’s people look like ancestral portraits. Newspapers and travelers tell all about China’s bandits and famines and civil wars. There is no incident in ‘Sons’ which has not been paralleled within my own knowledge in the last fifteen years. The mitigating thing in the whole picture is the quality of the common people, who bear with such noble fortitude the vicissitudes of their times….
“But I have said enough. I will not touch on Professor Kiang’s accusation of obscenity in my books. The narrowest sects of missionaries agree with him, and I suppose this fear of normal sex life is a result of some sort of training. I do not know. Suffice it to say that I have written as I have seen and heard.
“As to whether I am doing China a service or not in my books only time can tell. I have received many letters from people who tell me they have become interested in China for the first time after reading the books, that now Chinese seem human to them, and other like comments. For myself, I have no sense of mission or of doing any service. I write because it is my nature so to do, and I can write only what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there. I have had few friends of my own race, almost none intimate, and so I write about the people I do know. They are the people in China I love best to live among, the everyday people, who care nothing for official buttons.”
Pearl S. Buck
On the following day the
New York Times
commented on this exchange as follows, on its editorial page, in part: