Pearl buck a cultural biography example

By Peter Conn. Cambridge. pp. $

Most Nation readers probably recall reading Pearl Buck's The Good Earth in high school. But if they remember Buck's public role, it is likely to be as a vague "humanitarian." They would probably be surprised to learn of her prominent political role. Few would recall Edgar Snow's admiring review in this journal of Buck's autobiography, My Several Worlds: A Personal Record, which paid tribute to Buck's warnings that by allying itself with European imperialism the U.S. would sow the seeds of conflict with the peoples of Asia. And almost none would know that in the twenties Buck herself wrote in the pages of The Nation about the dilemmas facing the first generation of Chinese college students, and of the appeal of communism to the Chinese people.

Now Peter Conn, in the first comprehensive biography, restores both Pearl Buck's fiction and her politics to the central position in American cultural history that they deserve, and from which they have long been excluded. Indeed, Conn himself was among those English professors who helped keep Buck out of the academy: As recently as , he tells us, he wrote a survey of American literature that made no reference to this first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has more than made up for that oversight with this beautifully written, extensively researched biography. Conn presents a Pearl Buck for the nineties: a feminist, antiracist and early multiculturalist who challenged Americans to abandon previous stereotypes. She believed that only by acknowledging their status as a "minority group" in an increasingly transnational and interdependent world could white Americans begin to cope with the challenges of the modern age.

Born in in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Pearl Sydenstricker grew up in Chine as the child of American missionaries. She came to abhor the Chinese culture's mistreatment of women--the basis of many of her early stories and essays--but she rebelled as strongly against her own culture's failure to live up to its claims of gender equality. Reaction against the misogynist ethos of the missionary environment, and especially against her father, fueled much of Buck's passionate indictment of the Western misunderstanding of Asia, and led to this bitter passage in Buck's biography of her mother, Carie: "Since those days when I saw all her nature dimmed I have hated Saint Paul with all my heart and so must all true women hate him, I think, because of what he has done in the past to women like Carie, proud free-born women, yet damned by their very womanhood." Buck sought a divorce from the agricultural missionary John Lossing Buck when their marriage seemed to be following the same pattern as her parents'. This self-assertiveness was probably possible only because, with the runaway success of The Good Earth (), Buck had the financial resources to declare her independence as a woman. She returned to the United States for good in

Conn illuminates this feminist basis of Buck's work, pointing out that many of her novels and short stories showed not only the oppression that Chinese women faced but their competence and resilience in the face of adverse conditions. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind (), centered on the dilemmas of women raised in traditional China who now had Western-educated husbands. It had a happier ending than a short story of that period, "The First Wife," which Conn calls "an unblinking critique of China's systematic diminishment of women," but which at the same time demonstrated "the destructive consequences that 'progress' can have for traditional women themselves"--a frequent theme in Buck's work. While many contemporary reviews of The Good Earth hardly mentioned O-lan, the long-suffering wife, Conn correctly observes that she was "the story's moral center."

Buck also looked at the lives of American women. This Proud Heart () portrayed the struggles of a woman sculptor against the male-dominated art world. In this novel, as Conn points out, Buck upended the traditional romantic formula by concluding with the heroine walking away from her marriage to pursue her art. This fictional representation dovetailed with Buck's other efforts in these years for women's equality in the U.S., in book reviews, in speeches for the National Woman's Party and in her idiosyncratic Of Men and Women (). In a controversial essay in Harper's, she characterized as "America's Gunpowder Women" those educated women who were denied a productive role in society, and were therefore likely to explode.

Conn's discussion of Buck's prominence during World War II may surprise those who remember her role mainly as a cheerleader for Chiang Kai-shek. In fact, Buck's "A Warning About China" was among the most prominent published critiques of the corruption and authoritarianism of the Chinese government--and it appeared in Henry Luce's Life magazine, no less. It followed a dozen years of essays and several novels in which Buck criticized Chiang's failure to address the needs of Chinese peasants.

But perhaps even more important than Buck's efforts on behalf of China was her ultimately unsuccessful insistence that the Allied effort in World War II could only become a real war for freedom if the United States and Britain repudiated racism and imperialism. In February she told 1, people at a New York City luncheon that if the United States persisted in discriminating against African-Americans, "then we are fighting on the wrong side on this war. We belong with Hitler." And by the end of , says Conn, with Gandhi and Nehru in jail in British-ruled India, "it was Pearl Buck, not Franklin Roosevelt or any politician, who had become the leading American spokesperson for Indian liberation." Conn compares Buck's analysis of the war with that of W.E.B. Du Bois. Indeed, Buck gave an enthusiastic review to Du Bois's Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (), which charged that the new United Nations, which emerged from the Allied war effort, was reinforcing imperialism and suppressing real democracy. Again these concerns carried over into Buck's fiction, especially The Promise () and The Townsman ().

Later, Buck opposed U.S. cold war policies. She spoke out against universal military training and against military aid to the Chinese Nationalists, and she wrote several "talk books" on current events, based on conversations with articulate women--a Russian peasant with fond memories of growing up on a collective farm, a German socialist who had fought the rise of Nazism and who saw hints of fascism in postwar America, and Eslanda Goode Robeson, wife of Paul Robeson.

Occasionally Conn is too uncritical of writings that might challenge his overall argument. Buck's essay "Our Dangerous Myths About China," for example, punctured some myths about China, as he says, but also propagated others, such as the idea that landlordism was not a major problem. Conn pays scant attention to Buck's political backpedaling and changes in literary style in many of her later books, essays and interviews. His basic interpretation of her exclusion from the canon of American literature is persuasive: It was due to her novels' focus on Asia, on women, on the lives of ordinary people and on cross-cultural concerns--issues deemed unimportant by the professors and literary critics who "constructed the lists of required reading in the s and s"--and to her insistent dissent from American cold war policies. But her increased separation from the liberal, progressive and feminist movements in the sixties is surely due in part to her own writings and actions in these years. While she hosted a book party for Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, she also clumsily sought to distance herself in her autobiography from her earlier support for birth control, and she wrote against premarital sex and abortion in the sixties. Her fiction focused more and more on the upper class, and Buck often adopted the pose of a member of the Confucian elite wounded by mass society, an attitude that she had attacked mercilessly in her early novels and essays. A sharper textual analysis of her later works, from Pavilion of Women () to My Several Worlds () to Mandala (), might have developed this point.

Conn's use of the metaphors of separation, loneliness and alienation to explain Buck's life may cause confusion. For example, he says that Buck was "ideologically homeless" by Yet just a few pages later he describes Buck as being at the center of a series of progressive groups with an "interlocking directorate": Asia magazine, the East and West Association, the China Emergency Relief Committee, the American committee for Indusco (China's industrial cooperatives) and, later, the Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, the India League of America, the A.C.L.U.'s Committee Against Racial Discrimination and others. Such a network hardly indicates "homelessness." Conn's tendency to portray Buck as a political loner, a prophetic voice without a movement, undervalues the nature and significance of these organizations, which raised unsettling questions about race and empire in the midst of "the good war," and the later movements against the cold war.

Such flaws do not detract from Conn's considerable achievement. He has drawn a careful and compelling portrait of one of the most popular writers of this century, one who has been hitherto "hidden in plain sight." He also unravels for us the sources and implications of the transnational vision that was at the core of Pearl Buck's identity, a vision that practically demands that Americans today take a fresh look at her work. Robert Shaffer is a graduate student working on a study of Pearl Buck and American internationalist traditions.