Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509080120
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HILLSBORO, W.VA. LENGTH: Long
Because her star, long-ago fallen in the land of her birth, is finally on the rise in her beloved China.
Listen to Wei er Sun, who runs the Pearl Buck home place in Zhenjiang, China - the Nobel laureate's childhood home:
"Pearl Buck showed great sympathy for the Chinese people in our time of great trouble and tragedy. With the progress of the open policy in our country, more and more people come to love Pearl Buck."
They are words to warm a wounded heart.
Buck - born in this picturesque Pocahontas County valley in 1892 - was the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary named Absalom Sydenstricker. She was whisked away to China - where her father was doing his missionary work - when she was still an infant.
The writer, who died in 1973, would spend nearly half her 80 years in China. The country also is the subject of her most enduring works.
Still, Buck was vilified there in the 1960s for being insufficiently supportive of the Communist regime. She was refused a Chinese visa when she attempted to visit one last time, the year before her death.
It was a sad coda to a life already full of peaks and valleys.
A once internationally famous author, an early champion of rights for women and minorities, and - most impressively - the only American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature until Toni Morrison won it in 1993 - Buck was routinely ranked with the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt as one of the most admired women of the middle years of the century.
By the time of her death, however, her literary reputation already was in eclipse. Buck is now an all-but forgotten hero - out of fashion here and mostly out of print.
The author of an astonishing 106 books, she is now remembered almost exclusively for one of them, ``The Good Earth," which also became a Broadway play and a movie.
Calls to several Roanoke area bookstores found that novel - Buck's second - on the shelves, but none of her other works.
Various reasons have been given for Buck's fall from literary grace - from her precocious feminism to her ill-advised relationship with a young dance instructor, Theodore Harris, when she was in her 70s.
The relationship with Harris eventually extended to Buck's foundation for Amerasian children - where Buck made Harris an officer. Harris later resigned, following allegations of financial improprieties, said Elizabeth Lipscomb, an English professor at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, who has studied Buck's work.
"It was very messy," Lipscomb said.
All politics and scandal aside, some familiar with the bulk of Buck's work say her rapid slump toward literary oblivion was in part deserved.
"She produced too much, especially in the second half of her life," Lipscomb said.
Asked how Buck's reputation as a writer stands 22 years after her death, she said, "Not very high. I think there's at least the possibility of a resurrection. ... What I've always said about her work is that even if it wasn't too well done, there was always an interesting idea."
Buck was full of ideas.
From her support for feminism and civil rights to her criticism of the missionary culture in China to her own divorce (she was remarried to her publisher) in the 1930s, Buck never hesitated to make waves.
She was born in Hillsboro, at the home of her mother's family, the Stultings, while her parents were there on leave from their missionary work in China.
The fifth of seven children, three of whom had died in China before her birth, Buck grew up in China bi-lingual. As a child in China, she loved the works of Charles Dickens and read the classics of English literature as well as children's magazines from the United States.
Buck came back to the U.S. in 1910 to attend Randolph-Macon, where she won literary awards and was graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
Her amazing output as a writer is more astonishing because she was close to 40 before she published her first book. ``East Wind/West Wind" was submitted to more than 20 publishers before it was accepted by the John Day Co. It was published in 1930.
"The Good Earth," Buck's second novel, was published a year later. The story of Wang Lung, a poor Chinese farmer who rises to great wealth and prominence without losing his love for the land, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1932.
Sixty years later, its characterizations may strike some readers as thin, its moral heavy-handed.
In fact, the impact of "The Good Earth" was in many ways immense.
Buck's portrait of rural China in the novel "sort of created China for the American people," said Lipscomb. Thus, when the Japanese bombed China in World War II, to most Americans "it was Wang Lung being bombed."
Her phenomenal output notwithstanding, writing was not Buck's whole life. Despite her early grounding in a patriarchal missionary culture, not to mention the male-dominated rural Chinese society she fictionalized in "The Good Earth," Buck was no shrinking violet; she spoke her mind.
A speech and subsequent article criticizing missionaries for their perceived arrogance toward the cultures where they did their work created a great controversy, according to Lipscomb and other Buck scholars. Buck soon afterward resigned from the Presbyterian Board of Missions.
Her 1950 book, "The Child Who Never Grew," about her retarded daughter, Carol, also touched on a subject that few had had the courage to talk about publicly before.
"She was really quite an interesting woman," said Lipscomb, who with Randolph-Macon librarian Frances Webb organized a symposium on the writer in 1992 - the centennial of Buck's birth. "She was delivering speeches to black women in Harlem at a time when even New York was very segregated." Buck also gave the commencement address at Washington, D.C.'s Howard University in 1942.
The FBI had a thick dossier on Buck - due both to her support of civil rights and to her international background, Lipscomb believes.
Buck, meanwhile, had left China for good in the 1930s, buying a farm in Bucks County, Pa., in 1934.
She was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize for literature, for her "rich genuine epic portrayals of Chinese peasant life and for masterpieces of biography."
But her relations with her adopted country were increasingly rocky. One Chinese scholar recently called Buck's relations with China in her later years a "tragedy."
Though the matter is murky, Buck clearly ran afoul of the Communist regime of Mao Zedong.
Buck's sins included putting insufficient emphasis in her works on the class struggle in China, advocating "Western bourgeois values" and praising the Japanese and other "foreign imperialists," writes Liu Haiping, dean of foreign languages at China's Nanjing University, who attended the Randolph-Macon symposium in 1992.
The result, Haiping wrote in the paper he read then, is that most young people in China have never even heard of Buck.
"Most of the educated people in their late 40s and beyond would remember Pearl Buck as an American author who spent much of her life in China, won internatIonal fame with her novels about China and is politically problematic in China today," he wrote.
Said Lipscomb: "She [Buck] just didn't like the political system."
The resurrection of Buck's reputation in China is a by-product of the general thaw in relations - recent setbacks over trade and human rights notwithstanding. Sun - who runs the home in Zhenjiang where Buck grew up - said few in the city even knew that Buck had lived there until Zhenjiang became the sister city of Tempe, Ariz.
When Americans started coming to Zhenjiang, Sun said, some of them asked eagerly what he knew about Pearl Buck.
The answer then was "Nothing."
He knows more now.
"I'm deeply moved by her book, `My Several Worlds,'" said Sun, chatting recently on the front porch of Buck's birthplace in West Virginia. The house is now a Pearl Buck museum. "After reading the book [which is autobiographical], I came to know Pearl Buck is a true friend of the Chinese nation."
Buck's work is beginning to be read again in China, said Sun. A 1991 symposium in China on Buck went far toward restoring her reputation, he said.
"The participants came to a consensus that it was time to reassess," explained Sun.
Today, "People have a common point of view - that Pearl Buck is our friend, not our enemy. We never forget anybody who has done good to our nation, to our people."
Can a revival in America be far behind?
Well, maybe.
Though Lipscomb argues Buck deserves to be read.
"Some of the later things - you go, 'Oh, I sort of wish she hadn't written that.''' Still, Lipscomb said, "Even when her writing is not brilliant, her plots keep me interested.
"I think her best writing is the writing that brings us her China, without questIon. I think she was a very important writer for her subject matter.
"It's not that her books are so wonderful that we couldn't do without them," summed up Lipscomb. "It's that she holds a very important position in American culture of our life time."
Buck's thoughts on race, adoption - she had eight adopted children - the role of women in American society and other matters touch on many of the same problems we face today, noted Lipscomb. "Her subjects were ones that keep coming around."
The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace in Hillsboro, W.Va., is 30 miles north of Lewisburg and 10 miles south of Marlinton on U.S. 219. It is open for guided tours from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and from 1-5 p.m. Sundays, from May 1 through Nov. 1. The museum may be seen at other times by appointment. The phone number is (304) 653-4430.
by CNB