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Summary
Summary
The much honored biographer unearths the life and work of Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck, whose novels captured ordinary life in China.
Author Notes
Hilary Spurling was born in 1940 in Stockport England. She attended Somerville College in Oxford. She bacame the arts and theater critic for The Spectator during the 1960's. She was also the reviewer for The Observer and The Daily Telegraph. She has written several biographies including Pearl Buck in China and Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954, which won the 2005 Whitebread Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Book Prize for Biography in 2006.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Weaving a colorful tapestry of Pearl Buck's life (1892-1973) with strands of Chinese history and literature, Spurling, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize for Matisse the Master-vividly correlates Buck's experiences of China's turbulent times to her novels. Growing up in a missionary family in China, Buck lived through the upheavals of the Boxer Rebellion and China's civil war, two marriages, and a daughter with a degenerative disease; her closeup view of the horrors of China's extreme rural poverty made her an American literary celebrity as well as a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize winner when she enshrined her observations of China in the Good Earth trilogy. Back in the United States, having opened America's eyes to China, Buck worked to repeal America's discriminatory laws against the Chinese and established an adoption agency for minority and mixed race children. For her support of racial equality, Buck was blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer even as her books were banned in Communist China "for spreading reactionary, imperialist lies"; Spurling's fast-paced and compassionate portrait of a writer who described the truth before her eyes without ideological bias, whose personal life was as tumultuous as the times she lived in, will grip readers who, unlike Spurling, didn't grow up reading Buck's work. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Pearl Buck, the controversial, best-selling author of The Good Earth (1931) and a trailblazing Nobel laureate, was a quasar-bright celebrity, but her fame quickly dimmed after her death in 1973. Now, by some strange force, her radiance is resurgent. Anchee Min fictionalized Buck's dramatic life in Pearl of China (2010), and Spurling, Matisse's splendid biographer, adeptly matches factual rigor with enthralling insights in this brilliantly contextualized and beautifully crafted portrait of a unique cultural interpreter. Born in 1892 to beleaguered American missionaries, intrepid and book-loving Pearl Sydenstricker was shaped by the miseries of Chinese rural life, from floods to disease, famine, and war. Sadly, her marriage to John Lossing Buck, a pioneering agricultural economist, was oppressive; her concern for their mentally disabled daughter wrenching; and her grief over the Chinese people's epic suffering and her own exile was devastating. But, as Spurling chronicles so sensitively, Buck boldly channeled her profound knowledge of China into novels of mass appeal meant to incinerate Western prejudices. Lauded and condemned in America and banned in China, Buck, a pivotal player in U.S.-Chinese relations and a dauntless champion for universal human rights, lived a life of staggering traumas and triumphs.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN 1929, an American woman traveled from her home in China to settle her severely impaired daughter in a New Jersey institution. She did so with borrowed money, as she could not afford the fees. The parting was excruciating; she was, she recalled, "nearly destroyed by grief and fear." The house felt empty on her return to Nanjing, but she knew precisely what to do: "This I decided was the time to begin really to write." While her younger daughter was at nursery school, she chained herself every morning - another madwoman in the attic - to a battered typewriter. (The 9-year-old she left in America had made a sport of flinging porridge and dirt at the keys.) She felt her story already formed, at the tips of her fingers, and so it must have been: Five months later, a completed manuscript sailed to America. Published in 1931, "The Good Earth" spent two years at the top of the best-seller list and won its author a Pulitzer Prize. Pearl Buck later became the first American woman to win a Nobel for literature. Buck lived in interesting times, and in interesting places. The child of a Presbyterian missionary to China, she grew up amid bandits, beggars, lepers, typhoons, floods, rebellions, famine, sinister mobs, marauding soldiers, opium clouds. Hers was a fairy-tale childhood of the bleak and semi-tragic variety. Before her birth, her mother had lost a child each to dysentery, cholera, malaria. As Pearl explored the backyard, she stumbled upon tiny limbs and mutilated hands, the remains of infant daughters left to die. "Where other little girls constructed mud pies," Hilary Spurling writes evenly, "Pearl made miniature grave mounds." She was 8 years old before she saw running water. Buck's father, Absalom Sydenstricker, was a fanatical man with a healthy martyr complex, "proud of his ability to whip up quarrels with himself at the center." Daily he ventured out to save souls. Daily he was spit upon, cursed, stoned in the street. He produced few converts but plenty of frustration. While he devoted himself to God, Buck's mother gave herself over to grief and rage. It did not help that her husband never really believed that women had souls, or that the Chinese were people. Money was tight, the more so as Sydenstricker refused to spend any on his wife or daughters. There was every reason why young Pearl should throw herself into the pages of Dickens, her narcotic of choice and her sole link to the AngloSaxon world. Well before she was 10 she determined to be a novelist, as enchanted by ancient Chinese epics as by the Western canon, of which she made quick work. For a period of her childhood she reread all of Dickens annually. A blond-haired, blue-eyed Chinese girl, Pearl grew up an oddity and remained one. She had no place in the colonial caste system of her adopted country. English was her second language; even as an adult she thought in Chinese. In 1910, she enrolled as a freshman at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia. Everything about her was wrong, from the cut of her jacket to the braids down her back. "Girls came in groups to stare at me," she remembered a half-century later. As alien as she seemed to it, Randolph-Macon must have felt like a cloister to her; she was fresh from a volunteer job teaching ex-brothel workers and sex slaves. She drew crowds again after her marriage in 1917 to John Lossing Buck, an American agricultural economist stationed in China. With him she ventured into the interior of the country, the first white woman the villagers had seen. They mobbed around her, peeped under her doors, tore at the sides of her sedan chair. Much from those trips would, Spurling notes in "Pearl Buck in China," "be absorbed and distilled a decade later in the magical opening sequence of 'The Good Earth.'" For Lossing, Buck cooked without running water or heat or light And with Lossing, she went to seed. As the marriage dissolved, the Bucks endured several exiles, including a hair-raising one in 1927 when Nationalist soldiers drove them as refugees to Japan. The house to which they would return was in shambles; its kitchen had served as a stable. Buck set about restoring it to order. Throughout these pages she does an astonishing amount of housework. Her wrenching trip to America with her daughter, and its improbable aftermath, occur more than three-quarters of the way through this sparkling biography. Spurling's is very much the story of what turned an American missionary's daughter into a writer; of how literature is extracted from life; of what a woman (and a mother) must do to perform that operation; of what fueled Buck's astonishing output (39 novels, 25 works of nonfiction, short stories, children's books, translations and countless magazine articles). The American years and the fate of "The Good Earth" mostly fall outside Spurling's purview, which is just as well: the end is not a pretty one, as opulent and disillusioning as the early years were indigent and fantastical. (You really don't want to hear about the white mink or the limo with the silver-monogrammed door.) A revelation to America, "The Good Earth" would be an embarrassment to China, which banned it. Like many political innocents, Buck caused her share of dust-ups. Accused in the United States of being a Communist, she was denounced by the Communist Chinese as an imperialist. Time magazine banned her from its pages. China forbade her return, with Nixon, in 1972. From her evangelical childhood Buck emerged with an abiding faith in the power of fiction. She also subscribed to a selective amnesia: "I have the habit of forgetting what I do not care to remember" she conceded. (Nor did she believe in reading over what she had written. That was what husbands were for.) There was plenty to obliterate, from the Boxer Rebellion to the years Buck lived in the same house with her feuding father and husband, as well as two small children, one of them compromised. The amnesia also came in handy on the page: her portrait of her mother reads, Spurling notes, "more like a biography of the Statue of Liberty than an actual human being." THE author of widely praised biographies of Henri Matisse and Sonia Orwell, Spurling is left to contend not only with a great body of Buck's unreliable autobiographical works, but also with a dearth of documentary evidence and an absence of intimates. Working within those confines, she has fashioned an extraordinary portrait, rich in detail, ambitious in scope, with a vast historical backdrop that informs but never overwhelms its remarkable subject. Precisely and vividly she restores the ordeals Buck preferred to forget. There were a great number of them, both before and after the seismic publication of "The Good Earth." Unsurprisingly, Buck's marriage would fall apart. More surprisingly, she would fall in love with and marry her publisher. The girl who collected mutilated body parts would, late in life, adopt four additional children, then three more. Spurling makes no outsize claims for Buck, who was prescient about China's ascent as early as 1925. Nor does she make great claims for Buck's work, with the exception of "Fighting Angel," a life of her father, which Spurling believes "has the makings of a 20th-century classic." Throughout her gripping account, Spurling's touch is sure, light and nuanced. Generally she acknowledges the "heavy, cumbersome, potentially toxic baggage" Buck carried with her but leaves us to unpack it. We are to connect the dots between the boorish husband and the fictional scenes of marital rape; the doctrinaire father and Buck's fierce aversion to racism, sexism and, for that matter, missionaries. Vested early on in the power of narrative, Buck waged her own battle against ignorance and superstition, powerfully bridging two cultures that seemed mutually incomprehensible. In effect, she turned her father's mission on its head. A blond-haired, blue-eyed Chinese girl, Buck grew up as an oddity and remained one. Stacy Schiff's new book, "Cleopatra: A Life," will be published in November.
Choice Review
Spurling's narrative of Buck's life in China is as compelling a story as Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Good Earth (1931). The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries and the wife of an agricultural specialist, Buck was often at risk from cholera and malaria, floods and famine, marauding gangs and battling soldiers. Unlike four of her siblings, she survived, but deliberate forgetfulness became her weapon against painful memories, which included the tensions in her parents' marriage, her own marital troubles, and her struggles to bridge the worlds of China and the US. Spurling, best known for her two-volume biography of Henri Matisse (The Unknown Matisse, 1998; Matisse the Master, CH, Apr'06, 43-4452), traveled from Shanghai to Virginia to research Buck, who spent her final three decades in the US. Although Peter Conn's excellent Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (CH, Jan'97, 34-2608) describes the second half of Buck's life in much greater detail, Spurling's treatment of Buck's Chinese roots may have an even more important impact on future Buck scholarship. China's legacy of Confucian ethics, frank sexuality, imperial dynasties, and revolutionary passion indelibly shaped the prolific writer, whose name appears in Chinese characters on her Pennsylvania gravestone. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. J. W. Hall University of Mississippi
Kirkus Review
A biographical consideration of Pearl S. Buck (18921973), an author few take seriously today.Conventional wisdom dictates that Buckwhose bestselling novel The Good Earth (1931) captured the difficulties of life among poor farmers in rural Chinais at best an important footnote in 20th-century American literature. Whatever accolades that novel earned her (including the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes), many critics agree that she squandered her talents in her late career on thin, sentimental books. Spurling (Matisse the Master, 2005, etc.) doesn't deny her subject's serious shortcomings as a writer, but she adds valuable perspective by explaining the complicated circumstances of her rise to literary stardom. The daughter of American missionaries, Buck (nee Sydenstricker) spent the bulk of her childhood in parts of China characterized by hard living. The people her parents were hoping, and usually failing, to convert were subsistence farmers whose livelihoods were routinely unsettled by abusive rival warlords. Pearl's father was hard-headed and often absent, and her mother was often ill. The young girl took refuge in authors like Charles Dickens, though Western novels were poor preparation for the culture shock she experienced when she moved to the United States to attend college. Buck channeled her frustration with Westerners' misunderstandings about China into essays, stories and ultimately The Good Earth; in doing so, she had the support of her first husband, John Lossing Buck, a scholar on Chinese agriculture. Those writings earned her a place as a leading American spokesperson on the Chinese people, correcting numerous racist misconceptions. But Communist China eventually rejected Buck's efforts, and Spurling somberly depicts the novelist as a woman without a country. After her success, she wrote mostly to provide financial support to her daughter, who was afflicted with phenylketonuria. Buck's marriage eventually failed and her writings grew increasingly irrelevant, but Spurling speeds through this decline, emphasizing her high points as a leading novelist and advocate for China's everyday citizens.Does little to rehabilitate Buck's literary reputation, but respectfully resets her life and work in its appropriate contexts.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Spurling (The Unknown Matisse, Matisse the Master) explores the contradictions in writer Buck's life and works. Buck, the daughter of a fundamentalist Christian missionary, spoke Chinese before learning English and spent more time in China than America. Her family, both her birth family and the family she built with her second husband, had to flee China on more than one occasion owing to political turmoil. Her works achieved an enormous amount of success, especially her second novel, The Good Earth (after East Wind, West Wind), during her lifetime. They were best sellers, and she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, yet they have been largely ignored in recent years. Spurling's biography examines Buck's childhood, the influences that informed her writing, and the marriage that ultimately brought her happiness. Verdict Readers and academics interested in China will most likely find the book appealing. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/10; ebook ISBN 978-1-4391-8044-0.]-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Map | p. x |
| Foreword: Burying the Bones | p. xi |
| 1 Family of Ghosts | p. 1 |
| 2 Mental Bifocals | p. 33 |
| 3 The Spirit and the Flesh | p. 71 |
| 4 Inside the Doll's House | p. 92 |
| 5 Thinking in Chinese | p. 125 |
| 6 In the Mirror of Her Fiction | p. 162 |
| 7 The Stink of Condescension | p. 197 |
| Postscript: Paper People | p. 233 |
| Sources and Acknowledgments | p. 255 |
| Key to Sources | p. 259 |
| Notes | p. 261 |
| Note on Transliteration | p. 287 |
| Index | p. 289 |