Pearl S. Buck, Nobel Laureate

Pearl S. Buck portrait, from Wikipedia

The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace is an imposing white house just outside of Hillsboro. The gray landmark sign in front reads, in part: "Pearl Sydenstricker Buck....was born here at the Stulting Place June 26, 1892. In 1938, she achieved further distinction when she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature...." Evidently we are to understand that birth in such a place would be distinction enough for most people. The "Stulting Place" is indeed distinctive. It was intended to recreate the Stulting home in Utrecht, where Pearl Buck's great-grandfather had owned a large furniture factory.

Pearl Buck's parents were missionaries, home on leave from China when she was born here. When she was three months old, her parents returned to China. Except for a childhood visit to Hillsboro and her college years at Randolph Macon Women's College, Pearl Buck spent the first half of her life in China. Pocahontas County was important to Pearl Buck in so far as her mother's life was shaped here. In 1936, Buck published a lightly fictionalized account of her mother's life, called The Exile, in which she describes Carie Stulting's family history and childhood in Pocahontas County.

Next to her mother's birthplace stands Pearl Buck's father's childhood home. The Sydenstricker house was disassembled in its original Greenbrier County, WV location, brought to Hillsboro, and reassembled in the 1970's. It is a very different structure from the "Stulting Place." The Sydenstricker house is an old farmhouse, with a log section and a sawed lumber addition. There is a long, inviting front porch, and the addition suggests old-fashioned rural prosperity, but it is clearly built for function, not for show.

Pearl S. Buck on West Virginia

West Virginia has always been a personally important and interesting State in my life for it was there that I was born. My paternal and maternal ancestors had settled there in pre-Revolutionary times, and there the two families have remained ever since, except for those wanderers, my parents.....

My judgements of my native state must, of course, be colored by my personal experiences there. My forefathers on both sides were among the most fortunate. Politically my paternal ancestors, accustomed to Virginia and Virginian ways, sided with the Confederacy, and four of my uncles fought in the Confederate Army. They owned rich land around Lewisburg and were far from the mines and the poverty. They were educated at fine schools and universities, and today are among the so-called well-to-do. It is inevitable, since my maternal family was equally fortunate and in addition became musicians and artists, that my opinions regarding West Virginia are biased. I believe there is nothing to keep the state poor or backward. the people as I have known them are energetic, intelligent and of strong warm nature. I resent the notion that poverty and backwardness are endemic to West Virginia. To me it is a state ready for progress in every area--ready and able.

Quoted from Pearl Buck's America. Text by Pearl S. Buck, Photographs from Life. Published by Bartholomew House Ltd. 1971 (ISBN 0-87794-029-0).The book consists of a few photos and paragraphs for each state. West Virginia occupies pages 300-304.

The Good Earth

Buck's most famous work is the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good Earth. I reread it recently, and was most impressed by the painstaking description of everyday details. The language is deceptively simple, and sometimes recalls the cadences of the King James Bible, not a surprising connection for a missionary's daughter.

Clinging thus to the outskirts of the great, sprawling, opulent city it seemed that at least there could not be any lack of food. Wang Lung and his family had come from a country where if men starve it is because there is no food, since the land cannot bear under a relentless heaven. Silver in the hand was worth little because it could buy nothing where nothing was.

Here in the city there was food everywhere. The cobbled streets of the fish market were lined with great baskets of big silver fish, caught in the night out of the teeming river; with tubs of small shining fish, dipped out of a net cast over a pool; with heaps of yellow crabs, squirming and nipping in peevish astonishment; with writhing eels for gourmands at the feasts. At the grain markets there were such baskets of grain that a man might step into them and sink and smother and none know it who did not see it; white rice and brown and dark yellow wheat and pale gold wheat, and yellow soybeans and red beans and green broad beans and canary-colored millet and grey sesame. And at the meat markets whole hogs hung by their necks, split open the length of their great bodies to show the red meat and the layers of goodly fat, the skin soft and thick and white. And duck shops hung row upon row, over their ceilings and in their doors, the brown baked ducks that had been turned slowly on a spit before coals and the white salted ducks and the strings of duck giblets, and so with the shops that sold geese and pheasant and every kind of fowl.

As for the vegetables, there was everything which the hand of man could coax from the soil; glittering red radishes and white, hollow lotus root and taro, green cabbages and celery, curling bean sprouts and brown chestnuts and garnishes of fragrant cress. There was nothing which the appetite of man might desire that was not to be found upon the streets of the markets of that city. And going hither and thither were the vendors of sweets and fruits and nuts and little delicately spiced balls of pork wrapped in dough and steamed, and sugar cakes made from glutinous rice, and the children of the city ran out to the vendors of these things with their hands full of pennies and they bought and they ate until their skins glistened with sugar and oil.

Yes, one would say that in this city there could be none who starved.

The Good Earth, pp 94-95.

To me, this recalls

"And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly abouve the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth."

It is difficult for us to comprehend how little the average novel-reading American of the 1930's knew about China, but Ms. Buck makes the alien culture seem novel but not really so different from us with passages like this description of New Year's celebrations.

The New Year approached and in every house in the village there were preparations. Wang Lung went into the town to the candlemaker's shop and he bought squares of red paper on which were brushed in gilt ink the letter for happiness and some with the letter for riches, and these squares he pasted upon his farm utensils to bring him luck in the new year. Upon his plow and upon the ox's yoke and upon the two buckets in which he carried his fertilizer and his water, upon each of these things he pasted a square. And then upon the doors of his house he pasted long strips of red paper brushed with mottoes of good luck, and over his doorway he pasted a fringe of red paper cunningly cut into a flower pattern and very finely cut. And he bought red paper to make new dresses for the gods, and this the old man did cleverly enough for his old shaking hands, and Wang Lung took them and put them upon the two small gods in the temple to the earth and he burned a little incense before them for the sake of the New Year. And for his house he bought also two red candles to burn on the eve of the year upon the table under the picture of a god, which was pasted on the wall of the middle room above where the table stood. The Good Earth, pp 40-41.

Pearl S. Buck resources on the Internet