Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor
Pearl Buck.
photo by Marita PoxonIn 1988, The Washington Post reported that the Swedish Academy shocked the American literary establishment by awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Pearl S. Buck.
“The Nobel Committee had not only passed over such obvious candidates as Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson; it had given the world's highest accolade to a former missionary and a woman. As Robert Frost remarked, ‘If she can get it, anybody can.’”
The Post also maintained that she never again wrote anything as good as the biographies of her parents and "The Good Earth." It was also suggested that she wrote too much for a "serious" artist, that being more than 100 works of fiction and nonfiction. The Post claimed that she “wrote primarily as a secular missionary, using her Nobel status to reach as wide a public as possible.” Buck had to keep writing, The Post stated, so that “she could pay the institutional bills for her retarded child, Carol, for her dozen adopted and foster children, for the often shaky publishing house of her second husband -- and especially for her pioneering charitable enterprises.”
The words “mentally retarded” were not used when I revisited the Buck house this past Memorial Day weekend with friends Marita and Michael T. Poxon. The able tour guide simply said that Carol had the mentality of a four and half year old. (The term ‘mental retardation’ is used less frequently today. For some years it was replaced by the rather cumbersome, ‘developmentally disabled’ although that term is rarely used anymore either. )
Long before the women’s rights crusader, philanthropist, humanitarian and author moved to the 60-acre estate (or Green Hills Farm) in Bucks County she lived at 2019 Delancey Street in Center City.
The Delancey Street house, despite its having been occupied by the author of over 70 books and the winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature for “The Good Earth,” is registered with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission as the Richard Cadwalader house. Built in 1860 for Cadwalter in the Federal style, the multiple dwelling row house was later recast in the Beaux Arts style in 1918 by the Philadelphia architectural firm of DeArmond, Ashmead & Bickley.
DeArmond, Ashmead & Bickley (1911-1938), all University of Pennsylvania graduates, were famous for their colonial revival residences and English-influenced style buildings.
The 9,000 square foot, 5-floor townhouse was purchased in 1964 as the home of Pearl Buck and the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. While the basement and first floor was renovated for use as Foundation space, the second floor was designed to house the dining room, a formal drawing room and the solarium or Sun Room where Buck had large numbers of plants.
With the famous Rosenbach Museum and Library just a few doors away at 2010 Delancey Street, it’s no wonder that Buck saw this area as a special part of Center City. It may have been the beginning of the tumultuous sixties, but in those days Pearl Buck was referred to as “Miss Buck” and it is said that she dressed like a society matron, while in her Bucks County home she was far more informal.
The octagonal-shaped dining room was lavishly decorated with a Ming screen with inlaid ivory figures. A long Chinese buffet table was also situated under a smoked glass mirror. Since the dining room also doubled as a place for dancing, the octagonal table could be rolled into a closet and the chandelier could be raised or lowered as needed.
“Why did I choose Center City, you ask?” Pearl S. Buck once wrote. “Because there was a street, there was the house, there were the people. There, too, was the tradition of brotherly love…” Buck also wrote that no matter where she lived there were always elements of the Chinese. “Sooner or later into every room in any house I own the Chinese influence creeps.”
At 2019 Delancey Street the 3rd floor library contained a baby grand piano, the famous “Good Earth Desk,” an ancient Chinese drum on a pedestal which acted as a coffee table, as well as leather bound editions of her books given her as gifts by her publisher. Much of the furniture was imported from the Buck house in China, namely the rose and tan Peking rugs, the blackwood chairs, and a daybed.
The 3rd floor Master Bedroom had a small sitting room and a writing table.
One walked through the 1st Floor entryway into a vestibule that exploded with red lacquered doors, stained glass and a large statue of the Chinese goddess of Mercy. Beyond the foyer, near the fireplace with its flanking Mandarin Chinese chairs, was an altar table flanked by two antique candelabra.
During the renovation of the townhouse in 1964-65, the first floor kitchen was moved to the basement and the former kitchen became the Foundation’s conference room. In the center of the conference room was a six foot round table made of walnut and yellow marble.
Many of Buck’s Delancey Street townhouse treasures were moved to the Bucks County home when the townhouse was sold.
When Pearl S. Buck submitted ‘The Good Earth’ to one publisher in 1931 she was told that it could not be published because “the American public is not interested in anything on China.” ‘The Good Earth,’ though not the author’s first book, became a critical and popular success despite the conviction of the critic who thought the book would bore American readers. Buck wrote The Good Earth in three months after the birth of her daughter, Carol, because she wanted to have enough money to support her.
In 1932, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth; the Nobel Prize for Literature followed in 1938 for her genuine portrayals of Chinese life. The Nobel Prize announcement shocked writers like Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway because they felt that they were more deserving of the honor. The Good Earthwent on to become the second all time best seller of the 20thCentury, second to Gone With the Wind.
The post-Nobel Buck also had to contend with choruses of critics pointing fingers: “Mrs. Buck is unrepresentative of American letters,” they said. “Her work in no way reflects the literary and ideological ferment of 20th Century.” The high-handed insult stung, but Buck seemed to take it in stride. “Like the Chinese,” she said in her Nobel Prize address, “I have been taught to write for these people.” She meant “these people” as opposed to an intellectual elite. She was not, as some might have wished, an early Presbyterian version of Susan Sontag.
“’The Good Earth,’” said journalist Edgar Snow, “was the first book that made western countries conscious of the Far East.”
Born Pearl Sydenstricker Buck in 1892 in West Virginia to Southern Presbyterian missionary parents, at 3 months old she was taken to China where she would spend the next 40 years, barring a sojourn in the United States when she went to a women’s college in Lynchburg, Virginia. She returned to China in 1914 after graduation and met John Lossing Buck. The two were married in 1917, and had a daughter, Carol, who was born with severe mental retardation. In 1925, she returned to the United States to obtain a master’s degree in English at Cornell University. But the situation with Carol plunged Pearl into a depression, and for a time she consulted specialists and doctors in the hopes that Carol could be helped. Buck wrote in her autobiography, For Spacious Skies, that she achieved a sense of peace when a specialist told her that her daughter’s condition would never change.
After Pearl found an institution for Carol, she and John began adopting children in 1925. Their 18 year marriage was not a happy one although it was during this period that she began to amass the material she would use in The Good Earth. She had already published her first book, East Wind, West Wind in 1930 and was writing stories in Asia Magazine and Atlantic Monthly. Her marital unhappiness would end after the 1931 publication of The Good Earth when the book’s publisher, William Walsh of Paul Dry Books, and she became close friends. In 1934, she and Walsh would move to the U.S. and marry the following year. With Carol safely institutionalized in New Jersey, she was now free to adopt 6 more children with her new husband. Buck then bought a large old farmhouse in Bucks County and went on to write 70 books, including novels, collections of stories, poetry, and children’s literature.
After The Good Earth, she wrote Sons, a tale of sons rising against their fathers as revolutionary winds swept through China. The book was viewed as a critical success; many, in fact, saw it as superior to The Good Earth. Several other novels in The Good Earth trilogy would follow. But after years of working and living in obscurity, Buck found her new found fame difficult to handle.
As Peter J. Conn notes in his study on the author, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (1998): “Pearl had decidedly mixed feelings about her new found fame. She had spent too many years in the shadows to feel comfortable in the light. More to the point, she mistrusted her own talent. Although she pretended to be indifferent to hostile opinion, she was sensitive to condescension that she suffered at the hands of the serious quarterlies and advanced taste makers.”
In a 1958 Mike Wallace television interview with the author, Wallace starts the questioning in true 1950s fashion by announcing, “The battle between the sexes is a major social problem.”
“Yes,” Pearl Buck answers. “Most women make their home their graves.”
Wallace is perplexed, even annoyed at the comment.
“It’s difficult to understand how women make their home their graves, “he says, to which Buck replies, “I think because they stop reading books that would enlarge their minds or their family’s minds.”
“It’s also difficult to be an American,” Buck adds, “We’re committed to loneliness.”
“I don’t get it,” Wallace confesses.
“Well, you know, the old countries have a tradition of family and church support, so there’s less choices there. Americans don’t have traditional support systems that Europeans have. They live in a country with no boundaries and no patterns.”
When her autobiography, For Spacious Skies (1966), written in collaboration with Theodore F. Harris, was published, Buck appeared on the Merv Griffin Show and explained to the talk show host her feelings about Communism in China. Communism, she said, is “a curious impossible, impractical scheme of life; it’s not based on anything that’s sound psychologically….the Chinese are marvelous friends and frightful enemies.”
Pearl Buck died in Vermont in 1973 from lung cancer although she is buried on the grounds of her estate, now the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, an organization that the author founded in 1964.
During my recent visit to the Bucks County estate I was excited to find Andre Gide’s Journal in the massive Buck home library. I also spotted books by Morris L. West and Sloan Wilson.
