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."
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. Her father was a Presbyterian missionary to China. 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."
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. Daffy 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. Money was tight, the more so as Sydenstficker 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 Anglo-Saxon 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.
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."
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 tall 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. 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. What is the author’s opinion toward Spurling’s biography