The Nobel Prize in Literature 1938
Pearl Buck
Presentation Speech by Per Hallström Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, on December 10, 1938
Pearl Buck once told how she had found her
mission as interpreter to the West of the nature and being of
China. She did not turn to it as a literary speciality at all; it
came to her naturally.
«It is people that have always afforded me my greatest
pleasure and interest», she said, «and as I live among
the Chinese, it has been the Chinese people. When I am asked what
sort of people they are, I cannot answer. They are not this or
that, they are just people. I can no more define them than I can
define my own relatives and kinsmen. I am too near to them and I
have lived too intimately with them for that.»
She has been among the people of China in all their vicissitudes,
in good years and in famine years, in the bloody tumults of
revolutions and in the delirium of Utopias. She has associated
with the educated classes and with primordially primitive
peasants, who had hardly seen a Western face before they saw
hers. Often she has been in deadly peril, a stranger who never
thought of herself as a stranger; on the whole, her outlook
retained its profound and warm humanity. With pure objectivity
she has breathed life into her knowledge and given us the peasant
epic which has made her world-famous, The Good Earth
(1931).
As her hero she took a man who led the same existence as his
forefathers had during countless centuries, and who possessed the
same primitive soul. His virtues spring from one single root:
affinity with the earth, which yields its crops in return for a
man's labours.
Wang Lung is created from the same stuff as the yellow-brown
earth in the fields, and with a kind of pious joy he bestows upon
it every ounce of his energy. The two belong to each other in
origin, and they will become one again with the death he will
meet with tranquility. His work is also a duty done, and thus his
conscience is at rest. Since dishonesty avails nothing in his
pursuits, he has become honest. This is the sum total of his
moral conceptions, and equally few are his religious ones, which
are almost entirely comprehended in the cult of
ancestor-worship.
He knows that man's life is a gleam of light between two
darknesses; from the one behind him runs the chain of forefathers
from father to son, and the chain must not be broken by him, if
he is not to lose his dim hope of survival in a surmised, unknown
region. For then would expire a spark of the life-fire of the
race, which each individual man has to care for.
And thus the story begins with Wang Lung's marriage and his
dreams of sons in the house. Of his wife, O'Lan, he does not
dream, for - as is proper and fitting - he has never seen her.
She is a slave at the great house in the neighbouring town and
cheap to buy, since she is said to be ugly. For that reason she
has probably been left alone by the young sons of the house, and
to this the bridegroom attaches great value.
Their life together is happy, for the wife proves to be an
excellent helpmate, and the children soon make their appearance.
She satisfies all the demands laid upon her, and she has no
claims of her own. Behind her mute eyes is hidden a mute soul.
She is all submission, but wise and prompt in action; a wife also
in her paucity of words, springing from a philosophy of life
learned in a hard school.
Success attends the two. They are able to set aside a little
money, and Wang Lung's great passion, next to parenthood, his
longing for more ground to cultivate, may now venture forth from
subconsciousness. He is able to buy more fields, and everything
promises happiness and increase.
Then comes a blow from the hand of fate; a drought descends upon
the district. The good earth is changed into yellow, whirling
dust. By selling land they could avert starvation, but that would
be to bolt and lock the door to the future. Neither of them
wishes to do that, so they set forth in company with the growing
army of beggars to a city in the south, to live on the crumbs
from the rich man's table.
O'Lan had made the journey once before in her childhood, when the
end of it was that she was sold to save her parents and
brothers.
Thanks to her experience, they accommodate themselves to the new
life. Wang Lung toils as a beast of burden and the others beg
with an acquired aptitude. Autumn and winter pass. With the
spring, their yearning for their own land and its tilling becomes
unendurable, but they have no money for the journey.
Then again fate intervenes - as natural a fate in China as
drought and plague and flood. War, which is ever present
somewhere in that great country, and the ways of which are as
inscrutable as those of the powers of the air, stalks across the
city and makes chaos of law and order. The poor plunder the homes
of the rich.
Wang Lung goes with the mob without any definite motives, for his
peasant soul revolts at deeds of violence, but by pure chance a
handful of gold coins is almost forced into his hand. Now he can
go home and begin the spring work on his rain-soaked soil. More
than that, he can buy new fields; he is rich and happy.
He becomes still richer, though ultimately not happier, through
the plunder acquired by O'Lan. From her days of slavery she knows
something about hiding places in palaces, and she discovers a
handful of precious stones. She takes them nearly as
unpremeditatedly as a magpie steals glittering things, and hides
them as instinctively. When her husband discovers them in her
bosom, his whole world is transformed. He buys farm after farm.
He becomes the leading man in the district, no longer peasant but
lord, and his character changes colour. Simplicity and harmony
with the earth vanish. In their place comes, slowly but surely, a
curse for the desertion.
Wang Lung no longer has any real peace in his lordly leisure,
with a young concubine in the house and O'Lan pushed into a dark
corner, to die there when she has worn herself out.
The sons are not attractive figures. The eldest devotes himself
to an empty life of indulgence, the second is swallowed up by
greed for gold as a merchant and usurer. The youngest becomes one
of the «war lords» who drain the unhappy country.
Around them the Middle Empire is torn asunder in the tumult of
new creation, which has become so agonizing in our days.
The trilogy does not carry us so far, however; it concludes with
a sort of reconciliation between the third generation and the
good earth. One of Wang Lung's grandsons, a man educated in the
West, returns to the family estate and applies the knowledge he
has acquired to the improvement of the conditions of work and
life among the peasants.
The rest of the family live without roots in that conflict
between old and new which Pearl Buck has described in other works
- mostly in the tone of tragedy.
Of the many problems in this novel, the most serious and sombre
one is the position of the Chinese woman. From the very beginning
it is on this point that the writer's pathos emerges most
strongly, and amid the calm of the epic work it constantly makes
itself felt. An early episode in the work gives the most poignant
expression of what a Chinese woman has been worth since time
immemorial. It is given with impressive emphasis, and also with a
touch of humour which is naturally rare in this book. In a moment
of happiness, with his little first-born son dressed in fine
clothes on his arm, and seeing the future bright before him, Wang
Lung is on the point of breaking into boastful words but
restrains himself in sudden terror. There, under the open sky, he
had almost challenged the invisible spirits and drawn their evil
glances upon himself He tries to avert the menace by hiding his
son under his coat and saying in a loud voice,«What a pity
that our child is a girl, which no one wants, and is pitted with
smallpox into the bargain! Let us pray that it may die!» And
O'Lan joins in the comedy and acquiesces - probably without
thinking at all.
In reality the spirits need not waste their glances on a girl
child. Its lot is hard enough in any case. It is Pearl Buck's
female characters which make the strongest impression. There is
O'Lan with her scanty words, which carry all the more weight. Her
whole life is portrayed in equally scanty but telling
lines.
Quite a different figure is the chief character in the novel
The Mother (1934). She is not referred to by any other
designation, as if to indicate that her whole destiny is
expressed in that word. She is, however, vividly individualized,
a brave, energetic, strong character, of a more modern type than
O'Lan's, perhaps, and without her slave temperament. The husband
soon deserts his home, but she keeps it together for her
children. The whole story ends in sorrow, but not in defeat. The
mother cannot be crushed, not even when her younger son is
beheaded as a revolutionary, and she has to seek a stranger's
grave to weep by, for he has none. Just then a grandson is born,
and she again has someone to love and sacrifice herself
for.
The mother is the most finished of Pearl Buck's Chinese female
figures, and the book is one of her best. But in character
descriptions and the storyteller's art she is at her best in the
two biographies of her parents, The Exile (1936) and
Fighting Angel (1936). These should be called classics in
the fullest sense of the word; they will endure, for they are
full of life. In this respect the models from which the portraits
are drawn are of great significance.
One seldom feels any great sense of gratitude for the company
proffered in contemporary novels, and it is gladly forgotten. The
characters have no great wealth of qualities, and the writer puts
forth all his powers to lessen them, often by a persistent
analysis with foregone results.
Here, however, one encounters two consummate characters, living
unselfish lives of action, free from brooding and vacillation.
They are profoundly unlike each other, and the fact that they are
thrown together in a common struggle in a hard and strange world
often leads to great tragedy-but not to defeat: they stand erect
even to the very last. There is a spirit of heroism in both
stories.
The mother, Carie, is richly gifted, brave and warm, of a genuine
nature, harmonious amid ever-straining forces. She is tested to
the utmost in sorrows and dangers; she loses many children
because of the harshness of the conditions of life, and at times
a terrible death threatens her in those troubled times. It is
almost as hard for her to witness the never-ending suffering
around her. She does what she can to mitigate it, and that is not
a little, but no power is sufficient for such a task.
Even inwardly she passes through a hard and unceasing struggle.
In her calling, and with her nature, she needs more than the
conviction of faith. It is not enough for her that she has
dedicated herself to God; she must also feel that the sacrifice
has been accepted. But the sign of this, for which she begs and
prays, never comes. She is compelled to persist in an untiring
endeavour to find God and to content herself with trying to be
good without divine help.
However, she preserves her spiritual health, her love for the
life which has shown her so much that is terrible, and her eye
for the beauty the world has to offer; she even retains her
happiness and her humour. She resembles a fresh fountain
springing from the heart of life.
The daughter tells her story with rare and lively perspicuity.
The biography is precise in regard to the course of events, but
creative imagination plays its part in the various episodes and
in the description of the inner life of the character. Nothing is
falsified, for this imagination is intuitive and true.
The language has vivid spontaneity; it is clear and suffused with
a tender and soulful humour. There is, however, a flaw in the
story. The daughter's devotion to her mother makes it impossible
for her to do justice to her father. In his family life his
limitations were obvious, limitations sharp and at times painful.
As a preacher and soldier of Christ he was without blemish, in
many respects even a great character; but he ought to have lived
his life alone, free of the familial duties he hardly found time
to notice, duties which in any case weighed lightly with him
against his all-absorbing calling. Thus he was of little help to
his wife, and in her biography he could not be fully
understood.
This was accomplished, however, in another book, whose title is
the key to his life and being: Fighting Angel. Andrew did
not possess his wife's richly composite nature; his was narrow
but deep, and as bright as a gleaming sword. He devoted every
thought to his goal of opening the way to salvation for the
heathens. Everything was insignificant compared to that. What
Carie prayed for in vain, communion with God, he possessed wholly
and unshakeably in the firm conceptions of his Biblical faith.
With this faith he walked like a conqueror, further than any
other in the immense heathen country, he endured all hardships
without noticing them, and he encountered threats and dangers in
the same manner. For the poor, blind, strange brown people he
felt tenderness and love. Among them his stern nature broke into
blossom. When he had won their souls to a confession of faith, he
did not doubt the genuineness of the confession; with the naivete
of a child, he accepted it as good. The door to God, always
denied them before, had been opened to them, and to weigh them
and judge them was now in the hands of Him who knows best. They
had been given their possibility of salvation, and for Andrew it
was urgent to give this possibility to all he could reach in that
immense country, where thousands were dying every hour. His
enthusiasm burned, and his work had something of genius in its
magnitude and depth.
He strained his forces to the utmost in never-ending action, and
the repose he allowed himself was the mystic's abandonment to the
infinite amid ardent prayers. The whole of his life was a flame
which rose straight and high, in spite of all storms; it could
not be judged by ordinary conceptions. The daughter, whose
portrait conceals none of his repellent features, maintained pure
reverence before the nobility of the whole. One is profoundly
thankful for both these perfectly executed pictures - each in its
way so rare.
By awarding this year's Prize to Pearl Buck for the notable works
which pave the way to a human sympathy passing over widely
separated racial boundaries and for the studies of human ideals
which are a great and living art of portraiture, the Swedish
Academy feels that it acts in harmony and accord with the aim of
Alfred Nobel's dreams for the future.
Mrs. Walsh, I have attempted a short survey of your work, indeed
hardly necessary here, where the audience is so well acquainted
with your remarkable books.
I hope, though, that I have been able to give some idea of their
trend, toward opening a faraway and foreign world to deeper human
insight and sympathy within our Western sphere - a grand and
difficult task, requiring all your idealism and greatheartedness
to fulfil as you have done.
May I now ask you to receive from the hands of His Majesty the
King the Nobel Prize in Literature, conferred upon you by the
Swedish Academy.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1938
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