Pearl Buck - The Eternal Wonder

During my childhood the house was filled with books, as my father brought home the works of his other authors, and new books were sent to Pearl in hopes that she might write a promotional note in order to help a fellow writer’s work. Fascinating men and women came to visit: Africans, Chinese, Europeans, and Indians. There were writers, intellectuals, diplomats, and the occasional politician. The visitors I remember best were the writer Lin Yutang, along with his wife and three beautiful daughters, and the famous watercolorist Chen Chi, who during his visits painted several pictures of our home. Frequent guests were the Indian ambassador to the United States, as well as Indian prime minister Nehru’s sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and her daughters. Our neighbors included Oscar Hammerstein, James Michener, David Burpee, and the colony of artists and writers in nearby New Hope, Pennsylvania.

In a wing of our home, attached to the main house by a passageway with French doors, were three offices. There was one each for my parents and one for their secretaries. My mother’s office held her writing desk, a fireplace, and comfortable easy chairs, and it featured a large picture window that looked out over rose gardens and lily ponds and farm fields where our Guernsey cows grazed. There was a far view of a three-arched stone bridge that carried the public road.

In the quiet of rural Bucks County Pearl Buck wrote and wrote. After her trip to Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize in 1938 she did not travel outside the United States until the late 1950s. She ran her home and managed her staff and children with a firm hand. She did her creative writing for four hours every morning. In the afternoon she would answer fan mail and take care of business matters. She always had time to help her children with homework and piano lessons, and to exhort us to do our best work. Idleness was anathema. Her years in China, which exposed her to the poverty of most of that nation’s people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, instilled in her a belief that only through hard work could a person prosper.

ON JANUARY 4, 2013, THE handwritten manuscript and typed copy of The Eternal Wonder were delivered to me. I opened the package from Texas. I looked at my mother’s familiar handwriting and compared her narrative to the typewritten manuscript. There was no doubt that they were genuine. When I did my first read-through of the novel, I knew that it was her work, but could see that the book was in need of editing. It was apparent that someone, I don’t know who, had made some changes when the handwritten document was typed. Whoever typed the original had misread some of the handwritten words, and my mother, writing with her usual speed, had made mistakes in timelines and transitions in various places. I felt that, had she lived longer, she would have changed parts and extended or altered the ending.

When Open Road Integrated Media, Pearl Buck’s ebook publisher and the publisher of this work, presented me with the initial copyedit, I reviewed it, and together we tried to smooth out the manuscript’s rough parts where we could, while changing as little as possible of the original work. My guiding principle was to try to stay true to what I know about my mother’s writing and my father’s editing.

As I read the book I was also amused to note a familiar device that my mother used in many of her books and stories. If she had an interesting experience or visited a special place, or met a fascinating person, she would toss the event, place, or person into one of her narratives. She would also use mundane details from her private life. At one point in this novel, Rann, the young man whose life we follow, is at home with his mother:

He put the dog in the garage and then came back to the kitchen and sat down at the table while his mother cooked something.

“Neither of us will be hungry,” she said, “but I’ll bake some gingerbread and make that special sweet sauce you like.”

My mother was famous for her homemade gingerbread and a special sweet sauce, and we children always loved and looked forward to it.

At another point in the book the teenage Rann travels by ship to England. On board he meets a beautiful, widowed, aristocratic older woman. When they arrive in England she invites him to stay at her castle outside London. In 1959 my mother and I were guests at a castle north of London. It is this castle that she describes in the book.

I believe that it is important to bring this work to the public, despite its flaws. When I took the manuscript to Jane Friedman, CEO of Open Road Integrated Media, she agreed that the book should be published. Jane’s team has worked extremely hard to ready it for release, and I am grateful to them all. I think my mother would be pleased.

But it is impossible to know just how Pearl Buck, had she lived, might have revised what is, as it stands, an imperfect work. She was a perfectionist and the work is far from perfect. She left no instructions as to how the novel should appear in its final form. Still, for her readers past and present this work presents a unique opportunity to really know her and to understand her feelings and beliefs. I lived in her house for almost twenty-five years. When I married and moved on, I was still in touch with her constantly until she died. So I was always aware of her broad interests outside of her life as a writer. She was a deeply committed advocate of women’s rights, civil rights for minority populations, the rights of the handicapped, the rights of mixed-race children and adults, and religious tolerance. Indeed, she always stood for the less fortunate of the world. As you read the novel you will see that, to use the title of her translation of a classic Chinese story, she believed that “all men are brothers.”

In a way, reading this story was like being at home again with my mother in her study, both of us at ease in chairs by the fire, while she shared her thoughts, knowledge, and opinions. The young genius who is the central character in this book could be considered an autobiographical figure, and the many characters who interact with and educate him speak as my mother would have spoken. Years after her death Pearl Buck still has a worldwide readership and her works continue to be translated into many languages. I think that in these pages Pearl Buck fans will find the kind of storytelling that they have always loved from my mother, and I hope they will experience some of the wonder that I did in reading it. Unless another hidden manuscript comes to light, this will stand as her final work.

He lay sleeping in still waters. This was not to say that his world was always motionless. There were times when he was aware of motion, even violent motion, in his universe. The warm fluid that enfolded him could rock him to and fro, could even toss him about, so that instinctively he spread his arms wide, his hands flailing, his legs spreading in the sprinting fashion of a frog. Not that he knew anything about frogs—it was too soon for that. It was too soon for him to know. Instinct was as yet his only tool. He was quiescent most of the time, active only when responding to unexpected movements in the outer universe.

These responses, necessary, his instinct told him, to protect himself, became also pleasurable. His instinct extended into positive action. He no longer waited for outer stimulus. Instead he felt it in himself. He began to move his arms and legs; he turned over, at first by accident but then with purpose and a sense of accomplishment. He could move from side to side in this warm private sea, and as he grew larger he became aware of its limitations. Now and again hand and foot struck a soft wall, but a definite wall beyond which he could not move. Back and forth, up and down, around and around, but not beyond—this was his limitation.