Book review: Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck's Life in China

THE Nobel Prize is a terrible mistake and we all know because we don't have one. In literature it goes to gruesome Austrians and the wrong Portuguese, but also to a British Prime Minister for his prose style in rewriting history and the man who invented The Forsyte Saga. Those naive and sentimental Swedes seem to think that having readers is part of being literary.

And then we come to the follies of 1938 – when the prize went to Pearl S Buck, a missionary daughter back from China, a Book of the Month Club best-seller who'd been filmed by MGM, a celebrity in all the magazines. Pearl Buck is the very acme of literarily incorrect.

The Good Earth and its sequels made China visible in America and the West and exposed the real, hidden life of what was otherwise a faceless empire. Buck wrote potboilers, didn't she, and the movie was very short on genuine Orientals, which is shocking. She dealt in something uncomfortably close to researched fact, which no modernist would tolerate, and the books weren't flattering or hardline or what everyone knew already. And did we mention that she did some missionary work herself? The woman was, quite obviously, a mistake.

On the other hand, she's one hell of a story: the missionary's daughter who went wandering outside the claustrophobic world of the China missions where people were shut up inside marriages inside compounds and, worst of all, inside their own adamantine sense of superiority. Pearl, very young, explored the stinking streets, chatted to everyone, and everyone was astonished to find they understood her (they reckoned: English must be the same as Chinese, after all). She saved the bones of dead babies from the dogs, but she also went to the theatre, read boisterous novels, watched the great kites fly.

She was immersed in the China that almost drowned her mother with hard work, loneliness and awful childbirths, while her gaunt and ferocious father "itinerated" like mad, shouting the Gospel on street corners, and using every spare penny of family money to fund his translation of the Bible into Chinese – a project the Presbyterians particularly disapproved of, since it challenged their notion that they alone knew what the Chinese needed.

In time, Pearl went away to college in America – to a school for Southern women, but a good one, where she seems to have been a rather successful outsider; but then, inevitably, she went back.

She married a man who did agronomics with passion, who was trying to describe the farms, food supplies and farmers of China systematically. Where she could, she followed him, learning about country living by watching and asking; when she couldn't, she stayed home and learned from the neighbours. The fiercest of these was Madame Wu, who married her beloved son to a plain girl so he wouldn't get distracted, watched in fury as the boy fell in love, and then coldly drove the girl to the only exit possible: suicide.

In all of this, as one of her friends said, "You were on the ragged edge of a famine permanently." The reality Buck learned, door by door, chat by chat, was a fulminous melodrama that her plain style pulled down, and her plot tricks made accessible, but it was reality all the same. And she had the habitual, practised storyteller's ease that convinced her audience.

She had to leave China in the end. She lived through the Japanese attacks on Nanjing, the violence against foreigners, her growing belief that, as her Chinese tutor told her, there can be no peace until there is justice. Her marriage went cold, she could find no calm place in China for her severely retarded child, she went back to the America she hardly knew.

She brought back no finished manuscript, although she'd been writing industriously; only a memoir of her parents far too bilious to print. Now she settled to write, wrote with astonishing grace and speed, and all of a sudden the story of Pearl Buck in China starts to matter.

The best of the novels is still alive – The Good Earth shifts 10,000 copies a year in Britain, after 70 years – and Buck worked her material over, again and again. She wrote biographies of her father and her mother and two volumes of an official, rather absent-minded autobiography. You might almost think she meant to ward off proper biography, or at least fact-checkers. She did once say that she reckoned fiction was painting, while biography was just photography: "fiction is creation, biography is arrangement."

This is, Hilary Spurling says, "a prosaic and mechanical definition" and certainly not true of this book. It is also, you can tell, a challenge, especially to the writer who in her glorious account of Matisse raised biography to a kind of investigative love affair.

To make things harder, a kind of uphill marathon, Spurling concentrates on Pearl Buck's life in China despite the "more or less complete absence of external evidence relating to Pearl's childhood." There's plenty of public record when Buck gets back to America – her brave campaigns against racism which won her the name of a Commie, and a fat, malicious FBI file, and her war in defence of children born with developmental disabilities, unmentionable citizens at the time often consigned to institutions without even the dignity of a bed; Peter Conn, a decade back, laid all that out. Spurling dashes past it like a Toyota needing a recall.

Now the China story takes its life and wonder mostly from what Buck made of it, so it's curious that Spurling doesn't seem to have a very high opinion of her subject. "Pearl had a very good mind but she didn't use it," said a very famous, Mao-idolatrous China-watcher (Pearl had her doubts about the Chairman) and Spurling quotes her. She then announces that Buck's books sell because of their "bland, trite, ingratiating mass-market techniques," that "Pearl's sense of humour seldom got the best of her didactic intent".

This is very odd and unsympathetic coming from the biographer who made sense of Matisse's finances, and made him a hero for painting so his family could survive financial scandal. Pearl Buck was most industrious trying to give her daughter a life despite brain damage and save her husband's business from bankruptcy – not bad motives for building an assembly line of words.

Indeed, the end of the book is a pity. The older Buck becomes just a clich kind of Dragon Empress in her last New England exile: no eunuchs, but far too many ageing antique dealers. We don't see her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, and there's only one paragraph about her most startling achievement: overturning a century of deeply racist laws forbidding Chinese to settle in America. That wasn't some legal incident, it was a social earthquake.

Worse, the rush makes Spurling seem cold. When Buck's beloved second husband, and publisher, has a stroke which leaves him alive but ends his chances of a real life, she somehow equates his suffering with any cold, distant husband who won't leave home properly.

And all this comes after the beautiful retelling of Buck's unending curiosity about China, her sympathy, her courage; it just doesn't fit. Doubts surface. We're told Buck's annual re-reading of all Dickens left no trace on her own books, and a few dozen pages later she sounds like the Dickens of China, reporting, dramatising, sometimes sentimentalising the lives that other people never saw.

We're shown Pearl's opposition to mission arrogance, the assumption they just had to give the Word and all would be well, but not told why she went on working within a mission context or wanted to make the missions better; even her husband's experimental gardens were, at first, church sponsored. You get the feeling there is something missing, something convincing in mission work that Pearl's scepticism and her true respect for Chinese thinking never did quite override.

Doubt is dangerous in a story so heavy with wonders and oddities – and horrors, as well. It gives just the faintest Orientalist tinge to what is, after all, the story of a westerner's experience. It can almost make you think we're getting Pearl Buck second-hand.

But Spurling is a very fine writer, who couldn't turn a shoddy sentence if she tried, and her warm intelligence saves the day. She proves – and Pearl Buck would be furious – that the best biography is much, much more than just arrangement.