Pearl Buck is one of those once-great and now-forgotten
authors who’s getting a new lease on life through the influence of Oprah
Winfrey. In late 2004, Winfrey selected Buck’s The Good Earth for Oprah’s Book Club. Simon & Schuster's
Washington Square Press printed 750,000 copies of a new trade paperback version
of the book. Most of Buck’s novels had fallen out of favor with critics and
fallen out of print. The discussion that ensued around this Oprah’s Book Club
Selection brought several of Buck’s finest books back into print once more.
I know it’s fashionable in literary circles to criticize
Oprah, but I believe she provides America, in general, and literary culture, in
particular, a real service in encouraging reading and in bringing recognition
to forgotten or overlooked works. Look at what happened to Buck. Even though
Buck was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature,
her bestselling and award-winning books, such as The Good Earth, Sons, A House Divided, Other Gods, China Sky, Dragon Seed, Pavilion of Women, Peony,
The Big Wave, and Imperial Woman, had mostly been out of print. The gatekeepers of American literature,
professors and critics, had pretty much consigned her books to the ash heap as
“not literary enough” and “too popular” until Oprah pointed a spotlight back on
her Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The
Good Earth.
This is a recurring problem with modern American literary
criticism, which is primarily based in academia. When writers originally
considered literary and praised for their work become too popular or—heaven
forbid!—make too much money from their books, they are soon scorned and
relegated to the cultural ash heap of “not literary enough” and “too popular.”
If they start out popular and sell well, those works may never even be
considered literary—because how can they be if they’re so popular, right? In
large part, this derives from a literary culture which has moved mostly
to the university and where established writers and critics have their bills
paid by other means than their writing. Another whole blog post right there!
And in that category of another blog post to come, why is that male novelists
can write one or two strong books and be forgiven for weak, meandering work
after that for the sake of those powerful books, but too often women writers
can write a number of strong books, yet if they should have even one weaker,
less well-crafted book, all their work must then be dismissed?
Buck was a remarkable writer and remarkable person, who as a
missionary’s child in China found in her backyard the mutilated remains of
infant daughters abandoned to die and made them graves, as a teen volunteered
to teach ex-brothel workers and sex slaves, as an adult novelist was accused in
the U.S. of being a Communist while Maoist China accused her of being an
imperialist. She thought, even as an adult in America, in Chinese first. English
was always her second language. Even in her writing, she thought in Chinese and
translated onto the page into simple, lucid, and powerful English. She worked
tirelessly to improve the lot of minorities, women, and children, especially
those with disabilities, in America and China. And wrote many books and shorter
pieces, some weak and some extremely powerful. At the end of her long life, in
thrall to a con man, she degenerated in a sad way from the person she had been
for most of her life.
Buck always had the reader in mind when she wrote rather
than the critics, so it may be a given that the critics would turn their backs
on her. I love what Buck said in her Nobel acceptance speech. She pointed out
that, in China, "the novelist did not have the task of creating art but of
speaking to the people." “Like the Chinese novelist,” she said, "I
have been taught to want to write for these people. If they are reading their
magazines by the million, then I want my stories there rather than in magazines
read only by a few.” Perhaps this is why her stories of people’s lives,
especially women’s, are so enthralling. I know they have helped me through
times of great physical and emotional pain.
Do you have authors whom you have loved and who have meant a
lot to you who have fallen into disrepute or completely disappeared?
