The First Wife and Other Stories, by Pearl S. Buck.
John Day. $2.50.
China is met by the mind of a true writer in the stories of Mrs. Buck, and that is the chief reason why thousands of Americans are becoming somewhat China-wise. For Mrs. Buck, willy-nilly, gives every written paragraph a paragraph’s worth of mind; and if her subject is China (it might have been something else), why, that dimly and ignobly seen land may be considered literarily fortunate.
The First Wife is made up of stories showing how hearts are revolutionized when a country is; how China, with all its millions of tremendously anonymous people, has emotions to provide for each; and how, in a fashion, every one of these emotions is understandable and right—just as they are in Iowa or Brooklyn. Fathers are put into a great mournfulness by their sons who have been in the West and do not care for the solemn accumulations of family custom in China; serenely suffering Chinese wives kill themselves because of the strangeness and unwilling cruelty of their husbands who have seen trolley-cars and, perhaps, adding-machines; old mothers suffer; and sons suffer at the hands of their slow-proceeding parents. The China that changes is a China that suffers: from love, from floods, from hunger.
Mrs. Buck has no ups and downs, aesthetically. She has been deeply taken by existence; and one part of existence, little understood by the Atlantic, she has made her own; and she knows her territory. She doesn’t fumble; she doesn’t get vaporish; she goes off into no flamboyant thinnesses, no gorgeous vacancies or intense failures.
Her Chinese have been seen; she has captured her landscapes. But all this is because somewhere she worshipped reality and the word that can have reality in it. And a multitudinous Oriental people got in a writer’s way later.
I feel, from The First Wife and Other Stories, that sometimes immense, sensational popularity is explainable and most honorable. In Mrs. Buck’s book, China, reality, and the word make a grand private and public combination.
Eli Siegel.
1933