Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [143]
"Now, evil, idle sons---sell the land!" He choked and would have fallen, and they caught him and held him up, and he began to weep.
Then they soothed him and they said, soothing him,
"No---no---we will never sell the land---"
"It is the end of a family---when they begin to sell the land," he said brokenly. "Out of the land we came and into it we must go---and if you will hold your land you can live---no one can rob you of land---"
And the old man let his scanty tears dry upon his cheeks and they made salty stains there. And he stooped and took up a handful of the soil and he held it and he muttered,
"If you sell the land, it is the end."
And his two sons held him, one on either side, each holding his arm, and he held tight in his hand the warm loose earth. And they soothed him and they said over and over, the elder son and the second son,
"Rest assured, our father, rest assured. The land is not to be sold."
But over the old man's head they looked at each other and smiled.
THE END
Pearl Buck on
THE GOOD EARTH
This is from a speech by Pearl Buck, "Advice to a Novelist About to Be Born," given in 1935 and later printed in Pearl S. Buck: A Biography by Theodore F. Harris (The John Day Company, Inc., 1971).
One of the isolating factors of my own experience has been that some of the morbidly sensitive modern Chinese, especially those abroad in foreign countries, have not liked it that I have written of the everyday life of their people. In all justice to them I must say that this attitude has changed in the last two years very much, so that I have ardent friends among these, but certainly The Good Earth at first displeased many Chinese in the United States. In China itself it was accepted without dislike except that it was a foreigner who wrote it. It was often said there, "It is a book which a Chinese should have written." But among the Chinese in my own country, who felt they had the honour of their country to uphold, it made distress. They had to deny it, to criticize it, to struggle against it. This also was as astonishing to me as the letter from the Fundamentalist board member. Apparently with the simplest purpose in the world, namely, merely to write novels, surely a harmless necessity for a novelist, and without any sense of wrongdoing, I was able to infuriate an astonishingly large number of people.
See also her reply to Kiang Kang-hu in the following section.
Critical Excerpts
(1) The New York Times Book Review, 1931
Laying aside the question of the locale, The Good Earth is an excellent novel. It has style, power, coherence and a pervasive sense of dramatic reality. In its deeper implications it is less a comment upon life in China than upon the meaning and tragedy of life as it is lived in any age in any quarter of the globe. Notwithstanding the essential differences in manners and traditions, one tends to forget, after the first few pages, that the persons of the story are Chinese and hence foreign.... One cannot doubt that Mrs. Buck knows her China. Except for her college years in the United States, she has spent the greater part of her life there. But she portrays a China unfamiliar to the average reader, a China in which, happily, there is no hint of mystery or exoticism. There is very little in her book of the quality which we are accustomed to label "Oriental."... There are, to be sure, fundamental differences in the life and attitude of Wang Lung which the Western reader will recognize---his sense of responsibility toward the past and the future, his inarticulate and unexamined consciousness of his family as a permanent entity, and the dignity and importance which this consciousness lends to his humble place in the scheme of things. But these things are not explained, they are simply and firmly embedded in the fabric of the story. Whatever process of observation and analysis underlies Mrs. Buck's writing, it has been completely transmuted here into the stuff of art.
(2) Florence Ayscough,