The Exileby Pearl Buck

University of Northern Iowa

The Exile by Pearl BuckReview by: Eleanor L. Van AlenThe North American Review, Vol. 241, No. 2 (Jun., 1936), pp. 370-373Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25114744 .

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[ 370 ] THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

dangerous to dismiss Taney as a representative of the southern slave culture which the Civil War and industrialism swept out.

This impression is created in spite of the fact that that is prac

tically the final position the author leaves for him after the

tragic Dred Scott decision. In a way, he represented an even narrower interest group

? between northern industrialism and southern slave agrarianism. Taney thought he stood for

principles. It is difficult to conceive of a property system or

material culture under which many of his principles would not be valuable. Taney did not talk about natural rights and

higher laws, but he undoubtedly believed in them. He could not imagine the sovereign people deliberately contradicting them. He exhibited a faith, these books would indicate, declar

ing that citizens are to have equal rights and privileges, which

rights and privileges are to be determined by themselves, and which will always include those that permit a good life. Taney was not the sort of man to list the ones he believed to be in the last category, but he certainly did not die feeling they had become irretrievably obsolete.

PHILIP BURNHAM

THE EXILE. By Pearl Buck. A John Day Book, Reynal and Hitch

cock, $2.50.

IN

A RECENT paper on fiction, Mrs. Buck says that "in

choosing a life about which to write, the novelist does not

choose only one life. In that one he chooses all of humanity." As Mrs. Buck's first excursion outside fiction, and as a portrait of an exiled American mother, "The Exile" exhibits just that

universality. It does more, besides, of what her first and present

publisher has said of all her writings ?

that they further the common understanding of the human heart. The biography is no carefully tabulated and documented affair concerning a

life-history which was never front-page news anyway. Rather, the author has written an impressionistic sketch within the

loose confines of a cinematic narrative. The result is as loving and almost as objective a study as Daphne Du Maurier's

contemporary portrait of her actor father, Gerald. Viewed as

such, if less artistic, it is as absorbing as any of her novels. This reviewer generally dislikes fictionalized biography in



BOOK REVIEWS [371] literary art, regarding it as bastard progeny. But the medium

is to be pardoned in this instance ? perhaps because of the

warmth and sincerity, perhaps because of the explanations

through background and influences, of that feminine counter

part of Mr. Galsworthy in letters, Mrs. Buck herself.

This combined life-story and portrait of an American

mother, Carie, divides itself roughly into two component

parts. The first paints with a big brush, in a few strokes, her

family inheritance and girlhood. The author's great-grand father was a thriving merchant in Utrecht. Thus, on one side, Carie came of independent, well-to-do Dutch stock, three

generations of which sailed away from their country to Amer

ica for freedom, impelled by an ideal of God and man. On the

other side, she was of French extraction, having a dainty

Huguenot mother who had dared to go to America with a

Dutchman she knew hardly at all, and who made a marvelous

pioneer in West Virginia farmlands. There Carie grew up in a

house European in its etchings and fine furniture, while her

parents "set themselves resolutely to build their lives into the

life of the American nation." She enjoyed a gracious sort of

living with music and books and flowers and ordered land

scape, even in periods of hardship. Years later, broken and

homesick in China, an oval teakwood table she had bought from a Chinese dealer served as one of many manufactured

links to bind her children, bit by bit to their country. From her father, Hermanus, dandified and fastidious jeweler

and clockmaker, spoiled by all the rest of his family, Carie in

herited a sensuous love of beauty, likewise that churchly sense

of duty, stern daughter of the voice of God. Her mother be

queathed her a Gallic gaiety and practicality that stood her in

good stead on missionary pay in interior Asia. As non-slave

owners, caught on the borderland between north and south,

they had endured trials in plenty; and as Carie said, "I have

done every kind of work needed to maintain life and I am glad of it." She did much, as well, as this book testifies, to nourish

the spirit ? in prayer, but mainly in service. For despite her

Victorian conscience, she did not allow herself for a moment

ever to be introverted. In its beginning, the book harks back

to the disappearing America of certainties and puritanical faiths ? the home, the church, book-learning, domestic art,



[ 372 ] THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

not science ? and this with a wistful sincerity if not exactly

nostalgia. This section while it has the more abundant charm seems more removed from reality, being second-hand and

coming from oft repeated hearsay.

Just why Carie chose a man she admired but did not love, and took up a missionary's lot with him, abandoning her be

loved America, is not entirely clear to twentieth century eyes.

Perhaps she feared her pagan tendencies, as she thought them,

perhaps her mother's death, or the puritan preoccupation of a

sensitive woman with what was then termed her eternal soul, influenced her to take this step. Married to a Saint Paul who

never saw her as a woman, and robbed his wife of that "tiny

margin between bitter poverty and small comfort" for the

translation of his New Testament, Carie tried desperately to

take root in China. The Chinese called her the "American woman of good works." Her existence kaleidoscoped from

Shanghai up river to Hangchow to primitive Cheefoo, up the

treacherous Yangtze ? devoted always to the double effort of

healing some segment of the diseased and poverty-ridden

people, and shielding her children from the oriental jungle of

life about them, "too beautiful as it was and too sad for child

ish hearts."

Shocking experiences fill the pages like the episode of the

young missionary doctor rendered dangerously insane by the

enormity of his task in an inland city, or the flight from the

cholera epidemic, or the incident of midnight hospitality to

the Chinese rabble in time of drought which saved their

"white devil" lives. Four children (who would doubtless have

survived elsewhere) this Kwanyin, goddess of mercy, lost to

this alien land. Yet there were happy intervals: an economical

holiday in Europe, a visit to Virginia, the little stone house

above the sea where she could garden even in China, the

fruits of her kindnesses to the downtrodden of her sex and of

understanding towards Eurasians. She was in all probability a

domineering woman, being high-tempered and rebellious.

Nevertheless she endured unspeakable loneliness save for her

children, suffered rigid economy and a marriage that was a

travesty with cheerfulness and courage, where another would

have been crushed by it. She possessed one of those natures

that is at its best when sorely tried, mentally and physically,



BOOK REVIEWS [ 373 ] and challenged spiritually. The Chinese environment, except for its certain phases of beauty, was distasteful to her, but she

conquered and accepted it gladly at the last. Out of that

acceptance, probably, grew her daughter's ability to interpret so remarkably and in such universal language the Chinese

character in her books, "The Good Earth" and "The House

Divided." Her tormented search for God never ended nor suc

ceeded during a full and most incredibly useful life. Through her children and her good works she found fulfilment ? a

fulfilment the modern woman tends to scorn.

Mrs. Buck writes always with an emotional upsurge that

may lack reserve to some readers. They may resent so much

pathos and feel that even in this labor of love, she could pos

sibly have been more restrained and critical. They could

scarcely require of her, however, a testament of greater

honesty. ELEANOR L. VAN ALEN

INNOCENT SUMMER. By Frances Frost. Farrar and Rinehart, $2.50.

PARENTS

fare badly in Frances Frost's first novel, "In nocent Summer." This of course is entirely in accord with

fiction conventions of the present day. However, the reader cannot help wondering how it happens that each of the six children whose fortunes we follow throughout one summer

should be devoid of anything like real viciousness, while of

their twelve parents scarcely one is a normally decent human

being, and several are very bad indeed. Paul Hagar's pa is a

drunken brute; so is Sam Evans's; Mart O'Brien's father is

depicted as worse than brutal with his incestuous pawings. Fern Denoyier's daddy is a pretty tolerable individual, but her

mother's mind is filthy, and the scene wherein she tells the

"facts of life" to her shrinking daughter is the more hideous

because photographically true. Dorothy Burke's parents

quarrel incessantly over her theological upbringing, and her

stupid mother makes her the victim, not only of innumerable

spankings, but of much half unintentional cruelty. Consump tive Donald Moffat's parents are dead when the book begins, and he expires long before it is ended.



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The Exileby Pearl Buck