Books: Buck’s Father

FIGHTING AXGEL—Pearl Buck—Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

Less than a year ago, Pearl Syden-stricker Buck published a sympathetic portrait of her mother called The Exile (TIME, Jan. 13). In that affectionate volume, Carrie Sydenstricker, sensible missionary and patient mother, far overshadowed her husband Andrew. He emerged as a zealous, absent-minded man who was constantly pushing deeper into China to gather converts of doubtful loyalty and understanding. Good, unquestioning, self-righteous, he caused Carrie more suffering than he knew. This week in another purely biographical volume that is the December choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Pearl Buck gets around to giving her father his innings. If The Exile is a labor of love, Fighting Angel is a labor of filial justice. It gives less evidence of Pearl Buck’s understanding of her father than of her stubborn attempt to understand him.

Andrew was tall, bony, large-faced, the son of a hot-tempered West Virginia landowner, born into what the neighbors said was the “preachingest family in Greenbrier County, with dissenting blood as strong as lye.” When he got the call to be a missionary nothing could stop him, neither the opposition of his father, his lack of resources nor the five years he had to spend on the farm before he could start college at the age of 21. Daughter Pearl Buck asked him how he had proposed to Carrie, when he was ready to take her along on his mission. “I wrote her a letter,” he said. ‘It seemed to me to be the only way of putting everything clearly before her for her mature reflection.”

The Bucks started to China as soon as they were married. No romantic, Andrew thought Carrie’s seasickness on the way over was all foolishness. He was sure she could feel better if she made an effort. As they started for the interior after Carrie had had four wisdom teeth pulled without anesthetics they returned because complications developed. “It was very inconvenient,” Andrew later confessed to his daughter, “but we started again with a delay of a little under two hours. I was eager to get at my work.”

The Chinese called Andrew “The Fool about Books.” He preached, baptized, quarreled savagely with his brother missionaries, staked out for his domain a territory the size of Texas. In some villages dogs were set on him, in some he was beaten, in one he was captured by bandits. But in most the Chinese listened patiently and politely. They thought he was probably a good man, a little possessed, who was doing some religious penance. Carefully totting up each soul he had saved every year, Andrew was inclined to be doubtful about the women converts. “They haven’t much real idea of what they are doing,” he explained. “It’s beyond them.”

Paying her tribute to Andrew’s disinterestedness, his courage, his picturesqueness and the devotion to his work that never flagged in all his 80 years, Pearl Buck nevertheless makes it clear that he was often a trial to his family, his fellow missionaries and sometimes to the Chinese. Shamelessly confessing that he wished he had sons instead of daughters, he never read any of Pearl Buck’s writing. When he heard she was wasting God’s time scribbling novels, he picked up one of her books, stared at it doubtfully, put it back. “I think I won’t undertake that,” he said. He died in 1931.