Books: Bloody Ballet

DRAGON SEED—Pearl S. Buck—John Day ($2.50).

Pearl Buck’s new novel is the strongest and most instructive story yet written of China at war. As literature, it edges the first-rate. As discreet and powerful propaganda, it makes tangible the living, the suffering and the bravery of a great and obscure people under four years of hermetic tyranny, in a defeat which refused to stay put.

Ling Tan, his wife Ling Sao, their three sons, their daughters, the wives and children of their sons were one of those timeless, slightly-too-noble peasant families to whose portrayal Mrs. Buck brings sympathetic talents. They held land not far from Nanking, land to which they were immemorially anchored. Deep in their earth, when they dug a well, they found ancestral shards; and Ling Tan felt that he owned not merely the boundaries of his farm but a whole column of creation, straight through the planet, and straight into those unreadable stars whose toy-like glinting made friendly a night which would otherwise have been too dark.

Invasion. There came a day when, in the finest symbolic moment in the book, Ling Sao, cleaning a rice cauldron with sand, felt the vessel shiver in her hands, and ring with the rumor of distant artillery. The peasants vaguely began to realize that they must expect “the little dwarfs from the East Ocean, who always like to fight.” On a later day, high and small in the sunlight as daylit stars, the first “flying ships” came over, to their admiration, dropping silver eggs which made the earth stand up like black trees. From his son-in-law Wu Lien, a Nanking shopkeeper, Ling Tan learned that where these eggs fell in the city, all was reduced to dust; even people were taken apart “as though they, too, were made of clay.” Soon Ling Tan went into the city and saw it with his own eyes, and when his youngest son vomited, and was ashamed, he told him: “A man if he is honorable ought to be sickened and angry.”

His second son and Jade, this son’s wife, went into the free West with students, while the people of the city, rich and poor alike, began to crowd past into the country. Sometimes Ling Tan “felt more sorry for the rich than the poor because the rich were so helpless and delicate and knew little of where to find food.” But the peasants disguised their broad hats with branches, and stayed at their work. Ling Tan despised all those who made war; “it seemed to him that the greatest thing a man could do in these days was to live and keep alive his own.”

At length the rulers of the city fled, and the foreigners, as rats leave a ship; and the city fell. Ling’s village endured the plunder of their own retreating army, and prepared to meet the enemy. They decided to make ready tea and small cakes and fruits, and courteously to welcome the invaders outside their village, “and thus in decency and honor the conquest would take place.”

But as Ling Tan watched toward the city, through the unsure dawn, “it seemed as though the grey land itself were moving,” and through the mist came “strange huge shapes,” deaf machines no man could greet. As for their ceremonial spokesman, their eldest man, a soldier prodded him along with a bayonet. Late in that day he died, not of the wound, but of sorrow and shame. At the inn, the enemy refused their tea and bellowed for wine and for women.

Outside his barred gate Ling Tan heard his dog killed. He hurried his family through a rear gate, and he and his wife hid in the choking thatch next their rafters. When they came down they found that Wu Lien’s old, weak-minded mother had been raped and murdered. For her first time Ling Tan’s aging wife truly feared men.

In that village of fewer than a hundred almost every female, infant or old, was thus treated, and seven young girls died under it. Ling Tan and his sons put their women in a mission refuge in the city. Even there the soldiers threatened, and for the protection of the virtuous, seven courtesans left the shelter (à la Maupassant) for their certain death.

In his ravaged home, Ling Tan missed his wife as he had never missed anyone before, but he felt no more desire for her than if he had been a eunuch. His eldest son was also without desire and, after puzzling, diagnosed it thus: “We hear so many tales of lust and evil against women that the taste for any woman has gone out of us for awhile, and so I think it is with all men who are clean husbands and good men.”

Then soldiers broke in and tore the youngest boy from his work at the loom and, before his brother and his father, “used him as a woman.”

Occupation. Such is the first half of Dragon Seed. The next 100 pages, though they are a little tightly stretched (they cover nearly four years), are just as vivid and painful; they give the first sharp fictional account of resistance in Occupied China.

Every soul and beast and thing was registered and claimed, under the bitterest tyranny Ling Tan had ever dreamed of: all fish, all meat were for the Japanese, who also bought all crops, at a low fixed price. The peasants learned a mask of stupidity and every act of guile, seining for fish by night, threshing by night and hiding their harvests, so that the apparent yield was only half that of the year before. Ling Tan kept his old buffalo too thin and tough for slaughter, and exasperated the sores in his hide with lime, while he begged the beast for forgiveness.

They learned, also, to ally themselves with the free fighting men of the hills, to “harry the enemy like fleas in a dog’s tail so that the beast can make no headway for stopping to gnaw his rear.” Ling Tan’s sons wandered, but always secretly to return, sophisticated in the ways of killing. The eldest son set deep traps and coolly killed his victims with his knife. The second smuggled in firearms from the hill-men, and killed only when he had to. The youngest killed for pure joy and found joy in nothing else. Ling Tan too, who had once been unable to see a chicken die, killed without feeling. His daughter-in-law, Jade, managed, by poisoning some ducks, to kill off Japanese banqueters in the city. At Ling Tan’s signal, slouching and timid crowds of villagers would suddenly fall upon, murder and bury any small enough group of enemy troops.

“This secret anger and this constant search for ways to kill could not but change men’s hearts”; and the change—which calls forth some of the most just and serious writing in the book—deeply worried Ling Tan. In his sleepless nights he thought: “Is this not the end of our people when we become like other warlike people in the world?” And he answered himself, admitting the necessity of killing: “And yet in these days we must remember that peace is good. The young cannot remember, and it is we who must remember and teach them again that peace is man’s great food.”

The later pages of the novel rather sadly peter out. There is a not quite convincing effort, through radio, to give Ling Tan (and the U.S. reader) a realization that his people suffer not alone but as companions among the peoples of a planet. The last 50 pages are would-be-legendary romancing about the fierce third son and the goddess-like young woman who is found fit to be his wife and to pair off with him, presumably, as a symbol of China’s Future.

Mrs. Buck. Pearl Buck has a perception of human life and a prose style which combine most of the vices of the Lang, Leaf & Myers translation of The Iliad with some of the virtues of the Old Testament, Tolstoy, and the early Gertrude Stein. Her five senses are nearer the page than those of most authors. At her best she has a remarkable talent for telling a thing so that it seems not to be told about but actually to happen. Yet her narrative is never quite heroic and her superbly ordered peasant simplicities keep sieving-off into the remote beauties of ballet.

Still, when her ballet is at its best, the living blood beats in it; enough to make this book the timeliest of sermons on the greatest human force among the Allies.