The Good Woman of Chinkiang : PEARL S. BUCK: A Cultural Biography.<i> By Peter Conn (Cambridge University Press, $29.95, 468 pp.)</i>

Pearl S. Buck was a superwoman who did it all as a dutiful daughter, wife, mother (she had one daughter and adopted another seven children), teacher, occasional hostess, philanthropist, indefatigable fund-raiser, feminist and prolific writer. She published her first novel, “The Good Earth,” at the age of 40, then went on to write an astounding 39 books--including 15 Book-of-the-Month Club selections--countless essays, plays, short stories, translations of Chinese texts, children’s books, even poetry. She won the Nobel Prize for literature (with Toni Morrison, Buck is one of two American women to do so ), a Pulitzer, the Order of Jade from China and a dozen honorary degrees.

Despite these accomplishments, Buck’s literary reputation has faded and she has been virtually ignored by the academic community. Peter Conn, an academician who in 1989 left Buck out of his “Literature in America,” has taken a giant step in rectifying the situation with “Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography.”

Conn examines almost every piece of work Buck ever wrote and explains why it’s important today. Interestingly, those reasons--that Buck was a woman, that she wrote about China and family life, and that she was a commercial success--are the very ones that caused her to disappear from the American consciousness. But Conn has gone far beyond merely touting Buck’s literary merits to portray a consistent, believable and immensely fascinating woman. This is biography at its best: informative and entertaining.

Pearl, as Conn familiarly calls her, was born to Presbyterian missionaries in 1893. (She spent half of her life in China with the result that she never felt truly at home anywhere.) Her father, Absalom Sydenstricker, dedicated himself to the quixotic task of saving China’s heathens. His wife, Carrie, married him despite noting that he “lacked a sense of humor, but was undisturbed because she regarded her own tendency to laughter as a warning that she might be morally frivolous.” Once in China, Carrie was lonely, desperately homesick, sadly giving birth to four children only to see them perish and be buried in a country she considered primitive. So embittered was Carrie by her fate that on her deathbed she refused to see Absalom and, when someone put a hymn on the phonograph, pleaded, “Take that away. I have waited, and patiently--for nothing.” Carrie’s final despair and rejection of her faith and life’s work stayed with her daughter for decades. Eventually, Buck saw her father as a fanatic driven by apocalyptic visions and her mother as a woman shackled by deference and self-sacrifice.

Buck was exposed to violence against women and other social horrors from an early age. As a child, she often found hollow unmarked graves containing the bodies of unwanted baby girls. Later, during the war with Japan, Buck witnessed numerous casualties and had to hide with other Americans when the Japanese plundered Nanking.

Her father’s incessant belittling of her accomplishments--he paid for her college tuition but made it clear that he would have preferred to have spent his money on his religious work--had an effect on her self-esteem.

In May 1917, Buck made what she called “the worst blunder” of her life by marrying Lossing Buck, an agricultural missionary stationed in China. The social mores of the times dictated that Pearl should have been content as a professor’s wife, unpaid interpreter and research assistant. And she played her part well, even going as far as reading to her husband when his eyes were tired. Three years later, she added to her chores the care of her only biological child, Carol, who was born with phenylketonuria, a disease that, left untreated, leads to severe retardation. According to Conn, Pearl hid Carol’s existence for the next 20 years, deliberately omitting her from biographical material.

In 1929, the Bucks left Carol, age 9, at a private facility in New Jersey that cost $1,000 a year. Frantic to make the payments for her daughter’s care, Buck sat down to write “The Good Earth,” which was published in 1931. Lossing, who also had a book out that year on Chinese agriculture, congratulated his wife on her bestseller but “made it clear that he considered his work as far more significant.” (Her father refused to read the book, saying he didn’t have the time.) Meanwhile, her relationship with Richard Walsh, her editor at John Day, grew into one of the most successful literary partnerships in history. A few years later, Buck and Walsh divorced their respective spouses and married.

How did the rest of the world respond to Buck’s success? J. Edgar Hoover, judging Buck’s correct assessment of the China situation as unpatriotic, sicked the FBI on her, creating one of the longest dossiers on any American writer. The missionary community, deploring the lack of Christianity in her work, mounted a vicious campaign against her. She fueled their ire by criticizing missionaries as “narrow, uncharitable, unappreciative, ignorant.” In one of many responding volleys, the man who replaced Absalom in his mission said that Buck had “lost her bearings, run amok . . . prostituted her genius . . . debased her womanhood.”

The white male literary establishment consistently dismissed her books as “women’s novels.” When Buck won the Nobel Prize, her fellow writers grumbled that the prize just didn’t mean what it used to. Critic Norman Holmes Pearson complained, “Do they intend to make [the Nobel] as hammish [sic] as the Pulitzer award? Thank heavens I have seen no one who has taken it seriously. . . .” Later, when newspapers floated speculation that William Faulkner might win, he said rather churlishly, “It’s not the sort of thing to decline; a gratuitous insult to do so but I don’t want it. I had rather be in the same pigeon hole with Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, than with Sinclair Lewis and Mrs. Chinahand Buck.”

But living well is the best revenge. So Buck dressed expensively, bought large houses, endowed her daughter’s institution and supported her ex-husband and his parents. An outsider all her life, she campaigned against bigotry of all sorts, lecturing on women’s issues, calling for an end to the Chinese exclusion acts, condemning the internment of Japanese Americans and raising money for China relief, black civil rights and children. She founded Welcome House, the first international adoption agency in the U.S. (Conn adopted his own daughter from Welcome House, where, over the years, he met people who had known Buck.) She counted among her confidantes Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Foster Snow, Margaret Sanger and Margaret Mead. And, despite what the critics said, Buck became one of the most frequently translated authors of the century; in one year 69 editions of her work appeared.

Conn has done an amazing amount of research, gathering material from scores of sources, including libraries, Buck’s relatives, friends and business associates, as well as having full access to the holdings of the Pearl S. Buck Family Trust. All this makes my one criticism so peculiar: He repeatedly brings up the secrecy surrounding her daughter’s disability, even suggesting that Buck’s reticence was used for publicity purposes to create a veil of mystery around the writer, and that she kept the secret until 1950 when she published “The Child Who Never Grew,” which helped break the stigma about mental retardation.

However, if Conn had gone to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences--and it’s odd he didn’t given the popularity of the film versions of Buck’s books--he would have found two references to Carol’s condition. The first appeared in Picturegoer in 1937, the other, entitled “When a Little Child Fell Ill,” was the feature article in the program for the premiere of the film of “The Good Earth.” (Neither article uses the word “retarded,” but in the context of the code words of those days, the meaning is clear.) These magazines had to get the information from someone. If not Buck, then who? If nothing else, this omission may say something about the nature of “academic” research and the fact that a gold mine like the Academy Library can be overlooked.

This one caveat aside, “Pearl S. Buck” is a compelling biography, a must-read for people interested in China, the publishing world, awe-inspiring women, the struggles of people of color or the day-to-day dramas of human life.