PAVILION OF WOMEN

When I finished reading Pavilion of Women, I started searching Shakespeare’s sonnets to find the words “marriage of true minds.” Pearl Buck’s book had sparked the memory of a poem I hadn’t read in at least 30 years. My search for the phrase was, perforce, lengthened because I had to stop and read through several poems just because they were beautiful. Then at Number 116 I found the lines,

                                    Let me not to the marriage of true minds
                                    Admit impediments.

The body of the sonnet doesn’t have much to do with the novel, but Madame Wu, the protagonist of Pavilion of Women, does experience a “mental marriage.”

Pearl Buck, the daughter of American missionaries, grew up in China. She wrote novels about traditional Chinese culture; the most famous is probably The Good Earth, made into a movie in 1937. Reading about 1930’s rural Chinese aristocracy is a journey into an alien culture that at first seems stifling. However, the family compound that houses 60-plus people affords privacy that we might envy in our four-bedroom houses. And the restrictions on women seem less pronounced when we see them visiting and especially when we become aware of Madame Wu’s tight hold on the finances and accounts of the family businesses. Ms Buck treats the manners and customs with such ordinariness that they seem right and normal, bringing us into the household as if we had always known this culture.

Pavilion of Women opens on Madame Wu’s fortieth birthday.  At the end of the festivities she tells her husband of 26 years that she is moving out of his apartments and will find a concubine to warm his bed. The plot follows the consequences of those actions.

But when Madame Wu hires the missionary Andre to teach her son English, there is a change in the atmosphere. She supervises the lessons to make sure the monk does not try to convert her son to Christianity. Then in conversation after the lessons, Madame becomes entranced with Andre’s ideas about people’s relationships with God and with each other. After his death she takes on one of his projects — raising 20 girls he has rescued. And his remembered voice becomes her compass for maneuvering in the new world of war, airplanes, communism and democracy.

It’s an engrossing story about a woman who learns to love in spite of herself. And even though the story line could not have happened in the West at any time during the last few hundred years, its universal values and humanity speak to us today, especially to women “of a certain age.” And, although there are no sensual scenes, no violence and no foul language, parental guidance is recommended. This book is about sex!

Woman’s Place

“Upon completing my report on the condition of working-men in Europe, I was deputed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at Washington to examine into the condition of working-women in large American cities.” So begins the Tramp at Home.

The Tramp’s first stop was a labor hall in Brooklyn, where he was greeted with “hoots and jeers.”  The workers seemed to believe the government was run “entirely in the interest of the rich” and thought the Tramp to be a spy.

As he gets on with his task of interviews, he finds that factory workers of first-class intelligence and those working girls with limited intelligence are willing to help by providing information, while those in the middle don’t understand the value of statistics and provide him with silly answers:  “Don’t get any wages — live on love and fresh air” — or with hostility:  “It ain’t the Government’s business if my work ain’t healthy.”

Today there are people who believe that the government should be run “entirely in the interest of the rich,” whom they call job creators. These people would find it refreshing that some working women were hostile to government inquiries.  Perhaps they also believe a woman’s place is in the home.

The Tramp himself muses about a woman’s place — in the kitchen, in the nursery, in the parlor.  “Careful investigation in many lands,” he continues, “has led me to the conclusion that whatever woman’s sphere should be, it actually is about the same as man’s . . . in the very front rank of the hard battle of life.”

Most women work for their daily bread. In Switzerland, a woman is yoked beside an ox to pull a load of hay. In America, a shop girl hired for less than a living wage is advised by her employer to find a friend to help with basic expenses. Thus “a large per cent. of the fallen women in large American cities are graduated from the shop-girl class.”

Today, while there are some women in high places, both corporate and governmental, men’s wages still outpace women’s.  And women often come home from a full day of waiting tables to start on another full day’s work of housekeeping.

While she may not be yoked with an ox, she is still right there on the “front rank of the hard battle of life.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Next book:  Pavilion of Women, Pearl S. Buck

An oxymoronic title?  Isn’t a tramp, by definition, one who has no fixed abode? How then can he be “at home”?

It is this sort of playful skill with words that makes Lee Meriwether’s writing so pleasant and intriguing.

His first book, A Tramp Trip: How to See Europe on 50 Cents a Day, was the result of a bit of youthful rebellion: his father wanted him to go to law school, but he wanted to travel. As a result, in 1886, the 22-year-old set out for Europe on his own, staying with locals and walking his way from country to country.  Not exactly the Grand Tour!

On the steamer coming home to the U.S., he met a member of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and agreed to write up his findings on the conditions of labor in Europe.  The Secretary of the Interior, impressed with the report,  then commissioned the young man to perform a similar survey in his home country.

Meriwether started in the factories of  New York and Brooklyn and then moved on to New England.  Next he headed south.  He investigated conditions in the iron mills of Birmingham and Chattanooga, whose laborers had a lower cost of living, hence accepted lower wages.  “This is why the iron-men of the North and West are becoming alarmed at Southern competition. Probably we shall soon hear them crying for a protective tariff against ‘pauper’ Southern labor.”

He waxes philosophical about the influence of mountains on the independence of the populace: the people of the East Tennessee mountains grow their own food, weave their own cloth, make their own clothes and “distil their own whiskey.” They don’t need the outside world except to purchase “a few agricultural implements, and occasionally small quantities of coffee and tea.”

His recounting of a rural church service, including dinner on the ground (complete with an “opaque jug”) and horse trading and foot-washing, is comical without being disrespectful.  He goes to a dance, comments on “Mountain Etiquette” and spends time imprisoned by moonshiners who believe all “government men” are “revenuers.”

Then he moves on to Texas.

Hello

When I was a child, I often accompanied my grandmother to her root cellar in the basement, where there was also a wooden bin full of books. When I was 10 I began rescuing books and airing them out. That was before the Korean War, and the books were old then!

Once in a while I pull one out and read it, and it leads me to other books.  I hope this blog will entice readers to enjoy older books, and even if they aren’t on your English teacher’s list of classics,  all of them are interesting on several levels.

After this introduction, my first post will be about the author Lee Meriwether — not the 60′s-era actress, but a man born during the Civil War, who lived long enough to celebrate the centennial of the beginning of that war. He wrote a number of books for the general public that should be of interest to present-day historians, anthropologists and sociologists. These were books about the conditions of labor in the 1890′s, both in the US and Europe and about prison reform in the early 20th century.

But more importantly he tells good tales:  about dinner with King Kalakaua, being “kidnapped” by moonshining hillbillies in the Smokies, tramping Europe on fifty cents a day.

Originally, I thought about titling this blog, “Basement Books,” and limiting it to those really old ones! But I may want to digress sometimes and so decided on a less limiting name. With many best wishes for our mutual enjoyment for some out-of-date books,

Kay