Pearl Buck (1892-1973)—“The Good Earth” (1931), Pulitzer Prize (1932), Nobel Prize in Literature (1938)—had recurrent memory gaps

“Forgetfulness was a useful mechanism for Pearl, a discipline she worked at from her earliest years until it became instinctive. ‘I have the habit of forgetting what I do not care to remember,’ she wrote toward the end of her life. Her autobiography is full of references to canceled or obliterated episodes, nearly always periods of anxiety and disruption that led to major turning points. She forgot what happened after her family’s expulsion from Zhenjiang in the summer of the Boxer uprising—‘for the next few months, I think it was almost a year, my memory falters’—just as she forgot the second great uprooting ten years later when she left for college: ‘My memories of China suddenly dim on that day we left our compound.’ She blanked out her unhappiness at Randolph Macon (‘Of my college days I remember shamefully little’)…(1, p. 164).

“Her novels, like her life, incorporate a kind of ongoing amnesia. The reassurance they convey comes in part from both knowing and not knowing where the bodies are buried, simultaneously acknowledging and denying realities too painful to face directly” (1, p. 240).

“Memory for Pearl was an intensely creative faculty. It opened and closed like quicksand over fragments of the past, absorbing and transforming them, sucking them down only to disgorge them once again as much as ten or twenty years later in fictional or nonfictional form, sometimes in both one after the other” (1, p. 246).

Search “memory gaps” for past discussions of this recurrent topic.

1. Hilary Spurling. Pearl Buck in China: Journey to “The Good Earth.” New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2010/2011.