Pearl S. Buck, the Youngest Woman to Receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on Art, Writing and the Nature of Creativity

by Maria Popova 

“The creative instinct is … an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual… — an energy which no single life can consume.”

On December 10, 1938, novelist, essayist, and civil rights activist Pearl S. Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.” Buck was born in China to American missionary parents and spent the first four decades of her life living there — an experience she wove into her beloved book The Good Earth, which had won the Pulitzer Prize six years earlier. Although three other women had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature prior to Buck, she was and remains the youngest female laureate — at 46, she was nineteen years younger than the average laureate in the category and the third-youngest to that point, after Rudyard Kipling and, only narrowly, Harry Sinclair Lewis. The only younger laureate since Buck has been Albert Camus.
Two days after the announcement, on December 12, Buck took the stage at the Swedish Academy to deliver a superb acceptance address, eventually included Nobel Writers on Writing (public library | IndieBound). Although much of the speech is true to its title — “The Chinese Novel” — at its heart lies a broader, exquisitely timeless contemplation of the purpose of art and the vitalizing nature of creativity.

Buck considers the shimmering aliveness of which creative work is born:

The instinct which creates the arts is not the same as that which produces art. The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the individual keep himself from this process, because only by its full function is he relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy — an energy at once physical and mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more profound than another man’s, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened to that which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that actuality overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not only himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his dreams, into the circle of its activity.

Noting that art is deduced from this activity, Buck nonetheless cautions against preoccupation with forms and techniques at the expense of clarity of creative vision:

The process which creates is not the process which deduces the shapes of art. The defining of art, therefore, is a secondary and not a primary process. And when one born for the primary process of creation, as the novelist is, concerns himself with the secondary process, his activity becomes meaningless. When he begins to make shapes and styles and techniques and new schools, then he is like a ship stranded upon a reef whose propeller, whirl wildly as it will, cannot drive the ship onward. Not until the ship is in its element again can it regain its course.

She considers the primary — and rather primal, really — focus of the writer:

For the novelist the only element is human life as he finds it in himself or outside himself. The sole test of his work is whether or not his energy is producing more of that life. Are his creatures alive? That is the only question. And who can tell him? Who but those living human beings, the people? Those people are not absorbed in what art is or how it is made — are not, indeed, absorbed in anything very lofty, however good it is. No, they are absorbed only in themselves, in their own hungers and despairs and joys and above all, perhaps, in their own dreams. These are the ones who can really judge the work of the novelist, for they judge by that single test of reality. And the standard of the test is not to be made by the device of art, but by the simple comparison of the reality of what they read, to their own reality.

While William Faulkner, in his own Nobel acceptance speech, asserted that the writer’s role is to be a booster of the human spirit and its highest potentiality, Buck argues that the writer’s primary responsibility is to bear witness to human imperfection and, in the act of witnessing, to offer an assurance and an affirmation of our aliveness:

I have been taught, therefore, that though the novelist may see art as cool and perfect shapes, he may only admire them as he admires marble statues standing aloof in a quiet and remote gallery; for his place is not with them. His place is in the street. He is happiest there. The street is noisy and the men and women are not perfect in the technique of their expression as the statues are. They are ugly and imperfect, incomplete even as human beings, and where they come from and where they go cannot be known. But they are people and therefore infinitely to be preferred to those who stand upon the pedestals of art.

A visual history of Nobel Prizes and laureates. Click image for details.