In 1984, Professor of English Bert Stern traveled to Beijing to interview Robert Winter, Class of 1909, the College’s oldest living alumnus.
Born in Crawfordsville and taught by Ezra Pound, Winter lived and taught in China during the decades of that country’s greatest upheaval. He was a man many Chinese called “one of us.”
Stern saw in Winter a potential guide for understanding China’s turbulent 20th-century history. He also knew after a few visits with the 97-year-old that he wanted to write his biography.
“Winter was trapped, hopelessly, by infirmity and circumstance—and he complained about it and asked me the impossible favor of freeing him,” Stern writes in Winter in China: An American Life. “Telling his story, it seemed to me, was the only way I had of giving him a kind of freedom.”
Stern left China with an implicit promise—to Winter and himself—to bring Winter’s story to light.
That pledge went largely unmet for years, though not for lack of effort. Stern published an article in a journal and wrote extensively about Winter, but when a planned project with a university press fell through, so did Stern’s hopes of getting the biography published.
Then in 2011, Peking University Press became interested in the book. Stern dusted off his notes and manuscript, and 16 years into his retirement took on the sort of work that would have taxed the stamina of a man half his age.
This year, Winter in China was printed by Xlibris Press. In 2015, Peking University will publish the book in China.
“I feel that I’ve delivered on a long simmering promise,” Stern said as he anticipated his return to Wabash in September to read from the book and to be named an honorary alumnus of the College. “I liked Bob and looked up to him. He and I tacitly understood that my obligation to him was to tell his life as fully and with as much understanding as I could.”
“Romance Personified”
Bob Winter, as his friends called him, was a man famous in his world. His “freakish glands,” in Emily Hahn’s words, for a long time prevented him from showing any signs of advancing age. Winter naturally drew to his side companions like the eminent Chinese scholar John Fairbank and the renowned literary critic I.A. Richards, not to mention a host of Chinese scholars of equal stature.
As China’s history evolved, he lived a variety of lives—university lecturer, Rockefeller Foundation cultural ambassador without portfolio, gardener, health food advocate, and amateur zookeeper par excellence.
During the anti-Japanese war, he even had a fling at espionage. The story of how he rescued a Mongolian Living Buddha from Japanese hands should become a classic of spy literature, and there are a half-dozen stories equal to this, involving everything from gunrunning to smuggling radios and weapons to the Communist guerillas of Shan-tung province.
As Ms. Emily Hahn, writing in the 1940s, put it, “Romance in China is not dead. Bob was this romance personified.”
—from Winter in China: An American Life, by Bert Stern