Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

INTRODUCTION ^{DAVID STREITFELD}

Many celebrated novelists are not especially keen on interviews. They have nothing to say or they’ve said it all before or they’d rather spend their time writing or they’re afraid of giving up the hard-won secrets to their work. An interview is, at best, something to be endured.

Ursula K. Le Guin was different. She loved the push and pull of a good conversation. Her stories were laden with meaning, but she wrote without conscious intention, as a voyage of discovery—which meant that after publication she was delighted to entertain readers’ conclusions about where she ended up. She liked to do interviews in front of an audience and liked to do them by mail or email so she could weigh her replies. And she did them in person in her home, sometimes improving the transcript later, sometimes not. She always had something to say.

When necessary, Le Guin could play the role of the interviewer too, always better than whoever nominally had the job. Paul Walker, doing a Q&A for the fanzine Luna Monthly in 1976, could not visit her at her home in Oregon, so he asked from afar what would happen if he showed up and said, “Tell me about yourself.”

“Sure,” Le Guin playfully responded, “I could give you a vivid description of Mrs. Le Guin (Tall, balding, full-bearded, she met me at the door with a hearty handclasp. ‘Come in and help us gut the elk’ she boomed). But then I could give you other descriptions equally vivid (It was at first difficult to induce Mrs. Le Guin to speak, as she hung placidly head downward from a branch of the large catalpa tree in the drawing room).”

And then, the joke made, she cut to her point: “But what is truth, as jesting Pilate remarked, and what is the good of the cult of personality, I wonder? I mean some of us are Norman Mailer, right on, but others of us are middle-aged Portland housewives. It seems to me that my public self is in my books, and my private self is and should be of real interest only to myself and family.”

She maintained that distinction for more than forty years, talking publicly but not privately. It was enough. Some writers need experience to feed the imagination, but Le Guin’s experiences were all in her head. She prided herself in having as few external stimuli as possible. She told an interviewer from Poland in 1988 her ideal schedule:

She felt sorry for writers who have to force themselves to the typewriter. She didn’t understand writer’s block. “I have always liked to work,” she confessed. There was nowhere else she wanted to be, and even if there was, she couldn’t get there: she didn’t drive. She took a sabbatical year in London, went to Australia for a convention, and visited her family’s Napa Valley ranch every summer. That was about it. “I did that introversion/extroversion test once long ago, and I was just off the charts on introvert,” she told Interview magazine in 2015. “I was slightly inhuman. It was sort of scary.”

With such a passion for routine and order, the wonder is that the books were not routine as well. She could have written forty-three volumes set in the Earthsea archipelago instead of a mere six, made a bundle off them, and, given our debased age, been just as acclaimed. But she let her inspiration guide her, and it went all over the place. She wrote novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, essays, performance art, commencement speeches, how-to-write manuals, introductions, translations, criticism, children’s picture books, books for young adults, the text for photography volumes, and letters to the editor. She liked blogging, even after it was no longer in vogue. She was a political activist in word and deed. She did not like Twitter.

Her first story, at age nine, was about a man who sees elves. No one else can see them, but they get him in the end. That might have been the bleakest thing she ever wrote. She spent her twenties unknown and unpublished, learning her craft, then another five years breaking into the field of science fiction with pleasant but minor works. Then bang, in her late thirties she wrote and published her first masterpieces, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, within months of each other. The former was issued by an obscure Berkeley press, the latter as a paperback from Ace, the big sci-fi factory, but the reputation of both quickly transcended these modest beginnings. Left Hand was particularly influential with other writers, showing them how they could stretch their subject matter into areas like gender, but I suspect Wizard molded more readers. It taught them what they owe to the world—a reversal of most fantasy, which is about what the world owes you. Wizard is about power and responsibility, and how the greatest enemy is often within.

In the mid-1970s, when I was a science fiction–besotted teen, Wizard was reissued by Bantam with a cover showing a dragon intertwined with a town and its castle, his nostrils belching smoke. Neither too cute nor too grim, that cover sold me, and I read my first Le Guin. I liked the book and appreciated its Tolkien-flavored heroic quest, but nothing more. In 2003, covering a senseless war, I took my copy to Baghdad. At night I would crouch behind the bed in my hotel room, the safest place I could find, listening to the explosions in the distance and reading. The book had changed, acquiring depths I never noticed. I learned how Ged, the young wizard who has immense gifts and is arrogant about them, was apprenticed to the mage Ogion:

Wizard, its sequels, and Left Hand dominated discussion of Le Guin’s work for decades, with the occasional addition of The Dispossessed for those of a more political bent. This irritated the writer, who found herself endlessly talking about books she had written long ago. When Nick Gevers, in an interview reprinted in this volume, asked her in 2001 about her current work, her relief was palpable. As she moved through her eighties, the entire scope of her career became visible and she became a cultural sage. In 2007, Death Ray magazine tried to sum things up:

The first interview with a writer I can remember reading was a conversation with Le Guin in a science fiction fanzine called Algol in 1975. It was originally a radio interview, and like many of the author’s interviews, she reworked it heavily for print. She had won a Hugo from the science fiction fans for The Left Hand of Darkness, and a National Book Award for children’s literature for The Farthest Shore, the third Earthsea book, and so the interviewer rather crassly asked:

By the time she was in her eighties, they were giving Nobels for fantasy (Portugal’s José Saramago, for one) and she herself was a contender. I told her one year she was given odds of twenty-five to one, and she fired back that she knew what that meant: “All I have to do in the next twenty-five years is outlive the other twenty-four writers.” Le Guin, in retrospect, never had a chance with the Swedish Academy, which was enmeshed in a sexual harassment and abuse scandal that it covered up for years.

Someday scholars will seek out every Le Guin interview in every fanzine and Oregon newspaper. They will transcribe all the Q&As on YouTube and track down the public appearances that are not. The result will be several fat volumes, full of wisdom and other good things. In the meantime, here’s a sampling of some quotes from interviews that did not fit into this volume, but which I found particularly illuminating.

Why even her bleakest stories are interwoven with optimism:

How she became a feminist in the early 1970s:

The humor in her work that many cannot see:

On science fiction:

On the unconventional form of her far-future Napa Valley novel Always Coming Home, which reversed her usual method of composition:

Sex in fiction:

On form:

Whether she saw herself as a radical:

Why the map of Earthsea came before the stories:

How being a Westerner influenced her work and career:

The reality of made-up things:

Learning to argue with Tolstoy:

How our uncertain reality requires new storytellers:

As she grew older, she became even more irreverent. Here, a year before her death, she takes on a question from the Times Literary Supplement, “What will your field look like 25 years from now?”:

Life is a journey back to where you started from, Le Guin always said. True voyage is return. When you get there, you might know a little more than when you began.

I’m reading A Wizard of Earthsea again, this time aloud, to my nine-year-old daughter. I still have the same well-traveled copy of the book I bought in 1975, although it is beginning to disintegrate. We’ve made it to the part where Ged, whose arrogance has caused him to let loose a monstrous shadow creature on the world, is sailing to confront the dragon. Lily wants to know why Ged has to fight the dragon instead of making friends with it, and why all the wizards are men. I tell her Le Guin eventually had the same questions, and that the sequels show a different picture of life in Earthsea.

The book has shifted for me again. As a teenager I saw it as a heroic adventure tale. During my brief stint as a war correspondent it was a parable of power. Now it is a book about reckoning with oneself, about how to live fully and honestly. Ged’s only hope for survival is to turn the tables on his shadowy pursuer, to hunt the hunter, to take back the world. It is a message that seems particularly potent at this troubled moment in our country, one that Le Guin echoed in her 2014 National Book Foundation lifetime achievement acceptance speech:

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”