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

NAMING MAGIC ^{INTERVIEW BY DOROTHY GILBERT THE CALIFORNIA QUARTERLY, NO. 13-14 SPRING/SUMMER 1978}

This interview took place in December 1976 in the house on Arch Street in North Berkeley where Ursula Le Guin’s parents lived when she was born, and where she herself grew up. Ms. Le Guin met me at the door and led me through the living room and through the kitchen, where her mother looked up from some culinary project to greet us; Ms. Le Guin and I went into a small, sunlit room off the back garden, which had been her father’s study. It is now her room when she comes to Berkeley to visit. Through the windows one can look out at the garden and hear the sound of a small fountain. It is a room that suggests concentration, relaxation and practical comfort; it is decorated in blacks and browns, and contains a bunk bed, several comfortable chairs and a large table. Ursula K. Le Guin is a tall, slender woman with a neat cap of straight dark hair and large dark eyes. She speaks in a deep, low, musical voice with many inflections; it is a voice that conveys humor, or delight in small ironies, particularly well. As we talked, she smoked a briar pipe.

DOROTHY GILBERT: You grew up in this house. Does it have strong associations for you of your development as a writer, of when you first developed a sense of yourself as a writer?

URSULA K. LE GUIN: Well, sure. It’s a pretty strong-minded house.

GILBERT: Yes, I can see that.

LE GUIN: And a very livable house. Of course I lived here until I was seventeen, and didn’t move around. So, my whole beginnings are here. And in the Napa Valley.

GILBERT: Oh, yes, there was the family home called Kishamish, in the Napa Valley. The name came from a mythical figure that your brother made up, I gather.

LE GUIN: Yes. Sort of a legend.

GILBERT: Was there much of that kind of legend-making, of make-believe, among you and your brothers in your childhood?

LE GUIN: Well—yes. All my brothers were nutty in different ways. We were all nutty. That brother is the only one who made up myths.

GILBERT: You didn’t do that?

LE GUIN: Well, not in public. He told his aloud.

GILBERT: I see. Have you always assumed that you would be a writer?

LE GUIN: Yes.

GILBERT: You didn’t decide one day, “That’s what I’m going to do?”

LE GUIN: No, I just knew it.

GILBERT: What led you to science fiction?

LE GUIN: Trying to get published. The stuff I wrote has always been—it’s had what you’d have to call a fantasy element.

GILBERT: It always did?

LE GUIN: Always, right from the start, except for the poetry. It took place in an imaginary country or something like that, and the publishers didn’t know what to call it; they didn’t know what it was. And they didn’t publish it. And I got back to reading science fiction in my late twenties, and I thought hey, you know, maybe I could call my stuff science fiction. So I sent a story to Cele Lalli at Fantastic magazine, and she bought it. And from then on I was a science fiction writer. They found a label for me. I had a pigeonhole. You have to have a pigeonhole. You have to start with a pigeonhole.

GILBERT: And you can’t be half in each of two pigeonholes, either!

LE GUIN: Well, you can once you get started, yes. I’m a juvenile writer, a science fiction writer, and now I’m—well, The Dispossessed and the Orsinian tales and so on are not labeled science fiction. Now I’m a writer. But you have to get started, apparently, in a box, with a label. Then you can break out of the box.

GILBERT: I know from speaking to other science fiction writers, like Joanna Russ, that sometimes you have frustrations if you’re starting out in your career, and you try two things at once. Or if you do something that doesn’t quite fit in one category or another. Then you didn’t call your science fiction “science fiction” yourself.

LE GUIN: No, it really is a publisher’s label, and a bookseller’s label. And it’s a useful label, I don’t resent it. I like to go to a bookstore and find the science fiction all together. And yet in a way it has—I don’t use the label much for my own stuff, partly because everybody uses it differently. It’s a convenience label, but it doesn’t really mean anything, and of course nobody’s ever been able to define it. “What is the difference between science fiction and fantasy?’ [Laughs]

GILBERT: Oh, yes. Of course, there’s the convenient label “speculative fiction.” “Spec fic.”

LE GUIN: “Spec fic.” Yes. [Laughs] It beats “sci-fic.” I don’t mind “s-f,” but “sci-fi,” for some reason, grates.

GILBERT: You take an obvious pleasure in dealing with myths, folk myths and magic; some of my favorite examples of that are from A Wizard of Earthsea, where one can follow the apprenticeship and the difficult and dangerous career of the mage Ged, and also in your story “The Word of Unbinding,” where the magician keeps trying to escape, and trying to change himself into various things. I think, by the way, that you have a good deal of sophisticated fun with stereotypes—folk expectations of a sort—in your story “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow.” I’ve noticed that in a great deal of your work—as in J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and some of the best writers of “fantasy” or “science fiction”—there are traces of myths and legends from all over this planet, and I noticed particularly the reluctance of certain of your characters to disclose their true names, or “truenames.” They show this reluctance much as the California Indian tribes do, I gather.

LE GUIN: Many peoples. Many peoples.

GILBERT: And when they don’t reveal their truenames, they don’t surrender their identities, or put themselves into someone else’s power. And I also noticed traces of cultures from other parts of the world—magicians, kings, the ability of magicians like Festin [in “The Word of Unbinding”] and Ged to transform themselves.

LE GUIN: Yes. Again, that’s very widespread, that kind of folk belief.

GILBERT: When you have an idea for a story, do all these ideas for myths in the work come to you at once? How do you sort this out?

LE GUIN: Well, there are several things involved here. One is that science fiction allows a fiction writer to make up cultures, to invent—not only a new world, but a new culture. Well, what is a culture besides buildings and pots and so on? Of course it’s ideas, and ways of thought, and legends. It’s all the things that go on inside the heads of the people. So, if you want to make a world and populate it, you also have to make up a civilization and a culture. My father preferred to go find these things; I prefer to invent them. I’m lazier than he was. Of course, where the myths and legends come from is from your own head, the whole thing’s coming out of your own head; but it’s a sort of combination process of using your intellect to make a coherent-looking body of culture that you can refer to. Tolkien, of course, is the master of this kind of invention. You get the sense in his books of an enormous history, a great body of legend and history and myth all mixed together, which he refers to, so that you get the sense that it really exists. Of course a lot of it does, the book he was working on when he died apparently contains a lot of this body of myths. Well, in a sense you have to make it appear as if it were real, but where it comes from is your own unconscious mind, and it’s your own myths—the ones you’ve absorbed and the ones we all—if Jung is right—have within us. We share them. And you’re drawing upon your own, your personal mythology.

GILBERT: And the fact that you remember or cherish certain myths from other cultures perhaps means that those are your own personal mythology.

LE GUIN: Anybody can hear a story, or read a myth, that hits something deep within them. The ones you remember are the ones that reflect something deep within yourself, which you probably can’t put into words, except maybe as a myth. If you’re a painter, you could paint it, if you’re a musician you could put it into music. But in words you have to do it indirectly. It has to come out as a story.

GILBERT: Have you always done this?

LE GUIN: Well, I got better at it as I went along. [Laughs] But yes, I guess so.

GILBERT: Was it hard to learn? It’s a complicated art form.

LE GUIN: Well, it just came natural to me. It’s obviously the line I always wanted to follow.

GILBERT: Have you ever felt that you had to resist a fascination with a particular culture, or felt that a particular culture was having too great an influence on your work?

LE GUIN: A particular, real, existing earth culture? No, no. Except one is culture-bound. One’s own culture is going to dominate one. Again, it seems rather immodest, but science fiction and anthropology do have a good deal in common. As the cultural anthropologist must resist and be conscious of his own cultural limitations, and bigotries, and prejudices—he can’t get rid of them, but he must be conscious of them—I think a science fiction writer has a responsibility to do the same thing if he’s inventing what he calls a different planet, a different race, alien beings, and so on. His beings can’t just be white Anglo-Saxon Protestants with tentacles. You do have to do some rethinking—and [with] a certain self-consciousness of your own bias. But you can’t get rid of your limitations; you can’t deculturate yourself.

GILBERT: You have, like many poets and writers, a love of names and words, and many of the names you use are extremely evocative. The names are part of the strong spell, for me, of The Left Hand of Darkness—names like Karhide, Ehrenrang, Orgoreyn, etc. I suspect you got the last name from Oregon, didn’t you?

LE GUIN: No. No, it comes from ogres. Everybody thinks it’s rain in Oregon. [Laughs] But it’s not.

GILBERT: You must be very tired of that assumption.

LE GUIN: Oh, I don’t blame people. I just hadn’t heard it. [Pauses to think] I wanted the vague sense of threat—Orgoreyn sounds slightly threatening to me, and yet it’s a rather pretty word. Most of my names mean nothing. They are not puns, they are not anagrams. They’re just pure sound. They just sound right to me.

GILBERT: A pun can be distracting, sometimes.

LE GUIN: Yes. The book becomes a puzzle, instead of a novel.

GILBERT: Do you spend much time sorting out words, testing them? Testing names, that is?

LE GUIN: I have to for the main characters’ names. This whole naming magic is partly just a reflection of my own; a reflection of the way I work. If I can’t find a character’s name, I can’t write the book. The name has to be right—and when I get the name, it usually means the story’s going to come clear. Which is totally mystical; I have no explanation of this whatever.

GILBERT: Do you mean that it’s a sort of parallel development? You’re thinking of the story, and you’re also searching for the name?

LE GUIN: It’s as if the name were a key. And I know there’s a door there, and if I get the name right, it means I’m going to be able to get the door open, and go on in and find the story on the other side. But why this is so, I have no idea.

GILBERT: And then the other names start going?

LE GUIN: Yes, and the lesser names are always—they’re quite easy. And I can change them without doing any harm. But when I wrote A Wizard of Earthsea, I had considerable trouble finding what Ged’s truename was. And until I found it, I couldn’t go on. He had to lose his child’s name. Writing that part took—I had a whole page of names.

GILBERT: Do you often make lists of names?

LE GUIN: Oh, yes. Sometimes I think I’ve found it—oh, yes, that’s it—but no, that’s not quite right. [Laughs] And then I can’t write about this person.

GILBERT: You try a few names for a couple of days?

LE GUIN: Yes. Yes.

GILBERT: Have you a favorite among your books? Maybe that’s a terrible question, like asking if you have a favorite among your children, but do you have a favorite work?

LE GUIN: [Laughs] Well, in general it’s the one that I’m working on, of course, as all writers will admit. I think probably the best put-together book I’ve written is A Wizard of Earthsea. It moves with the most clarity and strength from beginning to end. I think perhaps my favorite of the ones I’ve written is The Dispossessed. I put most into it. It’s also the most faulty—probably for that reason—of my grown-up books.

GILBERT: Do you actually think of The Dispossessed as an “ambiguous Utopia,” as it’s described on the cover?

LE GUIN: That was my suggestion. I told the publisher to use that description as a subtitle. They were a little afraid of it, because “ambiguous” is a big word, for one thing. And Utopia does suggest to most of us—eeeuuuuuw—you know, dull stories. With morals. And so—one of the publishers used it, one didn’t. One of them used it in the blurb for the jacket, or something like that. And I think the English publisher printed it as a subtitle. I just sort of said, if you want to use this as a subtitle, do. Yes, I do think the book is an ambiguous Utopia—in all senses.

GILBERT: I am particularly fond of The Left Hand of Darkness; it evokes so many things so well. I like the names, and the evocation of the planet Winter, and the feeling of danger—political danger—of the trip across the ice at the end. Also, of course—I’m sure you’ve heard this many times—the imagination and daring of creating those androgynous beings. I like that very much.

LE GUIN: It was a very exciting book to write. It was kind of my breakthrough; in my first three science fiction books, I bit off much less, and did much less, and I think that with The Left Hand of Darkness I hit my stride, in a way. And it was very exciting to realize how much you could say in science fiction, how much of a real novel you could write. This form does lend itself to the novel, not just to the adventure story. And that was a delight. The Winter part was easy because I’m an Antarctic fan and that grew out of a long obsession with reading Captain Scott’s diaries and journals.

GILBERT: Have you been to that kind of country?

LE GUIN: No! As I say, I never left Berkeley until I was seventeen, I’d never seen snow until I went east. That’s why I like it so much, I suppose. [Laughs a little] But the androgyny part was hard, because I wrote that in 1967, and, as I’ve said elsewhere, it was when the present feminist movement was just beginning, just getting started. Some of the major books—modern books on feminism—were being written at about that same time, and this apparently was my approach. I’m not a theorist or activist, but—[pauses to think]—I wanted to find out what the differences between men and women really were, and so I used this sort of experimental situation of having people who were both men and women at once.

GILBERT: Sorting out new roles.

LE GUIN: Yes, and finding out what it would be like to be a man-woman, or a woman-man. And it was great fun; but it was rough, and I had to do a lot of homework on sex roles and on physiology, and on all sorts of things, which was fun. So I did some early feminist reading then, which I’d never done before.

GILBERT: You mean people like Mary Wollstonecraft?

LE GUIN: Yes, and Margaret Mead, and Ashley Montagu, and so on. The books that came just before our modern surge of feminist books. So it was a good education for me.

GILBERT: Did it take you a long time to think up the psychology of the androgynous characters in The Left Hand of Darkness?

LE GUIN: It took a long time to work out. For that book I really had to spend about six months, planning the people, the geography, the culture, everything. It was a long time before I could sit down and write the book.

GILBERT: You took notes, then?

LE GUIN: Yes, for that book I really had a notebook full of maps, and history, and all sorts of junk that didn’t get into the book—or only got in because I knew—you know, you’ve got to know, whether it gets into the book or not, how long the last king reigned and stuff like that.

GILBERT: Yes, I can see that you must work that way. When someone reads your books, or when he reads Tolkien, he feels that there is a whole atmosphere around him, a whole history around him. That’s part of the great fascination of the Earthsea books—with their maps of the Archipelago and so on—and of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. You’re surrounded by all sorts of things that would surround a whole life; you’re in a completely different world, but a whole one. Or so it seems.

LE GUIN: Yes. Somehow it’s a solid satisfaction, both for writer and reader, I think, to have this totally illusory perception of a non-existent reality. Another odd thing about that book is that—you know those myths that come into it, the little chapters which are local myths and legends?

GILBERT: Some of them very moving.

LE GUIN: They were not meant to go into the book, at first. I would hit snags with these people’s psychology, as I was writing the book, and I would think, well, now, how would Therem [Estraven, the main character] really feel about this? And I would be snagged up. So, one of these myths would sort of pop out and write itself, and it would explain something to me, obviously working on a kind of unconscious level. Then I stuck most of them into the book; I finally decided that if they were a help to me they might help the reader, too.

GILBERT: What has been the reaction of readers to those myths, in particular?

LE GUIN: Any novel reader or science fiction reader who is strong on fantasy is particularly fond of that element of the book, because that’s where it does run off into myth and fantasy. So those people like it particularly. I think that some of the others wonder what that stuff’s in there for.

GILBERT: Yes: I wondered if you got comments like, “I particularly liked the myth of the two young men on the hut on the ice,” or “Why do you stop your story and tell us these things?”

LE GUIN: Most of the reaction have been favorable. Most people seem to like those myths, or, if they don’t, they’re polite and don’t tell me.

GILBERT: I am, I must tell you, particularly moved by that myth of the two young princes on the ice. There’s the terrifying and beautiful legend of the person who meets the ghost of his brother inside the blizzard; and then there’s the legend of the two lovers on the ice.

LE GUIN: That’s kind of central to the book. After all, the book is a kind of re-telling of that legend, you see.

GILBERT: Yes. And then the long and dangerous trip over the ice, at the end of the book, is so fascinating. Where you see the old legend evolving again, as if there is an enormous cycle in the culture of the planet Winter and the people in that region of Karhide.

LE GUIN: Yes, that was great fun to write.

GILBERT: Had you thought of the androgynous beings before? How did that idea come to you?

LE GUIN: It came as I was working out this culture which I wanted—one of the original ideas for the book was, I wanted a planet with a lot of cultures on it, a lot of civilizations, a long history, that had never had a major war. This was actually how it began, and the androgyny came secondary to that, to begin with. Then that became a very minor element, once I got the idea that these were androgynes. I wrote a short story about the planet Winter, “Winter’s King”; I didn’t know yet they were androgynes, when I wrote that.

GILBERT: I’ve read the most recent version of that story.

LE GUIN: Yes, now I know about the androgynes, and I can put the pronouns into the feminine.

GILBERT: I want to ask you about that. I read that story after I read The Left Hand of Darkness, and when I read the novel, I was very much struck by these very convincing people, and I would not have known that a novelist could portray androgynes so convincingly, and I was fascinated. Then I read the story, in which you used the feminine pronoun for the people. It worked for me. I had wondered about using the masculine pronoun, and I guess I thought, as you did, that there was no way around it, other than making up artificial pronouns.

LE GUIN: Which I think you can get by with in a short story; and apparently they don’t bother some people; but at the length of a novel, and a serious novel, which is trying to make some point beside feminism—and I was—I just think it would drive a normal reader mad. I really do. And I think it would really weaken the book. It weakens the language. You have to work with the language you’re given. And thank God it’s English. But I’m sorry we don’t have a generic pronoun. It makes a great deal of difference. We’re trapped with this he. Thank goodness for one. And you can use they a good deal —and I don’t mind they, I don’t care what the English teachers say. I think they is often a good road out—instead of he or she—but you can’t always use it.

GILBERT: Can you say something about where you feel your work is going now?

LE GUIN: I have no idea. My most recent book is A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else, or Very Far Away from Anywhere Else. There was a slight mistake in the title.

GILBERT: Which is the real title?

LE GUIN: The title was meant to be A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else, and I simply didn’t get it straight with Atheneum. It’s not their fault at all, it’s my fault. I sent them a preliminary title and didn’t realize… So in England it’s A Very Long Way and here it’s Very Far Away. But it’s the same book. It’s just a story for young adults, I guess—no fantasy, no science fiction at all. It’s just a very short—well, sort of a love story. It’s about a high school boy who’s bright, which is not a very fashionable subject. But it’s very difficult to be bright in high school. And it’s about a high school girl who wants to be a composer. And they kind of find each other—you know, how some time along in high school you find another person like yourself. But then there are problems, they have to work out their relationship. And that’s all there is to it. It’s very short. And it’s absolutely straightforward realism, I suppose you’d call it. So, I didn’t expect that, I didn’t plan to write that, no publisher particularly asked for me to write anything like that. It just happened. I like it. I think it came out rather nice. But what happens next, God knows.

GILBERT: Do you like that feeling?

LE GUIN: Yes. Yes. I cannot write to order. I cannot make a deal with a publisher until I can send him a completed manuscript. I can write essays and stuff to order; I learned how to write term papers in college. But writing fiction—I can’t. I have to just wait and see what happens.

GILBERT: Have you ever tried to write to order?

LE GUIN: Well, no; I’ve tried to force myself to write. Just because I wasn’t writing, and it was time I wrote something. Well, it was a disaster. It has to come. Some of us are just at the mercy of our unconscious, I guess. And of course you control it, and of course you get work habits, and you learn that there is a tap you can turn on; you can sit down at your desk and you can write, if you’re working on something already. If the initial gift has been given you, then it’s your job to write, and that’s work, and it takes discipline and so on. But with me, it is a gift, it isn’t just something I invent by myself. I wish I could. It’d be nice.

GILBERT: Do you work at home? Do you have a regular schedule?

LE GUIN: Oh, yes. I’ve met one other professional writer who didn’t, and that’s Harlan Ellison, because Harlan can write anywhere, anytime, anyplace. You know, in shop windows, at a big New Year’s party—Harlan doesn’t need a schedule, because he has such enormous energy. And he’s free, too. Anyone with the usual commitments and so on—you have to have a schedule. When the kids were little, I worked at night. When they were babies, after they were in bed. When they started going to school, it was while they were at school. So it’s sort of nine to one, or nine to twelve.

GILBERT: Do you feel that it has been hard for you to be a writer and, at the same time, fulfill your obligations to your family? Have you found it hard to devote your energies to raising children and to writing?

LE GUIN: Well, yes. There are times, like when I read about Lady Antonia Fraser, with her big books and her five children and fifteen nursemaids or whatever it is, that I feel a profound and evil envy. Or when I hear about some man who has quit a paying job to “devote himself to writing full time”—I get mean. I think, oh buddy. I wrote when I had jobs I got paid for; when I quit those, I still had a fulltime job, the kids and the house, and I still wrote. Who is doing your work for you, Mr. Fulltime Writer? Mrs. Fulltime Writer? And where are her novels? But all this is mean, as I said. The fact is, I’m married to a man who has for twenty-four years ungrudgingly shared the work: the kids, the house, the whole schmeer. Two people can do three fulltime jobs—teaching, writing and family. And when pressed I will admit that I think this sort of sharing arrangement is better, though much more tiring, than the fifteen nursemaids, or than hiring help in any way. If I was “free,” as so many male writers have been free, I would be impoverished. Why should all my time be my own, just because I write books? There are human responsibilities, and those include responsibilities to daily life, to common human work. I mean, cleaning up, cooking, all the work that must be done over and over all one’s life, and also the school concert and the impossible geometry homework and so on. Responsibility is privilege. If you delegate that work to others, you’ve copped out of the very source of your writing, which after all is life, isn’t it, just living, people living and working and trying to get along.

Well, anyhow, so you get the others off to their work, at school or college, and you shut the door on the grotty kitchen and you sit down at your desk and do your work for a while. Or anyhow you sit there and stare and wish you were doing it. An awful lot of writing seems to be sitting and staring.

GILBERT: Thinking through something.

LE GUIN: Thinking about things; thinking about putting down lousy ideas—

GILBERT: Looking through notebooks?

LE GUIN: Looking through notebooks—exactly. Writing journals if there’s nothing better to do. [Laughs, lights her pipe]

GILBERT: Do you have strong feelings about where you think science fiction is going?

LE GUIN: I’m a little worried about it, at the moment. A couple of years ago, we were all very hyper. We thought we were really taking off, where we should have been going all along. At the moment, I think we’re sort of hesitating. There are some marvelous writers writing now, some of them appreciated, some not—people like Phil Dick, and Stanislaw Lem, D. G. Compton in England; there’s absolutely high-class writing being done, as good as any other kind of writing that’s being done. It seems to me, though, that there’s an increasing amount of schlock being written. That worries me a little. I thought maybe the schlock would taper off. There seems to be an awful lot of young writers who are grinding out the old baloney, and they’re going back and using the same old patterns of the 1930s and ’40s, which we all thought, a couple of years ago, that we really were outgrowing. There’s a great market for this stuff and the demand is going to find the supply somewhere. But I find it a little depressing. An awful lot of publishers really would rather have the schlock, you see.

GILBERT: They think there’s a big market for it?

LE GUIN: There is, apparently. It sells, yes. I think there’s a bigger market for the good stuff. It may not sell as well at first. It won’t sell so well in the drugstores. Look at Phil Dick’s books. Phil Dick has never got any publicity, he’s never got any real appreciation, very little inside the field, none outside. But his books are all coming back into print, because they are good books, they are first-rate novels. At least five or six or seven of them are absolutely first-rate novels, by any standards, and they are going to stay in print. He’s permanent—and science fiction publishers, particularly the paperbacks, aren’t used to thinking in terms of permanence. They think in terms of throwaways. And so that’s what’s got to be changed. And now that science fiction is being used in high schools and colleges, that means the book is going to sell year after year because that’s the book the teacher uses. And they’ve got to keep it in print, and they haven’t even realized that yet. They’re just beginning to.

GILBERT: And Phil Dick’s books, and your books, are being used for these purposes. They’re being used in courses all over the place.

LE GUIN: Sure. They’re fun to teach. In high school, it’s a way to get kids reading. In college they often like to work them into psych courses and sociology courses because they give nice illustrations of points the teacher wants to make. So they’re very useful. And I think it’s lovely that they’re using them that way. It doesn’t do anybody any harm, I don’t think. [Laughs]