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

IN A WORLD OF HER OWN ^{INTERVIEW BY NORA GALLAGHER MOTHER JONES JANUARY 1984}

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin lives in Portland, Oregon, in an old house that looks down on the shipyards and docks of the Williamette River. The house is clean and very spare: in the upstairs bedrooms (the Le Guins have three children, all of whom have left home), each bed is covered with a simple cotton cover, each floor has a single rug. At the end of the upstairs hallway, behind a door usually kept closed, is a tiny room, once a nursery, with French windows opening out to the tops of trees—hawthorn, pear, apple, willow. Within this room, for the past twenty years, Le Guin has been inventing and constructing whole worlds of her own.

On the wall above a narrow day bed, pieces of graph paper hang from large metal clips. On one, in Le Guin’s neat, penciled hand, is a map: two fingers of land interrupted by a sea. This is northern California, the author explains, and part of Nevada with the Central Valley in between, under water. Covering this sketch, on a sheet of transparent paper, are the familiar towns of the Napa Valley—St. Helena, Calistoga, Yountville—as well as the Sierra and lava beds in the northeast of the state. This map is only for reference so that Le Guin will not make a gross error when she describes the distances between the very unfamiliar towns—Sinshan and Wakwaha and Chumo—on a third sheet overlaying the other two. The maps are the working papers for Le Guin’s book-in-progress, which takes place sometime in the near future, after earthquakes and continental shift have destroyed San Francisco, sunk Bakersfield, and given the Humboldt River in Nevada an outlet to the sea.

In this book, Le Guin has come home, using as her central location the Napa Valley, where she has spent the summer for fifty of her fifty-four years. It has been a long homecoming. Of all her novels, this will be one of the few that takes place on Earth.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin has been writing stories ever since an older brother taught her to write. In the past twenty years, she has published fourteen novels, three books of short stories, a book of essays and two books of poems; she has collaborated on two screenplays and has written a television script of her novel The Lathe of Heaven. She has won four Hugo awards, three Nebula awards, a Newbery Honor Book Citation and a National Book Award. She is considered by many critics and readers to be the best writer of fantasy and science fiction in America today. But science fiction, at least as we have known it and although she has often passionately defended the genre, is not quite what Le Guin does. “I write science fiction because that is what publishers call my books,” she once wrote. “Left to myself, I should call them novels.”

The appeal of science fiction lies in its subject: the “Other”—the alien world, the stuff of dreams, the raw material from the unconscious. Because these things are contained in a story with a beginning, a middle and end, they are less terrifying than they might be if we met them on the street or in our nightmares. But what most American science fiction did before the late 1950s, when Le Guin’s generation of science fiction writers began to publish, was to present the Other and then immediately defeat it: the aliens always got theirs in the end; the lean, square-jawed space captain shot his way through the swarm of bug-eyed monsters (with the dumb blonde clinging to his muscular arm); and the whole galaxy was made safe for free enterprise. Probably more than any other writing, science fiction reflected the mood of America: if it’s different, kill it.

To this world, Le Guin has brought, well, first she has brought women: a black lawyer in The Lathe of Heaven; a marine biologist in The Dispossessed; a grocery clerk in The Beginning Place. Her aliens tend to be bewildered, obsessive, or just plain tired. In The Lathe of Heaven, her alien lives over a bicycle repair shop in Portland and runs a tacky secondhand store that sells, among other things, old Beatles records. Le Guin has introduced themes risky in any American novel: anarchism as social and economic alternative, socialism, feminism, Taoism, environmentalism, love and suffering. In one wonderful story, she swept up the male image of a spaceship and sex-changed it: “Intracom” is about a small space vessel that finds it has an alien onboard. The alien? A fetus. The ship, a pregnant woman.

In her novels, the human scale is always kept intact; all other things are measured against it. No fantastic technology takes the place of a human hand or heart: “Community is the best we can hope for,” Le Guin wrote in her essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” “and community for most people means touch: the touch of your hand against the other’s hand, the job done together, the sledge hauled together, the dance danced together, the child conceived together. We have only one body apiece, and two hands.”

Last summer, I spent three days in Portland talking to Le Guin: on the small deck of the house overlooking the river, over dinner at Jake’s (a wood-paneled restaurant famous for its crawfish), in the middle of a demonstration on Hiroshima Day, and standing ankle-deep in the Columbia River watching the wash from a ship. We were joined often by her husband, Charles, a professor of French history at Portland State University, a generous Southern man to whom she has dedicated two of her books. “For Charles,” she wrote in The Left Hand of Darkness, “sine quo non”—without whom, nothing.

Le Guin is a smallish person with large intelligent eyes, her gray hair cut into a neat cap. On the first day we talked, she was wearing a purple silk blouse, a raw silk skirt and delicate shoes. She has a low, direct voice and while there is about her an air of grave authority, she is also likely to burst into the accents of a French professor, a Cockney maid, a Scottish cook. At a speech she gave in London, she wore a formal black velvet suit and a propeller beanie. She has described herself as “a petty-bourgeois anarchist,” “an unconsistent Taoist and consistent unChristian.” What is morality, I asked her once, and she replied: “Something you grope after when a situation comes up in which it’s needed.”

The Left Hand of Darkness, which won both the Hugo and Nebula science-fiction awards, is set in another galaxy, but it is about two very human problems: betrayal and fidelity. (When asked once what the most constant theme in her novels was, she replied, without stopping to think twice, “Marriage.”)

The book grew out of Le Guin’s increasing involvement in feminism. “Along about 1967, I began to feel a certain unease, a need to step on a little farther, perhaps, on my own,” she wrote in her essay “Is Gender Necessary?” “I began to want to define and understand the meaning of sexuality and the meaning of gender, in my life and in our society. Much had been gathered in the unconscious—both personal and collective—which must either be brought up into consciousness, or else turn destructive. It was the same need, I think, that had led Beauvoir to write The Second Sex, and Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique; and that was, at the same time, leading Kate Millett and others to write their books, and to create the new feminism. But I was not a theoretician, a political thinker or activist, or a sociologist. I was and am a fiction writer. The way I did my thinking was to write a novel. That novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, is the record of my consciousness, the process of my thinking.”

At the center of her thinking the question became: What would a planet be like if it didn’t have any wars? How would the people differ from us? What would they have or lack? Over time, she began to realize that the people of her book would be neither male nor female, but both. Thus the “Gethenians” were born: sexual androgynes, bisexuals, sexual possibles. Once a month, like other animals, they enter into a kind of heat, when their bodies change and polarize, become male or female. No one knows which he/she will be. If conception occurs, the female remains female and bears a child. If not, she returns to androgyny. The mother of one child could be the father of several others. (Le Guin says she never really knew whether this was actually physiologically possible in humans until she gave the completed manuscript to her pediatrician, a Frenchman, to read. “It is perfectly possible,” he told her, “but it is disgusting.”)

There is no rape on Gethen, no division of labor between “weak women” and “strong men,” and since at any time one may bear and raise a child, no males quite so free as males elsewhere. There are also no wars. There are skirmishes, raids, quarrels over territory, but no huge troop movements over continents. A pregnant person does not a general make.

The hero of the book, a visitor from Earth, is very uncomfortable with this arrangement, and it is his gradual, painful discovery of love between equals that forms the book’s heart. Le Guin has been criticized for using a male hero, but she has an explanation: “I knew a woman would just love it. There wouldn’t be any dramatic scenes; she would just settle right down. I needed this guy who hated it, who was uncomfortable and miserable in it. It’s true, a woman wouldn’t have done. She would have just run around saying, ‘Oooh, this is wonderful.’”

Le Guin did not know all this when she began the novel. For her, it started with a vision of two people pulling something across a lot of snow, and much of its content was “told to her” by the characters as she went along. Once she discovered something about them, she would go back over the novel, changing pieces here and there.

“The first time I ever went to a meeting where they discussed any of my books academically,” she chuckled, “a Canadian scholar was going to discuss The Left Hand of Darkness. He didn’t know that I was going to be there. When I walked in, he was appalled. He looked at me with a savage look on his face and said, ‘Just don’t tell me you didn’t know what you were doing.’ That’s a basic thing, actually, between scholars and artists. I think, ‘Oh, is that what I was doing? Or Is that why I did that? and it’s very revealing. But the fact is, you cannot know that while you’re doing it. The dancer can’t think, Now I’m going to take a step to the left. That ain’t the way you dance.”

We ate a dinner of cold salmon from the Columbia Gorge, sitting at a picnic table on the broad porch that encircles the rear of the house, “leftovers” from a farewell dinner Le Guin had made for her daughter Caroline the night before. (Caroline was returning to Indiana, where she is starting her doctorate in Irish literature.) On the table was a small cup holding little silver spoons, very soft, very high-quality silver, commemorative pieces minted in different towns in Colorado during the great silver mining days. They were collected by Le Guin’s mother, Theodora; one was from Telluride, where she grew up.

Theodora met and married Alfred Kroeber in Berkeley, where he was a professor of anthropology at the university and she was his student (he remembered her bracelets clinking together when she spoke in class). Alfred is perhaps most well-known for his work and friendship with Ishi, a Stone Age man, the last of his tribe, who stumbled into the twentieth century in 1911. (Ishi died of tuberculosis in 1916, when he was probably fifty-six.) But it was Theodora Kroeber who, in her sixties, wrote the book Ishi In Two Worlds, which became nearly as popular as Coming of Age in Samoa and is considered a standard text in anthropology.

Much of Le Guin’s feeling for the Other, the anthropological details in her books and her fierce devotion to a balanced way of living on the earth, can be traced to her early upbringing. Although the name Ishi was never mentioned in the house (the subject seemed to cause Alfred Kroeber pain), Ursula heard Native American stories and myths from her father. And she remembers him sitting and talking to two of his closest friends, one a Papago and the other a Yurok, men who, unbeknownst to her then, were also her father’s anthropological informants, and who stayed with the family in the Napa Valley each summer and played croquet with Ursula and her three older brothers.

There were other guests: refugees with funny accents, other Native Americans, and a man with large ears who would “reappear” in her novel The Dispossessed: J. Robert Oppenheimer.[1]

Ishi was published in 1961, a year after Alfred Kroeber’s death. The book is so well written that Ursula, stricken with guilt, asked her mother if she had been unable to write earlier because of having to raise children. Her mother replied, “I did what I wanted when I wanted to. I have long thought I’d write when I wanted to.” She was, said Le Guin, “a very unusual person.”

Le Guin went to Berkeley High School, which she hated. “I wasn’t—you know, I never—my sweaters were never quite the right length or color. I never could do it right.” She then went to Radcliffe, and later Columbia, where she earned an M.A. in French, figuring she would need a skill to support herself while writing. She had already submitted poems and short stories by the time she went off to college—her father volunteered to be her agent. Some of the poems got published, but all of the short stories came back. These rejections went on until she was twenty-seven, short, civil notes; the characteristic adjective used by editors at Redbook and Harper’s and The Atlantic was “remote.” But Le Guin was not particularly discouraged: “I was dogged,” she says now. “I had an absolutely unfounded self-confidence, partly a temperamental thing and the way my parents brought me up. And I knew that I would get better.”

She met Charles Le Guin in 1953 on the Queen Mary when both were sailing to France on Fulbright scholarships. After the crossing, Le Guin was “fairly sure.” The two married in France and returned at the end of the year to Macon, Georgia, where Charles had grown up.

There, in the bosom of a huge Southern family (“There are hundreds and hundreds of them,” says Le Guin), Charles finished his doctorate and Ursula taught freshman French. She continued writing: she wrote a novel while she was working, once, as a secretary in the physics department of Emory University; after the children were born, she wrote at night, when she’d done the dishes.

One of her works was published in a small university quarterly, but it was not until 1962, when she was thirty-two, that she got her first check. Le Guin had given up reading science fiction years before, because all it seemed to be about was “hardware and soldiers.” But a friend encouraged her to read Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, and Theodore Sturgeon, and Le Guin discovered that the genre was changing. The first story she submitted to the science-fiction market was bought by a woman editor—Cele Goldsmith Lalli, then with Fantastic and Amazing magazines, both fantasy/sci-fi monthlies. For that story, “April in Paris,” Le Guin got $30, which she immediately spent on a pair of brown wool pants she had seen advertised in the New Yorker.

She published four novels before The Left Hand of Darkness. Then, in 1970, she made of her hometown, Portland, a novel. The Lathe of Heaven is about a small, ordinary draftsman named George, who discovers that he can change the future (and the past, retroactively) by his dreams. It is a very delicate novel, populated by ordinary people and turtlelike aliens who find themselves in the midst of environmental catastrophes. Le Guin says she was paying homage to the late Philip K. Dick, author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from which the movie Blade Runner was made, badly in Le Guin’s opinion. Dick’s books are filled with small businessmen going broke. One gets by, advises an alien in The Lathe of Heaven, with a little help from one’s friends.

Portland is a small, easy city built along the banks of the Williamette. It is a Le Guin city, as if parts of it had been invented by her. There is Powell’s Books, for example, which inhabits an old car-dealership garage. In Powell’s you can find anything; you can mumble at the counter clerk about that, ah, book about liberation theology and he’ll reply, “Cry of the People—downstairs, history.” There’s Jake’s (crawfish, Anchor Steam beer, old wooden booths) and, down by the Williamette, there’s Waterfront Park, with an area dedicated to Francis J. Murnane, former president of Local 8, ILWU. Near this park, every weekend, is the Portland Saturday Market (“Rain or shine, April through Christmas”), with crafts booths and food from teriyaki to huge, flat pastries called elephant ears. When I visited the park, four children with violins were playing a Brandenburg concerto under a freeway bridge.

Portland has sensible building-height regulations—460 feet, or about fifty stories—and many parks, including one downtown that has traditionally been reserved for women. (In 1904, the women in Portland decided they wanted a place of their own. There used to be an elderly ombudsman who stood at the entrance to the women’s park and gently advised men not to go in without an escort.) Over a drinking fountain near the public library is carved in stone, “Tongues in trees/Books in the running brooks/Sermons in stones/And good in everything.” I stayed in a pleasant old hotel near downtown for $24 a night.

The Le Guins have lived near Forest Park for twenty-three years. (There tend to be a lot of trees in Le Guin’s novels. She once called herself science fiction’s “most arboreal writer.”) When I went up to the park for a walk on Sunday morning, a couple sat on a bridge there drinking champagne out of martini glasses.

The Le Guins and I met downtown on the evening of August 6, near the women’s park, for an artists’ program in memory of the bombing of Hiroshima. The night before, two hundred people had painted two thousand “shadows” on the sidewalks of Portland, outlines, one of a man playing with a cat, as reminders of the way radiation from the Hiroshima bomb burned the forms of its victims onto the sides of buildings. Le Guin read a poem toward the end of the evening’s program:

Afterward, we walked down to Waterfront Park and people launched white balloons carrying paper cranes out over the river. A small group of drunk gentlemen stood off to the side of the demonstrators and sang something like, “The queers are dying, the queers are dying” over and over again, until someone in the crowd began to sing, very softly, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” And then another person picked it up, “All we are saying…” and then another—and soon, the drunken men were quiet and there was a great stillness over the water above the voices.

In 1974, Le Guin published her second novel to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, which took her two and a half years to write and is her most explicit political statement to date.

In the several years prior to beginning the novel, Le Guin had been reading the major anarchist thinkers, among them Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. Kropotkin was a nineteenth-century Russian natural scientist who, after observing animal and human life in Siberia and elsewhere in Russia, took on the Social Darwinists of his time in his book Mutual Aid. The point of Mutual Aid is that creatures of all kinds do not progress or survive by competing with one another, but instead cooperate to assure mutual survival. A very sweet-tempered, gentle man, Kropotkin was imprisoned in Russia (for conspiracy against the czar) in 1874, escaped to Western Europe and did not return to his homeland until the middle of the revolution in 1917. Although Kropotkin was supportive of the revolution, he became more and more critical of the Bolsheviks, finally breaking with Lenin entirely in 1920. He died, in despair, a year later.

Goodman was a twentieth-century American whose book on adolescent boys, Growing up Absurd, became a bestseller in the 1960s and is his best-known work. Like Kropotkin’s, Goodman’s thinking spanned many disciplines: he was a poet, a novelist, a lay therapist and a social critic. His early literary career suffered because he was a pacifist during World War II and an open homosexual. To most people, an anarchist is a bomb-throwing terrorist and anarchy means chaos. There have been violent anarchists, but much of anarchy’s bad name comes from successful propaganda against it. Anarchy is a loosely organized but often very successful political philosophy. (The recent “affinity groups” used by nuclear protesters were invented by anarchists during the Spanish Civil War.) To put it simply: anarchy is based on the realistic observation that people left to themselves, without the intervention of the state, tend to cooperate and work out their differences. This process may be awkward, inefficient and punctuated by fights, but its end result is usually more satisfying to everyone than when things are done by command.

Anarchists tend to be less theoretical and more practical than most political ideologues, relying on observation to prove their points. Thus, Goodman wrote about seating arrangements, banning cars from Manhattan, why vacant lots are good for children, why snow should be allowed to pile up in cities during the winter so people can go sledding, and why freeways are bad for bicycles and roller skates. Goodman liked messy, active, human-scale cities. He often wrote about his belief that the work of human hands should be out in the open in our cities, not concealed in factories far from downtown. Kropotkin recorded how peasants fought fires together and dealt with childbirth.

For Le Guin, reading them and other anarchists was “like breathing fresh air. They talked about everyday life. How you do it. As a concrete thinker, as a housewife, in a number of ways, they were talking my language.”

To show how anarchism might work, Le Guin constructed the planet Annares, an anarchist’s utopia. A desert planet, it is a postindustrial world—there are trains, factories, even a computer—but there are no laws or money (“To make a thief, make an owner: to create crime, create laws”); no prisons, almost no personal property, no possessive pronouns.

For contrast, and to compare anarchism to capitalism, Le Guin made another planet, Urras, a bountiful, expensive, beautiful world, populated by gorgeously arrayed men and women (the women have magnets implanted under their skin to hold jewels in place) and the hidden poor. Each planet is the moon of the other.

The hero of The Dispossessed is Shevek, a physicist, partly modeled after J. Robert Oppenheimer. Born on Annares, he eventually travels to Urras. Through Shevek’s eyes, we see the two planets. A city on Annares is Le Guin’s tribute to Paul Goodman:

On a street on Urras, Shevek goes shopping for the first time in his life:

In an unusual move before she had completed the manuscript, Le Guin showed it to a friend, the Marxist critic Darko Suvin, who teaches at McGill University in Montreal. Le Guin believes that Marxists and anarchists are their own best critics, “the only people that seem to speak to each other’s main problems.” He told her, among other things, that she couldn’t have twelve chapters in an anarchist book; she must have thirteen. And he told her that her ending was too tight, too complete. Le Guin added a chapter and made the book open-ended.

When The Dispossessed was finished, Le Guin was exhausted. “I sat around and was sure I never would write again. I read Jung and I consulted the I Ching. For eighteen months, it gave me the same answer: the wise fox sits still or something.”

Since 1974, when The Dispossessed was published, Le Guin has published three short novels, a collection of essays and two collections of short stories. (The Compass Rose, the most recent, includes a story about the use of electric shock on political prisoners in a country very much like Chile.) Only one of her recent stories takes place in outer space.

“Space was a metaphor for me. A beautiful, lovely, endlessly rich metaphor for me,” Le Guin says looking down toward the docks, “until it ended quite abruptly after The Dispossessed. I had a loss of faith. I simply—I can’t explain it. I don’t seem to be able to do outer space anymore.

“The last outer-space story I did was in The Compass Rose. It’s called ‘The Pathways of Desire,’ and it turns out to be a hoax in a sense. Apparently it’s an expression of my loss of faith.”

She hates the immensely popular science-fiction films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. “I wouldn’t go to see E. T., to tell you the truth, because I disliked Close Encounters so profoundly.

“It seems so exploitive. I don’t know, his attitude toward people is so weird. At the end of Close Encounters she’s got that beautiful little kid back, you know. He’s been lost for weeks or months, hasn’t he? She’s got her little kid back—what is she doing taking photographs? She doesn’t even have her arm around the kid. It bugs me.”

She pauses and then goes on. “I feel a little weird about standing aside and being snooty because it does seem like they’re not—you can’t talk about them quite like ordinary movies or like an art form. It’s almost like a ritual. People go because other people go. It’s a connection thing, isn’t it? It’s a weird way for people to communicate. But the trouble is, in other words, in a sense it’s like a religious communion, but it’s so terribly low-grade, morally so cheap. Star Wars is really abominable: it’s all violence, and there are only three women in the known universe.

“These films are working on a very low level intellectually and morally, and in their blindness perhaps they do get close to people’s feelings,” she continues, “because they are not only non-intellectual, they are anti-intellectual and sort of deliberately stupid. But I would rather say that about Star Wars. I think Steven Spielberg, on the other hand, is playing a very tricky game. I think he knows. I think he deliberately exploits archetypal images in a way that I really dislike a lot.”

(I ask her how she got through dinner parties when everyone was carrying on about E. T. “I didn’t say anything,” she replies, and then changes her voice to a linebacker’s—“I want to be loved.”)

“I did follow our space flights. The little Voyagers? God, those were lovely. But what we are doing now I find in itself extremely depressing—the space shuttle. I’m not happy about it the way I was happy about the other ones. It’s all military-industrial. It’s a bunch of crap flying around the world, just garbage in the sky. I think that did have to do with my loss of faith. My God, we could muck that up just as bad as—we’re going to repeat the same…

“I think we’re sick,” she finally says. “I hate to make big pronouncements, but I don’t know how you bring up a kid. There’s the size of our population and people who work so hard, and no one praises them for it. We’ve overbred our species.”

But, I point out, the saving grace for us in many of her books is the presence of others.

“But they don’t have to be human others,” she replies. “We live with others on all sides at all times. That’s the thing about religion, about monotheism. They say we’re other and better. It’s a very silly and dangerous course. It also relates to feminism. Women have been treated as animals have been. If the men insist on talking about it that way, then the men and God can walk in Eden—they can walk alone there.”

She gets up at 5:30 in the morning these days to work on the new book, in the little room at the end of the hall. The population in the book is very small, nearly that of the world in the late Stone Age, a few million here, a few million there, and great herds of animals. There is no hero in the book; there are many, many voices and a female anthropologist named Pandora.

Before I leave, we go out to Sauvie Island to pick blueberries. Finding none to pick, we picnic on the banks of the Columbia. Ursula asks Charles if it was Debbie Reynolds who divorced Eddie Fisher because he brushed his teeth with warm water, and Charles replies no, it was Elizabeth Taylor who divorced Nicky Hilton. She rolls up her pants and stands in the shallow water, the wake of the ships moving in neat waves toward her, each wave a pattern, each one the exact same distance from the next as they stroke the shore.

Mozart heard his music all at once, she had told me earlier, then he had to write it down, to extend it into time.