Tuesday, Jan 23, 2001 15:00 ET
Ursula K. Le Guin
The award-winning creator of mythic worlds, and a master of metaphor, writes about people, animals and trees -- "nothing that is alien."
As a reader, I have a complicated relationship with Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, the writer. It seems she's always one step ahead of me, reflecting my feelings and passions in her fiction. I read the young-adult "Earthsea" books while grappling with adolescent angst. I found my own deeply held social justice convictions explored in her science fiction of the 1970s and '80s. Her collections of short stories were required vacation reading, when I had the leisure to admire her lyrical style and glory in how she puts words together. Le Guin once said, "The writer cannot do it alone. The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
Given the way her stories have fired my imagination, it's vaguely disappointing to meet Le Guin. She stands a trim 5-foot-4, with white hair and a ready smile. I expect a literary giant to be bigger somehow, to take up more space and oxygen. I expect erudite conversation, but she peppers her speech with "ums," run-on sentences, fragments and common phrases like "Oh, golly!" just like the rest of us.
The disappointment fades as I talk to her about the boys throwing snowballs in front of her house and the destruction of Taoism in China. I realize she's no icon with a muse whispering in her ear; she watches, listens, thinks and feels, then reflects those observations and feelings in her art. "Authors are writing artists," Le Guin says. "I think people restrict the term 'artist' to mean painters and sculptors, but you can practice art in whatever medium you choose. Words are my medium."
And Le Guin is a master. Over nearly 50 years she's published 17 novels, 11 children's books, more than 100 short stories, two collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, two volumes of translation and screenplays of her works. She's received the National Book Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize and several "lifetime achievement" awards among dozens of other honors.
In contrast to her extraordinary career, Le Guin's life seems staid and ordinary; she's been married to historian Charles Le Guin for 47 years, and they have three children and three grandchildren. Le Guin and her husband have lived in the same house in Portland, Ore., for 40 years. She writes on a computer but refuses to "get connected." She strolls down to the local Minuteman Press to send and receive faxes. When she's not writing, she teaches it to others, and she serves on the board of her local library.
During our conversation, Le Guin chats easily about literary criticism and her newest work and how exhausting book tours are, but she leaves me to discover her heart and soul in her nonfiction, such as "Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women and Places." There I trace the roots of her feminism to a disastrous relationship with a "prince" in graduate school, see her patient humor in her description of eating cold mashed potatoes in take after take as an extra on the set of "The Lathe of Heaven" and dissect her feelings about utopias.
Le Guin has accepted a few labels over the years as "approximately accurate": novelist, radical, feminist, Taoist and, more recently, Western writer. Born in 1929, she is of that misnamed "Silent Generation" -- those Americans who were children during World War II -- but Le Guin is anything but silent. She was on the leading edge of the civil rights, feminist and antiwar movements of the 1960s. Through her tales and complex characters, she has explored the themes of sexism, racism, nationalism, unchecked technological progress and the flaws in popular utopian visions. Wherever I looked a generation later, she had already blazed the trail.
Le Guin is a product of both her times and her unusual family. Her father was anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who developed the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley and was known for his work among Native American tribes. Today, Kroeber is perhaps most famous for his close association with, and study of, Ishi, the Yahi Indian who wandered out of the Northern California wilderness in 1911 and spent the remaining years of his life residing at the University of California's anthropology museum -- where Kroeber was the curator. (Ishi died of tuberculosis in 1916, though he was in the news again in August when his brain was moved from the Smithsonian Institution and properly buried in his ancestral homeland, the foothills of Mount Lassen.)
Le Guin's mother, Theodora, trained as a psychologist and wrote the bestselling biography "Ishi in Two Worlds," as well as a number of children's works. Observation and analysis, words, myth and storytelling were an integral part of Le Guin's life from an early age. And given the themes and preoccupations that permeate her fiction, it's interesting to speculate about the influence the story of Ishi has had on her work.
The facts of Ishi's life and his intersection with the white man's world resulted in one of the more remarkable anthropological cases of the 20th century, and its elements seem to echo through many of Le Guin's stories -- from "Planet of Exile" and "City of Illusion" to "The Word for World Is Forest" and "The Dispossessed." It would be surprising if that weren't the case -- what artists do, among other things, is use the raw material of their own life to make a universal statement that, when most successful, resonates across time and cultures.
But she didn't spend her youth reading only anthropological texts and high literature, or immersed in her parents' interests. Le Guin admits she and her brother devoured the pulp science fiction magazines of the '30s and '40s. "Kids need to read a lot of dumb stuff," she says, "roughage in the diet. But there are ethical questions when you're writing for kids. You have to stand back from the work and say, 'Could this scare an 8-year-old? Could it do any harm?'" Her own children's books, such as the "Catwings" series, are beautifully illustrated, gentle fantasies of the Beatrix Potter stripe.
Intellectual refugees from the universities of war-torn Europe, her parents' extensive library, and storytelling around the campfire at the Kroeber summer home in California's Napa Valley helped nurture her native talent. At the age of 11, she submitted a piece to Astounding Science Fiction magazine (which later became Analog) that was rejected. In 1947, she left her Berkeley home to attend Radcliffe College. She continued her studies in Romance literature at Columbia University, where she earned an M.A. and a Fulbright scholarship.
On her way to study in France in 1953, she met fellow Queen Mary passenger Charles Le Guin. They married in Paris a few months later. Over the next 10 years, she and her husband, a professor, settled in Portland, and their three children, Elisabeth, Caroline and Theodore, were born.
Le Guin wrote after the children went to bed and, when they got older, during their school hours, but initially her work met with little acceptance. Her poems were regularly published, but she couldn't find a market for her short stories or fantastical historical novels set in a fictional analogue of Czechoslovakia, a country she named Orsinia. She describes her earliest work as being "just a bit off," containing some oddity or fantasy element that prevented editors from labeling her work, putting it in a literary or genre box.
She received love letters about her writing skills and style, but literary editors rejected her stories as "not quite right for us." Le Guin still maintains a dispute with critics and academics who insist only realistic fiction can be literary fiction. She says, "That attitude knocks out about nine-tenths of all American literature. Once we had the South American magical realists you couldn't say only realism is literary."
In 1961 her mother's book "Ishi in Two Worlds" made the bestseller list. (Still in print, it has sold over a million copies.) Theodora Kroeber started writing in her 50s, "after my children left to have children," and her work struck a chord with the market that surprised her family and her publisher. Le Guin's turn came the next year, when two of her stories sold. She sold an Orsinian tale to a small literary magazine (with payment in copies of the magazine) and a time-travel story, "April in Paris," to Fantastic for $30. Looking at the proceeds from both markets, Le Guin decided to focus her writing where it paid. She let loose her formidable imagination on the science fiction world and later earned the acceptance of mainstream readers as well.
In quick succession, Le Guin published "Rocannan's World" (1966), "Planet of Exile" (1966) and "City of Illusion" (1967). Those early works articulate mythic themes of the journey/quest, combined with the Taoist motif of a balanced and ordered wholeness and the literary convention of a stranger in a strange land. They're the first in what became known as Le Guin's "Hainish Universe." The common background in this set of novels, novellas and short stories, which cover about 2,500 years of future history, is that people from a planet named Hain seeded this part of the galaxy with human life. Under pressure of different environments and some direct genetic intervention, they evolve a diversity of human physical forms and social structures.
In 1969 critics hailed "The Left Hand of Darkness" for its feminist themes and mythic storytelling. In the book, Le Guin conducts "a thought experiment" on the effects of gender (or lack of it) on society by exploring the implications of an androgynous race. In those early days of the feminist movement, she was forcing people to examine the roles of men and women in society. Le Guin wasn't sure she could sell the book or the idea. She thought men might feel figuratively castrated by the androgynous characters. Yet it became the best known and most honored of her works, winning a Nebula, a Hugo and a James Tiptree Jr. Retrospective Award.
Le Guin admits that in her earlier works she "wrote like an honorary man." She was initially cautious in her feminism. Even in "The Left Hand of Darkness," she still used "he" for the androgynous characters and rarely showed them in feminine roles. She told me that she regrets having allowed her characters only heterosexual relationships. But she feels she wrote the best book she could given the times. Le Guin credits reading "The Norton Book of Literature by Women" and her literary inspiration, Virginia Woolf, for allowing her to write like a woman and to feel liberated in doing so.
Leading the life of an academic family, the Le Guins took two sabbaticals in England, because "it's easier on the kids to go where they speak the same language." The first, in 1968, was at the height of the Vietnam War. Le Guin, a pacifist and Taoist, was "angry and frustrated." That year she wrote "The Word for World Is Forest," a story of brutal Terrans colonizing a planet occupied by a race of peaceful, green-furred natives. She was "a little uneasy that 'Word' was a preachy book and it would die with the cause. It is certainly the most overt political statement I have made in fiction." It won the 1973 Hugo Award.
Spurred by the social optimism of the late '60s and early '70s, Le Guin took a crack at utopian fiction. Her Hainish book "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia" (1974) won both the Hugo and the Nebula, giving Le Guin the distinction of being the only author to twice win both awards in the same year for a novel. "The Dispossessed" is her most densely textured work. Another thought experiment, it plays anarchism against capitalism. By sending a dissatisfied inhabitant from one society to the other, Le Guin examines how both work -- or don't. "They're imperfect utopias because the people in them are just people."
Le Guin has studied Laotzu and the Tao Te Ching since age 14, when she discovered her father's old edition. She has been seeking out and comparing translations ever since, captivated by the book's practical, nontheistic, easygoing approach. She finds the tenets "endlessly fruitful and nourishing to me as an artist," and she published her own translation, "Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way," in 1997. She describes the book as "the most lovable of the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous and inexhaustibly refreshing." Her fascination with Taoism shows up early in her writing, most notably in her series "Books of Earthsea."
In the late '60s, Herman Schein, her mother's publisher at Parnassus Press, approached Le Guin about writing a young-adult novel. "A Wizard of Earthsea," which won the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award, came out in 1968, followed closely by 1970's "The Tombs of Atuan," winner of the Newbery Silver Medal, and 1972's "The Farthest Shore," which won the National Book Award for Children's Books. On the surface these are coming-of-age stories, each featuring an adolescent who struggles to learn life's lessons and set in a fairy tale, pre-industrial, vaguely medieval world. But Le Guin's artful storytelling and complex underlying themes elevate the works beyond mundane fantasy and the young-adult audience for which they are intended. "To light a candle is to cast a shadow," one of the wise characters says, and the protagonists spend the rest of their journey learning the need for balance -- light/dark, male/female, action/inaction.
At the time I read it, I didn't notice Earthsea's distinctly male bias. Nearly all fantasy fiction, from C.S. Lewis' "Narnia" to J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," featured male protagonists. Le Guin acknowledges, "That's how hero stories worked." She started on a fourth book in the mid-'70s to correct the imbalance, but put it aside. "Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea" finally appeared in 1990 and won the Nebula. In this story Le Guin shows the underside of Earthsea from the point of view of a mature woman and a battered girl. Although billed as the last book of the series, Le Guin has a collection, "Tales of Earthsea," coming out in the spring. "I thought after 'Tehanu' the story was finished, but I was wrong. I've learned never to say 'never.'"
Le Guin writes a loving homage to Taoism in her most recent Hainish book, 2000's "The Telling," again using the future as metaphor. "In China they've been practicing Taoism for two or three thousand years and apparently nearly wiped it out in only 20 years under Mao," she says. "It survives only in Taiwan and a few little exile colonies in North America. This whole thing haunted my imagination. It was a very hard book to write. I was playing with things that sort of scare me about our world."
The Taoist theory of inaction, that people should take action only when necessary, is shown best in "The Lathe of Heaven" (1972), in which Le Guin creates Everyman George Orr, who can do what we all wish we could -- make dreams real. But Orr falls under the control of a do-gooder psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, who realizes that Orr can change reality and tries to control those "effective dreams" to make the world better. These efforts lurch from inconvenience (no rain) to disaster (an alien invasion), an object lesson in unintended consequences for those who want to change the world.
Le Guin consulted on a 1980 PBS made-for-TV movie version of "Lathe" and chronicled her adventure in "Working on 'The Lathe.'" When David Loxton of the TV lab at WNET called and said he wanted to come to Portland and talk to her about making a TV movie of one of her books, she replied, "No you don't!" Loxton persevered, overcoming Le Guin's objections one by one: He could indeed fly all the way to Oregon and, yes, they could "melt" Portland, "especially if we film that bit in Dallas."
Le Guin admits to a certain amount of calculation in including an interracial relationship in "Lathe." "If you look at my books, you'll find that most of my central characters aren't white. You don't see it on the cover, because they refuse to put people of color on book jackets. But I've always done that deliberately because most people in the world aren't white. Why in the future would we assume they are?"
Regionalism is the most recent influence on Le Guin's work. After her second sabbatical in England, she looked around her Oregon home and made a commitment to "my dirt," shedding the last vestiges of what she calls "Europe-centeredness." She joyously returned to the anthropology and Native American tales of her childhood in the Napa Valley in her second utopian novel, "Always Coming Home" (1985), winner of the Kafka Prize for Fiction and short-listed for the National Book Award.
In this novel, Le Guin tries to "make a world that is a little less cruel and hard on the people who live in it than our world is." The book is remarkable for its structure and its content. Le Guin abandons the traditional narrative form and creates a fictional anthropology of a people far in the future, the Kesh, who have adopted a distinctly Native American way of life. Our dysfunctional historical era is referred to as "the time when people lived outside the world." It's a remarkably rich collection of short stories, myths, poems and music, held together by a central novella and explained by more traditional anthropological "back matter." In this work Le Guin brings together all her passions -- the balance of Taoism, an anarchic "feminine" style, environmentalism and great storytelling.
While chronicling her life and work, I realized my relationship with Le Guin has shifted through the years. I started as a reader inspired by her stories and her insight into the human condition, and I finish as a writer inspired by her artistry, style and continual innovation. I am not unique in feeling this connection to Le Guin's work.
"Boy, it makes you feel fairly humble and it's a little scary when you realize you influence people. But when I'm writing, nothing affects me, I'm just trying to do the story," Le Guin says. And as she has explained, "These are human stories. I'm using the other worlds and the other races as metaphors. All I know how to write about are people and animals -- and trees. Still, nothing that is alien."
http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2001/01/23/le_guin
WILLIAM WALSH I AM A WOMAN WRITER; I AM A WESTERN WRITER AN INTERVIEW WITH URSULA LE GUIN
URSULA LE GUIN is America's preeminent writer of science fiction. However, one should not be confused and call her only a science fiction writer, because-as she will tell you-since the publication of her first novel, Rocannon's World (Ace Books, 1966), she has published more than fifteen novels, four collections of poetry, five short story collections, seven books for children, two books of criticism, screenplays, edited anthologies, and she has made a half dozen recordings. She has published more than sixty short stories in the New Yorker, Tri-Quarterly, Kenyon Review, Omni, Redbook, Playboy, and Playgirl. Her most recent books are Going Out with Peacocks, a book of poems from HarperCollins, Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings, a book for children from Orchard Press, and A Fisherman of the Island Sea, a book of science fiction short stories from HarperPrism. In 1972 Le Guin won the National Book Award for The Farthest Shore. In addition to being a five-time winner of the Hugo Award and a four-time Nebula Award winner, her other honors include a Newbery Silver Medal Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Prix Lectures-Jeunesse, the Gandalf Award for fantasy writing, and the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award. She holds a B.A. from Radcliffe College (1951) and an M.A. from Columbia (1952), and has taught at, among others, Mercer University, University of Idaho, Kenyon College, Portland State University, Tulane University, and Bennington College. Born in 1929, in Berkeley, California, she spent most of her life on the West Coast, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, Charles A. Le Guin, a historian. Her father was anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, and her mother, Theodora Kroeber, published Ishi, a national best-seller. This interview was conducted in Macon, Georgia, on 30 March 1993. It was a sunny and breezy morning as we sat outside in her mother's backyard in the shade-talking and drinking coffee. I92
WW: During the introduction of your reading last week, you mentioned the labels placed on writers by critics as well as the deficiency of the canon in regard to women. I would like to address both of these issues. First, I have read endlessly where you are considered a science fiction writer, and often that's the only category. I never thought of you in that single category because Ifirst came to your essays. Do you find the categories limiting and how do you deal with this? UL: Right from the start I've always written other material. I started out publishing poetry long before I published prose. I've never been known as a poet, and I'm always having to tell people I have four volumes of poetry, two of them hardback. So, OK, I'm mainly a prose writer-that's fine. The first two stories I published were within a couple of months, one was science fiction and one was realism. One was in a science fiction magazine and the other was in a university quarterly. One, according to the wisdom of the time, was respectable and the other was not respectable. But it's not the respectable genre that I get categorized in. There is something very strange about the whole process. I've always written realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and books for kids, but the category that sticks is science fiction. I do write science fiction. Some of my books and stories are pure science fiction-I love the stuff. It's one of the things I do. There is something funny about this categorization-you get typecast like some actors. Poor Leonard Nimoy- nobody believes he has round ears. I began to see it as something not in relation to myself but this whole modernist, mid-twentieth-century idea of a canon in English literature, which, in fiction, is strictly realism, and everything else is subliterary, nonliterary. Maybe that was true in 1925, but it's just not true now. There is no way you can say that realism is the only literature going. I mean, most of our best novelists are not even writing realism anymore-writers like Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Leslie Silko. They are using realistic techniques to tell stories that are not realistic. WW: The fact is that it's very easy to categorize writers into genres and subgenres.... UL: It's a neat way of sweeping things under the carpet, particularly for the academics and the more narrow-minded reviewers. Book reviewers are terrible about this. Take my book Always Coming Home, or Karen Fowler's Sara Canary, which is a knockout book-if they can perceive those books as science fiction they'll sweep them under the science fiction rug and then they don't have to deal with them. Several reviewers have done that. Sara Canary is a good case in point because some people think it's science fiction and some I93
I94 THE KENYON REVIEW people don't. There's a character who you can see as an alien if you want, but she may not be an alien at all, just a woman. It's a kind of litmus paper novel. I don't know why there is so much arrogance toward science fiction. People have come up to me and said, "You write sci-fi. My children read that." What am I supposed to say, "Isn't that wonderful! Of course, you're a grown- up and you don't read it." (laughing) There is equal or more arrogance toward writing for children. Often people say when they find that I write children's books, "I've thought of doing that" as if I'd go up to a dancer and say that I thought about ballet in my spare time. It's incredibly arrogant. Children's literature is as tight a discipline as writing poetry. Another thing about science fiction and fantasy, you can't use the same critical apparatus to read it if you are seriously reviewing a book or teaching a book. For this you need some different techniques for understanding. In other words, you have to learn how to read a science fiction book. WW: What would these techniques be? UL: Some of the key suppositions are different. In realism and science fiction, the writer has a contract with the reader that the writer will live in the reader's world-even in science fiction, which may be the future or a plausible future. In science fiction, as in realism, nothing happens that couldn't happen or shouldn't happen. Whereas in fantasy, the contract is just the opposite. The reader agrees to enter the writer's world and follow its laws. That's a major step a lot of people will not take. They don't want to enter a world they don't share with everybody else. A fantasy world exists only in the book. Some people love that. Most children love it. They love to get into different worlds. It seems that a lot of people lose that capacity somewhere in their teens and then they are scared of it. WW: I would agree that this is true in literature, but deviates in film. People seem more accepting offilm and of entering a fantasy world or a science fiction world because they love to be taken away. UL: ... Although we don't have many good fantasy films. It's more often science fiction, which pretends to be our world extrapolated forward. WW: Star Wars is really cowboys in space. UL: Yes, and a lot of fantasy is cowboys in fairyland, too. I watched The Thief of Baghdad the other night, which is probably the greatest fantasy film ever made. It's beautiful, and I noticed how much people have been drawing from it ever since-even Disney. But most of our fantasy is animated, which makes it very safe because it isn't real people. There is a real fear of fantasy in America. Reading science fiction seriously is complicated, because like any
WILLIAM WALSH I95 literature the people who read it begin to share a language. And by now, science fiction has been written seriously for thirty or forty years. The writers mostly don't explain very much, and if you are not used to reading this stuff you may feel "what is going on?-I don't understand." A lot of the signals are in shorthand. You have to learn to pick up as you do with any literature. You certainly do in poetry. Perhaps, people growing up reading only realism may be unwilling to learn another dialect of the language. WW: When you are writing, either science fiction or realism, is there a different mindset you have to place yourself in so you can pull from a different world. With science fiction you have to expand the outer limits of what you perceive to be reality, as opposed to realism. UL: I don't see that opposition. Science fiction and realism are versions of the same literary trends-they both depend, in a sense, on science to tell us what is real. Before about 1700 all literature was basically fantastic. We had a religious consensus. The higher reality was a religious reality, the earth was basically a lower reality. There wasn't any science to tell you that this was possible or this was not possible. Sometimes it's difficult to tell fiction from natural history between the Middle Ages and the 1500s. Invention and reality are pretty much mixed together. As we began to move into the age of science, industry, and technology, we had a touchstone-yeah, this is possible-science says we can fly to the moon. Science also says that we can't fly to the moon on wings, flapping our wings and breathing, because there is nothing to breathe between the earth and the moon. That kind of voyage becomes strictly fantastic. You get a clearer line between realism and science fiction on one hand and fantasy on the other. However, since I write all of them, to me it's just a different mood-do I want to enter the commonly-agreed-to-be world or do I want to say, "Reader, come over here across the wall and I will make you a world that never could be. We both know it never could be, but we can enjoy it for itself." Science fiction is always a metaphor. We are really talking about right here, right now. We call it the future because in what we call the future we are very free to move around and invent. WW: Last night I was thinking about a writer who published a book in 1960 about flying to the moon. That would have been considered science fiction. But that same book published July 30, 1969, would not have been science fiction. I was toying with the idea of science catching up to the imagination. UL: There is a statute of limitations about fiction. Like Jules Verne inventing the submarine before anybody really invented it, and he's very cagey about what it is, but he also invented something like atomic power to fuel the submarine. He was doing this in the 1880s. People love to talk about science fiction as prediction. But actually its record of prediction is dismal. It's like one story
I96 THE KENYON REVIEW from the 1930s and early 40s predicted anything like the atom bomb, the major event of the mid-twentieth century. The writers had no clue anything like this was in the works. The future and space travel are just metaphors. They are very useful and beautiful metaphors for talking about us now, but they are not predictions. WW: I would never have thought of science fiction as prediction.... UL: A lot of people want to. They read it like astrology. WW: In your writing has anything come true that you invented or imagined without prior knowledge that this "thing" was a possibility, something that has later come true? UL: No, because I don't write high-tech science fiction. My technology tends to be complex and largely invisible. There's a kind of wiring diagram science fiction that goes into great detail about the technology of future spaceships and wars; it bores me to tears. In my book, The Lathe of Heaven, something happens but it's never quite clear what happens, in April 1998. It looks like we sort of blow up the world, but you can't be sure, because the book is full of dreams and visions, and you are never sure which is which. I wrote that book in the 70s when 1998 was a nice long way away. As it comes closer I start thinking: I hope we get through April 1998. (laughing) After 1998 my book will be a little bit different. Like Orwell's 1984; since we got through 1984 you have to read the book a little bit differently. It's more of a period piece than it was. But at least nobody can seriously believe that I am predicting, which I never was. I was telling a story. WW: I remember as 1984 started becoming more of a reality, everyone who had read 1984 almostfeared the entire forthcoming year-the closer the world came to 1984, the more we feared what was supposed to be. I think everyone else was worried, too, that Orwell would be right because there were television shows, and newspaper and magazine articles appearing everywhere on the predicted doom of our individual freedom. UL: In a way it did happen. Orwell's original title was 1948. The publishers said he couldn't call it that, because that was this year. Orwell said that's the point. He was talking about what was really going on, now, 1948. This is what I mean when I say the future is a metaphor. WW: That's like Heller's Catch 22. Arbitrarily it was changed, I believe, originally from Catch 19, because another writer published a book with "19" in the title, and now the term "catch 22" has become a cliche' in the American dogma ever since.
WILLIAM WALSH 197 UL: That's a good story, but 1984 is kind of a pity. I can see why the publisher did it, but Orwell was right. He was writing about 1948 and all that it included. WW: It's interesting to observe how people believe Orwell was predicting the world's future when in fact he was describing the present, and, by an editor's decision, changed how we saw ourselves. I wanted to follow up myfirst question with the second part, which has to do with the literary canon, and for the most part, the exclusion of women writers. UL: There again things are changing. There has been a steady campaign mounted in the last ten to fifteen years by feminist critiques, both male and female, against that exclusion. It's beginning to be the old guard that says the only women writers are Austen, Bronte, Woolf, and maybe Plath. And Dickinson, of course. The only good women writers are dead virgins. (laughing) Not only dead, unmarried, but preferably childless. In other words, as much like men as possible. I don't know why this is going on. I really don't. It just seems so damn silly to me to leave out half our writers. Nearly half of our fiction has been written by women. Often while they were alive these women were beloved and popular, respected, but as soon as they died the lid went on. There's been this whole process in the last fifteen years of rediscovering women writers who were either undervalued or just plain forgotten. A great case in point, Margaret Oliphant, a Victorian writer, who I think is better than Trollope, more varied, more interesting-a fascinating writer that no one has ever heard of. She was a better writer than Trollope, and she knew it. She said very bitterly, "I was paid for my best book what Trollope got for his pot boilers." And he ground out potboilers by the score. There has been a misogyny and a stupidity at work, which we are coming out of. And yet, when you look at the grants, prizes, and awards, it is still clearly male dominated. Just start counting the Nobel. A woman gets the Nobel once every thirty years. The prizes do not reflect the reality of who is writing. WV: That's true, but it is changing. There's Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Mary Oliver.... UL: Sure, you can name them, but now start naming the men. If my figures are right, publishing both poetry and fiction is about fifty-fifty men and women, but prizes, grants, and awards are nowhere near fifty-fifty. I don't want a quota system, God knows. This is art we're talking about. But I really do believe that right now most of our best writing is being done by women. Anybody who is honest about fiction in America in the last ten years, and maybe poetry, must say look at these women writers! It's explainable partly because of the feminist movement. We're learning how to write as women. A lot of us feel that we've found our voices. In poetry, I read men poets complaining about how narrow and tight the poetic canon is, but
I98 THE KENYON REVIEW they're not reading the women poets. There's a big change going on and we are in the middle of this big change. I may be fighting a battle that has essentially been won, but most feminists learned to be cautious about that, because every time you think you have won the battle you suddenly find yourself right back where you were a generation ago and all the doors are closed again. WW: Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize in 1991. UL: Before that it was Pearl Buck. WW: ... In 1938. UL: The Nobel is such a weird prize anyway. WW: It's interesting to see who has won the Nobel Prize at certain times. Isn't it a coincidence that Saul Bellow won it in 1976, an American winning during our bicentennial. Then, of course, Robert Penn Warren not winning, and he is perhaps our most distinguished writer. UL: Year after year, I and thousands of members of PEN [an international association that promotes cooperation among writers in the interests of inter- national goodwill and freedom of expression] voted for Jorge Luis Borges, who was the obvious international candidate for the Nobel. They would not consider him. They didn't like his politics. I was shocked that Italo Calvino never got it. It seems they never give it to the really risky writers. Bellow is a safe writer. WW: I wasn't dismissing Bellow, and I do like some of his work, especially Herzog.... UL: I am dismissing him just a little bit, because he is a really safe writer, sticking with mainstream male writing, what people are supposed to write about, what's accepted as the subject of writing. He hasn't taken any risks as far as I can see. He's safe as houses. WW: What types of changes would you like to see made with the canon? UL: We are in what we must call post-modernism. I hate the word. It's a stupid word. Maybe we can get a better name for what everybody is doing. People are writing differently and the genres are all merging. Magical realism is certainly one of the early signs of this, coming up from South America. We're mixing fantastic and realistic techniques to make a superreal picture of what's going on in the world. The old lines, walls, and pigeonholes just don't fit anymore. I don't know how criticism should be redone, but it
WILLIAM WALSH I99 should start by carefully reading and observing what is going on, instead of saying it's what everybody used to do and so they should be doing the same thing. Reviewers tend to have trouble with a writer like Toni Morrison, getting a handle on her, because she is doing something truly new. This is always difficult. Virginia Woolf... it's taken us fifty or sixty years to figure out what she was doing in her novels. We are just beginning to get some good Virginia Woolf criticism, because she was way ahead of her time. Everyone said James Joyce is it. OK, he was it for then, but to me Virginia Woolf is still it, while Joyce is an interesting phenomenon historically. Woolf is still a writer who took risks that we don't even know how to explain. It's a matter of rereading, learning to read, and seeing what is there, instead of what "ought to be there." WW: When I was an undergrad I had a very good teacher who approached literature as one entity, and within this entity there were subentities. We discussed literature as a whole; however, he always set portions aside and told us that we probably would always see groups of writers, so here are the categories you're going to find and probably never escape: Jewish writers, women writers, southem writers, etc. It was a very thorough understanding of the literary scene, and we spent about half the time on women writers without really discussing them simply as women writers. UL: This was when? WW: Early 80s. UL: In 1975 you would have spent a quarter of that much time. And in 1965 you would have read Dickinson. WW: We studied O'Connor, Walker, Oates, Welty, McCullers, Bishop, Plath, and Rich. Others who slip my mind momentarily. UL: There's women's literature, but there isn't men's literature. Modernism is male, white, urban, because anything that isn't urban is called "regional," and northern because it isn't "southern," and eastern because it isn't "western." There is a norm that is not honestly declared to be a norm. WW: So if you want to be a writer with longevity you'd better be a white male living in New York City? UL: I think that's changing. The fact is in the 1980s most of the great American novels were written by women. But ten years ago the literary establishment was fighting it. Some are still fighting it.
200 THE KENYON REVIEW WW: I don't know who or what controls these things, this governing device, but is it a fear that those who govern the canon won't be taken seriously if someone else is taken more seriously than themselves? UL: I suppose. Privilege always defends itself. You can see it as a gender thing; male dominance is deeply entrenched. But then you get other prejudices like the old New Yorker when they wouldn't publish anything that was identifiable as science fiction. The old New Yorker had a policy: No science fiction in this magazine. Why? What were they defending themselves against? It's an arbitrary hierarchy of privilege and excellence. If you stick to it long enough you convince people. I think the movement is away from that. Of course, the movement begins not with the critics and reviewers, but with the writers. The writers are doing something else. They have been for years. WW: If you had your voice in the matter, instead of being defined by critics as a science fiction writer, how would you like to be defined? UL: Novelist, short story writer, and poet, because I do write in different forms. Then if they want to say realism, science fiction, fantasy, children's literature, that's fine-so long as the terms are used descriptively and not just judgmentally. Yes, I write science fiction. No, I'm not only "a science fiction writer." Don't box me in! However, I will get provocative and say I am "a western writer" because we need to redefine that category. Then they say, so you write westerns? and I say no. I am a western writer. I was born in the West and lived most of my life here. I write as a westerner. And I will say yes, I am a woman writer. I finally learned how to say that when I was in my fifties. I am a woman writer, not an imitation man. WW: What do you mean by "imitation man"? UL: The canon was so male dominated and male writing was considered the only kind of writing, and women were only "good writers" as long as they imitated men. We all learned to do it except a few mavericks like Virginia Woolf, who never wrote like a man. WW: Do you mean using a certain male writer or male-authored novel as a criterion or guide to what should be written? UL: What interests men is what will interest the novel reader. That was the assumption. Thus, men are at the center of the book. This is something we have not really changed. If men are at the center of the book it's considered to be of general interest to the reader. If women are at the center of the book, it is considered to be of interest to women. Searoad-the book you have with
WILLIAM WALSH 201 you I had to fight my own publisher from saying it was a book about women for women, and only women could possibly be interested in it. I said, "My God, my sales are generally pretty good. Shall we not try to cut them in half by saying stay away from this book, boys, you'll hate it?" In Searoad there are women who don't seem able to keep men in their lives or don't have very good luck with men, women who live alone. I think that's what some of the reviewers and my editor homed in on, and why they said this is all about women. So what? There aren't any women in Moby Dick, but that doesn't keep women from reading it. Even if a book is mostly about women, like The Color Purple, which is very woman-centered, men read it. I know some men have trouble politically with the book, but aesthetically there's no barrier. There's a false rule. If it's about men everybody wants it; if it's about women it's only for women. WW: This supersedes literature. Take the movie Thelma and Louise, for instance. Before I saw the movie almost every male friend of mine said it's a movie for women, and then women said City Slickers is a male movie. So it may not be only in literature but may encompass human nature in a social context. UL: Of course, Thelma and Louise had a threat element in it to some men. It was pretty blunt. (laughing) If you were in the theater, as I was the first time I saw Thelma and Louise, when all the women burst into a cheer when the women blew up the truck-if I'd been a man I would have thought: Hey, I didn't know they were that mad. It was very impressive. I think a lot of women who saw that movie didn't know they were that mad until they saw it. That's why it's an important movie. WW: What are you working on now? UL: I'm waiting to see. I spent a lot of last year working on the Norton Book of Science Fiction, which if you know Norton Books, was an enormous amount of reading. I had a ball, but I didn't get much writing done. I never know what comes next. I've been writing some short stories. WW: You didn 't write much as a result of all the reading you did last year, and as most of us know that's a very thin line to balance on. How do you normally balance the writing life against everything else, and what types of things pull you away from the work? UL: Correspondence. Answering letters. It seems to be the thing I cannot control. Although I have a very good friend who works as my secretary. She's incredibly helpful-she'll say, "Don't answer that letter; answer this one," and helps me work out an answer. I get an awful lot of mail because of the types of things I write. There's a very lively and intense readership of science fiction,
202 THE KENYON REVIEW fans, and they write the authors. A lot of fiction writers get no response, a couple of criticisms and a few notices in Poets & Writers and that's it. It's nice to get a response. Then I write children's books, and kids write spontaneously. Those letters are ones you want to answer. But teachers increasingly make kids write authors-every kid has to pick an author and write the author and ask them really stupid questions, which you can tell the teacher told them to write. Or huge questions, like where do you get your ideas from. I mean, come on! (laughing) And then there's a moral dilemma-this is a child writing to you; you feel that you should answer this child. I feel that rather strongly as a woman, as a writer. But it can take half a week to answer letters. I wish teachers would realize that this is not putting a child in touch with a writer. It's just wasting the writer's time and the child's time. I think it's treating both of them with disrespect. If a child wants to write an author, fine. The kids writing me on their own usually tell me what I did wrong. (laughing) Or they suggest what the next book ought to be. They are great at that. WW: Have you ever used their suggestions? UL: (laughing) No. They're usually kind of wild. It's what a kid would write, and they're usually funny. Then, of course, there's business correspondence, where I have to say no I can't keynote your meeting. This eats up my time, and distresses me a lot. I don't know why I can't get it under control. I guess some writers just end up not answering letters, but that seems very arrogant to me. The real problem is lack of energy. When I was in my thirties I had three kids I was bringing up. I did not have any help except from my husband who was an enormous help. But I could write novels and bring up kids. I had energy. Like you, I didn't sleep much. But when you get in your sixties you don't have that much energy, and it gets more difficult. I'm slower as a writer. I don't know that I'm better, but my writing is more complex than it used to be. The last sixty pages of Searoad took me two years, and I was appalled at how slow it was going. What's wrong with me, I thought. Well, it just took that long. You have to let everything run its own course. WW: Are you1, selfish with your time? UL: All artists have to be a little rigid and say no I'm not going to answer the telephone, or no, I can't do something. I'm not very methodical. I used to be very contemptuous and disdainful of people who went to writer's retreats. There I was with my family and housework and other stuff, and I used to think why do you have to go off to some farm and be protected? Now I understand. Now I do need genuine solitude to write. It's the energy thing. I can't put the walls up anymore. Sometimes I even need to be away from my husband. We
WILLIAM WALSH 203 have a beach house and a town house. Sometimes we split up and he writes here and I write there. He says he doesn't need it, but he knows I do. That's a big change. I find it a little humiliating, like I ought to be able to write anywhere. But I really can't. WW: As we sit here in Macon, you're three thousand miles from your home, do you find it difficult to write here? UL: In a brief visit to a place like this, I write poetry, because it comes when it will and if you are open to it, it'll come. I'm writing reviews right now while I'm here. I would hate to start a short story here knowing how broken up my time is going to be. A short story is very intense and once I start I pretty much have to finish it in one deep breath. Even though it might be four or five days I want those four or five days. WW: How do you view your readership? UL: I have a very loyal readership. People look for my books. So I learned from that how reciprocal an art writing is. When I started, it seemed very lonely, because you are writing in a void-you don't know who your readers are. I still don't know who my readers are mostly, but I have a sense of them being there. I do hear from them. I do know they are there. They buy the books. I have a much stronger sense now that it is the reader who completes the book for me. It's slightly mystical. I tell the story as well as I can and I do it as an end in itself. When I'm working on a story I don't think of myself or the reader. If I do, it's fatal. I'm simply making something, and I make it as well as I can. But when it's published you're sending it out into this void, hopeful it's full of readers. And the way they read it is what makes it a story. They finish it. If it's not read, it doesn't really exist. It's wood pulp with black marks on it. The reader does work with the writer. You can't help but get mystical about it, because it's such a strange process. Where you feel it is in performance, and this is one reason why the older I get the fonder I am of performance art, either reading a story or an actual performance piece of poetry, poetry and music, poetry and dance, various things I've been involved in. It is a mystical experience when a performance piece and an audience work together on stage. It's this incredible energy where you give it to them and they give it to you. That's so addictive, as anybody who's into performance knows. What happens when you publish a book is the same thing, but it's continuous, and so mysterious because the audience is out there somewhere but you don't know them. And yet, it does happen. I think what I'm trying to say is that I hope this happens whenever I publish something. I hope the same energy begins to flow through my work to the reader and back to me, both empowering each other.
204 THE KENYON REVIEW WW: Your feminist views are forthright.... UL: Yes, I am a feminist. WW: I've noticed that television and radio interviewers and newspaper writers act, when they hear someone is a feminist or when they mention it in an article, as though it were a profession one chose opposed to what one ought to be doing regardless. The media seems amazed or surprised by this. I've told my classes before that I'm a feminist, and everyone, male and female alike, breaks out laughing. I ask them what would they want me to be? Like being a humanist, it's something each one of us should naturally be doing, taking up a cause for oneself as well as for others. It just seems to me that the media is always in shock over feminism and has to ask a woman what drew her to be a feminist. UL: Yes, I know. (laughing) It's like what drew me into breathing. WW: I bring this up because I'm interested in your position on the feminist movement oier the years, where it stands today, and where you would like to see it progressing. UL: It'll take a few hours. (laughing) Briefly, I was slow and kind of stupid in some ways. This present wave of feminism started in the mid-60s. It was partly fueled by the misogyny of the New Left. There's no doubt about that. Women found themselves pushed aside. The men were going to end the war and run everything. A lot of anger came out of that. I was slow to get in, but there began to be questions: What are men? What are women? Are there essential differences? This obviously led me to write the first book of mine that really hit, had success, and has been in print ever since, The Left Hand of Darkness, which is about people who can be either male or female for a few days a month. By the end of the book, most of the characters are both mothers and fathers. The book was a thought experiment. What if ? What if there is no difference between men and women? Let's remove all possible biological and psychological differences and see what we've got. What we got was a novel I certainly enjoyed. But I didn't realize at the time that there was anything very radical about it. It was really the first book of its kind (except a science fiction book by Ted Sturgeon called Venus Plus X, which I didn't know when I wrote mine). WW: In your writing, and this may pertain more to the science fiction, of all the things or ideas that you have thought of or worlds you have invented, when you wake up tomorrow what one thing would you like to see in place that we don't have today? UL: This is looking at the utopian element in my writing?
WILLIAM WALSH 205 WW: Yes, because this establishes a multitude of dilemmas. We have the idea that we would like to cure world hunger but that doesn't take into account that we will have to cure world thirst also. If there is no disease, then no one dies and it creates a new set of problems, and then there is some other aspect that is troublesome. UL: That's the plot of The Lathe of Heaven, where the doctor keeps asking the guy who can dream true to cure this and cure that, and so he does and it always makes something worse, then he has to work on that one. WW: Exactly. If you bring one utopian aspect to the world tomorrow, what would it be? UL: I can't pick one because I don't think that way. It's all network. You know the butterfly theory-if you kill a butterfly in North Carolina, it may result in a typhoon in China. Small causes have very large results. To answer your question I can only talk about my book that is a pure utopia, my utopia, my dream world: Always Coming Home, where I took my Napa Valley of north California and moved it into an imaginary time, the "future." I lessened the world population radically and let these people in the Valley develop a local culture, which isn't male or female dominated, and is pretty much consensual. They do a lot of singing and dancing and thinking. I created a "dream world" that I tried grounding absolutely and solidly in a real place, the Napa Valley, which I know stone by stone. Marianne Moore said real toads in imaginary gardens is what poetry is about. Well, what I did was create imaginary toads in a real garden. I tried working out in that book the world that I think I would like best to live in. Although this one will do.
Given the way her stories have fired my imagination, it's vaguely disappointing to meet Le Guin. She stands a trim 5-foot-4, with white hair and a ready smile. I expect a literary giant to be bigger somehow, to take up more space and oxygen. I expect erudite conversation, but she peppers her speech with "ums," run-on sentences, fragments and common phrases like "Oh, golly!" just like the rest of us.
The disappointment fades as I talk to her about the boys throwing snowballs in front of her house and the destruction of Taoism in China. I realize she's no icon with a muse whispering in her ear; she watches, listens, thinks and feels, then reflects those observations and feelings in her art. "Authors are writing artists," Le Guin says. "I think people restrict the term 'artist' to mean painters and sculptors, but you can practice art in whatever medium you choose. Words are my medium."
And Le Guin is a master. Over nearly 50 years she's published 17 novels, 11 children's books, more than 100 short stories, two collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, two volumes of translation and screenplays of her works. She's received the National Book Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize and several "lifetime achievement" awards among dozens of other honors.
In contrast to her extraordinary career, Le Guin's life seems staid and ordinary; she's been married to historian Charles Le Guin for 47 years, and they have three children and three grandchildren. Le Guin and her husband have lived in the same house in Portland, Ore., for 40 years. She writes on a computer but refuses to "get connected." She strolls down to the local Minuteman Press to send and receive faxes. When she's not writing, she teaches it to others, and she serves on the board of her local library.
During our conversation, Le Guin chats easily about literary criticism and her newest work and how exhausting book tours are, but she leaves me to discover her heart and soul in her nonfiction, such as "Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women and Places." There I trace the roots of her feminism to a disastrous relationship with a "prince" in graduate school, see her patient humor in her description of eating cold mashed potatoes in take after take as an extra on the set of "The Lathe of Heaven" and dissect her feelings about utopias.
Le Guin has accepted a few labels over the years as "approximately accurate": novelist, radical, feminist, Taoist and, more recently, Western writer. Born in 1929, she is of that misnamed "Silent Generation" -- those Americans who were children during World War II -- but Le Guin is anything but silent. She was on the leading edge of the civil rights, feminist and antiwar movements of the 1960s. Through her tales and complex characters, she has explored the themes of sexism, racism, nationalism, unchecked technological progress and the flaws in popular utopian visions. Wherever I looked a generation later, she had already blazed the trail.
Le Guin is a product of both her times and her unusual family. Her father was anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who developed the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley and was known for his work among Native American tribes. Today, Kroeber is perhaps most famous for his close association with, and study of, Ishi, the Yahi Indian who wandered out of the Northern California wilderness in 1911 and spent the remaining years of his life residing at the University of California's anthropology museum -- where Kroeber was the curator. (Ishi died of tuberculosis in 1916, though he was in the news again in August when his brain was moved from the Smithsonian Institution and properly buried in his ancestral homeland, the foothills of Mount Lassen.)
Le Guin's mother, Theodora, trained as a psychologist and wrote the bestselling biography "Ishi in Two Worlds," as well as a number of children's works. Observation and analysis, words, myth and storytelling were an integral part of Le Guin's life from an early age. And given the themes and preoccupations that permeate her fiction, it's interesting to speculate about the influence the story of Ishi has had on her work.
The facts of Ishi's life and his intersection with the white man's world resulted in one of the more remarkable anthropological cases of the 20th century, and its elements seem to echo through many of Le Guin's stories -- from "Planet of Exile" and "City of Illusion" to "The Word for World Is Forest" and "The Dispossessed." It would be surprising if that weren't the case -- what artists do, among other things, is use the raw material of their own life to make a universal statement that, when most successful, resonates across time and cultures.
But she didn't spend her youth reading only anthropological texts and high literature, or immersed in her parents' interests. Le Guin admits she and her brother devoured the pulp science fiction magazines of the '30s and '40s. "Kids need to read a lot of dumb stuff," she says, "roughage in the diet. But there are ethical questions when you're writing for kids. You have to stand back from the work and say, 'Could this scare an 8-year-old? Could it do any harm?'" Her own children's books, such as the "Catwings" series, are beautifully illustrated, gentle fantasies of the Beatrix Potter stripe.
Intellectual refugees from the universities of war-torn Europe, her parents' extensive library, and storytelling around the campfire at the Kroeber summer home in California's Napa Valley helped nurture her native talent. At the age of 11, she submitted a piece to Astounding Science Fiction magazine (which later became Analog) that was rejected. In 1947, she left her Berkeley home to attend Radcliffe College. She continued her studies in Romance literature at Columbia University, where she earned an M.A. and a Fulbright scholarship.
On her way to study in France in 1953, she met fellow Queen Mary passenger Charles Le Guin. They married in Paris a few months later. Over the next 10 years, she and her husband, a professor, settled in Portland, and their three children, Elisabeth, Caroline and Theodore, were born.
Le Guin wrote after the children went to bed and, when they got older, during their school hours, but initially her work met with little acceptance. Her poems were regularly published, but she couldn't find a market for her short stories or fantastical historical novels set in a fictional analogue of Czechoslovakia, a country she named Orsinia. She describes her earliest work as being "just a bit off," containing some oddity or fantasy element that prevented editors from labeling her work, putting it in a literary or genre box.
She received love letters about her writing skills and style, but literary editors rejected her stories as "not quite right for us." Le Guin still maintains a dispute with critics and academics who insist only realistic fiction can be literary fiction. She says, "That attitude knocks out about nine-tenths of all American literature. Once we had the South American magical realists you couldn't say only realism is literary."
In 1961 her mother's book "Ishi in Two Worlds" made the bestseller list. (Still in print, it has sold over a million copies.) Theodora Kroeber started writing in her 50s, "after my children left to have children," and her work struck a chord with the market that surprised her family and her publisher. Le Guin's turn came the next year, when two of her stories sold. She sold an Orsinian tale to a small literary magazine (with payment in copies of the magazine) and a time-travel story, "April in Paris," to Fantastic for $30. Looking at the proceeds from both markets, Le Guin decided to focus her writing where it paid. She let loose her formidable imagination on the science fiction world and later earned the acceptance of mainstream readers as well.
In quick succession, Le Guin published "Rocannan's World" (1966), "Planet of Exile" (1966) and "City of Illusion" (1967). Those early works articulate mythic themes of the journey/quest, combined with the Taoist motif of a balanced and ordered wholeness and the literary convention of a stranger in a strange land. They're the first in what became known as Le Guin's "Hainish Universe." The common background in this set of novels, novellas and short stories, which cover about 2,500 years of future history, is that people from a planet named Hain seeded this part of the galaxy with human life. Under pressure of different environments and some direct genetic intervention, they evolve a diversity of human physical forms and social structures.
In 1969 critics hailed "The Left Hand of Darkness" for its feminist themes and mythic storytelling. In the book, Le Guin conducts "a thought experiment" on the effects of gender (or lack of it) on society by exploring the implications of an androgynous race. In those early days of the feminist movement, she was forcing people to examine the roles of men and women in society. Le Guin wasn't sure she could sell the book or the idea. She thought men might feel figuratively castrated by the androgynous characters. Yet it became the best known and most honored of her works, winning a Nebula, a Hugo and a James Tiptree Jr. Retrospective Award.
Le Guin admits that in her earlier works she "wrote like an honorary man." She was initially cautious in her feminism. Even in "The Left Hand of Darkness," she still used "he" for the androgynous characters and rarely showed them in feminine roles. She told me that she regrets having allowed her characters only heterosexual relationships. But she feels she wrote the best book she could given the times. Le Guin credits reading "The Norton Book of Literature by Women" and her literary inspiration, Virginia Woolf, for allowing her to write like a woman and to feel liberated in doing so.
Leading the life of an academic family, the Le Guins took two sabbaticals in England, because "it's easier on the kids to go where they speak the same language." The first, in 1968, was at the height of the Vietnam War. Le Guin, a pacifist and Taoist, was "angry and frustrated." That year she wrote "The Word for World Is Forest," a story of brutal Terrans colonizing a planet occupied by a race of peaceful, green-furred natives. She was "a little uneasy that 'Word' was a preachy book and it would die with the cause. It is certainly the most overt political statement I have made in fiction." It won the 1973 Hugo Award.
Spurred by the social optimism of the late '60s and early '70s, Le Guin took a crack at utopian fiction. Her Hainish book "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia" (1974) won both the Hugo and the Nebula, giving Le Guin the distinction of being the only author to twice win both awards in the same year for a novel. "The Dispossessed" is her most densely textured work. Another thought experiment, it plays anarchism against capitalism. By sending a dissatisfied inhabitant from one society to the other, Le Guin examines how both work -- or don't. "They're imperfect utopias because the people in them are just people."
Le Guin has studied Laotzu and the Tao Te Ching since age 14, when she discovered her father's old edition. She has been seeking out and comparing translations ever since, captivated by the book's practical, nontheistic, easygoing approach. She finds the tenets "endlessly fruitful and nourishing to me as an artist," and she published her own translation, "Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way," in 1997. She describes the book as "the most lovable of the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous and inexhaustibly refreshing." Her fascination with Taoism shows up early in her writing, most notably in her series "Books of Earthsea."
In the late '60s, Herman Schein, her mother's publisher at Parnassus Press, approached Le Guin about writing a young-adult novel. "A Wizard of Earthsea," which won the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award, came out in 1968, followed closely by 1970's "The Tombs of Atuan," winner of the Newbery Silver Medal, and 1972's "The Farthest Shore," which won the National Book Award for Children's Books. On the surface these are coming-of-age stories, each featuring an adolescent who struggles to learn life's lessons and set in a fairy tale, pre-industrial, vaguely medieval world. But Le Guin's artful storytelling and complex underlying themes elevate the works beyond mundane fantasy and the young-adult audience for which they are intended. "To light a candle is to cast a shadow," one of the wise characters says, and the protagonists spend the rest of their journey learning the need for balance -- light/dark, male/female, action/inaction.
At the time I read it, I didn't notice Earthsea's distinctly male bias. Nearly all fantasy fiction, from C.S. Lewis' "Narnia" to J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," featured male protagonists. Le Guin acknowledges, "That's how hero stories worked." She started on a fourth book in the mid-'70s to correct the imbalance, but put it aside. "Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea" finally appeared in 1990 and won the Nebula. In this story Le Guin shows the underside of Earthsea from the point of view of a mature woman and a battered girl. Although billed as the last book of the series, Le Guin has a collection, "Tales of Earthsea," coming out in the spring. "I thought after 'Tehanu' the story was finished, but I was wrong. I've learned never to say 'never.'"
Le Guin writes a loving homage to Taoism in her most recent Hainish book, 2000's "The Telling," again using the future as metaphor. "In China they've been practicing Taoism for two or three thousand years and apparently nearly wiped it out in only 20 years under Mao," she says. "It survives only in Taiwan and a few little exile colonies in North America. This whole thing haunted my imagination. It was a very hard book to write. I was playing with things that sort of scare me about our world."
The Taoist theory of inaction, that people should take action only when necessary, is shown best in "The Lathe of Heaven" (1972), in which Le Guin creates Everyman George Orr, who can do what we all wish we could -- make dreams real. But Orr falls under the control of a do-gooder psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, who realizes that Orr can change reality and tries to control those "effective dreams" to make the world better. These efforts lurch from inconvenience (no rain) to disaster (an alien invasion), an object lesson in unintended consequences for those who want to change the world.
Le Guin consulted on a 1980 PBS made-for-TV movie version of "Lathe" and chronicled her adventure in "Working on 'The Lathe.'" When David Loxton of the TV lab at WNET called and said he wanted to come to Portland and talk to her about making a TV movie of one of her books, she replied, "No you don't!" Loxton persevered, overcoming Le Guin's objections one by one: He could indeed fly all the way to Oregon and, yes, they could "melt" Portland, "especially if we film that bit in Dallas."
Le Guin admits to a certain amount of calculation in including an interracial relationship in "Lathe." "If you look at my books, you'll find that most of my central characters aren't white. You don't see it on the cover, because they refuse to put people of color on book jackets. But I've always done that deliberately because most people in the world aren't white. Why in the future would we assume they are?"
Regionalism is the most recent influence on Le Guin's work. After her second sabbatical in England, she looked around her Oregon home and made a commitment to "my dirt," shedding the last vestiges of what she calls "Europe-centeredness." She joyously returned to the anthropology and Native American tales of her childhood in the Napa Valley in her second utopian novel, "Always Coming Home" (1985), winner of the Kafka Prize for Fiction and short-listed for the National Book Award.
In this novel, Le Guin tries to "make a world that is a little less cruel and hard on the people who live in it than our world is." The book is remarkable for its structure and its content. Le Guin abandons the traditional narrative form and creates a fictional anthropology of a people far in the future, the Kesh, who have adopted a distinctly Native American way of life. Our dysfunctional historical era is referred to as "the time when people lived outside the world." It's a remarkably rich collection of short stories, myths, poems and music, held together by a central novella and explained by more traditional anthropological "back matter." In this work Le Guin brings together all her passions -- the balance of Taoism, an anarchic "feminine" style, environmentalism and great storytelling.
While chronicling her life and work, I realized my relationship with Le Guin has shifted through the years. I started as a reader inspired by her stories and her insight into the human condition, and I finish as a writer inspired by her artistry, style and continual innovation. I am not unique in feeling this connection to Le Guin's work.
"Boy, it makes you feel fairly humble and it's a little scary when you realize you influence people. But when I'm writing, nothing affects me, I'm just trying to do the story," Le Guin says. And as she has explained, "These are human stories. I'm using the other worlds and the other races as metaphors. All I know how to write about are people and animals -- and trees. Still, nothing that is alien."
http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2001/01/23/le_guin
WILLIAM WALSH I AM A WOMAN WRITER; I AM A WESTERN WRITER AN INTERVIEW WITH URSULA LE GUIN
URSULA LE GUIN is America's preeminent writer of science fiction. However, one should not be confused and call her only a science fiction writer, because-as she will tell you-since the publication of her first novel, Rocannon's World (Ace Books, 1966), she has published more than fifteen novels, four collections of poetry, five short story collections, seven books for children, two books of criticism, screenplays, edited anthologies, and she has made a half dozen recordings. She has published more than sixty short stories in the New Yorker, Tri-Quarterly, Kenyon Review, Omni, Redbook, Playboy, and Playgirl. Her most recent books are Going Out with Peacocks, a book of poems from HarperCollins, Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings, a book for children from Orchard Press, and A Fisherman of the Island Sea, a book of science fiction short stories from HarperPrism. In 1972 Le Guin won the National Book Award for The Farthest Shore. In addition to being a five-time winner of the Hugo Award and a four-time Nebula Award winner, her other honors include a Newbery Silver Medal Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Prix Lectures-Jeunesse, the Gandalf Award for fantasy writing, and the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award. She holds a B.A. from Radcliffe College (1951) and an M.A. from Columbia (1952), and has taught at, among others, Mercer University, University of Idaho, Kenyon College, Portland State University, Tulane University, and Bennington College. Born in 1929, in Berkeley, California, she spent most of her life on the West Coast, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, Charles A. Le Guin, a historian. Her father was anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, and her mother, Theodora Kroeber, published Ishi, a national best-seller. This interview was conducted in Macon, Georgia, on 30 March 1993. It was a sunny and breezy morning as we sat outside in her mother's backyard in the shade-talking and drinking coffee. I92
WW: During the introduction of your reading last week, you mentioned the labels placed on writers by critics as well as the deficiency of the canon in regard to women. I would like to address both of these issues. First, I have read endlessly where you are considered a science fiction writer, and often that's the only category. I never thought of you in that single category because Ifirst came to your essays. Do you find the categories limiting and how do you deal with this? UL: Right from the start I've always written other material. I started out publishing poetry long before I published prose. I've never been known as a poet, and I'm always having to tell people I have four volumes of poetry, two of them hardback. So, OK, I'm mainly a prose writer-that's fine. The first two stories I published were within a couple of months, one was science fiction and one was realism. One was in a science fiction magazine and the other was in a university quarterly. One, according to the wisdom of the time, was respectable and the other was not respectable. But it's not the respectable genre that I get categorized in. There is something very strange about the whole process. I've always written realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and books for kids, but the category that sticks is science fiction. I do write science fiction. Some of my books and stories are pure science fiction-I love the stuff. It's one of the things I do. There is something funny about this categorization-you get typecast like some actors. Poor Leonard Nimoy- nobody believes he has round ears. I began to see it as something not in relation to myself but this whole modernist, mid-twentieth-century idea of a canon in English literature, which, in fiction, is strictly realism, and everything else is subliterary, nonliterary. Maybe that was true in 1925, but it's just not true now. There is no way you can say that realism is the only literature going. I mean, most of our best novelists are not even writing realism anymore-writers like Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Leslie Silko. They are using realistic techniques to tell stories that are not realistic. WW: The fact is that it's very easy to categorize writers into genres and subgenres.... UL: It's a neat way of sweeping things under the carpet, particularly for the academics and the more narrow-minded reviewers. Book reviewers are terrible about this. Take my book Always Coming Home, or Karen Fowler's Sara Canary, which is a knockout book-if they can perceive those books as science fiction they'll sweep them under the science fiction rug and then they don't have to deal with them. Several reviewers have done that. Sara Canary is a good case in point because some people think it's science fiction and some I93
I94 THE KENYON REVIEW people don't. There's a character who you can see as an alien if you want, but she may not be an alien at all, just a woman. It's a kind of litmus paper novel. I don't know why there is so much arrogance toward science fiction. People have come up to me and said, "You write sci-fi. My children read that." What am I supposed to say, "Isn't that wonderful! Of course, you're a grown- up and you don't read it." (laughing) There is equal or more arrogance toward writing for children. Often people say when they find that I write children's books, "I've thought of doing that" as if I'd go up to a dancer and say that I thought about ballet in my spare time. It's incredibly arrogant. Children's literature is as tight a discipline as writing poetry. Another thing about science fiction and fantasy, you can't use the same critical apparatus to read it if you are seriously reviewing a book or teaching a book. For this you need some different techniques for understanding. In other words, you have to learn how to read a science fiction book. WW: What would these techniques be? UL: Some of the key suppositions are different. In realism and science fiction, the writer has a contract with the reader that the writer will live in the reader's world-even in science fiction, which may be the future or a plausible future. In science fiction, as in realism, nothing happens that couldn't happen or shouldn't happen. Whereas in fantasy, the contract is just the opposite. The reader agrees to enter the writer's world and follow its laws. That's a major step a lot of people will not take. They don't want to enter a world they don't share with everybody else. A fantasy world exists only in the book. Some people love that. Most children love it. They love to get into different worlds. It seems that a lot of people lose that capacity somewhere in their teens and then they are scared of it. WW: I would agree that this is true in literature, but deviates in film. People seem more accepting offilm and of entering a fantasy world or a science fiction world because they love to be taken away. UL: ... Although we don't have many good fantasy films. It's more often science fiction, which pretends to be our world extrapolated forward. WW: Star Wars is really cowboys in space. UL: Yes, and a lot of fantasy is cowboys in fairyland, too. I watched The Thief of Baghdad the other night, which is probably the greatest fantasy film ever made. It's beautiful, and I noticed how much people have been drawing from it ever since-even Disney. But most of our fantasy is animated, which makes it very safe because it isn't real people. There is a real fear of fantasy in America. Reading science fiction seriously is complicated, because like any
WILLIAM WALSH I95 literature the people who read it begin to share a language. And by now, science fiction has been written seriously for thirty or forty years. The writers mostly don't explain very much, and if you are not used to reading this stuff you may feel "what is going on?-I don't understand." A lot of the signals are in shorthand. You have to learn to pick up as you do with any literature. You certainly do in poetry. Perhaps, people growing up reading only realism may be unwilling to learn another dialect of the language. WW: When you are writing, either science fiction or realism, is there a different mindset you have to place yourself in so you can pull from a different world. With science fiction you have to expand the outer limits of what you perceive to be reality, as opposed to realism. UL: I don't see that opposition. Science fiction and realism are versions of the same literary trends-they both depend, in a sense, on science to tell us what is real. Before about 1700 all literature was basically fantastic. We had a religious consensus. The higher reality was a religious reality, the earth was basically a lower reality. There wasn't any science to tell you that this was possible or this was not possible. Sometimes it's difficult to tell fiction from natural history between the Middle Ages and the 1500s. Invention and reality are pretty much mixed together. As we began to move into the age of science, industry, and technology, we had a touchstone-yeah, this is possible-science says we can fly to the moon. Science also says that we can't fly to the moon on wings, flapping our wings and breathing, because there is nothing to breathe between the earth and the moon. That kind of voyage becomes strictly fantastic. You get a clearer line between realism and science fiction on one hand and fantasy on the other. However, since I write all of them, to me it's just a different mood-do I want to enter the commonly-agreed-to-be world or do I want to say, "Reader, come over here across the wall and I will make you a world that never could be. We both know it never could be, but we can enjoy it for itself." Science fiction is always a metaphor. We are really talking about right here, right now. We call it the future because in what we call the future we are very free to move around and invent. WW: Last night I was thinking about a writer who published a book in 1960 about flying to the moon. That would have been considered science fiction. But that same book published July 30, 1969, would not have been science fiction. I was toying with the idea of science catching up to the imagination. UL: There is a statute of limitations about fiction. Like Jules Verne inventing the submarine before anybody really invented it, and he's very cagey about what it is, but he also invented something like atomic power to fuel the submarine. He was doing this in the 1880s. People love to talk about science fiction as prediction. But actually its record of prediction is dismal. It's like one story
I96 THE KENYON REVIEW from the 1930s and early 40s predicted anything like the atom bomb, the major event of the mid-twentieth century. The writers had no clue anything like this was in the works. The future and space travel are just metaphors. They are very useful and beautiful metaphors for talking about us now, but they are not predictions. WW: I would never have thought of science fiction as prediction.... UL: A lot of people want to. They read it like astrology. WW: In your writing has anything come true that you invented or imagined without prior knowledge that this "thing" was a possibility, something that has later come true? UL: No, because I don't write high-tech science fiction. My technology tends to be complex and largely invisible. There's a kind of wiring diagram science fiction that goes into great detail about the technology of future spaceships and wars; it bores me to tears. In my book, The Lathe of Heaven, something happens but it's never quite clear what happens, in April 1998. It looks like we sort of blow up the world, but you can't be sure, because the book is full of dreams and visions, and you are never sure which is which. I wrote that book in the 70s when 1998 was a nice long way away. As it comes closer I start thinking: I hope we get through April 1998. (laughing) After 1998 my book will be a little bit different. Like Orwell's 1984; since we got through 1984 you have to read the book a little bit differently. It's more of a period piece than it was. But at least nobody can seriously believe that I am predicting, which I never was. I was telling a story. WW: I remember as 1984 started becoming more of a reality, everyone who had read 1984 almostfeared the entire forthcoming year-the closer the world came to 1984, the more we feared what was supposed to be. I think everyone else was worried, too, that Orwell would be right because there were television shows, and newspaper and magazine articles appearing everywhere on the predicted doom of our individual freedom. UL: In a way it did happen. Orwell's original title was 1948. The publishers said he couldn't call it that, because that was this year. Orwell said that's the point. He was talking about what was really going on, now, 1948. This is what I mean when I say the future is a metaphor. WW: That's like Heller's Catch 22. Arbitrarily it was changed, I believe, originally from Catch 19, because another writer published a book with "19" in the title, and now the term "catch 22" has become a cliche' in the American dogma ever since.
WILLIAM WALSH 197 UL: That's a good story, but 1984 is kind of a pity. I can see why the publisher did it, but Orwell was right. He was writing about 1948 and all that it included. WW: It's interesting to observe how people believe Orwell was predicting the world's future when in fact he was describing the present, and, by an editor's decision, changed how we saw ourselves. I wanted to follow up myfirst question with the second part, which has to do with the literary canon, and for the most part, the exclusion of women writers. UL: There again things are changing. There has been a steady campaign mounted in the last ten to fifteen years by feminist critiques, both male and female, against that exclusion. It's beginning to be the old guard that says the only women writers are Austen, Bronte, Woolf, and maybe Plath. And Dickinson, of course. The only good women writers are dead virgins. (laughing) Not only dead, unmarried, but preferably childless. In other words, as much like men as possible. I don't know why this is going on. I really don't. It just seems so damn silly to me to leave out half our writers. Nearly half of our fiction has been written by women. Often while they were alive these women were beloved and popular, respected, but as soon as they died the lid went on. There's been this whole process in the last fifteen years of rediscovering women writers who were either undervalued or just plain forgotten. A great case in point, Margaret Oliphant, a Victorian writer, who I think is better than Trollope, more varied, more interesting-a fascinating writer that no one has ever heard of. She was a better writer than Trollope, and she knew it. She said very bitterly, "I was paid for my best book what Trollope got for his pot boilers." And he ground out potboilers by the score. There has been a misogyny and a stupidity at work, which we are coming out of. And yet, when you look at the grants, prizes, and awards, it is still clearly male dominated. Just start counting the Nobel. A woman gets the Nobel once every thirty years. The prizes do not reflect the reality of who is writing. WV: That's true, but it is changing. There's Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Mary Oliver.... UL: Sure, you can name them, but now start naming the men. If my figures are right, publishing both poetry and fiction is about fifty-fifty men and women, but prizes, grants, and awards are nowhere near fifty-fifty. I don't want a quota system, God knows. This is art we're talking about. But I really do believe that right now most of our best writing is being done by women. Anybody who is honest about fiction in America in the last ten years, and maybe poetry, must say look at these women writers! It's explainable partly because of the feminist movement. We're learning how to write as women. A lot of us feel that we've found our voices. In poetry, I read men poets complaining about how narrow and tight the poetic canon is, but
I98 THE KENYON REVIEW they're not reading the women poets. There's a big change going on and we are in the middle of this big change. I may be fighting a battle that has essentially been won, but most feminists learned to be cautious about that, because every time you think you have won the battle you suddenly find yourself right back where you were a generation ago and all the doors are closed again. WW: Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize in 1991. UL: Before that it was Pearl Buck. WW: ... In 1938. UL: The Nobel is such a weird prize anyway. WW: It's interesting to see who has won the Nobel Prize at certain times. Isn't it a coincidence that Saul Bellow won it in 1976, an American winning during our bicentennial. Then, of course, Robert Penn Warren not winning, and he is perhaps our most distinguished writer. UL: Year after year, I and thousands of members of PEN [an international association that promotes cooperation among writers in the interests of inter- national goodwill and freedom of expression] voted for Jorge Luis Borges, who was the obvious international candidate for the Nobel. They would not consider him. They didn't like his politics. I was shocked that Italo Calvino never got it. It seems they never give it to the really risky writers. Bellow is a safe writer. WW: I wasn't dismissing Bellow, and I do like some of his work, especially Herzog.... UL: I am dismissing him just a little bit, because he is a really safe writer, sticking with mainstream male writing, what people are supposed to write about, what's accepted as the subject of writing. He hasn't taken any risks as far as I can see. He's safe as houses. WW: What types of changes would you like to see made with the canon? UL: We are in what we must call post-modernism. I hate the word. It's a stupid word. Maybe we can get a better name for what everybody is doing. People are writing differently and the genres are all merging. Magical realism is certainly one of the early signs of this, coming up from South America. We're mixing fantastic and realistic techniques to make a superreal picture of what's going on in the world. The old lines, walls, and pigeonholes just don't fit anymore. I don't know how criticism should be redone, but it
WILLIAM WALSH I99 should start by carefully reading and observing what is going on, instead of saying it's what everybody used to do and so they should be doing the same thing. Reviewers tend to have trouble with a writer like Toni Morrison, getting a handle on her, because she is doing something truly new. This is always difficult. Virginia Woolf... it's taken us fifty or sixty years to figure out what she was doing in her novels. We are just beginning to get some good Virginia Woolf criticism, because she was way ahead of her time. Everyone said James Joyce is it. OK, he was it for then, but to me Virginia Woolf is still it, while Joyce is an interesting phenomenon historically. Woolf is still a writer who took risks that we don't even know how to explain. It's a matter of rereading, learning to read, and seeing what is there, instead of what "ought to be there." WW: When I was an undergrad I had a very good teacher who approached literature as one entity, and within this entity there were subentities. We discussed literature as a whole; however, he always set portions aside and told us that we probably would always see groups of writers, so here are the categories you're going to find and probably never escape: Jewish writers, women writers, southem writers, etc. It was a very thorough understanding of the literary scene, and we spent about half the time on women writers without really discussing them simply as women writers. UL: This was when? WW: Early 80s. UL: In 1975 you would have spent a quarter of that much time. And in 1965 you would have read Dickinson. WW: We studied O'Connor, Walker, Oates, Welty, McCullers, Bishop, Plath, and Rich. Others who slip my mind momentarily. UL: There's women's literature, but there isn't men's literature. Modernism is male, white, urban, because anything that isn't urban is called "regional," and northern because it isn't "southern," and eastern because it isn't "western." There is a norm that is not honestly declared to be a norm. WW: So if you want to be a writer with longevity you'd better be a white male living in New York City? UL: I think that's changing. The fact is in the 1980s most of the great American novels were written by women. But ten years ago the literary establishment was fighting it. Some are still fighting it.
200 THE KENYON REVIEW WW: I don't know who or what controls these things, this governing device, but is it a fear that those who govern the canon won't be taken seriously if someone else is taken more seriously than themselves? UL: I suppose. Privilege always defends itself. You can see it as a gender thing; male dominance is deeply entrenched. But then you get other prejudices like the old New Yorker when they wouldn't publish anything that was identifiable as science fiction. The old New Yorker had a policy: No science fiction in this magazine. Why? What were they defending themselves against? It's an arbitrary hierarchy of privilege and excellence. If you stick to it long enough you convince people. I think the movement is away from that. Of course, the movement begins not with the critics and reviewers, but with the writers. The writers are doing something else. They have been for years. WW: If you had your voice in the matter, instead of being defined by critics as a science fiction writer, how would you like to be defined? UL: Novelist, short story writer, and poet, because I do write in different forms. Then if they want to say realism, science fiction, fantasy, children's literature, that's fine-so long as the terms are used descriptively and not just judgmentally. Yes, I write science fiction. No, I'm not only "a science fiction writer." Don't box me in! However, I will get provocative and say I am "a western writer" because we need to redefine that category. Then they say, so you write westerns? and I say no. I am a western writer. I was born in the West and lived most of my life here. I write as a westerner. And I will say yes, I am a woman writer. I finally learned how to say that when I was in my fifties. I am a woman writer, not an imitation man. WW: What do you mean by "imitation man"? UL: The canon was so male dominated and male writing was considered the only kind of writing, and women were only "good writers" as long as they imitated men. We all learned to do it except a few mavericks like Virginia Woolf, who never wrote like a man. WW: Do you mean using a certain male writer or male-authored novel as a criterion or guide to what should be written? UL: What interests men is what will interest the novel reader. That was the assumption. Thus, men are at the center of the book. This is something we have not really changed. If men are at the center of the book it's considered to be of general interest to the reader. If women are at the center of the book, it is considered to be of interest to women. Searoad-the book you have with
WILLIAM WALSH 201 you I had to fight my own publisher from saying it was a book about women for women, and only women could possibly be interested in it. I said, "My God, my sales are generally pretty good. Shall we not try to cut them in half by saying stay away from this book, boys, you'll hate it?" In Searoad there are women who don't seem able to keep men in their lives or don't have very good luck with men, women who live alone. I think that's what some of the reviewers and my editor homed in on, and why they said this is all about women. So what? There aren't any women in Moby Dick, but that doesn't keep women from reading it. Even if a book is mostly about women, like The Color Purple, which is very woman-centered, men read it. I know some men have trouble politically with the book, but aesthetically there's no barrier. There's a false rule. If it's about men everybody wants it; if it's about women it's only for women. WW: This supersedes literature. Take the movie Thelma and Louise, for instance. Before I saw the movie almost every male friend of mine said it's a movie for women, and then women said City Slickers is a male movie. So it may not be only in literature but may encompass human nature in a social context. UL: Of course, Thelma and Louise had a threat element in it to some men. It was pretty blunt. (laughing) If you were in the theater, as I was the first time I saw Thelma and Louise, when all the women burst into a cheer when the women blew up the truck-if I'd been a man I would have thought: Hey, I didn't know they were that mad. It was very impressive. I think a lot of women who saw that movie didn't know they were that mad until they saw it. That's why it's an important movie. WW: What are you working on now? UL: I'm waiting to see. I spent a lot of last year working on the Norton Book of Science Fiction, which if you know Norton Books, was an enormous amount of reading. I had a ball, but I didn't get much writing done. I never know what comes next. I've been writing some short stories. WW: You didn 't write much as a result of all the reading you did last year, and as most of us know that's a very thin line to balance on. How do you normally balance the writing life against everything else, and what types of things pull you away from the work? UL: Correspondence. Answering letters. It seems to be the thing I cannot control. Although I have a very good friend who works as my secretary. She's incredibly helpful-she'll say, "Don't answer that letter; answer this one," and helps me work out an answer. I get an awful lot of mail because of the types of things I write. There's a very lively and intense readership of science fiction,
202 THE KENYON REVIEW fans, and they write the authors. A lot of fiction writers get no response, a couple of criticisms and a few notices in Poets & Writers and that's it. It's nice to get a response. Then I write children's books, and kids write spontaneously. Those letters are ones you want to answer. But teachers increasingly make kids write authors-every kid has to pick an author and write the author and ask them really stupid questions, which you can tell the teacher told them to write. Or huge questions, like where do you get your ideas from. I mean, come on! (laughing) And then there's a moral dilemma-this is a child writing to you; you feel that you should answer this child. I feel that rather strongly as a woman, as a writer. But it can take half a week to answer letters. I wish teachers would realize that this is not putting a child in touch with a writer. It's just wasting the writer's time and the child's time. I think it's treating both of them with disrespect. If a child wants to write an author, fine. The kids writing me on their own usually tell me what I did wrong. (laughing) Or they suggest what the next book ought to be. They are great at that. WW: Have you ever used their suggestions? UL: (laughing) No. They're usually kind of wild. It's what a kid would write, and they're usually funny. Then, of course, there's business correspondence, where I have to say no I can't keynote your meeting. This eats up my time, and distresses me a lot. I don't know why I can't get it under control. I guess some writers just end up not answering letters, but that seems very arrogant to me. The real problem is lack of energy. When I was in my thirties I had three kids I was bringing up. I did not have any help except from my husband who was an enormous help. But I could write novels and bring up kids. I had energy. Like you, I didn't sleep much. But when you get in your sixties you don't have that much energy, and it gets more difficult. I'm slower as a writer. I don't know that I'm better, but my writing is more complex than it used to be. The last sixty pages of Searoad took me two years, and I was appalled at how slow it was going. What's wrong with me, I thought. Well, it just took that long. You have to let everything run its own course. WW: Are you1, selfish with your time? UL: All artists have to be a little rigid and say no I'm not going to answer the telephone, or no, I can't do something. I'm not very methodical. I used to be very contemptuous and disdainful of people who went to writer's retreats. There I was with my family and housework and other stuff, and I used to think why do you have to go off to some farm and be protected? Now I understand. Now I do need genuine solitude to write. It's the energy thing. I can't put the walls up anymore. Sometimes I even need to be away from my husband. We
WILLIAM WALSH 203 have a beach house and a town house. Sometimes we split up and he writes here and I write there. He says he doesn't need it, but he knows I do. That's a big change. I find it a little humiliating, like I ought to be able to write anywhere. But I really can't. WW: As we sit here in Macon, you're three thousand miles from your home, do you find it difficult to write here? UL: In a brief visit to a place like this, I write poetry, because it comes when it will and if you are open to it, it'll come. I'm writing reviews right now while I'm here. I would hate to start a short story here knowing how broken up my time is going to be. A short story is very intense and once I start I pretty much have to finish it in one deep breath. Even though it might be four or five days I want those four or five days. WW: How do you view your readership? UL: I have a very loyal readership. People look for my books. So I learned from that how reciprocal an art writing is. When I started, it seemed very lonely, because you are writing in a void-you don't know who your readers are. I still don't know who my readers are mostly, but I have a sense of them being there. I do hear from them. I do know they are there. They buy the books. I have a much stronger sense now that it is the reader who completes the book for me. It's slightly mystical. I tell the story as well as I can and I do it as an end in itself. When I'm working on a story I don't think of myself or the reader. If I do, it's fatal. I'm simply making something, and I make it as well as I can. But when it's published you're sending it out into this void, hopeful it's full of readers. And the way they read it is what makes it a story. They finish it. If it's not read, it doesn't really exist. It's wood pulp with black marks on it. The reader does work with the writer. You can't help but get mystical about it, because it's such a strange process. Where you feel it is in performance, and this is one reason why the older I get the fonder I am of performance art, either reading a story or an actual performance piece of poetry, poetry and music, poetry and dance, various things I've been involved in. It is a mystical experience when a performance piece and an audience work together on stage. It's this incredible energy where you give it to them and they give it to you. That's so addictive, as anybody who's into performance knows. What happens when you publish a book is the same thing, but it's continuous, and so mysterious because the audience is out there somewhere but you don't know them. And yet, it does happen. I think what I'm trying to say is that I hope this happens whenever I publish something. I hope the same energy begins to flow through my work to the reader and back to me, both empowering each other.
204 THE KENYON REVIEW WW: Your feminist views are forthright.... UL: Yes, I am a feminist. WW: I've noticed that television and radio interviewers and newspaper writers act, when they hear someone is a feminist or when they mention it in an article, as though it were a profession one chose opposed to what one ought to be doing regardless. The media seems amazed or surprised by this. I've told my classes before that I'm a feminist, and everyone, male and female alike, breaks out laughing. I ask them what would they want me to be? Like being a humanist, it's something each one of us should naturally be doing, taking up a cause for oneself as well as for others. It just seems to me that the media is always in shock over feminism and has to ask a woman what drew her to be a feminist. UL: Yes, I know. (laughing) It's like what drew me into breathing. WW: I bring this up because I'm interested in your position on the feminist movement oier the years, where it stands today, and where you would like to see it progressing. UL: It'll take a few hours. (laughing) Briefly, I was slow and kind of stupid in some ways. This present wave of feminism started in the mid-60s. It was partly fueled by the misogyny of the New Left. There's no doubt about that. Women found themselves pushed aside. The men were going to end the war and run everything. A lot of anger came out of that. I was slow to get in, but there began to be questions: What are men? What are women? Are there essential differences? This obviously led me to write the first book of mine that really hit, had success, and has been in print ever since, The Left Hand of Darkness, which is about people who can be either male or female for a few days a month. By the end of the book, most of the characters are both mothers and fathers. The book was a thought experiment. What if ? What if there is no difference between men and women? Let's remove all possible biological and psychological differences and see what we've got. What we got was a novel I certainly enjoyed. But I didn't realize at the time that there was anything very radical about it. It was really the first book of its kind (except a science fiction book by Ted Sturgeon called Venus Plus X, which I didn't know when I wrote mine). WW: In your writing, and this may pertain more to the science fiction, of all the things or ideas that you have thought of or worlds you have invented, when you wake up tomorrow what one thing would you like to see in place that we don't have today? UL: This is looking at the utopian element in my writing?
WILLIAM WALSH 205 WW: Yes, because this establishes a multitude of dilemmas. We have the idea that we would like to cure world hunger but that doesn't take into account that we will have to cure world thirst also. If there is no disease, then no one dies and it creates a new set of problems, and then there is some other aspect that is troublesome. UL: That's the plot of The Lathe of Heaven, where the doctor keeps asking the guy who can dream true to cure this and cure that, and so he does and it always makes something worse, then he has to work on that one. WW: Exactly. If you bring one utopian aspect to the world tomorrow, what would it be? UL: I can't pick one because I don't think that way. It's all network. You know the butterfly theory-if you kill a butterfly in North Carolina, it may result in a typhoon in China. Small causes have very large results. To answer your question I can only talk about my book that is a pure utopia, my utopia, my dream world: Always Coming Home, where I took my Napa Valley of north California and moved it into an imaginary time, the "future." I lessened the world population radically and let these people in the Valley develop a local culture, which isn't male or female dominated, and is pretty much consensual. They do a lot of singing and dancing and thinking. I created a "dream world" that I tried grounding absolutely and solidly in a real place, the Napa Valley, which I know stone by stone. Marianne Moore said real toads in imaginary gardens is what poetry is about. Well, what I did was create imaginary toads in a real garden. I tried working out in that book the world that I think I would like best to live in. Although this one will do.
