Урсула Ле Гуин - Ursula K. Le Guin - The Last Interview and Other Conversations

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

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

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

GILBERT:Thinking through something.

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

GILBERT:Looking through notebooks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raj Lyubov is a typical figure in Ursula Le Guin’s fiction, an anthropologist whose mission is to report on higher intelligence life forms (HILFs) on another planet. In this case, the planet is populated by a peaceful race of furry human beings three feet tall who live in harmony with the lush forest that covers their world. The men from Earth who have come to log the planet are led by a military macho who regards these “creechies” as subhuman and treats them brutally. Le Guin has explained that she wrote The Little Green Men (as she entitled it) in protest against the Vietnam War in which the landscape was defoliated and noncombatants of a different race were callously slaughtered in the name of peace and humanity. Characteristically in this novel she subordinates science fiction to her liberal humanitarianism and her concern for the natural world of which humanity is but a part.

Anthropology came naturally to the daughter of the great Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and his wife Theodora, a writer best known for her biography of Ishi, the last surviving Indian of his tribe. Writing also came easily to Ursula Le Guin, but success did not come until she turned her talents to science fiction and fantasy. Then she published in rapid succession three novels set in the universe she was to explore in later novels, and the first volume in the Earthsea trilogy which introduced still another world, this time an antique world of wizards and dragons and legends. Since 1966 Le Guin has published more than a dozen novels and won some of the most prestigious literary awards. Her most highly acclaimed novels are The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

The interview was conducted in the Le Guin family home in Portland, a comfortable old wooden house on the edge of Forest Park. The neighborhood seems an appropriate setting for the author who created the forest world of Athshe. In collecting her stories for publication in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters she discovered “a certain obsession with trees” in her writing and concluded that she is “the most arboreal science fiction writer.” She talks a bit about this dendrophilia in the interview.

GEORGE WICKES:When did you first know that you were going to be a writer?