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

URSULA K. LE GUIN:I don’t know. I sort of took it as an established fact.

WICKES:From infancy?

LE GUIN:Yes. When I learned how to write, apparently.

WICKES:What do you suppose it is that makes people write fiction?

LE GUIN:They want to tell a story.

WICKES:There’s much more than story in your fiction.

LE GUIN:But I think the basic impulse is probably to tell a story. And why we do that I don’t quite know.

LOUISE WESTLING:Did you write lots of stories as a child?

LE GUIN:Some. I wrote a lot of poetry. They’ve always gone together. But I started writing stories somewhere around eight or nine, I think, when I got an old typewriter. Somehow the typewriter led me to prose—although I don’t compose on the typewriter now.

WESTLING:What kind of books were your favorites in early life?

LE GUIN:I grew up in a professor’s house lined with books. My favorites as a child were certainly fiction or narrative, novels and myths and legends and all that. But I read a lot of popular science, too, as a kid. Altogether, pretty much what I read now.

WICKES:If you were asked to compile a list of the books that have been most important to you, not only as a writer but also in your thinking, what would be the first half dozen?

LE GUIN:I tried to do it, and it goes on and on. It’s insufferably boring, because I’ve read all my life, and I read everything. I’ve been so influenced by so much that as soon as I mention one name I think, “Oh, but I can’t say that without saying that.” I think there are certain obvious big guns, but I really hate to say any one, or six, or twenty. But you could very roughly say that the English novelists of the nineteenth century and the Russian novelists of the twentieth century were formative. That’s where my love and admiration and emulation was when I started. But then I read all that other junk, too. And I did my college work in French and Italian literature. I never much liked the French novelists. I can tell you what I don’t like. I don’t much like “the great tradition,” the James-Conrad thing that I was supposed to like when I was in college. I’ve revolted against that fairly consciously. Flaubert I really consider a very bad model for a fiction writer.

WICKES:Stendahl?

LE GUIN:Stendahl’s a good novelist, but I think the limitations of Stendahl have been rather disastrous. I think you’d do better with Balzac. If you have to imitate a Frenchman.

WESTLING:Proust?

LE GUIN:You can’t imitate Proust. And in modern writing, for instance, Nabokov means nothing to me. I have great trouble reading him. I see a certain lineage there which I just don’t follow, don’t have any sympathy for.

WICKES:How about more philosophical books, like some of the Oriental thinkers, or Thoreau?

LE GUIN:You’ll find him buried around in poems and novels fairly frequently, but I don’t know Thoreau very well. You have to be a New Englander to really read Thoreau. There was stuff around the house, again. My father’s favorite book was a copy of Lao Tzu, and seeing it in his hands a lot, I as a kid got interested. Of course, it’s very accessible to a kid, it’s short, it’s kind of like poetry, it seems rather simple. And so I got into that pretty young, and obviously found something that I wanted, and it got very deep into me. I have fits of delving further into Oriental thought. But I have no head for philosophy.

WESTLING:You’ve said that you now associate some of your ideas with Jung but that you probably came to these yourself first before you ever read Jung.

LE GUIN:My father was a Freudian—he was a lay analyst—so the word Jung was a four-letter word in our household. After the Earthsea trilogy was published, people kept telling me, “Oh, this is wonderful, you’ve used Jung’s shadow.” And I’d say, “It’s not Jung’s shadow, it’s my shadow.” But I realized I had to read him, and then I got fascinated. Then he was extremely helpful to me as a shaman or guide at a rather difficult point in my life. At the moment I wouldn’t want to read Jung; you have to need him, like most psychologists. But it was amazing to me to find how parallel in certain places his imagination and my imagination, or his observation and my imagination, had run.

WESTLING:Well, part of it could be your absorption with mythology, because he came to his thinking by saturating himself in mythology.

LE GUIN:I didn’t have an absorption with mythology, but I had a child’s curiosity, and there were Indian legends all over the place. My father told us stories that he had learned from his informants, and my mother was interested, too. The books I read were mostly children’s editions, but what’s the difference? The stories are there.

WESTLING:Yes, it doesn’t matter, the pattern is what counts.

WICKES:How do your books come to you? Is there a particular process, or is it different every time?

LE GUIN:It varies from book to book. For some of them it’s very neat, and I can describe the process, but then for another one it’s utterly different. Left Hand of Darkness is the nicest one because it came as a vision, a scene of these two people pulling something in a great snowy wilderness. I simply knew that there was a novel in it. As Angus Wilson describes it, his books come that way, with a couple of people in a landscape. But some of them don’t come that easy at all. The Dispossessed came with a perfectly awful short story, one of the worst things I ever wrote. There it was, all about prison camps, everything in it all backwards, a monstrosity of a little story. Then I thought, “You know, it’s really terrible that you could write anything that bad after writing all these years; there’s got to be something in it.” And sure enough, there was, after about two years’ work and reading all these utopists and all the anarchists and thinking a lot. That one took real homework. But sure enough, the idea had been there all along; I just hadn’t understood it. Yes, I worked like all the blazes on that one. And for Left Hand of Darkness I had to plan that world with extreme care, writing its history, roughly, before I could do a good solid novel.

WICKES:It seems to me there’s a good deal of geography in your writing, too.

LE GUIN:I like geography and geology. You may notice the other thing besides trees is rocks.

WICKES:Yes, and landscapes, weathers, climates—you go into these things a great deal.

LE GUIN:It’s one reason I adore Tolkien; he always tells you what the weather is, always. And you know pretty well where north is, and what kind of landscape you’re in and so on. I really enjoy that. That’s why I like Hardy. Again, you always know what the weather is.

WESTLING:You said you liked trees and you liked rocks, and that expresses a dichotomy I’ve felt in your fiction, between lush forest worlds and desolate places where people have to struggle. I wonder whether you are simply a creechie but are restrained by pioneer impulses.

LE GUIN:You know, I’ve had this mad fascination with Antarctica ever since I was sixteen or seventeen and first read [polar explorer Robert Falcon] Scott, and that’s where all that snow and ice comes in. I believe all the sledge trips in Left Hand of Darkness are accurate. That was very important to me; that I didn’t give them too much to pull and make them go too far.