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

LE GUIN:That’s it. But you see, I happily identified totally with the hero—if it was Jane Eyre, I identified with her; if it was a hero in Zane Grey, I identified with him—and I never thought a thing about it. And so I didn’t think anything about it as a writer. My conscience had to be raised a lot before I saw that. As of about the early seventies, it does matter. Now I can’t do this innocently anymore, that innocence is gone. So now it matters a lot what one’s protagonist is. I would defend my earlier books, because then it didn’t matter. But now it does.

WESTLING:So you wouldn’t agree with Virginia Woolf that there is such a thing as a woman’s prose style.

LE GUIN:I don’t know. I am not going to disagree with Virginia Woolf about anything. I see her style, which is wonderful. Now there’s the kind of complexity that I envy with my whole heart, that kind of weaving. But is there anybody besides Virginia Woolf who can do that particular sort of thing? You see, that way of thinking slides so easily into a sort of sexism that it worries me a bit.

WESTLING:But many of your stories are about hero adventures in the vein of the old military epics with hardly any participation by women.

LE GUIN:Are they? Well, particularly the earlier ones. There’s nothing like a good vicarious adventure.

WICKES:Speaking of one of the later ones, when did you write Malafrena ? At the time it was published [in 1979], or was this a book you’d written earlier?

LE GUIN:No, it wasn’t a book I’d written earlier, but parts of it are very old. The idea and some bits of it go back to the mid-fifties or late fifties. And it shows in the way it’s put together; it creaks a little. It’s a very old-fashioned novel. It’s a nineteenth-century novel.

WICKES:We would have guessed that it was your apprentice work.

LE GUIN:Well, there’s apprentice work in it.

WICKES:Of course it’s entirely appropriate that it should be a nineteenth-century novel; it’s right in the tradition of Stendhal.

LE GUIN:If you’re going to write about the revolution of 1830, you might as well do so in a style appropriate to the subject.

WICKES:You majored in Romance languages in college. What other languages do you know at least something of? The reason I ask is that you have these names that seem to be part Germanic, part Slavic, part Scandinavian.

LE GUIN:Well, I’ve got a little linguistic facility which I haven’t done much with. I’m trying to teach myself Spanish now, but that’s no great trouble for someone with French and Italian. I didn’t learn any other languages. But my father was an ethnologist. There were books about language around, and he talked with informants in the languages he knew, like Yurok. The house was always full of people with funny accents. I’m comfortable with foreign languages, and I enjoy them, so it’s a lot of fun making them up. Word-making is one of the roots of fantasy. It reaches its peak in Tolkien, who said he wrote The Lord of the Rings so that they could say “Good morning” in Elvish.

WICKES:How do you choose your names? It seems to me you have a hodgepodge, or is that deliberate?

LE GUIN:I don’t think you’ll find too much hodgepodge in the phonemes of any language that is implied by the names in a certain island or a certain country in my books. I tried to have fairly clear in mind what pool of sounds they used because it bothers me very much in other people’s fantasies when they have a hodgepodge of sounds that don’t go together. One name obviously resembles German and the next something totally different, like Chinese, and then you get an “X,” which you don’t know how to pronounce. I tried for a certain coherence in implied language, and also for something that looks pronounceable to the reader so that he doesn’t have to stop every time he comes to it.

WICKES:In Earthsea you’ve got quite a variety in the names.

LE GUIN:Well, there are four languages going in Earthsea. There’s Kargad; there’s Hardic, the main one; there’s the Old Language, and then there’s the language they speak up in Osskil.

WICKES:Then in Malafrena you have characters with names taken from several different languages. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where Orsinia was, and whether you agree or not, I know it’s Hungary.

LE GUIN:Well, it isn’t Hungary, but it must be pretty near Hungary. I’ll tell you something funny. I’ve been told quite authoritatively by several people what it is and where it is, and nobody has ever mentioned Czechoslovakia, which is incredible to me because it seems fairly obvious that there’s a lot of resemblance. Could I throw Romania at you? That’s the language.

WICKES:Well, I figured it should be Romania, but it doesn’t fit. For me the real clincher is that when Luisa goes to Vienna she stays in the Hotel König von Ungarn.

LE GUIN:You know why? Because I stayed in the König von Ungarn. It was right behind the [cathedral]. It’s closed now, but it was a real hotel that Mozart and Beethoven stayed in, so I could use it with total assurance. I knew it was there in the 1820s and 1830s.

WICKES:Do you attach any particular significance to the names in Malafrena ? For instance, Valtorskar and Paludeskar seem to be landscape names. Is there a significance to those landscapes? Is Luisa a swamp?

LE GUIN:There’s a touch of swampiness in the Paludeskar family. I like Luisa, though. Now that was one of the parts of the book that was old. Luisa was an incredible villainess as I first thought about her, the femme fatale, when I was trying to write that book way back when.

WICKES:One final question. What are you writing now?

LE GUIN:I have just been working on a television screenplay of one of my short stories for PBS. This is a new venture for me, screenwriting. Last year I was working on a screenplay for Earthsea with Michael Powell. He’s an old British director—have you seen The Red Shoes ?—and he was determined to make Earthsea into a movie.

WESTLING:And what’s its fate?

LE GUIN:Its fate is Hollywood. We wrote a perfectly beautiful screenplay that would make a beautiful, serious fantasy, finally, in the movies. But then Hollywood said, “Oh, yes, this is wonderful, yes, we want to do this, but actually what we need now is a movie about immortality.” And so Michael and I said, “Well, yes, but you see, what we have is not a movie about immortality. We have a movie about this here wizard, and this young lady.” We did the whole thing backwards. You never start with a script. What we should have done is gone down to Hollywood together, Michael and me, and said, “Here we are, you’re going to buy us, for $200,000, and two years from now we will give you the script that you always wanted.” What idiots, we arrived with a script! And so now they want to rewrite it. And it’s going to be our movie or no movie. So it will probably be no movie. But we are both rather obstinate people, and we believe in our screenplay; so who knows?

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