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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He passed a glassworks, the workman dipping up a great molten blob as casually as a cook serves soup. Next to it was a busy yard where foam-stone was cast for construction. The gang foreman, a big woman in a smock white with dust, was supervising the pouring of a cast with a loud and splendid flow of language. After that came a small wire factory, a district laundry, a luthier’s where musical instruments were made and repaired, the district small-goods distributory, a theater, a tile works. The activity going on in each place was fascinating, and mostly out in full view. Children were around, some involved in the work with adults, some underfoot making mud-pies, some busy with games in the street, one sitting perched up on the roof of the learning center with her nose deep in a book… No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.