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

STREITFELD:Thurman Street is filled with places to while away an afternoon or maybe a lifetime. I had an excellent cup of coffee at the Clearing Café.

LE GUIN:I don’t know it. It must be new. The Crackerjacks bar hangs on, the one constant. Charles is from Georgia, so going to a bar is not part of his culture, but we used to go into the Crackerjacks now and then. We don’t drink much beer anymore. I don’t know who goes there. Not the trendy people.

STREITFELD:You’ve received a lot of honors and awards over the years, and the pace has picked up recently, but there’s a sense among your admirers that you still haven’t gotten your due—that your influence and accomplishments are only beginning to be charted.

LE GUIN:I’ve had a big influence, yeah. But I published as a genre writer when genre was not literature. So what can you say? I didn’t play by the literary rules at the time. I wrote what was not literature. I wrote genre. I paid the price. Don DeLillo, who comes off as literary without question, takes the award over me because I published in genre and he didn’t. Also, he’s a man and I’m a woman.

[That happened thirty years earlier, but clearly the wound was still fresh. In 1985 Le Guin published Always Coming Home, a story about people in California’s Napa Valley who, she liked to say, “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now.” It was her longest work of fiction and her most unconventional, using stories, original folktales, poetry, a glossary, dramatic works, illustrations, maps and mock histories to depict a society that might be a utopia. The book, released in a box with a cassette tape of music and songs that were an integral part of the story, did not sell well. It was too mainstream for science fiction, too much like science fiction for the mainstream. But it did become one of the three finalists for the National Book Award for fiction. DeLillo went home with the prize for White Noise, a tale of an airborne toxic event that borrowed certain motifs from science fiction. In early 2019, the Library of America plans to publish Always Coming Home as the fourth volume in its authoritative series of Le Guin’s works, a vindication of her original hopes for the tale.]

STREITFELD:You were a pioneer.

LE GUIN:Remember, always: you’re talking to a woman. And for a woman any literary award, honors, notice is an uphill job. And if she insists upon flouting convention and writing sci-fi and fantasy and indescribable stuff, well, you know how it’s going to end up.

STREITFELD:Is the situation any better now?

LE GUIN:I have fits of—well, it isn’t envy, because I don’t want celebrity, not at all. And it isn’t exactly jealousy. But sometimes my nose is out of joint when I see some kind of crappy writer getting all sorts of literary honors and I know I write better than he or she does. But all writers feel that way.

STREITFELD:In my experience, writers always want the opposite of what they have. If you sell ten million copies, you want to win the Nobel Prize. Win the Nobel Prize, and you want to sell ten million copies.

LE GUIN:That’s human nature.

STREITFELD:Still, you have been much honored of late. There is the 2014 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the Library of America is publishing your books.

LE GUIN:I don’t think the honors have been overdone. I think I earned them. They are welcome and useful to me because they shore up my self-esteem, which seems to wobble as you get old. And particularly with the National Book Foundation speech, it was really nice to know that people listened.

STREITFELD:You presented a bleak vision in that speech, but said that artists could help us out of it: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now.” It went viral.

LE GUIN:I certainly didn’t foresee Donald Trump. I was talking about longer-term hard times than that. For thirty years I’ve been saying, we are making the world uninhabitable, for God’s sake. For forty years!

That, as of old, was the writer’s job, maybe his primary job. To show us the futures we didn’t want, and the futures we could have if we wanted. The key line in the speech, for me, was the one about, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.” We can change our lives.

STREITFELD:Did the speech come easily?

LE GUIN:It took months to write. It was implied to me that we should be short and I kept trying to make it shorter. They were trying to speed the ceremony up a bit because writers will just babble on.

STREITFELD:The Library of America is the Valhalla of publishing—your hero Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Henry James. Only a few contemporary writers have been honored while they were still alive—Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow among the novelists, John Ashbery and Bill Merwin among the poets. Oh, and Philip Roth.

LE GUIN:Curious company. [ Chuckles ]

STREITFELD:I could have guessed you were not a Roth fan.

LE GUIN:I kept trying to read him. I couldn’t. Anyway, I didn’t know when the library contacted me that the number of living writers they had enshrined was that low. What caught my attention was when they republished some Phil Dick, a dozen or so novels spread over three volumes. I thought, “Well, well, well. The old genre walls really are crumbling.” But the distinction between the living and the dead didn’t initially occur to me.

I was a French scholar, or thought I would be. So I knew the French series of classics, the Pléiade. I think of them as sacred. They were the entire canon of the great literature of the French—such beautiful books on that very, very thin India paper with the golden binding.

In this country, sets of an author’s work were not such a big deal. I grew up with a set of Mark Twain in the house. My agent was a little iffy about dealing with the Library of America. “They don’t pay beans.” She was pretty scornful. I said, “Ginger, come on! Class! Kudos!” And she said, “Well, yeah, sure. But all the same, they don’t pay beans.” That’s because most of the people they handle are dead. But I’m not in it for the money. I have to coax Ginger into some of the deals I make. She’s a good agent. Her job is to make money. But I like a well-made book, and the Library of America volumes are well made. And the editing seems to be done with great care, line editing like no one does anymore.

STREITFELD:How did your first volume for the Library of America become the 1979 novel Malafrena and other stories from the place you call Orsinia? When most people think of Le Guin, they don’t first think of fiction about an imaginary nineteenth-century country.

LE GUIN:I bullied them into doing Orsinia first. I didn’t realize I was bullying them, but I was. They were very good-natured about it. They were going for the sci-fi, the science fiction, straight off and I kind of felt, okay, the Library of America is a literary series, and I’ve insisted for fifty years that science fiction properly done is literature. But it’s not all I write and I’m tired of having always foregrounded “the sci-fi writer.” No, I’m not a sci-fi writer. I’m a writer. I write novels, short stories, and poems, of various kinds. To just republish the same things that everyone republishes all the time, the old works, that I wrote way way back, does not interest me.