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

STREITFELD:You bend even the Library of America to your ways.

LE GUIN:What have I got to lose?

STREITFELD:You were this way fifty years ago.

LE GUIN:I really was. There’s some innate arrogance here. I want to do it my way. People are always trying to pigeonhole me and push me off the literary scene, and to hell with it. [ Chuckles ] I won’t be pushed.

STREITFELD:That even extends to the way you deal with publishers.

LE GUIN:So much writing about being a writer is about how you have to do it their way. I have never—or at least very, very seldom—made any deal for an unwritten work in my whole career. I write it and then sell it. That wasn’t so unusual fifty years ago, but it is now. I don’t promise work. People ask, will you write us a short story? I might, but I’m not signing any contract. No way do I contract for any unwritten work, ever. Way back my agent Virginia Kidd did it to me a couple of times and I gave her hell. I don’t write to order. I write to private order, to internal orders. Most of my fellow authors want a deadline. I ask for deadlines on nonfiction. “When you want this?” But when it comes to the stuff that comes from inside me, the fiction and poetry, I demand an extraordinary and unusual amount of liberty.

STREITFELD:The readers of Malafrena and the Orsinia stories have always struggled to locate them, sometimes literally. Orsinia seems like Hungary, but you once suggested Czechoslovakia. Poland seemed possible too.

LE GUIN:They take place in an imaginary Central European country but within the framework of European history. It’s confusing to people. What do you call the stories? It’s not alternative history because it’s just European history. There is no name for it. I do things like that. Parts of Malafrena go back decades, to the beginning of my career. I sold the first Orsinia story, “An die Musik,” in 1960 to the Western Humanities Review. That same week I sold my first fantasy story, “April in Paris.” I had two horses running. Fantasy paid better.

STREITFELD:There’s a quote I love, from Always Coming Home : “A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just space. It is not information, but relation.” With your books, they looked like one thing in the 1960s and ’70s. They looked like—forgive me—escapist trash, bought off a paperback rack, never reviewed, disposed of after consuming. And now they’ll be in those elegant, austere Library of America editions that are on acid-free paper that will last forever, or thereabouts. And yet they’re the same stories.

LE GUIN:And yet they’re the same stories. That’s what matters to me…

[She leafed through some of the books I had brought along. The 1967 Ace paperback of City of Illusions showed shadowy figures and rocketships, with the cover line: “Was he a human meteor or a time-bomb from the stars?” On Rocannon’s World, half of a 1966 Ace Double, a man holding a torch is riding a winged beast in outer space. The blurb: “Wherever he went, his super-science made him a legendary figure.”]

LE GUIN:Those are actually pretty good covers compared to some I got. There was the awful Wizard of Earthsea paperback from Ace that showed the shadow leaping onto Ged’s shoulders.

My books have risen above their Ace origins, their antecedents. They come from a nice working class family. I’m not remotely ashamed of their origins, but I am not captivated by them either the way some people are. Some people are fascinated by the pulps—there’s something remote and glamorous in the whole idea of a twenty-five-cent book. I am in the middle of re-reading Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael is enthralled by the whole comic book thing. That is perfectly understandable and I enjoy his fascination, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I am into content. Presentation? That is just something that has to be there.

STREITFELD:How do you feel about e-books these days? In 2008 you wrote for Harper’s Magazine about the alleged decline of reading. It now seems prophetic about the reliability and durability of physical books: “If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”

LE GUIN:When I started writing about e-books and print books, a lot of people were shouting “The book is dead, the book is dead, it’s all going to be electronic.” I got tired of it. What I was trying to say is that now we have two ways of publishing, and we’re going to use them both. We had one, now we have two. How can that be bad? Creatures live longer if they can do things different ways. I think I’ve been fairly consistent on that. But the tone of my voice might have changed. I was going against a trendy notion. There’s this joke I heard. You know what Gutenberg’s second book was, after the Bible? It was a book about how the book was dead.

Personally, though, I hate to read on a screen. I don’t have an e-reader.

STREITFELD:Speaking of Kindles, you’ve been a vocal critic of Amazon.

LE GUIN:Their wish to control is what scares me. What I want people to worry about is the extent this corporation controls what is published. Amazon sets the norm—if it’s interested, the publisher increases the print run. If it’s not, the print run goes down. Jeff Bezos has got all the guns on his side. I hate to put in war imagery here about everything being a battle, but I don’t know any other way.

STREITFELD:Some writers grumble to me about Amazon, but they’re reluctant to be public about it because they think it will hurt their careers. Others say they do not see an issue here at all.

LE GUIN:Amazon is extremely clever at making people love it, as if it were a nice uncle. I don’t expect to win, but I still need to say what I think. When I am afraid to say what I think is when I will really be defeated. The only way they can defeat me is by silencing me. I might as well go out kicking.

STREITFELD:You and Phil Dick were the two great science fiction writers of the 1960s and ’70s. You grew up a few miles from each other. You both went to Berkeley High. You graduated together, in 1947. You wrote in 1971 one of the best Phil Dick novels that Phil Dick never wrote, The Lathe of Heaven. You called him, in The New Republic, “our homegrown Borges.” He said some complimentary things about you in public and some less than complimentary things in private. You tangled in the pages of fanzines over his depiction of women, and he credited you with his luminous creation of Angel Archer in his last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. She was his most complex female character. I suspect monographs will be written one day about your influence on each other—and yet you never met.

LE GUIN:He was self-isolated. He went through Berkeley High with no one knowing him. I was shy but my picture was in the yearbook. His was not. He would scare people off. He scared his wives off. He was a loner—very ambitious, very self-destructive.

STREITFELD:He scared you off. He wanted to come visit you at one of his many low points, in the early 1970s. He tried to reassure you that the rumors you had heard weren’t true. “I swear I can conduct a civilized, rational conversation, without breaking anybody’s favorite lamp,” he wrote.