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

STREITFELD:The culture is getting more intolerant?

LE GUIN:There’s a tendency that way.

STREITFELD:But in some ways, there’s greater acceptance too. We’ve talked about how your work has made the transition from sci-fi to lit.

LE GUIN:I existed as an Ace double, half of a back-to-back paperback. We got somewhere. But then you look around and find out it really is the same place after all. Remember the spiral? That’s how I see it. It’s the same. America’s still America. [ Laughs ]

People are seeing the stories differently, with different eyes. That’s good, I’m happy. I’m delighted. It never was a battle to me exactly, and winning and losing are not the terms I would choose to talk in. It was a change I wanted to see happen, and in its own way and its own time it has happened and is happening.

STREITFELD:I’m reading your mother’s book about your father, Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration. He died in 1960. Around the time the book was published, in 1970, your mother remarried, to a much younger man.

LE GUIN:John Quinn. I had it in my head that he was thirty and she was seventy-two but I’m not good with figures. He was a lot younger. Her ten years with him, up to the last year, which was illness and other trouble, she had a terrific time. He just spoiled her rotten. He did it with a certain class. She had a good time.

STREITFELD:Have you ever been tempted to write more about your parents?

LE GUIN:Oh my Lord, it’s impossible. They’re just beyond me. She was… oh man. She was such a kind sweet mother. Men just ate out of her hand. Whatever “it” is she had “it.” “It” with a capital “I.”

STREITFELD:Since you’ve from time to time given me child-raising advice, I want you to know I took Lily, my eight-year-old, to see a production of Snow White. After it was over, all the kids lined up to have their picture taken with Snow White. Lily was the only one who wanted her picture taken with the Evil Queen.

LE GUIN:My eldest daughter took up the cello at age eight, and went on to become a cellist. Years later I said, “Elizabeth, how did you know to pick the cello?” And she said, “Oh it’s just that everyone else was doing the violin.”

Raising daughters is very interesting. My first daughter has always been just a good kid. My second daughter—oh my God. [ Laughs ] Is Lily a good reader?

STREITFELD:Yes. She takes books to the bookstore. If she can’t find anything there, she’ll have something to read on the way home. But she’s at an age where things in books really scare her.

LE GUIN:She may not get over that. I never did. I’ll stop reading because either I’m existentially terrified or it’s just too scary.

STREITFELD:Maybe you’re lucky you can still respond so intensely.

LE GUIN:I get sent a lot of books to blurb. I look at them. And so many have a lot of high tension, a lot of suspense. I’ll get really scared, and then it will turn out to be the first book of a series. To hell with it. I don’t respond well to suspense. I hate it. I’ll look at the end of the story when I’m still at the beginning.

STREITFELD:Speaking of children, between 1966 and 1974, you raised three children and wrote a series of masterpieces. Much of the work in your second and third Library of America volumes was done in a short span of time—a few years during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Did you feel at the time your brain was on fire?

LE GUIN:I worked just as hard before that and just as hard after. Why those years? That’s not all my significant work. There’s pretty good stuff after.

STREITFELD:But later your children were older. You had more time to write.

LE GUIN:I had a child under five at home for how many years? Probably seven or eight. No. 3 came along slightly unexpectedly, about the time No. 2 was beginning to go off to kindergarten. So all of a sudden I had a baby again, which was unexpected but profitable. I could not possibly have done it if Charles had not been a full-time parent. Over and over I’ve said it—two people can do three jobs but one person cannot do two. Well, sometimes they do, but it’s a killer.

STREITFELD:How did you manage?

LE GUIN:I don’t want to be Pollyannish but the fact is both jobs were very rewarding. They were immediately rewarding. I enjoy writing and I enjoyed the kids.

STREITFELD:You once said that having kids doesn’t make the writing easier but it makes it better.

LE GUIN:When I discovered I was pregnant the third time I went through a bad patch. I thought, “We didn’t really mean to do this thing. How are we going to do it all over again?” Pregnancy can be pretty devouring. But it was an easy pregnancy, a great baby, and we were really really glad we did.

STREITFELD:The kids sometimes inspired stories. Caroline, age three, came to you with a small wooden box and asked you to guess what was inside. As I recall, you guessed caterpillars and elephants, but she opened the box a tiny bit, allowing you to peek inside, and said: “Darkness.” That resulted in the story “Darkness Box.”

LE GUIN:That was a direct influence, which is kind of rare. Usually it was more general. There was all this vitality in the house. I was lucky because I was healthy and the kids were healthy. That makes such a difference. But it didn’t seem remarkable. I was of a generation when women were expected to—did expect to—have kids.

STREITFELD:Tillie Olsen, the author of Tell Me a Riddle, said that the need to earn money to support her family destroyed her as an artist. She’s remembered for that assertion now as much as she is for her stories.

LE GUIN:Tillie was the generation before mine. She was also a much more fierce kind of feminist than I was. She made me rather uncomfortable. But the real difference between us was that Tillie didn’t have any money. She had nine-to-five jobs or whatever she could get. That is a huge difference. I had friends in that position. It was particularly hard if the marriage was broken up. If they didn’t have a husband pulling in some income, they tried very hard to keep doing their art, but they had to earn money. And so they had to make a choice I never really had to make.

STREITFELD:When did you write?

LE GUIN:After the kids were put to bed, or left in their room with a book. My kids went to bed much earlier than most kids do now. I was appalled to learn my grandchildren were staying up to 11:00 p.m. That would have driven me up the wall. We got them down by old-fashioned hours—8:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m. I would go up to the attic, and have nine to midnight. If I was tired it was a little tough. But I was kind of gung ho to do it. I like to write. It’s exciting.

STREITFELD:Writing came easily to you.

LE GUIN:Yes, I had ideas.

STREITFELD:You didn’t try before bedtime?

LE GUIN:So long as I was in charge of the kids, that was that. It was full time. Sometimes Charles would be in charge, or they’d be out at music lessons. But I’m not very good at seizing broken bits.

STREITFELD:And when you started, you worked efficiently?

LE GUIN:Depends on the book. Sometimes I just sat there for two hours.