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

STREITFELD:You put in a plug for Elizabeth Gaskell recently.

LE GUIN: North and South is outstanding. Mary Barton makes me cry every damn time.

Speaking of writers, you know who floats my literary agency? Ayn Rand. I couldn’t read Hermann Hesse. He was boring but not as boring as Ayn Rand. I read The Fountainhead when I was twenty. About as loathsome a book as I’ve ever read.

STREITFELD:You have remained on good terms with Harlan Ellison.

LE GUIN:He was kind of adorable. Okay, not in a physical sense. But you would forgive the bastard anything. I’ve forgiven him a dozen times. Things I would not forgive anybody else. Because what the hell. It’s just Harlan. He was so funny. And so much… I need Jewish words here.

STREITFELD:I have a lot of complex feelings about Harlan. All the bragging, the aggression, the time wasted in feuds…

LE GUIN:I never met a man who didn’t have complex feelings about him. And most women too. I have complicated feelings too. He’s a bastard. He did stupid dirty things to me. But they didn’t amount to anything. [ Laughs ] Dastardly plots that didn’t work out. Besides, he was a lot of fun to be with.

STREITFELD:Neil Gaiman is in some ways the star fantasy writer of the era.

LE GUIN:His fans are devoted. He works in many fields. All my contact with him has been good. He’s truly generous. He’s been very generous to me. [ Laughs ] I just wish I liked his writing more.

STREITFELD:You’re now a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

LE GUIN:I almost wasn’t. It’s so embarrassing. Either the letter got lost in the mail or I tossed it thinking it was junk, I don’t know which, but in either case I never got the invitation. They waited and waited and waited and finally got in touch with my agent, who immediately got in touch with me. I wrote to them and said, “I wasn’t pulling a Dylan.” But they must have wondered.

STREITFELD:It’s another honor, a significant one.

LE GUIN:To paraphrase Mary Wollstonecraft’s line about the vindication of the rights of women, it’s a vindication of the rights of science fiction. It makes it a lot harder for the diehards and holdouts to say, “Genre isn’t literature.”

STREITFELD:Do they still say that?

LE GUIN:You’d be surprised. In academe, there are still diehards. Once a critic takes a position, he never changes it.

STREITFELD:For all my devotion to your work, the vast academic literature about it always seemed tough sledding.

LE GUIN:Well, they’re academics. There was one book that really took me by surprise and gave me great pleasure. It was called The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed.” It came out in 2005 and practically everything in it was readable. That’s very rare.

STREITFELD:Right after Trump’s election, you came up with a new model of resistance that elevates not the warrior but water: “The flow of a river is a model for me of courage that can keep me going—carry me through the bad places, the bad times. A courage that is compliant by choice and uses force only when compelled.”

LE GUIN:It’s rooted firmly in Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching. He goes very deep in me, back to my teenage years. I’ve found him a helpful thinker. I did my own translation a few years back.

STREITFELD:There are traces of Lao Tzu in Tehanu , but it’s not explicit.

LE GUIN:Most of my real work was fictional, where you don’t express things like that directly. You build it in. Like in The Lathe of Heaven. George, the hero, is kind of watery. He goes with the flow, as they used to say. I was dubious about publishing that piece about water as a blog entry. It was so direct, and sounded like I was trying to be some sort of guru.

STREITFELD:You are direct.

LE GUIN:I like to hide it in fiction.

STREITFELD:For a year or two, you thought you would never write fiction again.

LE GUIN:But then I suddenly went and wrote a little story called “Calx” for Catamaran, and then a long story called “Pity and Shame.” I should have remembered what all good SF writers know: prediction is not our game.

STREITFELD:Are you following the Me Too movement, as women assert themselves on social media after years of harassment?

LE GUIN:I don’t follow things on social media, and I don’t have very much faith in their endurance. Everybody explodes, get it out of their systems, and then they let it drop again.

STREITFELD:Maybe, although careers are definitely being affected here. Can we ever watch House of Cards, with its disgraced star, Kevin Spacey, again?

LE GUIN:If you start saying that about actors, you can’t go to the theater.

STREITFELD:A couple of producers announced they were going to do a show, an alternate history of the Confederacy where the South won. There was an outpouring of rage against it. The very idea was offensive.

LE GUIN:That’s political correctness gone mad, to ban a show that hasn’t even been made. This is why I never write contemporary fiction. I would get raked over the coals by every politically correct anti-racist. I was able to populate Earthsea with brown and black people fifty years ago but it was fantasy and so no one took it seriously. That is why they could keep publishing science fiction in the Soviet Union that was critical of the regime. It’s exactly the same thing. I would never get away with that today.

STREITFELD:I don’t see the books you and Charles were reading last night. Usually they’re on the tables here.

LE GUIN:He’s now reading the Oxford Book of English Verse to me. I’m reading Brontë’s Shirley to him. It’s a good book, much better than I realized. I wasn’t feeling so hot, so we had the reading upstairs, with a little whiskey. I’m still recovering from my birthday. It was very nice. It kind of went on for a week. My daughter came up from Los Angeles, and I got to see her. It’s a serious age, eighty-eight. If you turn the numbers on their side, it’s two infinities on top of each other.

URSULA KROEBER LE GUIN(1929-2018) was born in Berkeley and lived in Portland, Oregon. She published more than twenty novels, eleven volumes of short stories, six collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry, and four of translation. Among the many honors her writing received were a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, SFWA’s Damon Wright Memorial Grand Master Award, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Los Angeles Times ’s Robert Kirsch Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, and in 2014 the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

10 POINT 5 was a quarterly magazine of the arts in Eugene, Oregon. Its name came from the number of cycles per second that is the median alpha wave frequency of the human brain. The magazine published seven issues between early 1976 to summer 1978.

GEORGE WICKESand LOUISE WESTLINGare retired University of Oregon English professors. Westling is the author of The Green Breast of the New World . Wickes wrote Americans in Paris and edited three collections of Henry Miller’s letters.