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

JENSEN:How can you tell when a book you’re writing is finished?

LE GUIN:Well, it varies… it’s just like making a pot on a wheel, which I can’t do by the way, but I’ve watched other people do it—there comes a point when the pot is done, and you’d better take your hands off it. You’ve got the shape you want. Now with a pot it’s lovely, because it’s all there at once. The writing of a book takes place in time. But it really is the same thing. There comes a point when it’s done. You’ve got to know when to stop. Which means that before you start you’ve got to have some vague general idea about what that shape is.

JENSEN:Do you usually let people in your stories write the story for you?

LE GUIN:Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. Sometimes I feel myself in control of them, manipulating them. But characters do take over. Most novelists talk about this phenomenon, with a little awe. It is a little scary, when you’ve got a character and you can’t shut him up.

JENSEN:Do you just allow that to happen?

LE GUIN:Up to a point. The character I’ve written that gave me the most trouble is the wizard Ged, in the Earthsea books. He is completely autonomous. And in [ The Farthest Shore ] I had to do an awful lot of revising, cutting out stuff that Ged was telling me but that everybody would have gotten real bored reading.

ZELTZER:You use a lot of dialogue.

LE GUIN:I think I am not very good at dialogue and therefore I work on it as hard as I can. I don’t have the real ear for dialogue, which is probably just a gift from God. I would say my gift is the gift of place. I’m extremely place-conscious. For instance, when I am homesick, I don’t really think of the people, I think of the rooms that those people are in. I want to be in that room—it kind of implies the people that belong in that room. But this seems to be how my imagination works. And so I am good at that.

HALDERMAN:You do invent wonderful landscapes. The Earthsea trilogy creates such a vivid picture of the sea—have you done a lot of sailing?

LE GUIN:All that sailing is complete fakery. It’s amazing what you can fake. I’ve never sailed anything in my life except a nine-foot catboat, and that was in the Berkeley basin in about three feet of water. And we managed to sink it. The sail got wet and it went down while we sang “Nearer My God to Thee.” We had to wade to shore, and go back to the place we’d rented it and tell them. They couldn’t believe it. “You did what ?” You know, it’s interesting, they always tell people to write about what they know about. But you don’t have to know about things, you just have to be able to imagine them really well.

KRAMER:Do you read a lot of science?

LE GUIN:I don’t have a head for math so I can’t get very far. I wanted to be a biologist when I was a kid, but I got stuck on the math; I’ve got one of those blockheads. But I read the works for peasants, and I follow what interests me.

MCPHERSON:What about all that physics in The Dispossessed ?

LE GUIN:I had to get very deeply into that—using mainly [J. T.] Fraser’s The Voices of Time, have you heard of it? It’s a sort of general compilation of works about time. There hasn’t been a whole lot written about time that a peasant can understand. I didn’t show The Dispossessed to any scientists before it was printed, but later I took it to a friend at Portland State, a physicist, and he read it. He told me, “Your prediction is not too unlikely” and he said it was good gobbledygook though maybe I’d squeezed quantum mechanics a bit out of shape. It’s funny, I understood what I was writing back then. It was incredible, holding it all in that precarious balance in my mind. I don’t think I could follow it all now.

ZELTZER:Do you write science fiction because this is the kind of fiction you like to read?

LE GUIN:Sure. Writers are often asked, “Why do you write?” which is, you know, an impossible question. But a lot of them give that very answer. I wrote it because nobody else would, and I wanted to read it. Tolkien, as a matter of fact, said that—he said, “I knew nobody else could write it, because nobody else knew about Middle Earth.”

MCPHERSON:I guess if you take that approach you’re a lot less likely to end up boring your readers. You really have an extraordinary versatility—you don’t seem to get stuck with one story or one theme or one character type.

LE GUIN:I hate to repeat myself. If I start repeating myself I hope I just have the guts to stop.

JENSEN:Would you say there’s any kind of statement you’re making in the things which you write?

LE GUIN:Of course, I suppose in everything I write I am making some sort of statement, but I don’t know just what the statement is. Which I can’t say I feel guilty about. If you can say exactly what you meant by a story, then why not just say it in so many words? Why go to all the fuss and feathers of making up a plot and characters? You say it that way, because it’s the only way you can say it.

KRAMER:Can you tell us anything about your new book?

LE GUIN:It isn’t out yet. You’ll be interested, the main character is a woman. Talk about characters taking over your book… It’s short and humble. Only 40,000 words. It takes place on a prison planet with two exiled communities. First a shipload of hard-core criminals had been dropped off there, and fifty years later a group of pacifists. It’ll be called Outcasts, or maybe Ringtrees or—does anybody know a good title? War and Peace, maybe? [3] The novel was published as The Eye of the Heron.

This interview took place in December 1976 in the house on Arch Street in North Berkeley where Ursula Le Guin’s parents lived when she was born, and where she herself grew up. Ms. Le Guin met me at the door and led me through the living room and through the kitchen, where her mother looked up from some culinary project to greet us; Ms. Le Guin and I went into a small, sunlit room off the back garden, which had been her father’s study. It is now her room when she comes to Berkeley to visit. Through the windows one can look out at the garden and hear the sound of a small fountain. It is a room that suggests concentration, relaxation and practical comfort; it is decorated in blacks and browns, and contains a bunk bed, several comfortable chairs and a large table. Ursula K. Le Guin is a tall, slender woman with a neat cap of straight dark hair and large dark eyes. She speaks in a deep, low, musical voice with many inflections; it is a voice that conveys humor, or delight in small ironies, particularly well. As we talked, she smoked a briar pipe.

DOROTHY GILBERT:You grew up in this house. Does it have strong associations for you of your development as a writer, of when you first developed a sense of yourself as a writer?

URSULA K. LE GUIN:Well, sure. It’s a pretty strong-minded house.

GILBERT:Yes, I can see that.

LE GUIN:And a very livable house. Of course I lived here until I was seventeen, and didn’t move around. So, my whole beginnings are here. And in the Napa Valley.

GILBERT:Oh, yes, there was the family home called Kishamish, in the Napa Valley. The name came from a mythical figure that your brother made up, I gather.