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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
The award-winning creator of mythic worlds, and a master of metaphor, writes about people, animals and trees -- "nothing that is alien."
Jan 23, 2001 | As a reader, I have a complicated relationship with Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, the writer. It seems she's always one step ahead of me, reflecting my feelings and passions in her fiction. I read the young-adult "Earthsea" books while grappling with adolescent angst. I found my own deeply held social justice convictions explored in her science fiction of the 1970s and '80s. Her collections of short stories were required vacation reading, when I had the leisure to admire her lyrical style and glory in how she puts words together. Le Guin once said, "The writer cannot do it alone. The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
Given the way her stories have fired my imagination, it's vaguely disappointing to meet Le Guin. She stands a trim 5-foot-4, with white hair and a ready smile. I expect a literary giant to be bigger somehow, to take up more space and oxygen. I expect erudite conversation, but she peppers her speech with "ums," run-on sentences, fragments and common phrases like "Oh, golly!" just like the rest of us.
The disappointment fades as I talk to her about the boys throwing snowballs in front of her house and the destruction of Taoism in China. I realize she's no icon with a muse whispering in her ear; she watches, listens, thinks and feels, then reflects those observations and feelings in her art. "Authors are writing artists," Le Guin says. "I think people restrict the term 'artist' to mean painters and sculptors, but you can practice art in whatever medium you choose. Words are my medium."
And Le Guin is a master. Over nearly 50 years she's published 17 novels, 11 children's books, more than 100 short stories, two collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, two volumes of translation and screenplays of her works. She's received the National Book Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize and several "lifetime achievement" awards among dozens of other honors.
In contrast to her extraordinary career, Le Guin's life seems staid and ordinary; she's been married to historian Charles Le Guin for 47 years, and they have three children and three grandchildren. Le Guin and her husband have lived in the same house in Portland, Ore., for 40 years. She writes on a computer but refuses to "get connected." She strolls down to the local Minuteman Press to send and receive faxes. When she's not writing, she teaches it to others, and she serves on the board of her local library.
During our conversation, Le Guin chats easily about literary criticism and her newest work and how exhausting book tours are, but she leaves me to discover her heart and soul in her nonfiction, such as "Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women and Places." There I trace the roots of her feminism to a disastrous relationship with a "prince" in graduate school, see her patient humor in her description of eating cold mashed potatoes in take after take as an extra on the set of "The Lathe of Heaven" and dissect her feelings about utopias.
Le Guin has accepted a few labels over the years as "approximately accurate": novelist, radical, feminist, Taoist and, more recently, Western writer. Born in 1929, she is of that misnamed "Silent Generation" -- those Americans who were children during World War II -- but Le Guin is anything but silent. She was on the leading edge of the civil rights, feminist and antiwar movements of the 1960s. Through her tales and complex characters, she has explored the themes of sexism, racism, nationalism, unchecked technological progress and the flaws in popular utopian visions. Wherever I looked a generation later, she had already blazed the trail.
Le Guin is a product of both her times and her unusual family. Her father was anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who developed the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley and was known for his work among Native American tribes. Today, Kroeber is perhaps most famous for his close association with, and study of, Ishi, the Yahi Indian who wandered out of the Northern California wilderness in 1911 and spent the remaining years of his life residing at the University of California's anthropology museum -- where Kroeber was the curator. (Ishi died of tuberculosis in 1916, though he was in the news again in August when his brain was moved from the Smithsonian Institution and properly buried in his ancestral homeland, the foothills of Mount Lassen.)
Le Guin's mother, Theodora, trained as a psychologist and wrote the bestselling biography "Ishi in Two Worlds," as well as a number of children's works. Observation and analysis, words, myth and storytelling were an integral part of Le Guin's life from an early age. And given the themes and preoccupations that permeate her fiction, it's interesting to speculate about the influence the story of Ishi has had on her work.
The facts of Ishi's life and his intersection with the white man's world resulted in one of the more remarkable anthropological cases of the 20th century, and its elements seem to echo through many of Le Guin's stories -- from "Planet of Exile" and "City of Illusion" to "The Word for World Is Forest" and "The Dispossessed." It would be surprising if that weren't the case -- what artists do, among other things, is use the raw material of their own life to make a universal statement that, when most successful, resonates across time and cultures.
But she didn't spend her youth reading only anthropological texts and high literature, or immersed in her parents' interests. Le Guin admits she and her brother devoured the pulp science fiction magazines of the '30s and '40s. "Kids need to read a lot of dumb stuff," she says, "roughage in the diet. But there are ethical questions when you're writing for kids. You have to stand back from the work and say, 'Could this scare an 8-year-old? Could it do any harm?'" Her own children's books, such as the "Catwings" series, are beautifully illustrated, gentle fantasies of the Beatrix Potter stripe.
Intellectual refugees from the universities of war-torn Europe, her parents' extensive library, and storytelling around the campfire at the Kroeber summer home in California's Napa Valley helped nurture her native talent. At the age of 11, she submitted a piece to Astounding Science Fiction magazine (which later became Analog) that was rejected. In 1947, she left her Berkeley home to attend Radcliffe College. She continued her studies in Romance literature at Columbia University, where she earned an M.A. and a Fulbright scholarship.
On her way to study in France in 1953, she met fellow Queen Mary passenger Charles Le Guin. They married in Paris a few months later. Over the next 10 years, she and her husband, a professor, settled in Portland, and their three children, Elisabeth, Caroline and Theodore, were born.
