Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on January 22 at the age of 88, lived most of her adult life in Portland, Oregon, where she and her husband Charles—who taught French at the local university—quietly brought up their three children. I suspect that Le Guin, who herself majored in French at Radcliffe, must early on have taken to heart Flaubert’s dictum: “Be regular and ordinary in your life like a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.” For there is no question about it: This humorous, outspoken woman, who once told a feminist conference that she actually enjoyed housework, was one of the essential writers of our time. As I sit at this keyboard, the whole world, especially the science-fiction world, is mourning her passing—and a certain committee in Sweden is, I hope, kicking itself for having neglected to award her the Nobel Prize for literature.
Yes, Ursula Le Guin wrote science fiction and fantasy, but we’ve come a long way since people reflexively dismissed these two related genres as simply that Buck Rogers stuff or kiddie stories about elves. That we finally take ambitious “fantastika” seriously is due in no small part to Le Guin. After all, there’s nothing in the least pulpish about her moving exploration of gender, race, and love in The Left Hand of Darkness, while one has only to read the opening lines of A Wizard of Earthsea to recognize prose of assured and understated power:
You don’t write that utterly simple opening sentence, let alone perfectly set up that last cadence—“before the songs were made”—without knowing exactly what you are doing. Little wonder that Le Guin’s innumerable admirers include writers as accomplished and varied as Michael Chabon, Robert Silverberg, Margaret Atwood, Junot Díaz, Walter Mosley, and David Mitchell.
I first heard about Le Guin from Joanna Russ, author of the SF classic The Female Man. The two of us had met in the mid-1970s when I was a grad student in comparative literature at Cornell and Joanna was teaching at nearby SUNY Binghamton. Around 1979 I wrote to her for advice: As a young editor at the Washington Post’s Book World, I’d inaugurated a monthly fantasy and science fiction column, but my own knowledge of these genres was spotty at best. As a teenager I’d read a few Robert Heinlein novels and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, but not a whole lot else. What writers and books should I look for to bring myself up to speed? Joanna sent me an annotated list.
On it were Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, and more recent works by Samuel R. Delany, someone with the unlikely name Philip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin. I soon tracked down a copy of The Left Hand of Darkness, initially published in 1969 and, as the cover told me, the winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The novel hooked me immediately with its seemingly paradoxical first sentence:
A decade after my reintroduction to science fiction, Book World set up a monthly book club, each of the editors moderating an online discussion of a favorite novel or work of nonfiction. For my first selection, I chose The Left Hand of Darkness. Why? First and most important, it is a gravely beautiful and powerful work of art. More practically, however, it also readily elicits intense discussion. A black emissary from Earth arrives on a diplomatic mission to the planet Gethen, where the otherwise human population is androgynous—except during certain periods of “kemmer,” when a person’s body passes into either a female or male condition. By the end of this short, intense book, Le Guin has compelled you to think hard about every aspect of what it means to be human, told a thrilling story—no one ever forgets the desperate journey across the ice—and, not least, made you cry.
Being dazzled by her work, I naturally sought out Le Guin as a reviewer. Even now I recall her praise of Carolyn See’s California novel Golden Days and her magnificent piece on Virginia Woolf’s essays—which I’ve just now looked up: “All through the book the reach and stretch of that splendid mind, its leap, its sureness, are amazing, delightful, ennobling.” Did Le Guin identify with Woolf? Maybe just a little. She once described Philip K. Dick—her high school classmate in Berkeley, California, though, amazingly, the two didn’t then know each other—as “our own homegrown Borges.” To me Le Guin sometimes seems our own homegrown H. G. Wells. The two writers’ private lives were utterly dissimilar but Le Guin was comparably pioneering and prolific as a novelist, short-story writer, political essayist, visionary, and public intellectual.
Consider just three of her novels. To many readers, The Dispossessed (1974) is her greatest achievement, depicting the conflicts in the heart of her hero Shevek who is caught between two competing “ambiguous utopias,” one anarchist, one capitalist, neither wholly satisfying. In 1979 she brought out Malafrena, which focuses on 19th-century politics, art, family, and revolution in the imaginary country of Orsinia; it is written in the high-realist mode of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks or Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, the latter one of Le Guin’s favorite novels. Then in 1985 she published her most ambitious, albeit not entirely successful, work, Always Coming Home, which takes the form of a faux anthropological dossier describing the culture of the pastoral Kesh of northern California. It came in a box and included a cassette.
During much of her career, Le Guin also composed poetry, produced lighthearted children’s books about flying cats—I reviewed a couple of the Catwings titles—and regularly collected her many essays and talks into books, starting with 1979’s The Language of the Night, which included “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” and other cogent essays about fantasy and the imagination. All this time she was also writing short stories, the most famous of which, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” has become a staple of high school classrooms. It raises a troubling moral and philosophical question: If the unremitting torture of a child deep in an underground dungeon would assure the happiness and prosperity of millions, would you consent to that child’s torture? Something of the same muted polemicism marks her 1972 novella about colonialism and the despoliation of the environment, The Word for World Is Forest.
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To the end of her life, Le Guin remained fiercely feminist, anti-capitalist, and forthright in expressing her political views. In the essay “Lying It All Away”—from her last book, the 2017 collection of blog pieces titled No Time to Spare—she writes scathingly of “growth capitalism” returning to its origins and “providing security for none but the strongest profiteers.” She mourns that “I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard. A moral standard based on advertising.” Can America, she wonders, continue “living on spin and illusion, hot air and hogwash, and still be my country? I don’t know.” After all, the country is now run by corporations “of which Congress is an almost wholly owned subsidiary.” It may surprise readers to learn that she wrote these sentences when Barack Obama, not Donald Trump, was president.
Though often outspoken, Le Guin in person was gentle, kind, polite, and often slyly funny. For instance, in the talk “Making Up Stories”—collected in Words Are My Matter (2016)—she implores her audience not to ask where she gets her ideas: “I have managed to keep the address of the company where I buy my ideas a secret all these years, and I’m not about to let people in on it now.”
Back in 1990, Le Guin produced her unexpected masterpiece Tehanu, a fourth book in what had long been dubbed “The Earthsea Trilogy.” In A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), her focus had been on psychic maturation, on the hero Ged discovering the full complexity of who he is. The Tombs of Atuan (1970) and The Farthest Shore (1972), in their turn, emphasized sex and death. All three novels were replete with archetypal imagery—light and dark, labyrinths, night journeys, dragons (the mightiest and oldest of these, Kalessin, is a major character). Each also explored the proper use of power and urged the Taoist principle of balance. In the case of Tehanu, Le Guin boldly imagined the late middle age of her protagonists, when Ged and the former priestess Tenar have used up or repudiated their once-formidable powers. Women predominate as characters and the novel is, in large part, about the making of a family.
Tehanu could have been a dreadfully earnest book, but Le Guin’s own magic never fails her. At the climax, the frail Ged and Tenar are standing on a stony cliff high above the sea, their heartless enemies about to push the couple over the precipice. Tenar, rendered mute by a spell, suddenly points up to the sky, then laughs:
Le Guin would go on to write even more stories set in Earthsea.
In 2008, she received deserved acclaim for her late novel Lavinia, about the woman who marries Aeneas. In 2016 her best novellas and stories were collected in two mammoth volumes while her early fiction began to appear in the Library of America. To a younger generation of writers, especially female writers of fantasy and science fiction, she had long been revered as the feistiest and best of fairy godmothers.
Just last February I lectured on Le Guin in Helena, Montana: I was invited there because, a decade earlier, under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts’s Big Read program, I had worked up companion guides to A Wizard of Earthsea. Then this past Christmas I was visiting Portland, where my eldest son and his family live, and one idle afternoon thought of calling on Le Guin. But I didn’t. I knew she’d been in ill health and there was no real reason to disturb her. All I wanted, after all, was simply to touch the hem of her garment and mumble how much her work had meant to me, as it has to so many other people.
So we never met. Still, my friend David Streitfeld, a business reporter for the New York Times, did visit Le Guin last fall. He passed along my warmest wishes and she, in her turn, asked him to give me a present—a hardback reprint of her early 1967 novel, City of Illusions. It lies before me now, open to its inscription: “To Michael, For auld lang syne, Ursula Le Guin.” In those “times long past,” this irreplaceable writer brought out one wonderful book after another, including many I haven’t mentioned here. If, by some mischance, you’ve never read Ursula Le Guin, put down that ephemeral bestseller and get started.
Michael Dirda is the author, most recently, of Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books.
