Always coming home
Ursula Le Guin doesn’t tell readers much about her life, but revealing nuggets are starting to appear.
Ursula Le Guin doesn’t tell readers much about her life, but revealing nuggets are starting to appear.
Some writers can handle lava with bare hands,” writes Ursula Le Guin in the introduction to The Complete Orsinia, one of four major new collections of her work, “but I’m not so tough, my skin is not asbestos.” She’s referring to the way bits and pieces of her life turn up in her stories – one of the short stories included in The Complete Orsinia is “about as autobiographical as I ever got” – without actually telling readers much about her life.
“I have no interest in confession. My games are transformation and invention.”
Le Guin was born in California in 1929; she turned 87 last October. The Complete Orsinia includes a full diary-style chronology of her life, containing the entry, “1932: Is taught to write by her brother Ted and goes on doing it.” The volume also includes her first published work, a poem from 1959; her first published story, “An Die Musik” (1961); and the novel Malafrena, which she wrote at 22. It was her second novel and the earliest long work to get published, although the published version was so heavily revised that it amounted to a collaboration between her novice-writer self and the more seasoned author of The Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea.
The Complete Orsinia is the first volume of a full Le Guin edition from Library of America, a non-profit publisher devoted to American classics. (Its 2016 line-up also included Henry James, Abigail Adams, Jack Kerouac and Kurt Vonnegut.) Meanwhile, two 700-plus-page hardback compilations of her shorter fiction appeared in 2016 from Saga Press: The Found and the Lost collects all 13 of her novellas, and The Unreal and the Real is Le Guin’s own selection of her 39 best short stories. And Small Beer Press has just released Words Are My Matter, her latest collection of essays, talks and book reviews.
Any of these books makes an excellent entry point to a body of work that includes realism, science fiction, fantasy, poetry, children’s picture books, young adult fiction, translations, screenplays, criticism, satire and things harder to define. “I have been allowed to use my life well, in work that was worth the time spent on it,” Le Guin writes in Words Are My Matter. It’s hard to argue.
Two things she has not written: the molten lava of autobiographical or confessional fiction, and the thing on the far side of that, memoir. “I don’t write memoir, because I either can’t or don’t want to,” she told the Listener by email. “I don’t know which comes first. We make such a cult of the artist’s personality and opinions on current events and all. And I do that myself. I’ve read not only all the biographies of Virginia Woolf, but also her diaries and letters, and I love and admire the person I find there and am grateful for her generosity.
“But then I look at Shakespeare and think oh, that’s best of all. He gives us himself – and nothing about himself. Despite the hundreds of books about him, we hardly know more about him than we do about Homer. What we have of them is the work. And I think that’s what matters in the end. Authors’ travels, their love affairs, their opinions, what they keep on their writing desk (a frequent question from audiences) – it’s interesting and entertaining, but how much does it lead us right away from the thing they did that matters, their art?”
And yet the writing desk, the love affairs, the opinions: as she says, one wants to know. The opinions, at least, are knowable. In one of the most compelling essays in Words Are My Matter, “Teasing Myself Out of Thought”, Le Guin writes about the meaning of art, and the distinction between moralising in fiction and expressing complex ideas. “No matter how humble the spirit it’s offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression.” It’s a point she needs to emphasise for her own sake, she told me.