Don’t try to pigeonhole her. She was more than any one thing.
Four years ago, on a midsummer Sunday, I rang the doorbell of an unassuming Victorian perched on the north slope of the Forest Park neighborhood of Portland, Ore., and waited for Ursula Kroeber Le Guin to come to the door. I’d grown up with — and in no small part, because of — her writing, from “Earthsea” to “The Left Hand of Darkness” to “The Dispossessed” to “Lavinia,” and the moment felt appropriately otherworldly. Not everyone is lucky enough to find himself ringing the doorbell of one of his literary heroes, let alone with a decent chance of being let in, and I was somewhat dumbstruck at the privilege. My host, when she came to the door, was decidedly less solemn.
“Come on in, Wray,” she said. “You get here all right? Good. Watch out for that [expletive] cat. He’s a terrorist.”
(Ms. Le Guin’s vernacular, I’d soon discover, was saltier than might be anticipated from an 84-year-old with a pixie cut. From here on, let the reader insert invectives into our dialogue at will.)
Fittingly for a writer of speculative fiction, Ms. Le Guin’s house seemed larger on the inside than it was on the outside. I entered cautiously, and not only because of the cat. I was there to spend a long weekend conducting an interview with her for The Paris Review, the highbrow literary journal known for its in-depth conversations on the craft of fiction, and I’d had to lobby the editor for a month to get him to consider featuring a writer whose work was so tinged with genre. Ms. Le Guin, however, was distinctly beyond caring what literary New York thought of her — if the thought, in fact, had ever crossed her mind.
One of the first things I asked her, on the record, was how she felt about the term “science fiction” as applied to her work. The response she gave was preceded by a sound I would come to know well — a good-natured, contemptuous snort.
“Where I can get prickly, Wray, is if I’m just called a sci-fi writer,” she said. “I’m not. I’m a novelist and a poet. Don’t shove me into your pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.”
My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions. If there’s ever been a better description of Ms. Le Guin’s astonishingly diverse and adventurous body of work, I’ve yet to come across it. She’ll doubtlessly be remembered for her sophisticated, nuanced and profoundly humanistic speculative fiction, and of course for her series of magical coming-of-age novels, the Earthsea series, without which the Harry Potter megafranchise could scarcely be imagined. But she was more than a sci-fi or fantasy writer, much more. She was more than her identity as a trailblazer in the overwhelmingly male (and chauvinistic) field of 1960s and ’70s science fiction, as well, and more than an iconoclastic thinker on gender, or on ethics, or on the material world. The much-discussed fluidity of gender in her most famous novel, “The Left Hand of Darkness,” could serve as a metaphor for Ms. Le Guin’s entire approach to living, thinking and creating: She reserved the right to think, and write, and react as she saw fit — and to inhabit a completely different role as the occasion, or the project, demanded.
Ms. Le Guin cared passionately about many things, as is clear to any reader of her books: the rights of indigenous peoples, the search for alternatives to our pitiless economic scheme, the myth of innate gender difference, our slow collective murder of the planet. But what she cared about above all, it seems to me, was the paramount freedom — if not obligation — of all thinking individuals to define their personal enterprise strictly for, and by, themselves. By the time I came to know her, Ms. Le Guin had made peace with the nature of her legacy, and with the reductive effects of the passage of time. But it was, to the end, an anarchist’s peace.
I learned many things from Ms. Le Guin in the course of that first day, which we spent drinking tea and chatting on her slightly vertiginous veranda, with its glorious view of the snowy cone of Mount St. Helens. We talked about the usefulness of whispering one’s writing aloud when revising, and how it somehow functioned better than reading at a normal volume, when trying to get the music of a sentence right. We talked about the advantages an interest in ethnography can give to writers interested in imagining entire societies, if not whole worlds. We talked about the mysterious power of artists in the last stages of their creative lives, when they were writing to please no one but themselves.
I was working on a science fiction novel of my own at the time — my first — and I confessed to her that it seemed to be turning into something too complex, perhaps even convoluted, for the rollicking page-turner I’d hoped for. Her response shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.
“ Entertaining them is all well and good, Wray, but does it make them think?”
I answered, a bit defensively, that I thought my book did — maybe more so than most readers might be looking for. That snort came again.
“We don’t know what we’re looking for when we pick up a book, no matter how clear-cut the genre,” she said. “We think we do, but we don’t. Don’t ever give people the thing they expect just because they expect it. Our job is to surprise them, to shake them — to turn their expectations on their heads. And do you know why, Wray?”
Why, I managed to mumble.
“Because that’s when the MRI of their brain lights up, and they begin to see .”
Don’t try to fit Ms. Le Guin into your pigeonhole, posterity — or even into two, or three, or half a dozen. Her tentacles are coming out in all directions.
