Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  That’s why I love fiction and encourage people to make up stories. And to take the time to learn how to get the words right. It takes a while to learn how to use words. It takes practice. It takes work, years of work. And then what you write may never get published. Even if it does it almost certainly won’t ever make you enough to live off of. But if it’s what you want to do, nothing, nothing in the world, can give you a sweeter reward than doing it, doing the work itself—and then knowing you did it, you got the words right, you made a story up and told it truly. Truth-telling is a great thing, and a rare one. Enjoy it!

  A few words more about reading in the brave new world of the internet. Here we all are talking about writing, and everybody is telling us that nobody is reading. Pundits wail that the book is dead. Johnny not only can’t read, he won’t read. Americans read a quarter of a book apiece every ten years, or some such statistic. How can Homer compete with the iPad? Nobody wants Don Quixote; it can’t be tweeted. So what are we doing here at our festival of writing?

  The same thing writers have always done. We write for people who read, and they’ve always been a minority. I don’t say an elite, simply a minority. The majority of people in this world have never read for pleasure and never will. Some can’t; some won’t.

  This is nothing to tear hair about. It takes all kinds to make a world. Watching men hit balls with bats for hours on end is not a pleasure to me, nor to many other people in the world. That doesn’t mean baseball—or even cricket—is dead.

  We’ve gone into an unnecessary panic about reading, when what’s changed is not reading, but publishing. There, some panic is warranted. Our technology has got so far ahead of our brains that we’re in danger of throwing out perfectly reliable methods of keeping readers freely supplied with reading matter and writers adequately supplied with peanut butter. The big publishers, who for all their faults were pretty good at both those jobs, are now controlled by huge corporations that demand they publish only what will sell fast and die fast—profiteers who have no interest in books or authors other than profit-making control of the market and the commodities sold in it. Copyright, the only guarantee writers and publishers have that they can make a living, is in imminent danger of being abandoned with nothing to replace it. Growth capitalism is by nature inimical to the craftsman and the artist. Copyright was a kind of loophole that allowed us to live within capitalism, but by using reactionary elements in the government, the corporations are actively seeking ways to wreck copyright, exploit us, and control what we write.

  How can we use e-publication and the internet to our advantage so we can write what we want and get paid for it? I am too old to have any idea. You here are going to have to figure that out. And you will. People do want to read. Sometimes it seems that everybody wants write, but believe me, even more of them want to read. And somewhere in the loopholes and crannies of the huge machinery of capitalist technology, writers and readers will find each other, as we always have done. If you’re aware that it’s up to you to make that happen, you’ll find out how to do it. I wish you courage, and the best luck in the world.

  Freedom

  A speech in acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for

  Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, November 2014.

  To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long—my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

  Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.

  Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

  Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this—letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

  Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

  I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

  Thank you.

  Book Introductions and Notes on Writers

  Most of these pieces about various authors were written as introductions to a new edition of a book, a few as freestanding essays. They are arranged alphabetically by the author’s last name.

  The essay on José Saramago, “Examples of Dignity,” is the only piece in this book that differs substantially from its form(s) as originally published. Joy Johannessen, who licked this book into shape, combined two essays and two book reviews from different years into a single, very much less repetitive essay. Again, the earlier versions can be found in the periodicals where they were published, or on my website; and reviews of two Saramago novels, not incorporated into this piece, can be found in the next section, Book Reviews.

  I wouldn’t agree to write an introduction for a book I didn’t admire, or write at length about an author who didn’t interest me intensely, so these pieces give a glimpse of the kind of fiction I like. But they’re totally useless as an indication of what I read, or as a list of favorite writers. People think of me as a science-fiction writer, and so I’m asked to write about science fiction, and that’s fine, but still—three pieces on H. G. Wells and none on Virginia Woolf?

  The two subjects I picked freely for myself were H. L. Davis’s great Western novel Honey in the Horn, at the generous invitation from Tin House magazine to write about any book I liked, and Charles McNichols’s Crazy Weather, an introduction written for Harry Kirchner of Pharos Books. He invites writers to pick an out-of-print book and tell us why it should be back in print, and then he publishes it. A notable venture, resulting in an extraordinary publication list.

  A Very Good American Novel: H. L. Davis’s Honey in the Horn

  First published in Tin House, 2013.

  Writers west of the Mississippi are up against the Eastern notion that everything west of the Mississippi, except maybe Stanford, is cactus. Many Easterners also hold that “regional” fiction is inferior and that a “region” is anywhere that isn’t the East. You can’t beat logic like that. It’s amazing that H. L. Davis of Oregon won a Pulitzer, even in 1936. Lately, however, he’s been so neglected, so lost to literature, that readers may be startled to recognise in his style and tone a model for Ken Kesey in Sometimes a Great Notion, Don Berry in Trask, and most other serious novelists of the West, including even the high-toned Wallace Stegner. Molly Gloss, in The Jump-Off Creek and The Hearts of Horses, is his true heir, the one I think he might have acknowledged as getting it pretty near all the way right.

>   Davis’s prize-winning masterpiece was Honey in the Horn. Its protagonist, Clay, is a likable, mule-headed, mixed-up boy of eighteen or so who has already been through a good deal, but hasn’t yet shut down in self-defense. His instincts are decent, but he falls in with an unlawful posse and takes enthusiastic part in hunting down and lynching his own worthless father, who might only be his uncle. His girl, Luce, the most vivid character in the book, is a wonderful mixture of forthright honesty and wary elusiveness. It’s a good love story, always balanced on the high wire between possibility and tragedy. Clay and Luce are both quite capable of murder, which keeps the tension up. Both are ignorant, intelligent, young but already damaged, haunted by bad mistakes, pursued by past darkness, yet struggling to find a moral sense in the huge complexity of life. Of the wildly various people they meet or travel with, some have sunk contentedly into crime, many into futility, some are merely restless, and some, like Clay and Luce, keep groping vaguely toward a clearer standard, a better way to live, maybe just over those mountains there . . .

  Clay takes a lively interest in the world, and through him, in a deceptively easygoing style, Davis gives us his own stunningly vivid perceptions of people and places. Here we’re riding with Clay across a hardpan desert:

  In the big stretches the alkali reflected the exact dark blue of the sky, and that parted to right and left as he rode into it, so that he rode with the sky rubbing either elbow and washing softly back from the mare’s feet as she advanced. There were places where spots in the clear air expanded with heat and magnified distant sections of scenery so they seemed only a few feet away, and then they would go on expanding till they got gigantic, until a couple of sage rats cutting grass would look as big as colts; and then they would vanish as if they had been dissolved in water.

  Davis was a generous, cross-grained man who drank too much, as journalists and male novelists were expected to do. He wrote several fine novels and stories, including the unforgettable “Open Winter,” all of them about the Oregon country and the people who worked in it. He said he wanted Honey in the Horn to contain an example of every job people did in Oregon in 1912. That statement itself takes us back to a faraway world of hard, skilled, physical, and infinitely various work, such as cowboying, or blacksmithing, or cooking for ranch hands, or fishing for salmon by dangling off a rope in a waterfall with a gaff in hand, or sewing grain sacks shut. The novel was written during the Great Depression, when work was something very much on people’s minds. The time it describes is now a century ago. Given the rate of technological change, it’s been the longest hundred years in human history. To some, Davis’s picture will be meaningless, to others fascinating. In any case, it’s worth considering that from the beginning of human culture until a generation or two ago, everybody lived in the work world he describes; and it won’t take much to put us back into it.

  For all its vivid, vigorous language, its dry, teasing humor, its grand scenery indicated by a few easy strokes, and its crowd of cantankerous characters noisily causing trouble for themselves and everybody else clear across two mountain ranges, the essential feeling the book leaves me with is loneliness. Or what I think of as the American version of the word: lonesomeness. Lonesome people. That could be a strike against it. We may adulate the lone hero, but we don’t want to be him. Lonesomeness is what the ever-present TV and cellphone and social media save us from. All the same, it’s what a lot of people in the West came looking for—room, space, silence. We’re social animals, but we crave solitude to make our souls. Americans cherish their opinions at least as much as their souls, and opinions allowed to take root where nobody’s around to crowd them grow great and very strange. Davis takes a good deal of pleasure describing them.

  He had some strong opinions of his own, including a low one of “developers,” the people who turned the West into desirable real estate, filled alkali flats with little white stakes marking out unbuilt avenues and opera houses, and fooled the hopeful with talk of ten-foot topsoil, railroads certain to come, fortunes to be made, orange orchards in the sagebrush. Developers are loyal, active servants of capitalism, of course; possibly that explains his opinion of them.

  The kind of super-respectful language used today when speaking of non-white peoples, language that white racists label “political correctness,” was as unknown to Davis as it was to Shakespeare. He treats everybody exactly alike. Nobody gets any respect from him who hasn’t individually earned it. He speaks of Native Americans not across a gulf of wishful thinking, but from a personal knowledge of difference so rare in fiction that it will shock people these days (and may be part of the reason why Honey in the Horn has been dropped from the canon). The many Indian groups are clearly, vividly differentiated. In a sketch of a coastal village, he describes a tiny isolated group of Athabascans:

  There was a kind of hopelessness about that lost tag-end of a great people, stuck off in such a place without anything to use their brains on if any of them ever developed any, with nothing that they could ever amount to except to become chief of a shack town containing maybe six dozen human beings, with strange people and strange languages all around them so that there could be no chance of ever getting away.

  Not that there was anything mournful about it. They didn’t want to get away, and they had stayed where they were for pretty close to a thousand years without the slightest suspicion that any place in the world could be finer or more interesting than their own twenty acres of it.

  Davis omits the probability that this village, like many on the Oregon Coast, had recently lost eighty or ninety percent of its people to white diseases; and he was a desert man, who couldn’t imagine liking the rainy coast. Otherwise, he mocks these people only as he mocks everybody—his picture of white settlers near this Indian village is just as unsparing. Disrespectful of conventional pieties but fascinated by and respectful of cultural difference, Davis can feel sympathy with the Indians without feeling obliged to share their view of life. What’s more, he knows that his judgment of it is immaterial. Such fair-minded plain speaking is too easily silenced by the emotional rant of racism/antiracism. When Huckleberry Finn is banned, calumniated, and bowdlerized for using the word nigger, despite the fact that “Nigger” Jim is the moral hero of the book, how can any lesser book survive?

  For all their failure to attain any goal or even do anything that makes much sense, the book’s characters are fiery with life—absurdly tragic, painfully funny, ornery as all get-out. Through the grand indifference of the Oregon landscape Davis sends a cavalcade of mavericks and loners, a crazy symphony of dissenting voices, a pilgrimage of obdurate souls. In them, with some reluctance, with some relief and even delight, I see my countrymen as they can be seen only from the farthest West, the farthest stretch of the extraordinary American experiment in how to be human.

  Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle

  An introduction to the Folio Society edition of 2015.

  The Man in the High Castle was published at the end of 1962, before what we think of as the sixties was under way, and long before science fiction was considered as having anything to do with American literature. When the book came out, there was a smell of gunpowder in it, the whiff of revolution. And indeed it played a part both in the deconstruction of conventional thinking that led to the social upheavals of the sixties and seventies, and in the dilapidation of the wall that critics had set up between realistic fiction and the larger realities of fiction.

  Since few reviewers of the time ever crossed that wall, only the science-fiction community took much notice of the novel. It found readers outside the genre, but could always be marginalized as a “cult” book (one of those handy dismissive adjectives dear to critics). The 1982 film Blade Runner, nominally based on Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, sacrificed most of the intelligence and ethical complexity of the story to sensational effects and violent action, but its success brought Dick’s name into some prominence. By the nineties, a more informed and generous
criticism was beginning to appreciate the unsettling energy and disquieting power of The Man in the High Castle.

  Sometimes awkward, sometimes obscure, thoroughly unpredictable —literally plotted by the chance fall of coins or yarrow sticks, yet ultimately controlled and driven by rational, moral purpose—this novel continues to fascinate both the critical interpreter and the common reader. It may be the first big, lasting contribution science fiction made to American literature.

  Its form, alternate history, rearranges actual, familiar events on earth without introducing new technologies or alien worlds, thus reassuring people who are afraid of science fiction that the book can be read as safely as an ordinary historical novel; in this case, a snare and a delusion: the author was a master of both. His rearrangements of the outcome of World War II are not altogether historically probable, but fictively they are horribly convincing. To read the book is to be drawn into the perceptual vividness of a vision, the disorienting and lasting conviction of nightmare. Since 1963, I’ve been unable to forget that the Nazis might? did? control the East Coast of the United States and the Japanese the West. And I have been haunted by the awful shadow-memory of Africa as a silent graveyard.

  A year older than I, Philip Kindred Dick spent his adolescence in the city I grew up in, Berkeley. We both graduated from Berkeley High School in 1947. That there were over three thousand students at the school may explain why I never even knew his name, yet it seems a little odd. Absolutely no one I’ve spoken to from our Berkeley High years remembers him. Was he a total loner, was he out sick a great deal, did he take “shop” courses rather than the more academic ones? His name is in the yearbook but there is no picture of him. In Dick’s life as in his fiction, reality seems to slither from the grasp, and ascertainable facts end up as debatable assertions or mere labels.