Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  So, there we are, given perfectly conflicting instructions. Perhaps if we could follow them we might arrive somewhere near the condition of “negative capability” which Keats believed the most fruitful of all. I have a notion that Italo Calvino lived a good part of the time there.

  Margaret Drabble: The Sea Lady

  2006

  Each of Margaret Drabble’s eighteen or nineteen novels has been an accurate, honest record of its time in the idiom of its time, and yet she has never been truly fashionable. A sharp critical intellect keeps her keenly aware of trend, and she’s never bucked it; but the qualities for which I value her fiction could not be satisfactorily called modernist, nor are they postmodern now. Of course I’m trying to avoid the word old-fashioned, because I fear Drabble herself thinks it the kiss of death; and yet what is one to say? A compelling narrative impetus, essentially straightforward though entertainingly subtle; a moral burden, clear though mostly unstated; acute and amusing observation of society, gender, manners, fashions; strongly individual characters, whose character is probably their destiny. Lord, am I talking about Jane Austen?

  A while back, Drabble seemed to be going a bit astray, hipped on some pseudo-issues such as the fascination that serial murderers are supposed to have for all of us; I thought her novels suffered accordingly. It is a pleasure to read The Sea Lady and find again the canny, cagy, unfooled, intransigent author of The Needle’s Eye.

  To get the caviling over with, I’ll register my objection to one character, or voice, or persona, or whatever, in The Sea Lady—a Public Orator, male, who appears sporadically in a self-conscious pose to comment on the story, combining the metafictional interfering author, the Thackerayan aside to the reader, and a faint whiff of Bunyan. Some of the passages about him are eloquent:

  . . . the powers of the Orator are limited. They have been limited to the forethought, to the planning, to the invitation, to the setting of the stage, to the choice of the venue, to the public confrontation. After that, the actors have this terrible freedom. They can write their own script. The Orator’s formal script is already written, but they can write their own informal interchanges, as they meet in a crowded room, and as they climb the painful cobbled steps. This is risky, this is terrible.

  So it is. It is also revealing. But I’m not certain that the revelation is relevant. It serves to emphasise the characters’ artificiality while asserting their autonomy, and thus to protect the author from critical accusations of soft-heartedness; but having fearlessly subtitled her story “A Late Romance,” she might as well have braved it without the Orator. He is, incidentally, related to (but cannot be identified with) one of the actual characters, to whom I have some objections also; this character resurfaces far too late, and unconvincingly. Ockham’s razor might spare him, but would shave the Orator quite away. There is no need to multiply entities when you’ve got hold of two such good solid ones as Ailsa and Humphrey.

  Ailsa is the Sea Lady, whom we first meet dressed in silver sequinned scales. “She gleamed and rippled with smooth muscle, like a fish. She was boldly dressed, for a woman in her sixties,” and she’s a bold woman—a brazen hussy of the intellect, a star in the showbiz of the mind. She is wearing her fish scales to present a literary prize, after which she will drive north to receive an honorary degree at a small university. She is the same Sea Lady who loved and married a man who loved fish and the sea, a marine biologist; they divorced and have not seen each other for decades, but as it happens (not by chance), he will be traveling north by train to receive an honorary degree at the same ceremony. They are converging.

  Ailsa is genuinely brilliant and also a fake, maybe a bit of a monster, a mermaid on dry land. Humphrey is the real thing, both feet on the ground, an excellent scientist with a strong moral sense, a kind, responsible man. She is all performer, driven by competition; he has forfeited top honors in his field by refusing to treat science as a competition for recognition. Both have had success and yet have had to settle for somewhat dubious rewards. But the two of them also have a history, and not a simple one. Long before they were married long ago, they knew each other as children, in that same small northern city by the sea, just after the end of the Second World War.

  The depth and weight of the story, its ballast, its bottom, are in the pages that relate Humphrey’s two summers as a child in Ornemouth and Finsterness. The flexible, steady accuracy of the narration in these chapters is marvelous; the story is utterly engrossing. Identification with the child’s point of view all too often leads to the whining falsities of The Catcher in the Rye, but Drabble has always been able to write as an adult about children. Her generous and unsentimental truthfulness to the condition of childhood is very rare. Hump is a nice boy, and he has one wonderfully happy summer—not an easy thing to write about, happiness. The betrayal, anxiety, and dubious gains of the second summer are more predictable, yet ring equally true.

  So satisfying are these hundred pages that the rest of the book has a problem matching them, particularly as the direction of the narrative is trickier, moving back and forth. Humphrey grows up into a really nice man—again not an easy thing to write about—but when he and Ailsa, who is not a very nice woman, but an entertaining one, first meet again as adults and fall in love, the episode fails to engage on the deep level of the Ornemouth summers. It’s all right, as lust goes. But novelistically, it isn’t much more than an interlude between the dense, brilliant reality of the beginning—children on the beach—and the guarded ambiguity of the end, with the sixty-year-old smiling public man and woman, receiving their accolades. And, perhaps, finally, their true rewards.

  Carol Emshwiller: Ledoyt

  First published in 1997, revised in 2002, and revised again for this book

  Looking over the New Fiction shelf at the library one day in 1997, I saw Ledoyt, by Carol Emshwiller. Emshwiller? I thought—my Emshwiller? She wrote a new book that’s been out for two years and I never heard about it?

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Emshwiller’s readers know her to be a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction. But her books, mostly published by a good small press in San Francisco, Mercury House, don’t get wide attention. Part of the problem may well be her calm originality. Most reviewers prefer pigeons that fit in holes and rabbits that redux. Emshwiller’s like a wild mixture of Italo Calvino (intellectual games) and Grace Paley (perfect honesty) and Fay Weldon (outrageous wit) and Jorge Luis Borges (pure luminosity), but no—her voice is perfectly her own. She isn’t like anybody. She’s different.

  Before I get to Ledoyt (which is different) I want to talk a little about the other Emshwiller books (which are all different).

  Before 1990 I knew her work only from science-fiction publications. She isn’t categorisable as an sf writer, but she knows how to play brilliant games with sf themes. Verging on the Pertinent (from Coffee House Press, 1989), the first of her books I read, is a collection of fables, witty, cool, scary. After reading it I thought of her as an impressive and sophisticated writer whom I admired without exactly liking—though I did love the first story in the collection, “Yukon,” about a woman in the Far North who runs away from her husband and spends the winter comfortably with a bear and then meets her true love, who is an Engelmann spruce tree, or a man very like a spruce tree, named Engelmann. . . . So often in Emshwiller stories you can have it the way you want it. She doesn’t make you have it the way she wants it. For all her formidable wit, she is a kind writer. And a surprising number of her stories have happy endings. At least they do if you want the ending to be happy. I am not sure Mr. Engelmann is really the heroine’s true love, but it seemed that way to me last time I read the story. It may seem quite different the next time.

  In 1990 came Carmen Dog, a novel about women turning into animals and animals turning into women, perhaps the funniest and the cruelest of her books, a sort of feminist Candide. The kindness of the innocent heroine, P
ooch, triumphs over cruelty in the end, which is happy; at least it is if you want it to be. Even Pooch’s children turn out well, “setters, and all male.” Why this book isn’t a feminist classic I don’t know. Maybe it is. Maybe that’s why people haven’t heard about it. It should be a required text on gender in all high schools and colleges.

  I taught Carmen Dog in a literature class at San José State University in the spring of 2001. That is, I got permission to Xerox the first three chapters for the class, since Mercury House had let the book go out of print and didn’t seem interested in the fact that we needed fifteen copies. The class loved it so much that they demanded I get permission for them to xerox the rest of the book, which they’d found several copies of. Teaching it made me see that it is better even than I had thought, and there is no cruelty in it. Truth, yes. And funny? Lord!

  After Carmen Dog came the stunning collection The Start of the End of It All, in which both her range and her voice have widened, deepened. The comparison to Borges becomes inevitable with such stories as “The Circular Library of Stones” or the haunting “Vilcabamba.” And so does the contrast with Borges. In Emshwiller’s fables, while the invention is as magistral, the element of human pain is less distanced. And her humor is wilder than Borges’s. The title story of this collection is a magnificent example of what happens to science fiction when a real feminist gets hold of it. It’s about aliens coming to earth, yes, but has nothing whatever in common with gooey-minded stuff like Close Encounters and E.T. The heroine, like most Emshwiller heroines, is obliging and trusting and has very low self-esteem, being one of “the rejected, the divorced, the growing older, the left out.” An Alien, or several of them, named Klimp, trick(s) her into giving birth to his (its) (their) offspring, a lot of tiny little fishy Aliens; but her cats eat all of them but one. She keeps it and names it Charles after her father, or possibly Henry, and indulges in no more illusions about the Aliens. It is a perfectly happy ending if you want it to be, or not at all if you don’t; but either way it is extremely and profoundly funny.

  All right, so this was the Carol Emshwiller I thought I knew, this kind, scary, funny, feminist fabulist. I picked Ledoyt (Mercury House, 1995) off the New Fiction shelf and stared at the cover: not Queen Kong climbing the Empire State Building, not a bird-dog-woman, nothing wild and imaginary, but a hand-tinted photograph of a very young woman in old-fashioned Western riding gear, reading a letter, in a desert.

  And the cover is a fair introduction to the book. Ledoyt is different, as I said—from its author’s other books and from most contemporary novels. It does belong in a certain fragile and discontinuous tradition of novels by or about women in the Far West in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But first of all I want to say that it is a love story.

  We tend to consider love stories as common, a simpleminded genre stuffing the Romance shelves, rarely rising to art in the hands of a Brontë or Austen. But how many stories are, in fact, about love? I never asked the question till I gave “a love story” as an assignment to a writing workshop. From that group I got fourteen stories about lust. Next time I tried it, I got eleven lust stories, two hate stories, and one love story about a woman who loved her niece.

  Given all the kinds of loving we do, it’s odd that we use fiction so often to explore love only as sexual desire or as an abusive, exploitive, or obsessional relationship employing sexuality as a means to power.

  Ledoyt is a love story. It’s about the passionately fulfilled but never secure love of a married couple for each other, and the passionately angry, rejecting love of a young girl, Lotti, for her stepfather, her mother, and her young half-brother. Family love, that voyage across a shoreless, uncharted sea of shipwrecks and sunken treasures. What a story it makes! How infinitely more interesting it is than any position Madonna can be photographed in! And how close such a story comes to the love life most of us actually live—the unromantic, endless adjustment and disappointment and readjustment, the blind cruelty and blind tenderness, the knots and complications and tangled nets, the rage and loyalty and rebellion, the ordinary passions of ordinary people trying to live with one another, trying to love one another.

  At the center of the story are Ledoyt, the dirty, gentle cowboy who keeps trying to run away from his luck because he can’t believe in it, and young Lotti, who sets herself afire and shoots a man and draws horses with mustaches that are portraits of Ledoyt . . . Ledoyt, who married her mother, Oriana. Oriana, raped by her respectable fiancé, ran away, came West, and had the daughter who’s going to wreck the family and run away from her. A lot of the history of our country consists of people running away. It doesn’t mean they weren’t good people. Some of them.

  Then there’s the setting. Those who live in the eastern half of the country tend to see cowboys on the range and ranches in the sagebrush as props for macho movies, not as the setting for a serious novel. You mean real people live out there?

  Emshwiller’s Sierra-slope California of 1905 is far, far from Louis L’Amour and on another planet from Hollywood; but it’s right up the road from Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain. This is one of the Americas where “success” has no meaning, a country of dryland farming and hardscrabble cattle ranching, where each loner knows the next loner. These are people with low expectations, tough, peculiar failures and runaways, desert people. In this impassively dangerous and beautiful landscape, human acts and relations take on the importance of any voice or gesture that breaks deep stillness. But Emshwiller doesn’t rhapsodise desert life. She knows the country as a rancher knows it, as land, not scenery; she knows its people as individuals, not archetypes. She knows how to listen to its silences, and theirs.

  My family on my mother’s side, Far Westerners from the mountain and desert states, were people like these, and Emshwiller has them absolutely right. Young Lotti keeps a diary, which recurs through the novel. Reading it, I kept thinking of my great-aunt Betsy, born in Oregon in 1874. This sounds like Betsy, I thought. Betsy would have known this girl. Betsy was this girl. It’s still a rare experience for a Westerner to find her people in fiction, to hear them talk the way they talked. There were women writers early in the century who knew them; Mary Hallock Foote, whose work Wallace Stegner appropriated without credit in one of his novels, was one. H. L. Davis’s Honey in the Horn and Molly Gloss’s The Jump-Off Creek have an implacable honesty about Western place and character. Writers like Carolyn See, Judith Freeman, Deirdre McNamer, and Alison Baker are bringing this tradition up to date. At last, and slowly, and mostly by women writers, the West is being won.

  But Emshwiller, whose stories are so New Yorkish and sophisticated, who teaches writing at NYU, how does she know all about my great-aunt? By being a first-class novelist, I guess. Fiction writers do, after all, use the imagination, which is what makes them different from memoirists. Emshwiller knows the setting of her novel by heart, knows what life was like on a homestead ranch, knows what side you get onto a horse from. In a photograph at the back of the book, she’s laughing as she hefts a businesslike saddle towards a handsome Appaloosa. But the background, trees or bushes, could be a creek bottom near Barstow, could be Long Island, could be anywhere. All I’m sure of is, she knew what she wrote about in Ledoyt, and it was worth writing about, and nobody else has ever written anything quite like it.

  I’m sorry to report that as of this writing, Ledoyt is still out of print. And if you look it up at the place everybody thinks you have to buy books from these days, you may get what I got: the title Ledoyt, but a description of a book about Belarus. So there we are again—up the Amazon without a paddle. I can only hope some publisher will have the sense to reissue Ledoyt: a fierce and tender portrait of a girl growing up fierce and tender; a sorrowful, loving portrait of a man whose talent is for love and sorrow; a Western, an unsentimental love story, an unidealised picture of the American past, a tough, sweet, painful, truthful novel.

  Alan Garner: Boneland

  2012

  Boneland is an adult sequel to
the two books for children Alan Garner published in 1960 and 1963. Colin and Susan, in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, are twins of about twelve, rushing about on nonstop miraculous aventures, enduring sleeplessness, danger, and pain, and accepting supernatural events with almost superhuman placidity. At the end of the second book, Susan appears to be destined for an otherworldly fate or role.

  At the beginning of this third book, Susan has vanished. Her brother Colin has aged some thirty or forty years, and their author nearly fifty.

  I had to wait seventeen years between books to see where the story of my own Earthsea must go, and the whole series took thirty-three to write. Fifty years is a long time between books; yet it seems perfectly right and natural that Alan Garner should need five decades to gyre back round to where he began, the legend-haunted landscape of Alderly Edge, to be able follow his story deeper into the human psyche and the dark backward and abysm of Time.