Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  She looked down at her feet on the pavement. They were cold. She would have worn her boots if she had thought it was going to snow, if Fana hadn’t hurried her so. She felt cold, lost, lonely to the point of tears. She set her jaw and set her lips and stood firm on her cold feet on the cold stone.

  There was a sound, sparse, sparkling, faint, like the snow crystals. The crowd had gone quite silent, swept by low laughing murmurs, and through the silence ran that small, discontinuous, silvery sound.

  “What is that?” asked Bruna, beginning to smile. “Why are they doing that?”

  This is a committee meeting. Surely you don’t want me to describe a committee meeting? It meets as usual on Friday at eleven in the morning in the basement of the Economics Building. At eleven on Friday night, however, it is still meeting, and there are a good many onlookers, several million in fact, thanks to the foreigner with the camera, a television camera with a long snout, a one-eyed snout that peers and sucks up what it sees. The cameraman focusses for a long time on the tall, dark-haired girl who speaks so eloquently in favor of a certain decision concerning bringing a certain man back to the capital. But the millions of onlookers will not understand her argument, which is spoken in her obscure language and is not translated for them. All they will know is how the eye-snout of the camera lingered on her young face, sucking it.

  This is a love story. Two hours later the cameraman was long gone but the committee was still meeting.

  “No, listen,” she said, “seriously, this is the moment when the betrayal is always made. Free elections, yes, but if we don’t look past that now, when will we? And who’ll do it? Are we a country or a client state changing patrons?”

  “You have to go one step at a time, consolidating—”

  “When the dam breaks? You have to shoot the rapids! All at once!”

  “It’s a matter of choosing direction—”

  “Exactly, direction. Not being carried senselessly by events.”

  “But all the events are sweeping in one direction.”

  “They always do. Back! You’ll see!”

  “Sweeping to what, to dependence on the West instead of the East, like Fana said?”

  “Dependence is inevitable—realignment, but not occupation—”

  “The hell it won’t be occupation! Occupation by money, materialism, their markets, their values, you don’t think we can hold out against them, do you? What’s social justice to a color TV set? That battle’s lost before it’s fought. Where do we stand?”

  “Where we always stood. In an absolutely untenable position.”

  “He’s right. Seriously, we are exactly where we always were. Nobody else is. We are. They have caught up with us, for a moment, for this moment, and so we can act. The untenable position is the center of power. Now. We can act now.”

  “To prevent color-TV-zation? How? The dam’s broken! The goodies come flooding in. And we drown in them.”

  “Not if we establish the direction, the true direction, right now—”

  “But will Rege listen to us? Why are we turning back when we should be going forward? If we—”

  “We have to establish—”

  “No! We have to act! Freedom can be established only in the moment of freedom—”

  They were all shouting at once in their hoarse, worn-out voices. They had all been talking and listening and drinking bad coffee and living for days, for weeks, on love. Yes, on love; these are lovers’ quarrels. It is for love that he pleads, it is for love that she rages. It was always for love. That’s why the camera snout came poking and sucking into this dirty basement room where the lovers meet. It craves love, the sight of love; for if you can’t have the real thing you can watch it on TV, and soon you don’t know the real thing from the images on the little screen where everything, as he said, can be done in two seconds. But the lovers know the difference.

  This is a fairy tale, and you know that in the fairy tale, after it says that they lived happily ever after, there is no after. The evil enchantment was broken; the good servant received half the kingdom as his reward; the king ruled long and well. Remember the moment when the betrayal is made, and ask no questions. Do not ask if the poisoned fields grew white again with grain. Do not ask if the leaves of the forests grew green that spring. Do not ask what the maiden received as her reward. Remember the tale of Koshchey the Deathless, whose life was in a needle, and the needle was in an egg, and the egg was in a swan, and the swan was in an eagle, and the eagle was in a wolf, and the wolf was in the palace whose walls were built of the stones of power. Enchantment within enchantment! We are a long way yet from the egg that holds the needle that must be broken so that Koshchey the Deathless can die. And so the tale ends. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people stood on the slanting pavement before the palace. Snow sparkled in the air, and the people sang. You know the song, that old song with words like “land,” “love,” “free,” in the language you have known the longest. Its words make stone part from stone, its words prevent tanks, its words transform the world, when it is sung at the right time by the right people, after enough people have died for singing it.

  A thousand doors opened in the walls of the palace. The soldiers laid down their arms and sang. The evil enchantment was broken. The good king returned to his kingdom, and the people danced for joy on the stones of the city streets.

  And we do not ask what happened after. But we can tell the story over, we can tell the story till we get it right.

  “My daughter’s on the Committee of the Student Action Council,” said Stefan Fabbre to his neighbor Florens Aske as they stood in a line outside the bakery on Pradinestrade. His tone of voice was complicated.

  “I know. Erreskar saw her on the television,” Aske said.

  “She says they’ve decided that bringing Rege here is the only way to provide an immediate, credible transition. They think the army will accept him.”

  They shuffled forward a step.

  Aske, an old man with a hard brown face and narrow eyes, stuck his lips out, thinking it over.

  “You were in the Rege Government,” Fabbre said.

  Aske nodded. “Minister of Education for a week,” he said, and gave a bark like a sea lion, owp!—a cough or a laugh.

  “Do you think he can pull it off?”

  Aske pulled his grubby muffler closer round his neck and said, “Well, Rege is not stupid. But he’s old. What about that scientist, that physicist fellow?”

  “Rochoy. She says their idea is that Rege’s brought in first, for the transition, for the symbolism, the link to ’56, right? And if he survives, Rochoy would be the one they’d run in an election.”

  “The dream of the election . . .”

  They shuffled forward again. They were now in front of the bakery window, only eight or ten people away from the door.

  “Why do they put up the old men?” asked the old man. “These boys and girls, these young people. What the devil do they want us for again?”

  “I don’t know,” Fabbre said. “I keep thinking they know what they’re doing. She had me down there, you know, made me come to one of their meetings. She came to the lab— Come on, leave that, follow me! I did. No questions. She’s in charge. All of them, twenty-two, twenty-three, they’re in charge. In power. Seeking structure, order, but very definite: violence is defeat, to them, violence is the loss of options. They’re absolutely certain and completely ignorant. Like spring—like the lambs in spring. They have never done anything and they know exactly what to do.”

  “Stefan,” said his wife, Bruna, who had been standing at his elbow for several sentences, “you’re lecturing. Hello, dear. Hello, Florens, I just saw Margarita at the market, we were queueing for cabbages. I’m on my way downtown, Stefan. I’ll be back, I don’t know, sometime after seven, maybe.”

  “Again?” he said, and Aske said, “Downtown?”

  “It’s Thursday,” Bruna said, and bringing up the keys from her handbag, the two apartment keys and the
desk key, she shook them in the air before the men’s faces, making a silvery jingle; and she smiled.

  “I’ll come,” said Stefan Fabbre.

  “Owp! owp!” went Aske. “Oh, hell, I’ll come too. Does man live by bread alone?”

  “Will Margarita worry where you are?” Bruna asked as they left the bakery line and set off towards the bus stop.

  “That’s the problem with the women, you see,” said the old man, “they worry that she’ll worry. Yes. She will. And you worry about your daughter, eh, your Fana.”

  “Yes,” Stefan said, “I do.”

  “No,” Bruna said, “I don’t. I fear her, I fear for her, I honor her. She gave me the keys.” She clutched her imitation leather handbag tight between her arm and side as they walked.

  This is the truth. They stood on the stones in the lightly falling snow and listened to the silvery, trembling sound of thousands of keys being shaken, unlocking the air, once upon a time.

  CHRONOLOGY

  NOTE ON THE TEXTS

  NOTE

  Chronology

  1929

  Born in Berkeley, California, on St. Ursula’s Day, October 21, to Alfred Louis Kroeber and Theodora Covel Kracaw Brown Kroeber. (Father, born in 1876 in Hoboken, New Jersey, completed a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia College under Franz Boas in 1901 and moved to Berkeley to create a museum and department of anthropology at the University of California. In 1911, Ishi, a Yahi Indian and the last survivor of the Yana band, came to work with Kroeber and others at the Museum of Anthropology, where he remained until his death, from tuberculosis, in 1916. Mother, born in 1897 in Denver, Colorado, completed a master’s degree in clinical psychology at the University of California in 1920 and married Clifton Spencer Brown in July 1920; they had two children: Clifton Jr., born September 7, 1921, and Theodore “Ted,” born in May 1923. Brown died in October 1923, and mother began taking anthropology courses from Alfred Kroeber. They married in March 1926, and Kroeber adopted both sons. They bought a house designed by Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck at 1325 Arch Street on the north side of the university campus. Le Guin will later cite (in an essay in the journal Paradoxa) the beauty and “integrity” of its design as an early influence. Parents took a field trip to Peru for eight months, shortly after marriage, living in a tent. Brother Karl Kroeber born in Berkeley on November 26, 1926.)

  1930

  Parents buy a ranch in the Napa Valley, later named Kishamish from a myth invented by brother Karl. Family will spend summers there entertaining visiting scholars, including physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and both native and white storytellers.

  1931

  Juan Dolores, a Papago Indian friend and collaborator of A. L. Kroeber’s, spends the first of many summers with the Kroeber family at Kishamish.

  1932–1939

  Is taught to write by her brother Ted and goes on doing it. Ursula and Karl, along with Berkeley neighbor Ernst Landauer, invent a world of stuffed animals. Later discovers science fiction magazines, including Amazing Stories. Father tells her American Indian stories and myths; she also reads Norse myths. Mother later recalls, “The children wrote and acted plays; they had the ‘Barn-top Players’ in the loft of the old barn. They put out a weekly newspaper.”

  c. 1940

  Submits first story to Astounding Science Fiction and collects her first rejection letter.

  c. 1942

  With her brothers in the armed services (Clifton joins in 1940, before the war starts for America, Ted in ’43, and Karl in ’44), Ursula is left without imaginative co-conspirators. In a later interview she recalls, “My older brothers had some beautiful little British figurines, a troop of nineteenth-century French cavalrymen and their horses. I inherited them, and played long stories with them in our big attic. They went on adventures, exploring, fighting off enemies, going on diplomatic missions, etc. The captain was particularly gallant and handsome, with his sabre drawn, and his white horse reared up nobly. Unfortunately, when you took one of them off his horse, he was extremely bow-legged, and had a little nail sticking downward from his bottom, which fit into the saddle. . . . So my brave adventurers lived entirely on horseback. Also unfortunately, there were no females at all for my stories; but when I wrote the stories down, I provided some.”

  1944–46

  In fall, begins attending Berkeley High School. Socially marginal, a good student, reads voraciously outside school, Tolstoy and other nineteenth-century writers, including Austen, the Brontës, Turgenev, Dickens, and Hardy, as well as the Taoist writings of Chinese writer Lao Tzu. Her mother introduces her to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, which she says she didn’t really get until much later. In spring 1946, father retires from Berkeley. Parents travel to England, where father receives the Huxley Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute.

  1947

  Graduates high school in class of 3,500, which includes Philip K. Dick. The two never meet, although they later correspond. Father accepts a one-year appointment at Harvard University, and it is decided that, with parents nearby, Ursula will attend Radcliffe College instead of the University of California. Spends summer with parents and Karl in New York City, where father teaches at Columbia University until Harvard appointment begins. They rent an apartment from parents’ friends near 116th and Broadway and spend the summer seeing many plays and Broadway shows. Takes recorder lessons with Blanche Knopf. Moves to Radcliffe in the fall. Lives last three college years in Radcliffe cooperative Everett House with close friends Jean Taylor and Marion Ives.

  1948

  Father returns to Columbia, where he will teach until 1952. Spends summer with parents in New York City, this time in another apartment rented from parents’ friends, near 116th and Riverside Drive.

  1950

  A relationship in her senior year at Radcliffe results in an unplanned pregnancy; an illegal abortion is arranged with the help of friends and parents.

  1951

  Elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Graduates cum laude from Radcliffe in June, writing a senior thesis titled “The Metaphor of the Rose as an Illustration of the ‘Carpe Diem’ Theme in French and Italian Poetry of the Renaissance.” College acquaintances include John Updike, who marries one of her housemates. Travels to Paris with Karl and begins writing novel A Descendance, about the imaginary Central European country of Orsinia, whose name reflects her own: both come from the Latin word for “bear.” Starts graduate work at Columbia in the fall. Begins writing and attempting to publish poetry and stories. Father helps her submit poems for publication, mailing her submissions and also investigating subculture of little magazines.

  1952

  Completes an M.A. in Renaissance French and Italian language and literature at Columbia University, writing a thesis titled “Ideas of Death in Ronsard’s Poetry” on the sixteenth-century French poet Pierre Ronsard. Begins work on a doctorate at Columbia on the early sixteenth-century poet Jean Lemaire de Belges. Submits A Descendance to Alfred Knopf, a friend of her father’s, and receives an encouraging rejection letter. In a 2013 interview, Le Guin will recall that “The first novel I ever wrote was very strange, very ambitious. It covered many generations in my invented Central European country, Orsinia. My father knew Alfred Knopf personally. . . . When I was about twenty-three, I asked my father if he felt that my submitting the novel to Knopf would presume on their friendship, and he said, No, go ahead and try him. So I did, and Knopf wrote a lovely letter back. He said, I can’t take this damn thing. I would’ve done it ten years ago, but I can’t afford to now. He said, This is a very strange book, but you’re going somewhere! That was all I needed. I didn’t need acceptance.” Begins writing new Orsinian novel called, variously, Malafrena and The Necessary Passion.

  1953

  Receives a Fulbright Fellowship to study in France. Departs from New York on September 23 on the Queen Mary. On the ship she meets fellow Fulbrighter Charles Alfred Le Guin (born June 4, 1927, in Macon, Georgia), who is writing his thesis on
the French Revolution. On December 22, marries Le Guin in Paris after numerous delays in procuring a marriage license—later says there was “always another tax stamp we needed across the city.” (On the marriage license, a space between “Le” and “Guin” is restored, in a surname that had not had one in America.)

  1954

  Le Guins return to U.S. on the Ile de France ship in August. Ends graduate work and the Le Guins move to Macon, Georgia, where Charles teaches history and Ursula teaches freshman French at Mercer University. Meets Charles’s large extended family. Sees, and is first puzzled and then appalled by, her first sign for a “Colored Drinking Fountain.”

  1955

  Completes first version of novel Malafrena. Works as a physics department secretary at Emory University in Atlanta, where Charles is completing his Ph.D.

  1956

  Charles receives his doctorate from Emory and they move to Moscow, Idaho, where they both begin teaching at the University of Idaho. Out of boredom in a rather insular community, together with friends they fabricate items about an imaginary poetry society (including poems by Le Guin’s alter ego Mrs. R. R. Korsatoff) and succeed in placing them on the society page of the local newspaper.

  1957

  Oldest child Elisabeth Covel Le Guin is born, July 25.

  1958

  Moves to Portland, Oregon, where Charles takes up position as professor of French history at Portland State University (then College). They buy a Victorian house below Portland’s Forest Park, where they will live for the next six decades.

  1959

  Spends summer at Berkeley with parents and Karl’s family. The Orsinian poem “Folksong from the Montayna Province” appears in the fall issue of the journal Prairie Poet. It is her first published work. Second child Caroline DuPree Le Guin is born, November 4. Mother publishes The Inland Whale, a book of retold legends from California Indians, including the title story, which was learned from Yurok storyteller (and frequent guest at Kishamish) Robert Spott.