Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Theory #3. The hypothesis of gendered reprinting. It appears that as a general rule books written by men get reprinted more frequently and over more years than books written by women. If this is so, Heinlein has always been given a handicap over McIntyre and will always have one.

  On the other hand, good writing tends to outlive mediocre writing, real moral questioning to outlast rant and wishful thinking. Dreamsnake is written in a clear, quick-moving prose, with brief, lyrically intense landscape passages that take the reader straight into its half-familiar, half-strange desert world, and fine descriptions of the characters’ emotional states and moods and changes. And its generosity to those characters is quite unusual, particularly in science fiction with its tendency to competitive elitism.

  Take the birth-control-via-biofeedback idea—certainly one of the great technological-imaginative inventions, and appreciated as such by many of McIntyre’s readers, although male critics have tended to ignore it because it’s not hard tech and is subversive of gender dominance. McIntyre doesn’t make it a subject of celebration, excitement, or question; it’s taken for granted, it’s how things are. Meeting a young man whose education has been so cruelly mismanaged that he doesn’t know how to control his fertility, Snake is appalled, but sympathetic. She knows how bitterly humiliated he is by what he can see only as a personal failure, like impotence, but worse, because for him to have a heterosexual relation might involve damage to the other person.

  They do manage to solve his problem.

  Yes, there is some wishful thinking in McIntyre’s book, but it is so thoroughly, thoughtfully worked out in terms of social and personal behavior that its demonstration of a permanent streak of kindness in human nature is convincing—and as far from sentimentality as it is from cynicism.

  The writer Moe Bowstern gave me a slogan I cherish: “Subversion Through Friendliness.” It looks silly till you think about it. It bears considerable thinking about. Subversion through terror, shock, pain is easy—instant gratification, as it were. Subversion through friendliness is paradoxical, slow-acting, and durable. And sneaky. A moral revolutionary, rewriting rules the rest of us were still following, McIntyre subverted us so skillfully and with such lack of self-promoting hoo-ha that we scarcely noticed. And thus she has seldom if ever received the feminist honors she is due, the credit owed her by writers to whom she showed the way.

  What I mean by sneaky: Take the character called Merideth. When I first read Dreamsnake I thought the odd spelling of the name Meredith was significant and tried so hard to figure out why this enigmatic, powerful person was called “merry death” that I totally missed what’s really odd about Merideth. Three-cornered marriages being usual in this society, Merideth is married to a man and a woman—sure, fine—but we don’t know whether as husband or as wife. We don’t know Merideth’s gender. We never do.

  And I never noticed it till, in conversation about the book, I realised that I’d seen Merideth as a man—only because I knew Meredith as a Welsh male name. There is no other evidence one way or the other, and McIntyre avoids the gender pronoun unerringly, with easy grace.

  June Arnold’s The Cook and the Carpenter came out in 1973 to much acclaim by feminists and was read mostly by feminists. Dreamsnake was published five years later as science fiction and read by everybody who read science fiction. How many of them even noticed that the gender of a character had been left up to them to decide, or refuse to decide? I still remember the shock of realising that I’d been well and truly subverted. All the stuff we were saying about gender as social construct, as expectation, was revealed to me as built solidly into my own mind. And by that revelation my mind was opened.

  I wish this beautiful, powerful, and highly entertaining book were back in print for the generation of sf readers who missed it, and all the young readers ready to have their mind blown open by the wild winds of possibility. Dreamsnake is a classic, and should be cherished as such.

  Getting It Right: Charles L. McNichols’s Crazy Weather

  An introduction to the Pharos Edition of 2013.

  I don’t know a novel like Charles L. McNichols’ Crazy Weather. I don’t think there could be one. It’s a book written out of a unique knowledge and life experience in a place way off the beaten track.

  Its singularity is both its virtue and its bane. The book that’s unlike any other has no ready-made niche in the shelves of the store, the library, or the mind of the literary critic. But such a book often has a unique place in the hearts of readers fortunate enough to find it.

  An author writing about a group of people he doesn’t belong to runs two risks. One is of misunderstanding, misrepresentation—getting it wrong. The other is of exploiting, expropriation—doing wrong. Writers of a dominant group who assume the right to speak for members of a less powerful one take these risks in complacent ignorance of their existence. Such ignorance, however good the intentions, dooms the result.

  Columbus brought to the New World the White man’s conviction of being by nature and God’s will controller, owner, and rightful exploiter of everything and everyone else. The Indians have been up against that enormous sense of entitlement ever since.

  To speak for those who have been silenced is one thing; to co-opt their voice or drown it out with yours is another. This wrong was done for so long that maybe no amount of honest goodwill and good work can ever entirely clear the White novelist (or memoirist, or anthropologist) writing about Indians of the suspicion of expropriation. Guilt is there in the whole history of Indian-White relations, unavoidable.

  Guilt is useless unless by acknowledging it you can move away from it to a better place. Over the last century, thanks principally to tireless consciousness-raising by Indian writers and activists, we’ve been slowly heading towards that better place. White writers gradually realised that enthusiastic identification can be a gross transgression, that idealization can be as much an insult as demonization. By now, few undertake naïvely to write fiction from “the Indian point of view.”

  Natachee Scott Momaday’s 1994 introduction to Crazy Weather is an act of the greatest and most gracious generosity, not only in her affectionate presentation of McNichols’s book, but in her approving mention of older fiction by White authors about Southwestern Indians. I discovered some fine novels I hadn’t known of by looking up those she mentions. I’d like to take the liberty of adding to her list the children’s book Waterless Mountain, by Laura Adams Armer, with its tender picture of a young soul at home and at peace in the world of the Navajo.

  But this book, Crazy Weather, is about a soul not at home and not at peace: South Boy, who on the verge of manhood is living in and between two worlds, without a clear way to go in either.

  I haven’t been able to find out much about the author of Crazy Weather. He flew for the navy in the First World War, was a journalist, wrote for the movies, but published only the one novel. He knew a great deal about the Mojave Indians and all their neighbors in that wild corner of the Southwest, but he was not Indian.

  And his young hero isn’t either. South Boy hasn’t really found out yet who and what he is, and Momaday’s introduction speaks of him as a “mixed-blood,” but his parents are both White. In the novel we hear the voices of many kinds of people, Indians, Mexicans, Whites, we hear what they say and sing and shout and tell us, but we only know what one person thinks. Everything and everyone is seen through South Boy’s eyes.

  He was nursed by an Indian foster mother, and as his Mojave friend Havek says, “Milk becomes flesh and blood. In so much, then, you are a Proper Person. So as you dream, thus you are.” Living on a remote cattle ranch deep in Mojave country, South Boy has grown up with and among Indians, has learned most of what he knows from Indians, and does a very large part of his thinking like an Indian. But he isn’t an Indian. He isn’t of mixed blood but of mixed culture, mind, heart. He has two souls. And at the age of fifteen, he sees that he’s going to have to choose one and leave the other, forever.

  Maybe
coming of age is always a matter both of finding your own people and of going into exile.

  My father, an anthropologist, liked and admired Crazy Weather. He said something I don’t remember his saying about any other novel about Indians: “I think McNichols got it right.” My father meant the understanding of Mojave life and thought and religion that comes to us through the words and behavior of the characters. Having lived some time in Mojave country and worked with people there recording the kind of dream-journey-myths that are retold in the novel, he had strong affection and respect for both the tellers and the tales.

  His praise of the book spurred me to read it, a year or two after it first came out in 1944. I was fifteen or so. I liked it a lot, and understood parts of it. This being the case with most books I read at that age, it’s of no significance except to say that I never forgot the book, and, rereading it some seventy years later, liked it even better, and understood more of it.

  There’s a lot to understand. This is not a simplistic pitting of Native wisdom against White blindness, or wise young innocence against stupid adult villainy. The author’s view of all the characters is ironic, compassionate, and complicated. And while the author is unfolding the coming-of-age story through a rapid and exciting series of events and characters, he’s also guiding us through a way of life and thought most of us know nothing of, profoundly different from any White cultural tradition, yet just as profoundly and immediately human.

  I can’t say how much I admire the offhanded skill, the ease, with which McNichols takes us deep into a complex society and the complex minds and hearts of its people. His retelling of Mojave myth is light-handed, accurate, sympathetic, and irreverent. He is never disrespectful of Mojave ways, yet is as unsentimental as a coyote. And his humor is dry and understated, like an Indian’s. That’s probably one reason a good deal of the book was over my head in 1945.

  These days, Crazy Weather might have been published as a “young adult” novel, a marketing category that tacitly excludes older adults, assuming that stories about teenagers are for teenagers. Like Huckleberry Finn and Romeo and Juliet? . . . After all, every reader older than fifteen has been fifteen. We can be grateful to an author like McNichols who can bring to us the brilliant intensity of perception and the muddle-headed confusion, the knowledge of dawning power with no idea how to use it, the fearlessness and vulnerability, the morbid lows and glorious highs and wrenching passions that a fifteen-year-old, spendthrift of life, can run through in a few days or hours.

  South Boy’s dramatic rite of passage takes place in four days of terrible desert heat building to apocalyptic thunderstorm—a dangerous, beautiful, crazy journey in crazy weather.

  The world of the story is a world coming, in some ways, to an end. To the timeless landscape and long-kept customs of the Southwest, the Christian twentieth century is bringing rapid, cataclysmic change. South Boy and his friend Havek set off happily to do brave deeds in a war with the Piute, which turns out to be a disorganized hunt for one miserable psychopath. The glory days are over. “Thus we come to imitate coyotes when the days of our greatness are ended,” groans the great old warrior Yellow Road. “World’s end! World’s end!” shouts the Mormonhater, who may have been a White man once. Trapped in hurricane-force rain and wind on a crumbling cliff trail, Mojave boys sing aloud, “throwing away their dreams,” and South Boy tries to fight his own fear of death with their belief—but his mother’s hellfire teachings of damnation rise up and overwhelm him:

  He had sinned—and long hair, the sign and symbol of the heathen world, was whipping his face. Over all the other noise he heard his own voice cry, “O God, I’ll cut my hair—I’ll cut my hair!” And the wind died, then, as though it had never been.

  The clash of superstition with superstition at the moment of death, the collision of shame with glory, the great deed which is a ridiculous mistake, the mixed-up friendship and enmity of White and Indian or Indian and Indian, the sublime inextricably involved with the utterly absurd—the whole story consists in a marvelous interweaving of such stark contrasts. It’s as dramatic as a Shakespeare tragedy, and as fiercely unromantic as the Iliad.

  And its ending is as fortuitous yet inevitable as everything else that happens. During the strange, wild funeral for the old warrior, during the storm and in the aftermath of the storm, South Boy begins to see what he has to do. Doing it will take him where he has to go and make him what he has to be. It is a revelation, a way out of his confusion, a road to manhood. But to choose such a way into the future means to abandon all other ways. As he’s about to part with Havek, he thinks:

  Last year, at the Great Cry—the annual celebration for the year’s distinguished dead—they had sat together with the other boys, holding the feathered wands for the young-men-who-run. Next summer, when the celebration would be for the great Yellow Road, with singing and running and “preaching” and a drama of great deeds, Havek would be a young-man-who-runs. South Boy would be sitting on his horse among the white men, just watching.

  The last pages of the story move quickly to a satisfactory conclusion, a happy ending. South Boy has made his choice, found his people. It was quite a while after finishing the book that I thought suddenly, But what is his name among his people?

  We never know it.

  ——

  Natachee Scott Momaday tells us to read Crazy Weather slowly, savoring it, and she’s right—but it may be a hard thing to do the first time you read it. Once the two boys ride off into the fantastic landscape of myth and adventure, dream and danger, things happen fast, and the suspense grows fast. You have to ride and run with them into the storm and through it.

  Then after a while, maybe, come back and read it again. Now you can do as the Grandmother says: take it slow. Realise the richness, think about the strangeness, and wonder how it is that so many mistakes, misunderstandings, follies, and griefs can add up to a story of such force and beauty.

  On Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago

  First written for the National Public Radio segment

  You Must Read This, May 2008.

  Fifty years ago this September, Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago came out here in English. He couldn’t publish it in his own country.

  It was my birthday present that October—I was twenty-eight. It bowled me over. The Cold War muddied our thinking in the fifties, and I didn’t really understand the complex political stance of the book—but it’s a book you understand emotionally: it is fiercely intelligent, but it must be understood with the heart.

  Pasternak was a mystical realist, equipped to tell us about a strange time in human history—what living through the great Revolution of 1917 was like, day by day, for ordinary Russians: a huge chaos of ideas and ideals, everything changed, the familiar in ruins, a new order brutally established and suddenly knocked apart again, endless factional war and destruction—and the spiritual resilience of common people somehow getting through it, day by day.

  What a joy to come back to the great passages, like Yury Zhivago’s long train trip with his wife and child, crammed with other refugees in a freight car, from Moscow to the Urals. The book’s full of unforgettable images, like the long, empty trains standing on the tracks in the snow in Siberia, black, dead; and the quiet, terrifying sentences that tell of ripe grainfields heaving and rustling, not with wind, but with mice—the villagers are dead, the grain uncut, mice breeding in it by millions—as Yury makes his way on foot, alone, all the way back from the Urals to Moscow.

  It’s all journeys, partings, and meetings—dozens of characters disappear and reappear, they bond together in passionate love but can’t hold on to each other, passionate hatred unites them as closely as love, they meet and part and weep, meet again and don’t know it. It’s not disorder, but a wild complexity of interconnection, like the tracks in a great train station—all these crisscrossing destinies, all these souls full of earnest intention, all of them helpless as dust blown on the great wind of the Revolution.

  I reali
se now how much I learned about how to write a novel from Pasternak: how you can leap across miles and years so long as you land in the right place; how accuracy of detail embodies emotion; how by leaving more out you can get more in . . .

  It’s a huge book. Five hundred pages isn’t long to contain all Russia, forty years of history, a man’s life and dreams. But it is vast, like a human soul. It holds immensities of pain, betrayal, and love. I love it, this maybe last of the great Russian novels, this beautiful, noble testimony from a terrible century.

  Examples of Dignity: Thoughts on the Work of José Saramago