She met and married Charles A. Le Guin (pronounced Luh Gwinn) while they were both on Fulbrights in France. He is now a Professor of French History at Portland State College, Oregon; they have lived in Portland for ten years. They have three children: Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore.
In 1968–69, Ursula and her husband went on sabbatical to England; they returned in July of 1969, to Portland, but out of the journey came some marvelous letters, portions of which I include here as examples of purest Ursula.
Here's an example:
"You know London buses have 2 storeys with a sort of half-circular staircase, smoking allowed on the top deck—in winter, between Woodbines & Bronchitis, it's like an Advanced T.B. Ward crossed with a Sauna Bath on fire, all lurching through dark Dickensian alleys jammed with Minicars and Miniskirts—Well, you never get up the stairs before the bus plunges off again, so the conductor/tress shouts, 'Eol pridi daeneow!' or 'Eoldon toit luv!'—or, if West Indian, sings out in the picturesque native dialect (English), 'Hold on pretty tight now!' And if you don't, you've had it. There's no door."
Or how about this summation of the English encounter: "We were on sabbatical, except the kids, who went to the local school and got a splendid education and a Cockney accent. We lived in a drab old North London borough called Islington, long rows of high houses like dirty toffees all stuck together staring at the row of dirty toffees opposite. By the time we left, we found these streets very beautiful, and inhaled the exhaust gases of a double-decker red London bus deeply, like sea air. This was essentially a result of the kindliness of the English (including Pakistani Indian Greek Italian, etc.) among whom we lived in Islington. It was the Spirit we were breathing in. London air causes asthma in many, but it is worth it. The English are slightly more civilized than anyone else has yet been. Also England is a good country for introverts; they have a place in society for the introvert, which the United States has not. In fact there is a place in London for everything; you can find what you want there, from organized diabolical perversity à la Baron Charlus, to the kind of lollipops that change color as you proceed inwards. I mean it has everything. But the best thing, the finest thing, is the kindliness."
Kindliness is something of a central concern with Ursula Le Guin, and as soon as I tend to her bibliography here, I'll tell you of a gratuitous kindness she did me which sums up for me the wonder of Le Guin.
Apart from The Left Hand of Darkness and the brilliant Playboy story, "Nine Lives," Ursula Le Guin has written the following novels (all available in Ace paperback editions): Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions and A Wizard of Earthsea. These in addition to poems in various of the "little" magazines and short stories in magazines and collections like QUARK and ORBIT. Her latest titles are The Tombs of Atuan (Atheneum) and The Lathe of Heaven (Scribner's). That taken care of, let me tell you an Ursulincident that made me forever her slave.
In 1970, in Berkeley, the Science Fiction Writers of America saw fit to award both Ursula and myself Nebula awards, which I've mentioned before (not only to assert her gloriousness, but to balm my own ego-needs as well). One splendid evening during that Nebula weekend was spent in the company of Ursula, sf-writer Norman Spinrad, Ms. Terry Champagne (author of the world's foremost cockroach horror sf story), the ever-popular Ms. Louise Farr, and a couple that memory vaguely reminds me were Greg Benford and his lovely wife. We went to an Afghanistani restaurant where, to my again flawed memory, I did not cause a scene, thereby making it an historic occasion. And afterward, we went up into the Berkeley hills to the magnificent all-wood home of Ursula's mother. Seeing the latter, it is easy to understand where the former obtained her elegance and style. It was one of the most pleasant evenings I've ever spent, rife with bon mots and lucid conversation, but I had the undercurrent feeling (totally self-generated, I assure you) that I was a guttersnipe among royalty. Nothing in the manner of Ursula or her family contributed to forming that little nubbin of self-flagellation . . .it was just one of the many niggling little doubts about personal worthiness that all of us have when we are in the company of the very talented, the very beautiful, the very rich or the very landed gentry. It interfered in no way with my enjoyment of the evening.
The next night, when the Nebulas were awarded, a ceremony of singular traumatic content, Ursula Le Guin proved by one single gesture how senseless it is for even the most secure of us to harbor such lack of self-worth.
Among the nominees sitting in that small dining room at the Claremont Hotel that night, were Norman Spinrad (who was up against Ursula with his novel Bug Jack Barron), Fritz Leiber (who was vying with me for the novella Nebula with his "Ship of Shadows"), Chip Delany, Greg Benford and Norman again, all up against Ursula's "Nine Lives" for the novelette award, and Larry Niven (whose short story "Not Long Before the End" was up against my "Shattered Like A Glass Goblin"). It was a tense situation. When Ursula's The Left Hand of Darkness beat out Zelazny, Brunner, Silverberg, Vonnegut and Spinrad . . .Norman went into a funk that spread its miasmic pall throughout the time-zone. When I copped mine, a very lovely lady sitting with Fritz Leiber burst into tears and Karen Anderson, author and wife of Poul Anderson, looked as though she wanted to cut my throat. When Samuel R. Delany took the novelette Nebula, Greg and Ursula were a study in conflicting emotions, and Norman went under the table. Thank God Silverberg grabbed the short story award, because Larry Niven would have cheerfully knifed me, had I won two that night. Those of us who were there—Ursula, Chip and myself—(Silverberg accepted his award at the East Coast banquet in New York, safe from his competition) slunk up and took our trophies with a few mumbled, embarrassed words, and crawled away again. All in all, it was horrendous. Never have I felt so guilty winning an award.
Shortly thereafter, when the crowd broke up into small groups, I detached myself from the well-wishers to go over and congratulate Ursula on winning what was surely the first of many awards to come. She was sitting at a table with a clot of people standing around. Her Nebula was on the table. Mine was in my arms. Hers was prettier than mine. I switched them. (Since our names and the stories we'd written to win the trophies were engraved on the plinth of each, it was clearly a gag of the moment.) I waited for that moment when Ursula would realize she had my Nebula and I had hers, and it would be my way of saying good-for-you. But that moment never came.
One of the ladies standing there, a lady with a penchant for hysteria, began shrieking at the top of her lungs, "Ursula! Ursula! He stole your Nebula! He stole your Nebula, Ursula, Ursula!!!" and she began weeping convulsively.
I panicked and quickly switched them back as Ursula, suddenly jerked into a wild scene, tried to get her bearings to establish what was happening.
"Hey, take it easy, it was only a joke," I said to the trembling lady, "they're both Nebulas, you know."
To which the lady responded, "Yes, but hers is for a novel, not a story." Since I have never won an award for a novel—and the lady knew it—that was what we of the jet set call a consummate downer. It dropped a shroud over the joy of the evening, such as it was, and added to Fritz Leiber's companion's tears, it made me feel like a pound and a half of mandrill shit.
I started to lurch away, when I felt a hand on my arm. It was Ursula. I looked back down at her and she was staring at me with an expression that said I understand, forget it, it doesn't matter what she says, all's right with the world.
It instantly brought me up like the Goodyear blimp. And it saved the evening for me.
One gesture of kindliness, that tells more about Ursula K. Le Guin than all the biographies anyone could write.
And as a final note, check the placement of her very long and very fine novella in these pages. It is the second actual story in the book (Heidenry's is, as stated, a keynote entry). The wise editor, I was informed early in my career as a compiler of anthologies, puts his very strongest stuff at the beginning and the end of the book. I started off with the Rocklynne because of its strength and because of his personal meaning for the field. And since
I had three extra-long pieces for inclusion here, one to start, one in the middle, and one to close, I wanted to make it a story that would zonk the readership.
Her wonderfulness aside, it am the words of Ursula Le Guin what wins the heart and memory, and the hot spot in this book.
THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST
Ursula K. Le Guin
I.
Two pieces of yesterday were in Captain Davidson's mind when he woke, and he lay looking at them in the darkness for a while. One up: the new shipload of women had arrived. Believe it or not. They were here, in Centralville, twenty-seven lightyears from Earth by NAFAL and four hours from Smith Camp by hopper, the second batch of breeding females for the New Tahiti Colony, all sound and clean, 212 head of prime human stock. Or prime enough, anyhow. One down: the report from Dump Island of crop failures, massive erosion, a wipe-out. The line of 212 buxom beddable breasty little figures faded from Davidson's mind as he saw rain pouring down onto ploughed dirt, churning it to mud, thinning the mud to a red broth that ran down rocks into the rainbeaten sea. The erosion had begun before he left Dump Island to run Smith Camp, and being gifted with an exceptional visual memory, the kind they called eidetic, he could recall it now all too clearly. It looked like that bigdome Kees was right and you had to leave a lot of trees standing where you planned to put farms. But he still couldn't see why a soybean farm needed to waste a lot of space on trees if the land was managed really scientifically. It wasn't like that in Ohio; if you wanted corn you grew corn, and no space wasted on trees and stuff. But then Earth was a tamed planet and New Tahiti wasn't. That's what he was here for: to tame it. If Dump Island was just rocks and gullies now, then scratch it; start over on a new island and do better. Can't keep us down, we're Men. You'll learn what that means pretty soon, you godforsaken damn planet, Davidson thought, and he grinned a little in the darkness of the hut, for he liked challenges. Thinking Men, he thought Women, and again the line of little figures began to sway through his mind, smiling, jiggling.
"Ben!" he roared, sitting up and swinging his bare feet onto the bare floor. "Hot water get-ready, hurry-up-quick!" The roar woke him satisfyingly. He stretched and scratched his chest and pulled on his shorts and strode out of the hut into the sunlit clearing all in one easy series of motions. A big, hard-muscled man, he enjoyed using his well-trained body. Ben, his creechie, had the water ready and steaming over the fire, as usual, and was squatting staring at nothing, as usual. Creechies never slept, they just sat and stared. "Breakfast. Hurry-up-quick!" Davidson said, picking up his razor from the rough board table where the creechie had laid it out ready with a towel and a propped-up mirror.
There was a lot to be done today, since he'd decided, that last minute before getting up, to fly down to Central and see the new women for himself. They wouldn't last long, 212 among over two thousand men, and like the first batch probably most of them were Colony Brides, and only twenty or thirty had come as Recreation Staff; but those babies were real good greedy girls and he intended to be first in line with at least one of them this time. He grinned on the left, the right cheek remaining stiff to the whining razor.
The old creechie was moseying round taking an hour to bring his breakfast from the cookhouse. "Hurry-up-quick!" Davidson yelled, and Ben pushed his boneless saunter into a walk. Ben was about a meter high and his back fur was more white than green; he was old, and dumb even for a creechie, but Davidson knew how to handle him. A lot of men couldn't handle creechies worth a damn, but Davidson had never had trouble with them; he could tame any of them, if it was worth the effort. It wasn't, though. Get enough humans here, build machines and robots, make farms and cities, and nobody would need the creechies any more. And a good thing too. For this world, New Tahiti, was literally made for men. Cleaned up and cleaned out, the dark forests cut down for open fields of grain, the primeval murk and savagery and ignorance wiped out, it would be a paradise, a real Eden. A better world than worn-out Earth. And it would be his world. For that's what Don Davidson was, way down deep inside him: a world-tamer. He wasn't a boastful man, but he knew his own size. It just happened to be the way he was made. He knew what he wanted, and how to get it. And he always got it.
Breakfast landed warm in his belly. His good mood wasn't spoiled even by the sight of Kees Van Sten coming towards him, fat, white, and worried, his eyes sticking out like blue golf-balls.
"Don," Kees said without greeting, "the loggers have been hunting red deer in the Strips again. There are eighteen pair of antlers in the back room of the Lounge."
"Nobody ever stopped poachers from poaching, Kees."
"You can stop them. That's why we live under martial law, that's why the Army runs this colony. To keep the laws."
A frontal attack from Fatty Bigdome! It was almost funny. "All right," Davidson said reasonably, "I could stop 'em. But look, it's the men I'm looking after; that's my job, like you said. And it's the men that count. Not the animals. If a little extra-legal hunting helps the men get through this godforsaken life, then I intend to blink. They've got to have some recreation."
"They have games, sports, hobbies, films, teletapes of every major sporting event of the past century, liquor, marijuana, hallies, and a fresh batch of women at Central. For those unsatisfied by the Army's rather unimaginative arrangements for hygienic homosexuality. They are spoiled rotten, your frontier heroes, and they don't need to exterminate a rare native species 'for recreation.' If you don't act, I must record a major infraction of Ecological Protocols in my report to Captain Gosse."
"You can do that if you see fit, Kees," said Davidson, who never lost his temper. It was sort of pathetic the way a euro like Kees got all red in the face when he lost control of his emotions. "That's your job, after all. I won't hold it against you; they can do the arguing at Central and decide who's right. See, you want to keep this place just like it is, actually, Kees. Like one big National Forest. To look at, to study. Great, you're a spesh. But see we're just ordinary joes getting the work done. Earth needs wood, needs it bad. We find wood on New Tahiti. So—we're loggers. See, where we differ is that with you Earth doesn't come first, actually. With me it does."
Kees looked at him sideways out of those blue golf-ball eyes. "Does it? You want to make this world into Earth's image, eh? A desert of cement?"
"When I say Earth, Kees, I mean people. Men. You worry about deer and trees and fibreweed, fine, that's your thing. But I like to see things in perspective, from the top down, and the top, so far, is humans. We're here, now; and so this world's going to go our way. Like it or not, it's a fact you have to face; it happens to be the way things are. Listen, Kees, I'm going to hop down to Central and take a look at the new colonists. Want to come along?"
"No thanks, Captain Davidson," the spesh said, going on towards the Lab hut. He was really mad. All upset about those damn deer. They were great animals, all right. Davidson's vivid memory recalled the first one he had seen, here on Smith Land, a big red shadow, two meters at the shoulder, a crown of narrow golden antlers, a fleet, brave beast, the finest game-animal imaginable. Back on Earth they were using robodeer even in the High Rockies and Himalaya Parks now, the real ones were about gone. These things were a hunter's dream. So they'd be hunted. Hell, even the wild creechies hunted them, with their lousy little bows. The deer would be hunted because that's what they were there for. But poor old bleeding-heart Kees couldn't see it. He was actually a smart fellow, but not realistic, not tough-minded enough. He didn't see that you've got to play on the winning side or else you lose. And it's Man that wins, every time. The old Conquistador.
Davidson strode on through the settlement, morning sunlight in his eyes, the smell of sawn wood and woodsmoke sweet on the warm air. Things looked pretty neat, for a logging camp. The two hundred men here had tamed a fair patch of wilderness in just three E-months. Smith Camp: a couple of big corruplast geodesics, forty timber huts built by creechie-labor, the sawmill, the burner trailing a blue plume over acres of logs and cut lumber; uphil
l, the airfield and the big prefab hangar for helicopters and heavy machinery. That was all. But when they came here there had been nothing. Trees. A dark huddle and jumble and tangle of trees, endless, meaningless. A sluggish river overhung and choked by trees, a few creechie-warrens hidden among the trees, some red deer, hairy monkeys, birds. And trees. Roots, boles, branches, twigs, leaves, leaves overhead and underfoot and in your face and in your eyes, endless leaves on endless trees.
New Tahiti was mostly water, warm shallow seas broken here and there by reefs, islets, archipelagoes, and the five big Lands that lay in a 2500-kilo arc across the Northwest Quartersphere. And all those flecks and blobs of land were covered with trees. Ocean: forest. That was your choice on New Tahiti. Water and sunlight, or darkness and leaves.
But men were here now to end the darkness, and turn the tree-jumble into clean sawn planks, more prized on Earth than gold. Literally, because gold could be got from seawater and from under the Antarctic ice, but wood could not; wood came only from trees. And it was a really necessary luxury on Earth. So the alien forests became wood. Two hundred men with robosaws and haulers had already cut eight mile-wide Strips on Smith Land, in three months. The stumps of the Strip nearest camp were already white and punky; chemically treated, they would have fallen into fertile ash by the time the permanent colonists, the farmers, came to settle Smith Land. All the farmers would have to do was plant seeds and let 'em sprout.
Again, Dangerous Visions Page 7
