But in our conversations about her life, I kept seeing her openness to reimagining the established order.īorn on October 21, 1929, she grew up in Berkeley, California, the youngest of four gifted, competitive, argumentative professor’s children. Violent overthrow wasn’t what she was after: For one thing, she had too much talent for enjoying the bourgeois here and now (good food, travel, season tickets to the Portland Symphony).
Discussing her dislike of orthodox religion, she sent Voltaire’s “ Ecrasez l’infâme! ” blazing past my head. In recent years she cheered on the fall of the Wall, Occupy, the Arab Spring. Le Guin wasn’t anyone’s dear old lady either, and she too had revolutionary sympathies. The fire’s out, boys, it’s safe to come up close. She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts!… They accepted their tongue-lashing meekly as children, gratefully, as if she were some kind of All-Mother.… She! She who had…kicked policemen, and spat at priests, and pissed in public on the big brass plaque in Capitol Square.… And now she was everybody’s grandmama, the dear old lady, the sweet old monument, come worship at the womb. She likes them - they’re young and full of ideas - but doesn’t want their adoration. A group of young people visit Odo, wanting to see the Great Woman up close. In the past week I’ve found myself rereading her 1974 short story “ The Day Before the Revolution.” It describes the last day in the life of Laia Odo, the theorist of the Odonian anarchist society Le Guin imagined in her novel The Dispossessed. “We’ll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality.” Very often in our art, the art of words,” she told them. “Resistance and change often begin in art. Apologetically at first, then with growing authority, she castigated them for philistinism and for selling out. When Le Guin accepted a lifetime achievement award at the 2014 National Book Awards, an audience of New York editors and publishers witnessed her in her full angry glory, just before they were sizzled into a smoldering ash heap by her speech. As her biographer, I can attest to her warmth, and elsewhere I’ve written about the love of home and humor that was one aspect of her many-sided being.īut I also want to talk about how good her aim was with a verbal thunderbolt. The outpouring of tributes to her generosity, inventiveness, and wisdom has been so profoundly personal because she spoke to people so directly: a book or story by Le Guin could go so deep that it felt like yours alone. Le Guin, who died last week at age 88, goes to dwell among the stars - maybe near the constellation that bears her name - it’s worth remembering how provocative she could be.
Le Guin, 1929–2018 Writer Pictures via AP Imagesīefore Ursula K.
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