Later, I went with her into the kitchen, where it’s easy to end up in the Le Guin household. A place of honor at the right of the fireplace is given to a portrait of Virginia Woolf, a hand-colored print that is a treasured gift from a writer friend. Some of her awards are in the attic, but she keeps several, notably her first Hugo, from 1970, discreetly displayed in the hall on the way to the kitchen. The front hall is surveyed by a row of British Museum reproductions of the Lewis chessmen, souvenirs of the Le Guins’ two sabbatical years in London, when their three children were small. Past the barriers at the entrance-Charles’s menacingly thorny roses, the lion’s-head knocker that guards the door-the dark-panelled Craftsman living room, with its Victorian feel, might stand for her books set in Europe, or for the great nineteenth-century novels she has always loved, with their warmth, humanity, and moral concern. The house where Le Guin has lived for more than fifty years has, in certain respects, come to resemble its owner. On the hillside below us, two scrub jays traded remarks through the trees. The bourbon is part of the couple’s evening ritual: when they don’t have company, they have a drink before dinner and take turns reading to each other. Coming out onto the back porch, where I was sitting with Charles in the late-afternoon sun, to offer us a bourbon-and-ice, she was positively cheerful, her deeply lined, expressive face bright under a cap of short white hair, her low, warm woodwind voice rising into an easy laugh. When I met Le Guin at her house in Portland this summer, she was in a happier mood.
“Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption,” she has written, “and make us look up and see-with terror or with relief-that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.” She has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or “McMagic” but the imagination as a subversive force.
Keeping an ambivalent distance from the centers of literary power, she makes room in her work for other voices. She sees herself as a Western writer, though her work has had a wide range of settings, from the Oregon coast to an anarchist utopia and a California that exists in the future but resembles the past. If the Bundy brothers were in love with one side of the American dream-stories of wars fought and won, land taken and tamed-Le Guin has spent a career exploring another, distinctly less triumphalist side. The history of America is one of conflicting fantasies: clashes over what stories are told and who gets to tell them.
The story gives hints of what Le Guin already knew: that the empty spaces of America have a past, and that loneliness and loss are mixed up with the glory. He was one of the very first ranchers in what is still very desolate country.” The family stayed there for five years before they moved on, in search of new grass or less isolation-her grandmother didn’t say. I don’t think he made a claim there was nowhere to make it. They drove three hundred and fifty head of cattle up through Nevada and built a stone house on the back side of Steens Mountain. Not long ago, she told me excitedly that she’d rediscovered records in the attic of her grandmother’s childhood: “My great-grandfather, with my grandmother age eleven, moved from California to Oregon in 1873. . . . She has roots in eastern Oregon that go back to the early days of white settlement. In a poem, “A Meditation in the Desert,” she imagines a stone being “full / of slower, longer thoughts than mind can have.” She has led writing workshops at the Malheur Field Station, a group of weather-beaten buildings used mainly by biologists and birders, and published a book of poems and sketches of the area, with photographs by Roger Dorband, called “Out Here.” She likes the awareness the desert gives her of distance, emptiness, and geological time. She often goes there in the summer with her husband, Charles, a professor emeritus of history at Portland State University, to a ranch on the stony ridge of Steens Mountain, overlooking the refuge. The high desert of eastern Oregon is one of Le Guin’s places. Le Guin says she is “not just trying to get into other minds but other beings.” Illustration by Essy May