GEORGE PEREC’S SMALL BOOK Je me souviens provided me with the inspiration to summon up memories of Ursula Le Guin, some distant, some recent. And like Georges Perec’s dear friend Harry Mathews, in The Orchard: A Remembrance of Georges Perec, to write the two words I remember and go from there. Like a gleaner in an orchard. And now the notion of windfall comes to mind.

Mathews in his Foreward to The Orchard wrote:

Shortly after Perec’s death, I adopted the “I remember” mode to write about him. I did so neither to play homage to him nor to salvage our years of friendship, simply to avail myself of the written word in facing the dismay that at that moment was overwhelming so many of us. Every day for several months I wrote down one or two recollections in the form of “I remember Georges Perec.” Without trying to be exhaustive or particularly acute: I accepted all the items that occurred to me as though they were pebbles cast ashore by a rough sea…

My first response had been to write a list of whatever memories of Ursula came to mind, weeping as I went along. About two days later, without returning to that first list and thinking of both Mathews and Perec, I began a list of memories from the first to the last, but not so many in between.

But before going on to my Rememberings, I want to share the exchange of e-mails I had with Ursula the Monday before the Monday of her death. I had been rereading Borges at 80: Conversations, and guessing that Ursula hadn’t run across it, I quoted two passages from it, the first, about what it is to be a writer, and the second, how he became a rereader:

I suppose life, I suppose the world, is a nightmare, but I can’t escape from it and am still dreaming it…Yet I do my best and I find my salvation to be the act of writing, of going in for writing in a rather hopeless way. What can I do? I’m over 80. I am blind. I am very often lonely. What else can I do but go on dreaming, then writing, then, in spite of what my father told me, rushing into print. That’s my fate. My fate is to think of all things, of all experiences, as having been given me for the purpose of making beauty out of them. I know that I have failed. I’ll keep on failing, but still that is the only justification of my life.

There’s more [I wrote] where he speaks of the joy of reading, then of “something far better than reading, and that is rereading, going deeper into it because you have read it, enriching it. I should advise people to read little but to reread much.”

I soon received Ursula’s reply:

Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 4:55 PM

Dear Tony,

Thank you for the Borges quotes. The first is magnificent. And I totally agree with the second!

I have been letting a story lead me where it will. Very slowly. It is such a pleasure to follow, to find out where it’s going. Like walking beside our creek in the California hills. Of course the creeks there mostly stop running in the summer. But they’re there; if you dig into the sandy adobe it gets damper and damper. And now and then the water runs out in the open again for a little ways.

I got the Emily Wilson Odyssey for Xmas. She has a bit of a tin ear for word choice sometimes, but her pentameters carried me on like the wind over the sea. I’d think it might be THE translation to give college kids. It’s like she knows she can’t give us the music but she sure enough can tell us a story!

Be well,

xoxo

Photo courtesy Euan Monaghan/Structo

I REMEMBER URSULA:

A Variation on George Perec, Je me souviens and Harry Mathews, “I Remember George Perec”

I REMEMBER URSULA signing one of my daughter Sara’s Earthsea books “Aunty Ursy,” and Sara carefully saying aloud Ursy and Earthsea and the two words sounding exactly alike.

I remember meeting Ursula for the first time and her taking off her shoes for the sake of our hardwood floors, one shoe black, the other brown.

I remember my daughter Jessie’s autograph book from childhood, with Ursula’s drawing of a dragon spitting fire, and seeing that again on the web two days after Ursula’s death.

I remember Ursula addressing a group of elementary school teachers and saying how The Hobbit is perfect for reading aloud to children, because every day’s episode will begin with fright and end in relief.

I remember at a reading at the Looking Glass Bookstore someone asking, “What’s the favorite of all your books?” And Ursula replying Always Coming Home. The question Ursula remembered was “What’s your most neglected book?” And her reply, “Always Coming Home.”

I remember hosting a farewell party for Carol Franks and in the kitchen asking Ursula, “Who should I be reading?” Her reply, “Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy.”

I remember driving with Ursula to an evening meeting of the school board at a small town upriver on the Washington side of the Columbia River where one of the board members wanted to ban The Lathe of Heaven from its classrooms for its many obscene references to homosexuality, for its foul language, for its ungodly plot. When his turn came he read his list of passages page number by page number. The English Department countered. That done, the chair, observing that “the author is present,” asked if she had any comments on the motion to ban her novel. Ursula’s reply: “Thank you, no. The English Department has done quite well without any assistance from me.” And when someone else said how remarkable it was to have the author of Lathe with us, Ursula replied, “Where books are banned, you will find authors.”

I remember Ursula giving me a list of Indian spices to bring back from London.

I remember Ursula phoning to tell me there’s a book I must read: Solaris by a Polish writer by the name of Stanislaw Lem. Then another phone call some years later to say that she had passed on my name to Lem, whose son was thinking of studying at PSU. And knowing how we often have housemates, thought that a possibility. I said, “Sure,” though what I was envisioning was the father paying a visit to his son’s digs up on our third floor and, like Philip K. Dick’s Glimmung, the two Lems crashing through to the basement, given the massive weight of Lem’s Eastern European intellect.

I remember Ursula giving me a curious 1920s hybrid stringed instrument, a cross between a baritone ukulele, a guitar, and a banjo. “It’s been in the family a good while and no one plays it.” A Harmony De Luxe.

I remember Ursula saying early in 1975, “Let’s split the ($600) salary. This said after she had said, “Let’s do it together.” All of this after I was approached by the Division of Continuing Education to see if she’d be willing to teach a Science Fiction Writing class.

“When someone said how remarkable it was to have the author with us, Ursula replied, ‘Where books are banned, you will find authors.’”

I remember the first meeting of the class when Ursula laid out the parameters of expectation. And a couple of weeks later when Ursula gave us her story, I saw the handwriting on the wall. For fifteen years I had been the dutiful academic, writing about literature rather than writing the thing itself.

I remember 1981 and Ursula and I with plans to teach the SF writing class again, but the administration taking its good old time to commit itself to the $1500 salary. Desperate, I went to the president’s office, Joe Blumel, a friend from the days when he was just an Econ teacher. “Joe, if this doesn’t happen right now, Ursula’s going to get a call from Timbuktu and say Yes and that’ll be that.” Joe, bless his heart, saying he’s got a discretionary fund for moments just like this. Maybe I kissed him on the cheek.

I remember not long after that it was my job to meet at my office with the potential students (more wanted into the class than we could handle). We ended up with a good group, one of whom had graduated from PSC in the early 60s and fancied herself a writer of westerns. But this being a SF class, she took the bit between her teeth and wrote a SF story that got her not only into the class, but as she said later, also got her a publication and an agent. Yes, Molly Gloss. Who went on to write what Ursula called the best multi-generation space journey story ever, The Dazzle of Day. And a fair amount more.

I remember needlepointing a miniature carpet for Ursula and Charles’ son Theo’s miniature house.

I remember a dream where I was walking in a valley and far ahead on the upslope was Ursula. Getting smaller and smaller.

I remember her returning the box with the manuscript of my first novel, Adventures in the Fur Trade, and opening the box to a slip of paper saying, I LOVE THIS BOOK.

I remember 1991 and the third time we taught and someone asking how to count in Italian. Ursula’s groan was audible when I said, “At’s a one, at’s a two…”

I remember Ursula phoning early one morning to tell me she dreamed I’d won the Pulitzer Prize. I guess what I’d won was the Ursula Prize.

I remember the many times I’ve taught one of Ursula’s books and pointing out the window to the Northwest and saying, “She lives there.”

I remember Ursula saying, “I can’t read Jose Saramago, but Charles loves his books.” Then in Words Are My Matter seeing wondrous reviews of Saramago’s novels, Saramago who goes for an entire chapter without a paragraph indent.

I remember Ursula’s instant anger when I brought a very small gift to a “NO GIFTS” 75th birthday party for both Ursula and her house. Her eyes like flames. “THE INVITATION SAID NO GIFTS!” Me the size of a mouse, stuttering that it was for House. It, being one of my harmless needlepointed Möbius strips.

I remember just getting home from school on a Tuesday in January and I’m handed the phone. It’s my daughter Jessie from New York. Her first words, “I want to offer you my condolences.” Dead silence. I muster up, “Who died, Jessie?” Then her answer and my saying, “Jessie, I have to get off the phone and weep.” Later, after Jessie apologized, I said that I’d so much rather hear that from a loved one, not a stranger.

I know of Tony’s great good fortune of coming to teach in 1965 at a small college in Portland and living across the river from a house as old as Ursula Le Guin.

Tony Wolk is the author of the story collection The Parable of You (Propeller Books), and the novels Abraham Lincoln: A Novel Life, Good Friday, and Lincoln’s Daughter. He has taught writing and literature at Portland State University since 1965, and lives in Portland, Oregon.