Ursula K. Le Guin
URSULA K. LE GUIN
THE COMPLETE ORSINIA
Malafrena
Stories and Songs
Brian Attebery, editor
THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
Volume compilation, notes, and chronology copyright © 2016 by
Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
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quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Introduction copyright © 2016 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Malafrena copyright © 1979 by Ursula K. Le Guin. “Folk Song from the Montayna Province” copyright © 1959 by Ursula K. Le Guin. “Red Berries (Montayna Province)” copyright © 2016 by Ursula K. Le Guin. “The Walls of Rákava (Polana Province)” copyright © 2016 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Orsinian Tales copyright © 1976 by Ursula K. Le Guin. “Two Delays on the Northern Line” copyright © 1979 by Ursula K. Le Guin. “Unlocking the Air” copyright © 1990 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Published by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved.
“Sisters and Science Fiction,” by Karl Kroeber, copyright © 1976 by Karl Kroeber. Published by arrangement with Jean T. Kroeber. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015959535
eISBN 978–1–59853–494–8
First Printing
The Library of America—281
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin
MALAFRENA
SONGS
Folk Song from the Montayna Province
Red Berries (Montayna Province)
The Walls of Rákava (Polana Province)
STORIES
Orsinian Tales
The Fountains
The Barrow
Ile Forest
Conversations at Night
The Road East
Brothers and Sisters
A Week in the Country
An die Musik
The House
The Lady of Moge
Imaginary Countries
Other Stories
Two Delays on the Northern Line
Unlocking the Air
Chronology
Note on the Texts
Notes
Introduction
IN HIGH SCHOOL I was, like many American intellectual kids, a stranger in a strange land. I made the Berkeley Public Library my refuge, and lived half my life in books. Not only American books—English and French novels and poetry, Russian novels in translation. Transported unexpectedly to college in another strange land, the East Coast, I majored in French lit and went on reading European lit on my own. I felt more at home in some ways in Paris in 1640 or Moscow in 1812 than in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1948.
Much as I loved my studies, their purpose was to make me able to earn a living as a teacher, so I could go on writing. And I worked hard at writing short stories. But here my European orientation was a problem. I wasn’t drawn to the topics and aims of contemporary American realism. I didn’t admire Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Norman Mailer, or Edna Ferber. I did admire John Steinbeck, but knew I couldn’t write that way. In The New Yorker, I loved Thurber, but skipped over John O’Hara to read the Englishwoman Sylvia Townsend Warner. Most of the people I really wished I could write like were foreign, or dead, or both. Most of what I read drew me to write about Europe; but I knew it was foolhardy to write fiction set in Europe if I’d never been there.
At last it occurred to me that I might get away with it by writing about a part of Europe where nobody had been but me.
I remember when this idea came: in our small co-op dorm at Radcliffe, Everett House, in the dining room, where you could study and typewrite late without disturbing sleepers. I was twenty years old, working at one of the dining tables about midnight, when I got the first glimpse of my other country.
An unimportant country of middle Europe. One of those Hitler had trashed and Stalin was now trashing. (The Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1947–48 had been the first event to rouse the political spirit in me.) A land not too far from Czechoslovakia, or Poland, but let’s not worry about borders. Not one of the partly Islamized nations—more Western-oriented. . . . Like Rumania, maybe, with a Slavic-influenced but Latin-descended language? Aha!
I begin to feel I’m coming close. I begin to hear the names. Orsenya—in Latin and English, Orsinia. I see the river, the Molsen, running through an open, sunny countryside to the old capital, Krasnoy (krasniy, Slavic, “beautiful”). Krasnoy on its three hills: the Palace, the University, the Cathedral. The Cathedral of St Theodora, an egregiously unsaintly saint, my mother’s name. . . . I begin to find my way about, to feel myself at home, here in Orsenya, matrya miya, my motherland. I can live here, and find out who else lives here and what they do, and tell stories about it.
And so I did.
My first attempt at a novel, begun in a tiny notebook in Paris in 1951 (for I had at last got to Europe), was intrepid, immodest, and unwise. An attempt to relate the fortunes of an Orsinian family from the late fifteenth to the early twentieth century, it was called A Descendance. I did not know enough about people to write a novel, and barely enough European history to support my invented history, which included the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and a civil war resulting from it, several invasions, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a couple of revolutions. The characters were mostly men, because in the early 1950s, fiction was mostly about men and history was all about men and I thought books had to be about men. I wrote it at white heat and submitted it to Alfred Knopf, who rejected it with a letter that said (in essence) that ten years ago he’d have published the crazy damn thing, but these days he couldn’t afford to take such chances.
A rejection like that from a man like that is enough to keep a young writer going. I never sent the manuscript out again. I knew Knopf was right, it was a crazy damn thing. I suspected he was possibly just being kind because he knew my father, but also knew he was too hard-nosed an editor for that. He’d sort of liked it, he might have published it. That was enough.
All my next (unsold) novels were about contemporary America, except for one set in Orsinia. I began it in 1952. In various revisions it was called Malafrena or The Necessary Passion. It was about the generation in Europe that came of age in the 1820s and broke their hearts in the revolutions of 1830. Of the earlier versions of the book, the only piece I have at hand is a carbon-copied typescript page annotated “First p. of 2nd version.” It exemplifies the mood, tone, and style of the earlier drafts of the novel, directly influenced by European writing of its period, the 1820s, when Romanticism was gathering steam.
The Necessary Passion
Malafrena
Part One. In the Mountains
Mute, dark, and grave, the mountains stood against the evening sky, against the darkness of gathering storm. Below them the waters of Malafrena lay rough and troubled, and the wind, blowing from the west where the last li
ght of sunset had died away, mixed the long roar of the pine forests with the voice of the lake on its stony shores. Storm and darkness gathered fast on the lake, the forests bowed in the rising wind, but over them, under the high, running clouds, the mountains stood silent in their greater vision of plains and realms beyond, indifferent to the tumult of lake and sky.
The lights of the few houses on the eastern shore of Malafrena shone bright and a little tremulous, like the planet that gleamed sometimes over the shoulder of a western peak and then was lost again in the clouds; there was already rain on the wind. A man who had been standing down on the lake shore, alone, watching the storm rise and the mountains obscure themselves in night, lifted his head when he felt the first heavy drops. Turning up his coat collar and stooping a little against the wind, he began to make his way along the shore toward a house that stood almost over the lake, on a long narrow slope running from the bulk of the mountain behind and into the lake as a short peninsula. Several of the rooms were lit, their yellow gleam shining out into the garden, where trees and [. . . .]
The manuscript never “died,” as manuscripts do (and as A Descendance and the other unsold novels did). It went through long periods of silence and darkness, but stayed alive and close to my heart. I thought about it and fiddled with it on and off. I rewrote it. I rewrote it again in 1961. In the seventies, in a time of stress when my best friend was dying of cancer, I was drawn back to the book and wondered if I could rewrite it. Three years after that, in 1978, a similarly stressed time when my mother was ill, I considered the idea again. Thinking that I might have enough reputation as a novelist to chance submitting a serious historical novel set in a nonexistent country, I proposed it to my agent, the dauntless Virginia Kidd. She encouraged me to give it a try. I rewrote the book.
Here are passages from my daybook, written at intervals while I was working on the final draft.
(Feb 11 1975) I re-read The Necessary Passion for the first time in five years: I went over it in ’69, according to a note—Six years, then. Several things strike me: one, how young everybody in it is!—the main characters; I could not do that now. Piera is a good character, though the end, and her part in it, is weak. So is Laura, who is as autobiographical as I ever got. The bits of Tolstoy—one bit, actually—is pure imitation, but the Lawrence influence is superficial and could be done away with; I was writing from experience! only not quite hard enough. The queerest thing is that it is The Dispossessed [published the previous year, 1974], much much more than I realised when writing the latter: not only the person and the situation are similar but the words:—True pilgrimage consists in coming home—True journey is return—and so on. I have not a few ideas: I have ONE idea.—Then there is the Way to Radiko section. Now how did I know then—that was written as a story about 1951—how did I know then how I feel now? There is Amadey in me, and I have turned from him, and he has waited quietly, biding his time. The suicide of course is symbolic, i.e. not a total, bodily death: A partial death. I saw it, I saw it then, I saw the road and the abandoned tower. “I turn, not knowing if I see it fallen.” [a line from a poem in] The first bound copy of Wild Angels is in my hands today, brought by Bob Durand.
I worked as hard on that book as I have ever worked, and phrases from it are forever recurring to my mind: I did say some things right in it. It draws me still and it grieves me that I see no way to bring it alive and into print. I could revise it once more, I think, but it might be extremely dangerous—a regression, not a reculer pour mieux sauter—And if I did, still, who wants a genuine 19th century novel written in the third quarter of the 20th century? It is a period piece in two ways, by now. But by damn it has some good work in it; it is a far better book than the first three sf novels—maturer, larger, and despite its weaknesses and embarrassing parts, surer. I was on the right road, on the way, writing that. It is better than Dispossessed in one way: it has more humor and variety of character.—Even old Atro in his relation to Shevek is prefigured/repeated (there is no Before and After in the place from which novels rise) in old Helleskar and his relation to Itale. Of that I was utterly unconscious, working on Disp’d—no memory of old Helleskar at all. Of so much that I was repeating/prefiguring. No wonder the dimension of Time insisted on making itself so important in the second book! I am here, I was here, I have always been here.—Three or four times in N.P. people have déjà vu, or the sense of “I have always been here.” Well, I have. And am.
(12 11 75): Itale, my dear, you say to do what comes under your hand to do, to do what you must do, what needs doing next, and you also wave your hand dismissing the irrelevances, the trivialities, amongst which the way gets lost. Now how do I tell the one from the other? I have to go take the wash out and fold it, yes, definitely. I should clean up the living room, yes, probably. Should I answer all the letters? and if not, which? The well, the I Ching tells me, needs relining. The way, I tell myself, needs re-finding.—I left you, to be sure, in very much the same state, at Malafrena, many years ago.
I wonder what you did in 1848.
(16 Oct 1978): I am working hard & daily rewriting NP, starting w Pt II. I do not feel basically that this is a good thing, the right thing—the necessary thing, in Itale’s phraseology—to do; it’s going to be an old sheep in new wolf’s clothing, at best, if I can finish the job at all. But it seems to be what I have let myself in for, forced upon myself. [By discussing the possibility of marketing such a novel with my agent, Virginia Kidd, who encouraged me.] Well let it, by ending once for all the part of my life-work that began with NP, be the beginning, the opening of the door, to the next & so far unimagined and unimaginable part: because every thing on every hand says so me, when I have the courage to listen, “You must begin all over again, you must begin at the beginning . . .” and at 49 next Saturday I know about as much of my job as I did at 9 years old.
(26 Oct 78): Isaber does jump off tower
Often I lack the courage of my intuitions.
I wonder if when the sentence or scene sticks in the mind that means, despite all complacency, something is wrong with it?
(30 Oct 78) Luisa nursed her mother; she cannot nurse Itale because of sexual disgust. It is she who sends Itale away, also—Self-destructive, frustrated sexuality.
Record the high for the glory of God:
This is the greatest pleasure. “For this I came.” No comparison. That I suppose is why I was afraid of it. FOOL. TG.
(2 Nov 78) 7 Jan 1827.
And a price to pay—bien entendu!—thought last night at Symphony, maybe creation in the latter half of life must always go against the grain, upcurrent—after all.
There is no use fighting evil from innocence because you don’t know what you’re up against, and when you do find out and are no longer innocent you are either corrupted or mortally wounded by the knowledge of evil—Seems to be the Message, at this point. The Lesson of 1830?—well.
(9 Nov 78) Aug 8, 1830.
(18 Nov 78) “Being in love—falling in love”—now I understand it—now I know what it means—what happens to me when I am writing: I am in love with the work, the subject, the characters, and while it goes on & a while after, the opus itself.—I function only by falling in love: with French and France; with the 15th Century; with microbiology, cosmology, sleep research, etc. at various times—I could not have written A Week in the Country without having fallen in love with current DNA research! All very strange; is this feminine? do men fall in love this way? They certainly do in the usual way because the poems about sleeplessness & not eating & all the world being an appendage of the Beloved are by men—I expect they too fall in love with Revolution of 1830, or a dead Russian, or a sentence in Italian, or what have you. What it is I suppose is the creative condition as expressed in human emotion and mood—So it comes out curiously the same whether sexual or spiritual or aesthetic or intellectual—
Hence the personal God, you thickheaded perpetual adolescent. Oh, she says, OK, so Jesus is just not my type. I prefer thin dirty
wogs with rivers in their hair. I see. What do I see, Lord?
Du bist’s, der was wir bauen . . .
(6 Dec 78) 11.05 am—Finished Malafrena. Again.
11:07—But no! Left out 3 pp. beginning Pt II! tipico tipico!!
The “Folksong from the Montayna Province” was my first published poem.
The two tiny “Folksongs” are the only extant texts in Orsinian. The words were taken down from a broadcast from Radio Orsenya in the sixties but unfortunately the tunes were not recorded.
The map of Orsinia is here reproduced for the first time.
The Orsinian Tales came along—both the century in which they took place and the year in which I wrote them—at unpredictable times. The date at the end of a story refers, also rather unexpectedly, to the story, not the date of composition.
For years I felt as if I were a transmitter of some kind, that would be suddenly activated by an urgent message from Orsinia, from one century or another and from various persons. It was my duty and privilege to interpret these, but learning how to do so took me quite a while.
I think “Conversations at Night” was the earliest written of the stories. In graduate school in New York I used to listen to the Italian radio station, and a sentimental audio drama about a blind man got me trying to imagine blindness. Then suddenly the transmission from Rákava came through.
“An die Musik,” written some ten years later, was my first work of fiction accepted by a literary magazine. I sent a copy to Lotte Lehmann in homage. It is the sorrow of my heart that I lost the warm, generous note that great artist wrote back to me.