Beautiful Reward
Remembering the great American writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)... and her love of Bruce Springsteen
I should have known Ursula Le Guin was a Springsteen fan.
Both Ursula and The Boss have always been interested in the same things: love between people; the rise and fall of cities and empires; and the challenge of living a life of meaning and integrity, among other non-trivial pursuits.
But I never knew she was a fan of his music until a few weeks ago, when I had the pleasure of taking an online course through the Community of Writers on her work. Even better, it was taught by another great, the wonderful novelist Karen Joy Fowler, who was a friend of Le Guin’s. The poet Molly Gloss, another friend, passed along the Springsteen nugget, and I’ve since found references to her fandom elsewhere, too.
I’ve loved Springsteen ever since I was a teenager and first heard Nebraska, his stripped-down album of neo-noir folk songs about serial killers, car lots, and loneliness. And I’ve loved Le Guin since a few years before that, first reading the Earthsea trilogy, her fantasy chronicle of wizards and dragons, and later her science fiction, poetry, and one of my all-time favorite books, her translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching: A Book About The Way and the Power of The Way. The only thing Le Guin and Springsteen had in common, I assumed with the self-centered arrogance of a fan, was me.
Not so. Of course not.
Bruce Springsteen is world-famous for his songs of working-class heroes, for chronicling, as he put it, the “stoic recognition of everyday reality, and the small and big things that allow you to put a foot in front of the other and get you through.” But the work is not always done in factories or 9-5 jobs; he writes a lot about being a writer, too (in addition to the writer’s block, please note the terrible sleeping patterns of the writer here):
I get up in the evening / and I ain’t got nothing to say
I come home in the morning / I go to bed feeling the same way…
I’m dying for some action / I’m sick of sitting around here trying to write this book
I need a love reaction / Come on baby give me just one look
In his music and interviews, Springsteen always returns to the core of what made him turn to music in the first place: a sense of transformation. He talked about it in his keynote speech at SXSW 2012:
“In the beginning, every musician has their genesis moment. For you, it might have been the Sex Pistols, or Madonna, or Public Enemy. It’s whatever initially inspires you to action. Mine was 1956, Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was the evening I realized a white man could make magic, that you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination, and you could create a transformative self.”
Transformation was at the heart of Ursula Le Guin’s writing, too.
“I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.”
That quotation comes from Le Guin’s legendary 2014 acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, when she was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. What followed was a short speech about the power of art and the importance of creative freedom. You’ve probably heard at least part of it, but I encourage you to watch the whole (6 min) thing. Here’s an excerpt:
“Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.”
Throughout the talk, she referred to something she called her “beautiful reward.” At first, it seemed she was referring to the Medal she’d just received. But that wasn’t it.
“I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”
Did Bruce Springsteen ever hear about it? I hope so. Because Le Guin was making reference to his 1992 song, Beautiful Reward, a gorgeous, melancholy song about searching for love and meaning. He writes a lot about freedom, too. In Beautiful Reward, Springsteen chronicles his search from barroom to church pew “to ease the pain that living brings,” in the final stanza the narrator himself transforms, in a metaphor Le Guin, who often wrote from the perspective of animals, would love:
Tonight I can feel the cold wind at my back
I'm flying high over gray fields, my feathers long and black
Down along the river's silent edge, I soar
Searching for my beautiful reward
Searching for my beautiful reward
Both Le Guin and Springsteen knew that the beautiful reward wasn’t something you waited a lifetime for, hoping it would miraculously show up. The beautiful reward came from the doing: the living, the writing, the singing. The freedom of creation, the freedom of imagination. That’s the beautiful reward.
As our teacher, Karen Joy Fowler, put it, “In order to change the world, you first have to believe that it can be changed.” That’s what Ursula Le Guin and Bruce Springsteen had in common, that faith in the transformative, freeing power of the human imagination. And although I have no reason to think this has ever happened, I like to imagine Bruce reading his own beat-up paperback of A Wizard of Earthsea or The Left Hand of Darkness, and finding there a fellow believer.
Thanks for reading, folks. Many thanks to the Community of Writers for their ongoing literary offerings, and to Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, and my fellow ULG students for their terrific insights. Wishing you all a creative and transformational week. And down with the divine right of kings!
xo Buzzy
Thank you.