In spite of the tepid reception for The Crown of Columbus and the tragic death of their son, Abel, some good news did come to Dorris and Erdrich in the early 1990s. Dorris was appointed to the Board of Directors of Save the Children Foundation and received the Sarah Josepha Hale Literary Award in 1991. A year later, Erdrich received one award—from the Western Literature Association. The film version of The Broken Cord was released and won a multitude of awards. In addition, Dorris’s novel Morning Girl won the Scott O’Dell Award for best historical fiction for young readers, and his essays on Zimbabwe won an award from the Center for Anthropology and Journalism as well as an Overseas Press Club citation.
The literary publications from both Dorris and Erdrich slowed in relationship to the sheer quantity of work they had published in previous years, however. While Erdrich must have been working on The Bingo Palace, their attention was elsewhere, dealing with the grief of Abel’s death and the overwhelming family problems with their other two adopted children, particularly Sava, and Dorris’s increasingly violent and erratic private behavior, which he effectively masked from public view.
The fourth of Erdrich’s novels, The Bingo Palace, continues with the lives of characters, now older, that Erdrich introduced in earlier novels, while birthing further generations. Lipsha Morrissey, protagonist in this story, is the son of June Kashpaw, the dead woman at the center of Love Medicine, and the grandson of Lulu Lamartine, daughter of Fleur Pillager from Tracks. Lipsha has not lived up to an early promise but spent his life after basic education as a wanderer and ne’er to well, but has returned to his home. There, he visits grandmother Lulu, eventually seeking her advice in capturing the heart of a young woman, Shawnee Roy. His quest to slowly redeem himself is the heart of the story, but other characters and subplots intervene in the main plot line. Erdrich displays flashes of humor in the story such as the food fight at the Dairy Queen and Lipsha’s vision quest from which he awakes, snuggled up to a talking skunk.
Back home with no marketable skills, Lipsha takes a job as caretaker at the Bingo Palace, a tribal gambling enterprise that is the forerunner of modern casinos operated by many American Indian tribes across the country. Lyman Lamartine, the father of Shawnee Roy’s child and Lipsha’s boss at the Bingo Palace, is a recognizable figure to most American Indians who grew up on a reservation in that Lyman epitomizes the typical wily politician who seeks power and influence, usually at the expense of the tribe as a whole. Erdrich would be familiar with this type since her grandfather was active in Turtle Mountain Chippewa politics, and undoubtedly told stories of similar real people. Indeed, Erdrich has likely met some of these tribal politicians herself.
The book is structured better than The Beet Queen, but is not as tightly written as Tracks. The reviews for The Bingo Palace were good, but that may have been because her other reviews were good—good news begets more good news, and critics were beginning to view Erdrich’s works less as individual pieces but more as parts of a continuing, related saga. At least one review was slightly less than complimentary. Publishers Weekly stated, “. . . if the Bingo Palace is a capstone to the saga, as its interweaving of characters and half-remembered stories from previous volumes rather suggests, it disappoints.” The concluding statement in the review suggests that the book is cluttered with too many stories, characters, and details that detract from what could have been a central theme.1
In 1993, while finishing The Bingo Palace, Erdrich was guest editor for The Best American Short Stories, 1993. Guest editor is a less intensive job than that of editor-in-chief of a group-produced volume. For the latter, the editor must usually first solicit contributions from qualified writers, then read and evaluate the submissions, choose the ones that most closely fit the overall theme of the work, copy edit in some cases (which means correcting spelling, grammar, syntax, and formatting), pester the writers to rewrite, when necessary, to complete rewrites, and finally to organize the submissions into a coherent whole. Guest editors usually have fewer duties. An editor-in-chief has already collected possible contributions, but still, the guest editor has to read through a mass of material, which is a time-consuming task, and decide which submissions are worthy of inclusion in the final work while remaining objective about writing styles that may be vastly different from the guest editor’s own. While this work is rewarding in that it supports and encourages the work of other writers, at the same time, it subtracted from the time Erdrich had to create her own works. This may have been a respite for her, however, in that critical reading and editing required a different set of skills, which provided a break from her usual creative work. At some point in 1994, during what would be a tumultuous period for Erdrich, she penned an introduction to a book titled The Falcon, which was a reprint of a book first published in 1830, The Narrative of John Tanner, The Falcon: His Captivity—His Thirty Years With the Indians. Captivity narratives, published in the United States mostly in the early colonial period, were supposedly first person accounts of a White person’s capture by a tribe of Indians, their subsequent trials and tribulations at the hands of their captors, and their eventual release. The most famous of these stories and the one that is most often the subject of scholarly articles about captivity narratives is the narrative of Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, first published in 1682. Rowlandson’s story and other captivity narratives are polemics about the brutality of American Indians toward their captives and the goodness of God in saving the captive from the savage Indians. However, these stories give only the White captive’s side of the story, without any details of the atrocities committed by Whites against the Indians that caused the retaliation.
John Tanner was captured by the Shawnee in Ohio and quickly sent on to the Ottawa Ojibwa. He was never ransomed and released, but grew up as an Ojibwa person who married and fathered children with Ojibwa wives. In his late fifties, he wrote his story, which detailed not only the circumstances of his capture, but of late-18th-century and early-19th-century daily life and customs of the Ojibwa people. The book was reissued in 1956, and again in 1994 with Erdrich’s introduction,2 wherein Erdrich writes that the 1956 edition was a part of her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau’s library and that she had read it as a child.
Scholar Peter G. Beidler claims that Erdrich relied upon this historical background for much of her novels. He writes:
One of the curious problems facing contemporary native American fiction writers is how they learn about their people’s history, and one of the curious solutions to this problem is that these writers turn to non-Indian authors to fill gaps in their knowledge and understanding . . . 3
Beidler’s article goes on to cite historical references within Erdrich’s novels as proof that she gained her knowledge from the John Tanner captivity narrative. While Erdrich may have borrowed and fictionalized some incidences from Tanner’s story, it is quite a leap to assume that everything she knew and wrote about historical Ojibwa culture was gleaned from the Tanner story, without considering that Erdrich’s grandfather may have valued the Tanner book not for gaining information that he did not know, but for reinforcing information he already knew. To assume that Indians can only learn about their own historical past by what White people have recorded about it is insulting. That may be true in some instances, but by no means, in all. The assumption may be because Indians transmitted information orally, and in mainstream society, if information is not written down, it is assumed to be lost. Erdrich never commented about the Biedler article. Perhaps she was unaware of it.
Dorris published two books during this time—Rooms in the House of Stone, which was a collection of essays, most of which had been previously published in periodicals. It was only 66 pages long. The other book, Working Men, at over 300 pages, was a much more ambitious book of short stories. This latter work garnered little attention, and seemed more of an afterthought. Another book, Paper Trail, a collection of essays previously published in such mainstream venues as Family Circle Magazine, was scheduled for publication in 1994, but would not be released until the following year. While the public persona of Dorris and Erdrich as enviable and glamorous literary superstars remained intact, their private world was crumbling.
Sava, the second adopted son, who had moved out some time earlier and was living in Denver, Colorado, began threatening Dorris and Erdrich, accusing them of abuse and demanding a payoff of $15,000. The couple, obviously afraid of what Sava might do, moved to an undisclosed location, and eventually pressed charges against him. In 1994, the couple traveled to Denver for the trial. One letter from Sava to Erdrich and Dorris read:
Guess what? I am a bully. I pick on things weaker than I, I hurt them, and now I try to kill them . . . As long as I have friends that work in the Oklahoma police department, I’ll always be able to find you. You can’t hide.4
While Sava boasted in the note about connections to law enforcement, it is likely that this was an empty threat, but indicative of a disordered mind, probably symptomatic of his Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. His defense lawyer alleged that Dorris in particular had abused Sava, but his accusations included Erdrich as well. At trial, the entire jury did not accept that argument, but at least one juror must have thought the accusation plausible because they deadlocked on the verdict. A second trial resulted in an acquittal on one count and an 11–1 decision to acquit on the second count.
The decision indicates that while the jury may have thought Sava’s behavior and threats were serious, they did not feel those threats rose to the level of criminal behavior. Whether or not Sava’s condition as a child born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome had an effect on the jury’s decision is not known. It would seem that some jurors at least considered the possibility that Sava was truthful when he, through his attorneys, alleged physical abuse from Dorris and a complicity of silence from Erdrich. Perhaps this experience was the initiator of difficulties in the Dorris–Erdrich marriage, or perhaps it was only the catalyst for the breakup of a marriage that had been in trouble for many years.
Just four years earlier, the Washington Post had published an interview article with Dorris and Erdrich entitled, “Marriage for Better or Words: The Dorris-and-Erdrich Team, Creating Fiction without Friction.”5 The article reiterates what the couple had been telling interviewers from the beginning of their marriage and writing careers and what they would continue stating right up until the moment they separated—that they collaborated on every writing project, that neither let ego get in the way of producing good writing, that they used mutual criticism as an impetus to produce more and better literary works. Charles Trueheart, author of this particular interview wrote about Dorris’s contribution to Erdrich’s writing:
“Michael,” she [Erdrich] explains, is a “spiritual guide, a therapist, someone who allows you to go down to where you just exist and where you are in contact with those very powerful feelings that you had in your childhood.” He organizes her work; he deploys a blue pencil on her manuscripts. He is, by her account, indispensable.6
In this particular interview, when asked what he might be writing or if he would be writing if he and Erdich had not met and married, Dorris replied that he did not think he would be writing fiction. He cites Erdrich’s training as a creative writer and her experience as being superior to his amateur, untrained skills, but goes on to say that, “I came in basically as a suggester—very tangential—and in the course of time became more involved and more confident. But I don’t think it ever would have happened without her.”7
At that point in their marriage and careers (1988), there was no reason to doubt the sincerity of their mutual admiration. Only much later would Erdrich make statements indicating that she had resented Dorris’s overwhelming and at times smothering influence.
Interviewer Trueheart asked a question at the end of the interview that was eerily prophetic and disturbing in light of the eventual Dorris–Erdrich legal troubles, marriage breakup, and Dorris’s suicide. He asked if Erdrich would go on without Dorris, and she responded that she did not think she would, that she would not have the same sense of purpose. She implied that before she met and married Dorris, she believed that she would write no matter who else was in her life or what else what going on, but after her marriage and collaboration with Dorris, her feelings might have changed. No doubt Erdrich believed and felt deeply what she said in that interview, but seven years later in 1995 Erdrich separated from Dorris. Perhaps it was the strain of Abel’s death and what must have felt like Sava’s betrayal that brought them to the decision to part, at least temporarily. Perhaps, it was too much togetherness, contrary to their very public, frequent, and fervently stated appreciation for each other as collaborators, lovers, and parents, both in interviews and in the florid dedications each penned in the front pages of their published books.
The dedications in Erdrich’s books are a love fest for Dorris. While her first book of poetry, Jacklight (1984), reads simply, “For my parents,” in The Beet Queen (1986), she wrote—“To Michael, Complice in every word, essential as air.” In Tracks (1988), her dedication page reads—“Michael, the story comes up different every time and has no ending but always begins with you.” For the dedication in her second book of poetry, Baptism of Desire (1989), she wrote, “For Michael, The flame and the source.” Tales of Burning Love (1996) has a cryptic dedication—“To Michael [heart]Q, [heart]J.” Of course, the heart icon is an indicator of love, but the meaning of the “Q” and the “J” is unknown. The book was published in 1996, when Dorris and Erdrich were separated. Perhaps, the loving dedication was sincere, possibly mere habit, or maybe it was written to offer some solace to the man with whom she had spent so much time loving, working, and parenting, but could now no longer tolerate in her life.
Dorris was equally demonstrative in his own book dedications. In A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), he wrote—“FOR LOUISE/ Companion through every page/ through every day/ Compeer.” For Paper Trail (1994), he wrote—“For Louise: Absent by name/from most of these pages/only because/you are so everywhere/within them.”
The dedication that Erdrich wrote for her first non-fiction book is very different from all the previous ones. The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood was published in 1995, when the Dorris–Erdrich collaboration and marriage was unraveling. Her dedication here does not mention Dorris, but is instead a quote from Marianne Von Willemer (adapted by Goethe)—“You wakened this book in my mind, you gave it to me; for the words I spoke in delight and from a full heart/were echoed back from your sweet life.” Of course, this quote could be understood as applying to Michael Dorris, but since the book is about pregnancy and childbearing, it would seem more likely that the quote applies to her children. Further, the dedication is not a few short, loving words to Michael Dorris, but rather a page of narrative that mentions their daughters, and in a second paragraph, mentions that Dorris wrote in their farmhouse in New Hampshire while Erdrich wrote in a little house across the road.8 For a couple that trumpeted their collaborations to the point where they had said they sometimes could not tell who wrote what, they were obviously geographically separated in their work at this point. It could be argued that collaboration on a book about pregnancy written by the mother was not something in which her husband and the father of her children could physically participate with the same degree of feeling and understanding. One wonders, though, if Erdrich had deliberately chosen a topic that would make full participation by Dorris difficult. In fairness to her, it might be that the choice of topic was simply coincidental. Still, the subject of the book may have conveniently allowed her to achieve some separation between her work and Dorris’s, and at the same time, to give her breathing room from the marriage.
Eventually the couple would move to a house in Minneapolis, where mutual friend and writer, Joy Harjo and others said that Erdrich decided she had to create a new identity, but she may have meant an identity separate from Dorris, so she moved out of the family residence in 1996, leaving the three girls with Dorris. Further, “She initially said she was going to move into a studio where she was going to write, but she left all her things. She left a nightgown hanging on a hook in the bedroom. Michael said he didn’t have the heart to remove it. It was a symbol she was coming back.”9
Their marriage—and collaboration—had lasted for 14 years, longer than many had anticipated. Michael Curtis, an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, never believed the collaboration would last long. “If it does,” he said, “they will certainly have set a record for suppressed egos . . . Some couples work together and help each other, but none of them insist to such lengths and in such a firm way on their mutuality.”10 Another writer acquaintance of the couple said, “For any writer of fiction, it’s impossible to believe any two people can write a book together. Something extreme had to come out of all this togetherness.”11
In spite of Erdrich’s assertion in 1988 that she would not be able to continue without Dorris, she did continue writing after their separation. Tales of Burning Love, published in 1996, probably had its beginnings while the couple was still together, but was likely finished after they had separated. Erdrich followed her established writing strategy by publishing four short stories that she later revised and expanded for the novel. Much like June Kashpaw in Love Medicine, Jack Mauser—the character at the heart of Tales of Burning Love—is dead at the beginning of the book, but brought back to life in memory by the stories his survivors tell of him—and of themselves. Two blizzards frame the story. Just before the first blizzard, a drunken Jack marries a young Ojibwa woman. Twenty-three years and four marriages later during a second blizzard at Mauser’s funeral, the wives of Mauser, who are trapped together in a camper, tell stories of Jack and how each of them contributed to his downfall. This is a classic writer’s technique for telling a story, one that Agatha Christie used in her mystery story, “Ten Little Indians,” where the characters are trapped in an old mansion during a storm. However, Christie tells the story herself as the writer/narrator, while Erdrich steps back from the narrative and allows the story to be told by the multiple narrator characters of the wives. And, in Christie’s story, the storytelling characters are not all one gender. In his review of the book, John Barrow quotes Erdrich:
. . . there hadn’t been a lot of books about women’s closeness and women’s bonds [when Erdrich began to write]. It was always there, this underground network. But women have begun to value their connections. It’s often the case with men, too, I guess. But I wanted to write what I know.12
All of Erdrich’s works were based on what she knew about growing up in a small upper Midwestern town, about being a woman of mixed heritage, of both American Indian and mainstream culture, and of human foibles. Since that is true of all her earlier work, it is not outside the bounds of possibility to assume that is true of this novel as well, which includes elements from all of her life to that point, including her relationship with Dorris. In this novel, she writes:
Her marriage, though safe, kept her grounded. Her position as the wife of one of Fargo’s leading citizens was both gratifying and constricting. . . . her every action was reported in the local news, her turn-of-the-century house was envied . . . She was known for her original, even eccentric arrangements of flowers . . . her newspaper columns . . . she had become, in short, an admirable woman . . . 13
Consciously or not, Erdrich wrote of her own most recent personal experiences, slightly disguised.
Erdrich’s first book for children, Grandmother’s Pigeon, was also published in 1996. This excursion into children’s literature might be seen as a natural extension of the nonfiction Blue Jay’s Dance about childbirth and early childhood parenting. The story of Pigeon is simple, as befitting a children’s book, and is only 30 pages long, half of which are illustrations. In the story, the grandmother departs on a trip leaving behind three passenger pigeon eggs, mysteriously generated from a stuffed animal toy pigeon. The theme of environmentalism and colonialism is obvious. Passenger pigeons were once the most numerous species in North America but loss of habitat and overhunting made them extinct. Their nesting grounds and food sources were destroyed as European colonists arrived and moved inland, destroying wildlife habitat to establish farms and villages. Then they were hunted as cheap food for both poor American Indians and White settlers until the last one died in 1914. There are elements of the supernatural in this book, as well, notably when the grandmother leaves for Greenland on the back of a porpoise, a plot twist that has echoes of New Zealand Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera’s book, Whale Rider. For Grandmother’s Pigeon, Erdrich departed from her usual strategy of publishing pieces first as short stories, but the story does draw upon her personal experience. She stated:
I stopped writing poems and started writing children’s books [the author says]. It’s like a poem to me. It came like a poem all as a piece. And I worked on it line by line. It came from very much missing my grandmother, who was very eccentric.14
As well as being a challenge to write in a different genre, the book could also have been another way for Erdrich to express her independence from the collaboration with Dorris.
Separation and divorce is almost always a painful process for both partners. Maybe it is even more painful when the couple has had such a seemingly joyful and publicly successful union. Many couples experience bitter divorces with “he said/she said” accusations and protracted fights over money and child custody, but the Dorris–Erdrich breakup was about to descend into a horror that most couples never endure.
The emotional pain of the impending divorce worsened in 1996 when Erdrich and her daughters were driving back to Minneapolis that fall from a family gathering in Wahpeton, according to an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune by Calvin Covert. One of the girls had recently seen a video in a school health class about good touch/bad touch, which prompted her to tell her mother that their father had engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with her, touching her in ways that made her uncomfortable. The other girls corroborated the first daughter’s assertions.
Erdrich responded first by taking her children to Minnetonka psychotherapist James Fearing, and on December 8, Fearing reported the situation to child protective services, as he was required to do by law. Some may have wondered why Erdrich herself did not notify the police first, but the couple’s celebrity status would have ensured a media frenzy, something she would have wanted to avoid to protect her children. She did take matters into her own hands, though, when she told Dorris that he had a problem with alcohol, and insisted that he enter Hazelden, an addiction treatment facility in Minnesota. The couple had shared custody of the children since their separation, but the abuse had been happening only during the last three months, the girls stated. Since the girls’ statements are not quoted directly in the Covert article, it is unclear how specific their accusations are. Perhaps, in Erdrich’s mind, there was the possibility that the girls had simply misinterpreted some innocent behavior on Dorris’s part. She may also have felt that if he did cross the line, it was a result of his being so inebriated that he was not aware of what he was doing. Eventually, all four of the couple’s daughters, ranging in age from 8 to 24, including adopted daughter Madeline who was not living with Dorris at that time, would accuse him of both sexual molestation and violent physical abuse. While the sexual abuse accusations from the couples’ biological daughters were confined to only the previous three months, the physical abuse accusations went back years.
The girls stated to the authorities that Dorris had an explosive temper that erupted whenever they failed to meet his expectations. Examples of his violence included stabbing one daughter in the hand with a fork because, according to Dorris, she could not or did not hold her fork correctly. This same daughter stated that she needed medical attention after her father deliberately crushed her fingers in the kitchen door. Other incidents include kicking one daughter down the stairs, choking another, and striking them so viciously that they often had split lips, bruises, and bloodied noses.15
The litany of accusations was a continuation, perhaps affirmation, of what Jeffrey Sava had alleged in the court proceedings against his father back in 1994. In her own statement to the authorities investigating the case, from the article published by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Erdrich:
. . . confirmed that for years, she knew her husband “beat, hit, kicked, verbally and emotionally abused” their children. He once became so angry, she said, that he grabbed one of their daughters by the hair and ripped a clump from her scalp. She said such physical abuse occurred several times a month, yet she failed to report it until the final months of their 15-year marriage.16
This shocking and damning information destroyed the image of the perfect couple with the perfect family, as well as the image of the compassionate father who, prior to his marriage to Erdrich, has adopted three special needs children, wrote the definitive book on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and crusaded for children’s rights as an active member of Save the Children Foundation.
Dorris’s shining public persona did not deter the authorities from investigating the allegations. Katherine Quaintance of the Hennepin County District Attorney’s office was appointed to handle the case along with two investigators. The day he learned of his daughter’s accusations, Dorris called his friend, Douglas Foster, former editor of Mother Jones magazine and told him, “My life is over.”17 Despite his statement, Dorris tried to carry on. Released from Hazelden treatment center in January, he was soon on a book tour promoting his latest novel, The Cloud Chamber.18 Like Erdrich’s novels, this novel from Dorris was an intergenerational continuance of the characters he had created for A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. The first pages of the reprint edition of The Cloud Chamber cite no less than 32 glowing reviews from major publications and well-known writers such as Pam Houston, Anne Lamott, and Amy Tan. The last words of the dedication read—“. . . to Louise, my love and gratitude for all of it.”19
In March of 1997, investigators traveled to Colorado to interview Sava and Madeline about their father’s possible sexual and physical abuse. At first, Madeline denied being victimized by her father, but eventually she said she had been abused, and Sava confirmed her statements.20 After learning of this event, on the night of March 28, 1997, Dorris went back to the house in New Hampshire where he and Erdrich and the children had lived for so many years. Then he went to the cottage across the road from the main house—the cottage where Erdrich had worked separately from Dorris when their marriage and writing collaboration had begun to come apart—and swallowed pills and alcohol. He answered the phone from there when his friend, Doug Foster, called. From the conversation, Foster became aware that something was terribly wrong. He called the state police, who transported Dorris to the hospital and from there to Brattleboro Retreat in Vermont. Apparently, Dorris was angry with his friend for interfering.21
Erdrich was notified, but as far as anyone knows, she did not contact Dorris. In an interview for the Seattle Intelligencer, Erdrich stated, “I knew that Michael was suicidal from the second year of our marriage, . . . he talked about it often.”22 After 13 years of hearing Dorris threaten suicide, of trying to be kind and understanding and comforting, any human, no matter how much they loved the suicidal spouse, is likely to become wearied by the exercise. The common statement is that suicide is a cry for help, and that may be true in most cases, but how many times can the cry be addressed before those trying to help begin to wonder if the suicide threats are more of an attention-getting device rather than a sincere desire to get past psychic or physical pain?
From 1972–1977, NBC television ran Sanford and Son, a half hour sitcom starring Redd Foxx as junkyard owner, Fred Sanford, and Demond Wilson as Fred’s son, Lamont. The irascible character of Fred constantly got himself into trouble through foolish mistakes or deliberate lies and misbehavior. When Fred’s misdeeds were discovered by Lamont, Fred’s usual reaction was to fake a heart attack to get sympathy. While it is doubtful that Dorris would behave so obviously as Fred Sanford, perhaps he engaged in more subtle but similar behavior. A reasonable person could have believed that if Dorris had really wanted to die, he would not have answered the phone call from Foster. The next time, however, Dorris was serious.
Dartmouth had planned a celebration on April 11 for the 25th anniversary of the founding of their Native American Studies Program and had asked Dorris to speak at the event since he was the first director of that program. Dorris got a pass from Brattleboro and traveled to a nearby hotel, The Brick Tower Inn. He must have been very determined that there could be no interference this time because he parked his car in the parking lot of a different motel across the street and registered at the Brick Tower Inn under the name of George Fonta. There he swallowed a massive dose of sleeping pills along with substantial quantities of vodka and covered his head with a plastic bag. His body was discovered the next day, the same day he was to have been charged by the Hennepin County (Minnesota) Attorney’s Office with criminal sexual child abuse. Dorris’s death ended the investigation, but did not silence the matter. From then on, his entire life and work as well as that of Erdrich would be put under the microscope. In death, he managed to escape public scrutiny over whether or not he was a physically and sexually abusive father. His suicide, however, only added another layer of scandal that Erdrich and her children had to endure.
Humans have an insatiable desire to know why things happen, especially so if the event that happened is of a shocking or prurient nature, and not only to know why, but to find someone to blame. Erdrich, dealing with the trauma of her marriage breakup first, then her children’s accusations against their father, now had to deal with Dorris’s suicide, and the inevitable horde of reporters and others who wanted to dig around not only in her life, but in her psyche as well. There were those who judged her complicit in Dorris’s physical abuse of their children, if not in Dorris’s sexual abuse, which might have been either confirmed or dismissed had he lived and the case came to trial.
Calvin Covert, in the article that he wrote months after Dorris’s suicide, did not directly go after Erdrich as a contributing factor in the children’s abuse, but his bald statements were damning in such words as—“She [Erdrich] never filed a police report about the child beatings she said she had witnessed.”23 Covert’s article was published four months after Dorris’s suicide, proof that the story was still of interest to the reading public.
Erdrich had wisely tried to anticipate and dampen the firestorm that was to come with the interview she granted to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on April 19, just eight days after Dorris’s suicide. The newspaper interviewer wrote, “Now, Erdrich said, she wanted to talk about their lives and the circumstances surrounding his death—to correct some misconceptions” that “seem to be floating around in the media” and to help shift the emphasis from the “grotesque details” of Dorris’ death and the “morbid fascination” with the most intimate details of their private troubles.24 Undoubtedly, Erdrich’s first consideration was to protect her children from painful gossip and innuendo by trying to offer factual information. She tried to get out ahead of the story, as politicians say when scandals break.
Of Dorris’s friends and acquaintances, most did not believe the sexual abuse and other physical abuse allegations. For example, according to the Washington Post article of April 16, “Charles Rembar, a New York lawyer who represented the couple in literary matters said that ‘on the basis of a long and close relationship with Michael Dorris, I regard the charges as utterly implausible.’ ” In the same article, writer Robb Forman Dew stated, “He has always been an advocate for children. Every instinct I have tells me this is as unlikely as anything I’ve ever heard.”25
Friends and acquaintances were equally disbelieving about Erdrich’s statements of Dorris’s long-standing suicidal thoughts. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer article stated—“Indeed, close friends of Dorris have said in recent interviews that they found it difficult to believe that the generous, brilliant and gregarious man they knew was secretly tormented by depression and thoughts of suicide.”26 Oddly enough, even Douglas Foster, the friend who had rescued Dorris from the first attempted suicide on March 28, said, “He may have had his dark moments, but to say that he was fixated on suicide, I didn’t see it.”
Erdrich’s statements contradict those of Dorris’s friends. She said that the friends and colleagues who were disbelieving of Dorris’s mental state did not know of his “private suffering” because Dorris kept those feelings hidden. In her writer’s language of metaphor and simile, Erdrich stated that the picture Dorris presented to the world was like the third floor of building with a “very deep basement.” While his friends may have been oblivious to the real Dorris, Erdrich said that she knew of his personal anguish.27
The most painful press story of all may have been Eric Konigsberg’s June 16 article in The New Yorker. Before it came out in print, Konigsberg tracked Erdrich down at her home in Minneapolis to tell her what he had written and maybe to get her response to it. He came to her house unannounced, an act that must have made her feel trapped and besieged. From a journalistic standpoint, the Konigsberg article is well-written and includes some documented facts, but it also implies much—that Dorris may have engaged in homosexual liaisons, something that no other article had done. Erdrich may have felt it was better to let such allegations lie rather than to refute them in print and so keep the information in circulation. If so, she was right. No other publication picked up on the Konigsberg speculations about Dorris’s sexual proclivities.
The public enjoys creating celebrities and heroes, placing them on an impossibly high pedestal and worshipping them, but it takes just as great a delight in pulling down those same celebrities and heroes. Perhaps there is some perverse pleasure to be had in discovering that the perfect couple is beset by some of the same problems or even worse ones than ordinary people. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, the marriage and literary collaboration of Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich was the best of times, and it was the worst of times.
1. Review of The Bingo Palace, Publishers Weekly, January 31, 1994.
2. John Tanner, John Tanner, The Falcon (New York: Perennial, 1994).
3. Peter G. Beidler, “The Facts of Fictional Magic: John Tanner as a Source for Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and The Birchbark House,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24:4 (2000): 37–54.
4. David Streitfeld, “Writer Was Suspected of Child Abuse: Probe Ends with Michael Dorris Suicide,” The Washington Post, Apr 16, 1997.
5. Charles Trueheart, “Marriage for Better or Words,” The Washington Post, October 19, 1988.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood (New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 1995), vii–viii.
9. Streitfeld, The Washington Post.
10. Ibid.
11. Susan Shreve, quoted in Streitfeld article, The Washington Post.
12. John Barrow, “All the Right Connections//Louise Erdrich Adds ‘Burning Love’ to Other Related Tales,” Chicago Sun Times, May 26, 1996.
13. Louise Erdrich, Tales of Burning Love (New York: First Harper Perennial, 1997), 220.
14. John Barrow, Interview and Review.
15. Specific information included here comes from Calvin Covert’s article, “The Anguished Life of Michael Dorris,” published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on August 2, 1997, almost four months after Dorris’s death. While the information is graphic, Covert states that the information contained in the story was obtained from “interviews with the couples friends, neighbors, and professional peers; court, police, and child-protection records in the Twin Cities, New Hampshire, and Colorado; two lawsuits filed against Dorris’s estate and Erdrich by their adopted daughter, Madeline, and Dorris’s memoirs.” Erdrich did not sue the paper for false statements, which does not necessarily mean the information was correct, only that Erdrich did not choose to contest the content.
16. Ibid.
17. Covert article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
18. Michael Dorris, The Cloud Chamber (San Diego: Paw Prints Imprint of Baker and Taylor Publishing, 2008, Reprint).
19. Ibid., 9.
20. Eric Konigsberg, “The Last Page,” The New Yorker, June 16, 1997, 31–37, 70.
21. Ibid.
22. Staff writer, “Wife Claims Dorris was Suicidal for Years, Only She Knew of His Tormented Secret Life,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 19, 1997.
23. Covert article in The Minneapolis Star Tribune.
24. Article in Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 19, 1997
25. Streitfeld, The Washington Post.
26. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 19, 1997.
27. Ibid.