After Dorris’s death, Erdrich moved back into the house in Minneapolis where Dorris had lived with their three daughters. She went on with her writing and raising her daughters, even reconciled with Madeline, the adopted daughter who had accused Dorris of physical and sexual abuse. Whether or not those allegations from Madeline and Sava and from the couple’s three biological daughters were true or not is unknowable. Erdrich herself testified to the validity of the physical violence, but the sexual abuse is questionable. It is possible that their biological daughters mistook innocent acts of affection or drunken fumblings from Dorris for more than what they were, and it must be remembered that Madeline, who claimed sexual abuse as well, and Sava, who supported Madeline’s statement, were both Fetal Alcohol Syndrome children. These children naturally have difficulty in distinguishing reality from fiction.
Pressed by the Minneapolis prosecutor Katherine Quaintance and her investigators, Madeline and Sava were likely to have said what they believed these people in positions of authority expected to hear. Such situations are not uncommon. There are numerous instances of innocent people with mental disabilities testifying that they committed or were witnesses to crimes they could not possibly have committed or witnessed.
Erdrich sought comfort, security, and love from her parents, Ralph and Rita Erdrich, from her brothers and sisters and their families, and from the community where she grew up. She wrote:
My brothers are loyal and kind fellows, and they have seen me through tough times. When my husband died in 1997 they took off work to come and stay with me, to answer the telephone and guard my children. They also made sure I didn’t stay in bed all day, chew the woodwork, or just sit in the corner and drool. They helped the household keep on functioning. They kept my world partly normal. They are tall and sturdy and they make me feel safe.1
Her work and her children were in Minneapolis where she lived, but there were frequent trips home to Wahpeton and to Turtle Mountain, where she was not the famous writer at the center of a scandal, but just Louise—daughter, sibling, and friend.
Back in 1988, when Louise Erdrich told an interviewer that she would not go on [writing] without Michael Dorris, she was no doubt sincere, but by 1996, when she separated from him and filed for divorce, she had changed her mind or maybe, came to know her own mind better. After his suicide in 1997, she had no choice but to go on without him. They had claimed that they wrote in collaboration, that at times it was hard to tell who wrote what in any published work, so after the separation and Dorris’s subsequent suicide, readers at least, if not publishers, were curious to discover if the writing Erdrich did on her own would be of the same quality, quantity, and style as the work she published with Dorris as editor and collaborator.
The Antelope Wife, her sixth novel (not counting The Crown of Columbus, written as a stated collaboration with Dorris), was published in 1998. The Acknowledgements page of the novel begins with, “As always, my family is first in my thanks,” and continues with expressions of gratitude to specific family members, indicating that she had, indeed, relied upon them for comfort and support during the year of her separation from Dorris and, following his death, the painful public revelations—true or false—about their life together and apart. The comments about beadworking in this section mirror the beadworking motif that runs throughout The Antelope Wife. Erdrich’s real life off the page blurred into the writing on the page, as was always true.
The dedications in almost all her other books were to Dorris, but the one for The Antelope Wife reads:
TO MY CHILDREN,
PERSIA, AZA
PALLAS, BIRDIE
AND SAVA
She included all the living children, even Sava, though there is no evidence that they had reconciled their differences at that time. (Note that Birdie was the family nickname for Madeline.) Another page—more of a disclaimer than a dedication—is inserted at the front of the book. It reads—This book was written before the death of my husband. He is remembered with love by all of his family. Here, Erdrich speaks for herself and for all the children—even the daughters who had accused Dorris of child abuse. If Dorris had lived, been prosecuted, and found guilty, this page would almost certainly not be included, but Erdrich has stated elsewhere that she believes the dead should be left in peace. That may be the reason for this disclaimer in The Antelope Wife, but it is also likely that she felt she had to say something to forestall possible speculation since so many of the themes and events in the novel seem to bear on her own personal life.
The files of the investigation had been sealed after Dorris’s death, a common practice, but also something that Erdrich had urged. Further, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article from just days after Dorris’s suicide, Erdrich said specifically that the strange and difficult circumstances surrounding the family accusations against Dorris and his subsequent suicide was a private, family matter, and that generally, she ascribed to the idea that public gossip and speculation about any person after they had died was unconscionable.2
Another novel with mostly American Indian characters, The Antelope Wife is written in Erdrich’s usual style—flowing poetic or descriptive sentences followed by short cryptic sentences, or even incomplete sentences, such as the following:
In chaos of groaning horses, dogs screaming, rifle and pistol reports, and the smoke or errant cooking fires, Scranton Roy was most disturbed not by the death yells of old men and the few warriors shocked naked from their robes, but by the feral quiet of the children. And the sudden contempt he felt for them all. Unexpected, the frigid hate.3
This novel proved that Erdrich’s solitary writing was as good as her collaboration writing with Dorris and not just in style and plot. In her previous novels, there is a great deal of humor, and she continues to use humor to humanize her characters, to forward plot structures, and to lighten dark moments. Much of the humor she included in previous novels arises out of cultural perspectives from her own Anishinaabe heritage. For example, the character of Nanapush in Tracks is a classical trickster figure common in Native American oral tradition and mythology.
In American Indian cultures, trickster figures are characters that usually have an animal counterpart, which varies depending upon the tribe of origin. Among tribes in the Northeast, Great Rabbit is the common figure, while Southwestern tribes reference Coyote in their stories. Iktomi, the Spider, is the trickster figure in stories from the Great Plains tribes, but in the Northwestern United States and Canada, the Raven is the animal/human trickster figure. Greediness for food, drink, and money; arrogance and selfishness; sexual promiscuity; bawdy humor; and gender switching are all characteristic of trickster figures. Usually the trickster attempts to con someone out of something of value—typically, food or sexual favors. Because the trickster is also inept, he inevitable bungles his own con, and in so doing creates something of value, even if it is only the lesson that greediness does not pay. The result of his behavior is serendipitous. From the seeds of disaster, something wonderful grows. While scholars recognize the trickster figure in American Indian stories, less often do they acknowledge that such figures exist in the literature and stories of other cultures. The gnomes of Scandinavian cultures are one example, as are the fairies and elves of Ireland.
Nanapush does not appear to have a directly recognizable animal counterpart, but his trickster qualities are evident throughout Tracks. He utters bawdy, sexually explicit comments to Pauline, the young Anishinaabe woman who aspires to be a nun, and to his former trapping partner’s wife, Margaret, who later becomes Nanapush’s lover. He has no compunctions about making anatomical jokes with the priest at the local church. Nanapush complains about the hard seats in the church, and Father Damien replies, “You must think of their unyielding surfaces as helpful,” he offered. “God sometimes enters the soul through the humblest parts of our anatomies, if they are sensitized to suffering.” Nanapush makes a typical trickster response, “A god who enters through the rear door,” I countered, “is no better than a thief.”4
As in her earlier works, the humor Erdrich utilizes in The Antelope Wife is often situational, such as that embodied in the character of Cecille, the ditsy relative of Rozina’s lover and later husband, Frank. Cecille is a good person, a hardworking martial arts instructor, but she also embroiders the truth, creating fantastic, often funny stories about everyday events in her life. One such incidence is when the women are in the kitchen preparing for the marriage of Rozina and Frank. Cecille begins one of her long-winded stories, but no one listens to her, with tragic results because when Cecille informs the group that Rozina’s ex-husband, Richard, is going to show up at the event, no one believes her. Of course, Richard does show up, creating a violent and embarrassing, though humorous, scene.
Toward the end of the book, Erdrich includes another incident of situational humor at Rozina and Frank’s first wedding anniversary. Both characters want to please the other, so Frank lets Rozina believe it will be a private celebration with just the two of them, even though he knows Rozina would prefer to have family and friends present. Frank plans a surprise party, where Rozina shows up almost completely naked, believing the two will be alone. She is surprised and embarrassed when she discovers other people are present. Author Lorena Stookey, in her book about Erdrich’s work, discusses this incident as a reference to O. Henry’s classical story, “The Gift of the Magi,” where two lovers want to please each other with a perfect Christmas gift, but, through a turn of fate, each one’s gift is made useless by the other’s gift.5 Stookey cites this situation in The Antelope Wife as a “comic retelling” of the O. Henry story,6 and also notes humor as a grounding theme in Erdrich’s works.7
One of the funniest sections in The Antelope Wife concerns the reservation dog, Almost Soup, who is given a human voice with human emotions, especially fear of death and the urge to survive. For readers who are not American Indian or did not grow up on a reservation, much in this section may be glossed over or misunderstood as akin to children’s stories where animals talk and have feelings. Dogs are ubiquitous on reservations; they are family pets, feral animals, and strays. Indians are aware, of course, that neutering and spaying are humane practices that cut down on the number of unwanted animals doomed to suffer and die, but poverty is as rampant on reservations as stray animals. When it is a choice between food or a vet bill, people have to choose food.
The role of dogs is usual in ceremonial practice for tribes of the Great Plains, where a dog—usually a white puppy—is ceremonially sacrificed and boiled. The resulting soup with small bits of the flesh is consumed by people as a healing rite rather than a secular meal. The character of Almost Soup is very aware of this practice and is determined not to become the sacrificial dog. This section of the book, the beginning of Part Two, is written in second person. The dog addresses the reader as “you,” as if the reader is a dog to whom Almost Soup is giving advice after recounting his own family background and his story of surviving the soup pot. His advice includes such items as:
Eat anything you can at any time. Fast. Bolt it down. Stay cute, but stay elusive. Don’t let them think twice when they’ve got the hatchet out . . . Avoid all black-and-white striped moving objects. And slow things with spiny quills. Avoid all humans when they get into a feasting mood. Get near the tables fast, though, once the food is cooked. Stay close to their feet. Stay ready.
But don’t steal from their plates.
Avoid medicine men. Snakes. Boys with BB guns. Anything rope-like or easily used to hang or tie. Avoid outhouse holes. Cats that live indoors. Do not sleep under cars. . . . Do not, unless you are absolutely certain you can blame it on a cat, eat any of their chickens. . . .
Always, when in doubt, the rule is you are better off underneath the steps. Don’t chase cars driven by young teenage boys. Don’t chase cars driven by old ladies . . . Pee often. Take messages from tree stumps and corners of buildings.
. . . Which is how I come to my next story of survival.8
The above is only a small excerpt of this section, all of which is incredibly funny for any reader, but especially for those readers who are familiar with the lives of reservation dogs.
Maybe more incredible to some than the humor itself, is that Erdrich was able to write this passage, to exhibit this much humor at what might have been the lowest point in her life. People who have been through great trauma usually have one of three reactions—some completely fall apart emotionally and physically and may even need to be hospitalized. Others find some deep well of fortitude and through luck and sheer strength of will survive and sometimes prosper. Yet a third group embodies elements of both despair and resilience. There is no evidence that Erdrich suffered any great overwhelming tragedies in her early life from which she might have learned coping mechanisms. She seemed to have had the kind of life that most people experience—a smooth progression with the inevitable blips on the radar of life, perhaps a failing grade on a school exam, or the illness of friends and family, or the death of pets, but no single terrifyingly horrible event. Many people who have led such ordinary lives or even charmed lives with every advantage often fall apart when a hurricane, real or metaphorical, descends upon them. Another American Indian writer, Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene) used a violent storm as a metaphor for a horrible family situation in “Every Little Hurricane.”9 Why was Erdrich still able to think and write with such humor? It may be cultural.
While there is little that is laughable in more than 500 years of colonialism of American Indians, the ability to laugh, even in the face of insurmountable difficulties, is useful for survival. Vine Deloria, Jr, is widely acknowledged as the person who raised awareness of the American Indian situation through such publications as Custer Died For Your Sins.10 His works inspired the activism of the American Indian Movement in the late 1960s and the 1970s, and he was instrumental in the founding of American Indian or Native American Studies programs at major U.S. colleges and universities, including the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Arizona. Deloria has written extensively about American Indian humor. In a chapter on the subject in Custer Died for Your Sins, he wrote:
Laughter encompasses the limits of the soul. In humor life is redefined and accepted. Irony and satire provide much keener insights into a group’s collective psyche and values than do years of research.
. . . Indians have found a humorous side of nearly every problem and the experiences of life have in general been so well defined through jokes and stories that they have become a thing unto themselves. . . .
Humor has come to occupy such a prominent place in national Indian affairs that any kind of movement is impossible without it. . . .
The more desperate the problem, the more humor is directed to describe it. Satirical remarks often circumscribe problems so that possible solutions are drawn from the circumstances that would not make sense if presented in other than a humorous form. . . . When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects of life together without letting anybody drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that that people can survive.11
While Erdrich may not have had any one single tragic event in her own life prior to the separation from Dorris (which is not meant to discount the death of adopted son, Abel), she is American Indian of the Anishinaabe community. She would have grown up hearing the metanarratives of tragedy and loss for American Indians: The Trail of Tears, when entire American Indian tribes, notably the Cherokee, were forcefully removed from their homelands east of the Mississippi River and relocated to Oklahoma, and the broken treaties and lies that led to such events as the Minnesota Sioux uprising, which resulted in the largest mass execution in American history presided over by none other than President Abraham Lincoln, and a multitude of other horrific events. Just as African Americans are aware of their history of slavery and repression, American Indians from childhood are taught the stories of tragedy that school history books have largely ignored or elided. Erdrich may have felt that if American Indians could survive and even prosper after 500 years of genocide, then she, as an Indian person, could survive her personal tragedy.
Because books take time to write and to go through the editing process, the publishing date always reflects work done earlier, usually a year or two previously, which means that the bulk of material in this book was likely written after the Erdrich–Dorris separation and before his suicide. One of the main characters in the book, Richard Whiteheart Beads, attempts suicide through carbon monoxide poisoning. He shuts himself in his truck in a closed garage with the motor running, but is distracted, gives up the effort, and leaves his truck running. However, one of his daughters, thinking that her father is going someplace, hides herself behind the pickup seat. Hoping to surprise him, she dies instead of Richard. Later on in the novel, Richard attempts suicide several times on the day that his ex-wife, Rozina, is getting married to another man. Erdrich constructs Richard’s character as a publicly charming, politically aware man who always finds a scapegoat for his own transgressions. He is a selfish, egocentric man. Knowing the personal history of the Erdrich–Dorris relationship, it is tempting to draw parallels between Richard Whiteheart Beads and Michael Dorris. Certainly, Erdrich could not have known that Dorris would succeed in a suicide attempt as Richard ultimately does in the novel, but even the reactions of Rozina, Richard’s wife, seem parallel to Erdrich’s own. Rozina cannot live with Richard, and is filing for divorce when Richard first attempts suicide. Years later, after Richard does ultimately commit suicide, Rozina’s response is withdrawal. She returns to her family home on the reservation, engages in the tradition of bead-working and spends time with her remaining living daughter and other family members, which is also similar to Erdrich’s life after Dorris.
Erdrich could not have predicted that her life would come to resemble the novel she was writing, but years of living with Dorris’s depression and suicidal thoughts and expressions were obviously an influence on her writing. As all creative writing students are told, write what you know, and it would seem that she did, including her construction of the character Richard Whiteheart Beads and his wife Rozina. That the character of Richard was Michael Dorris would not have been obvious to the friends and acquaintances who refused to accept Dorris as the haunted, suicidal man who was often violent with his children and who exerted a controlling influence over his wife and her work. If the Erdrich–Dorris marriage breakup had proceeded without any of the additional drama provided by the children’s accusations of abuse, perhaps the divorce would have been granted, both Erdrich and Dorris would have continued as respected writers apart, and Louise might never have revisited those public claims of undying love and respectful collaboration that had been so much an attribute of their marriage.
For years after Dorris’s death, Erdrich resisted openly discussing not only his suicide, but also the facts of their marriage. Only in 2010 in the interview for Paris Review, did she speak at length on these painful subjects. Interviewer Lisa Halliday asked Erdrich how the experience of writing The Crown of Columbus with Dorris was different from the experiences of writing her other books. Erdich opened up at last, with this:
I’ve not spoken much about what it was like to work with Michael, partly because I feel that there’s something unfair about it. He can’t tell his side of the story. I have everything that we once had together. . . . it’s difficult to set the record straight because it would be my view, the way I see it. Still, he controlled the narrative when he was living. I am weary of all the old leftover assumptions, and what else, really, do people have to go on?
I would have loved for Michael to have had his own life as a writer and not covet my life as a writer. But he couldn’t help himself. So in agreeing to write The Crown of Columbus I really made a deal, at least in my thoughts, that if we wrote this new book together, then we could openly work separately—as we always did in truth, of course.12
Here, then is the answer to that question so many had posed in the past: Did they really collaborate on all the work they published under their own individual names? The answer from Erdrich is “No.” Of course, no writer ever works alone, even if their name appears singly on the cover. Writers do ask other people for advice as a manuscript is produced; sometimes, those people directly read drafts, sometimes not. Sometimes one or more people actively read a draft penciling suggestions and comments in the margins; then the manuscript may go to an agent who makes his or her own editorial comments, and from there to the publisher, where one or more editors do it all again. The ideas, the basic structure of a novel, and the style are uniquely the author’s, but often, the final product is a far cry from the original work. Yet the person who came up with the original idea and wrote down the story is the person whose name appears on the book. Acknowledgement pages in books are full of thanks to many people, and in some cases these thanks run on for three or four pages. None of these people, however, would claim equal collaboration with the author as Dorris did to Erdrich. Here was a man who had talent of his own, yet could not allow his wife credit for her own unique stand-alone ability. Why did Erdrich allow him to take part of the credit that he had earned no more than any other author’s editor? In the interview with Halliday, Erdrich goes on to say,
I wanted to make him happy you know. He was the kind of person whom people want to make happy. People did this all the time, they tried to make him happy, but there was a deep impossibility within him and he couldn’t really be happy. Or he couldn’t be happy alone.13
Erdrich loved this man, so she tried to please him, but it would seem that the more she pleased him, the more he demanded. By all accounts, she was a shy person from her earliest childhood, not outspoken but passive except on the page. Early on in their marriage, she had become hostage to his demands, his rages, and found it difficult to break the cycle. How could she, when they had both publicly announced their undying love and their collaboration on everything they did? She thought that she could “ease” him out of the collaboration part, if not the marriage. She believed that writing one book jointly where both their names appeared on the cover would satisfy him, and then they could both be free to write as individuals. Obviously she felt smothered by his constant attention and, although she does not explicit say so, she resented his claims to her work. She stated,
So I’d had the idea for The Crown of Colombus; I’d done the research and I said, this is the project. We can do it together because you can write your part and I can write mine and both of our names will be on the cover.
. . . I hoped that The Crown of Columbus would be what Michael needed in order to say, Now it is enough, we truly collaborated. Instead, it became the beginning of what he wanted for every book. When he told me he wanted both of our names on every book now, something in me—the writer, I guess—couldn’t bear it any longer and that was the beginning of the long ending. . . . 14
It was at this point that Erdrich moved her writing space from their main house in New Hampshire to the cottage across the road. The Bingo Palace, published in 1994, was likely a book that she had already done most of the work on with Dorris looking over her shoulder, so to speak, and possibly she also did some work on Tales of Burning Love (published in 1996) under Dorris’s scrutiny as well. However, the subjects for her writing projects for the remaining years that they were together (The Blue Jay’s Dance, the story of pregnancy and a child’s first year of life from the point of view of the mother, herself, and the children’s story, Grandmother’s Pigeon) were subjects as distant from Dorris as could have been possible at the time.
Interviewer Halliday probes deeper and Erdrich, rather than withdraw from difficult questions as she had done for the previous 13 years, responded,
Interviewer: Why do you think he wanted and needed so badly to see himself as a writer?
Erdrich: Perhaps because I loved writing so much and he loved me. Perhaps because he was a very good writer. Or perhaps—I don’t say this in a negative or judgmental way, because this is the case with writers whether they admit it or not—Michael also adored everything that went on with the identity. He adored meeting other writers, adored being part of a literary world. He would answer everyone who wrote to him, beautiful letters, every single person. I don’t take much pleasure in being “the writer.”15
In the above, Erdrich is describing the two types of writer, the introvert and the extrovert, and it is easy to decide which was Dorris and which was Erdrich. Some writers, such as Hemingway, are able to closet themselves away to do the solitary work of writing, but only for a set amount of time. They need social interaction and crave the attention that comes with being a successful writer. For them, writing and publishing is a means to the end of getting positive feedback. Dorris was this type.
The other kind of writer prefers solitude, the time they spend alone filling an empty page. For them, writing is an end unto itself, and the attention that comes with successful publication is something that must be endured rather than sought and enjoyed. These people go to book signing parties because they must but sneak glances at the clock to see if enough time has passed so they can leave. Erdrich is this type. Of course, not all writers fall neatly into one category or the other. There are writers who are somewhere in between, and writers who may be introverts part of the time, and extroverts at other times.
A marriage between an extrovert and an introvert can certainly work. Sometimes one fulfills the other, and this may be what Erdrich and Dorris had in the beginning, but as time passed, the extrovert began to assume control. There are gardeners who have set Pampas grass in their yard where it flourished, but then to the gardener’s dismay, the grass self-seeded and began to take over, smothering out all the other plants until it had to be removed before it killed everything else in the garden.
In the Halliday interview, Erdrich says that she allowed Dorris to continue taking over her career. She said,
There were signs from the beginning, but I ignored them or even exhaustedly encouraged them. . . . Actually, I was tired. Love Medicine and Jacklight were published in 1984, and I had a baby. The Beet Queen was published in 1985, and I bore my second daughter that year. What kind of woman can do that? A tired woman who lets her husband do the talking because she has the two best things—the babies and the writing. Yet at some point the talking infected the writing. I looked into the mirror and I saw Michael. I began to write again in secret and put together a novel that I didn’t show him.16
Perhaps that novel was The Antelope Wife.
The reviews for this novel stand in stark contrast to the tepid or even harsh criticism that The Crown of Columbus earned. Writing for The New York Times, reviewer Michiko Kakutani, who had written less than ecstatically about The Crown of Columbus, wrote enthusiastically, but with cautions to readers about The Antelope Wife. Kakutani urges Erdrich’s readers to avoid looking for parallels between Erdrich’s personal life and the plot of The Antelope Wife. Kakutani argues that all writers’ works arise from their own personal experiences, so similarities between the story and the writer’s personal life is inevitable. Kakutani believes that this novel is a “virtuoso” display of Erdrich’s prodigious writing skills, and that is all that needs to be said about the book.17
Erdrich had proved to her readers and to literary critics that she was a talented writer in her own right, that she did not need Dorris’s “collaborative” or editorial efforts, but could do very well without his influence. Her next book, The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse would not come out until 2001, but the three years between these two books would be full, rewarding ones for Erdrich.
1. Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2003), 22.
2. Staff writer, “Wife Claims Dorris Was Suicidal For Years: Only She Knew of His Tormented Secret,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 19, 1997.
3. Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife (New York: HarperFlamingo an imprint of HarperCollins: 1998), 4.
4. Louise Erdrich, Tracks (New York: HarperCollins: 1988), 110.
5. The man in the story sells his pocket watch to buys combs for his lover’s beautiful hair, but she sells her hair to buy a fob for his watch.
6. Lorena L. Stookey, Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 134.
7. Ibid., 15, 20–21, 24, 26, 29, 37. 39, 45, 52–53, 83, 94, 113, 124–25, 134, 139.
8. Erdrich, The Antelope Wife, 79–80.
9. Sherman Alexie, “Every Little Hurricane,” in Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 1.
10. Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1969).
11. Ibid., 146–7, 167.
12. Lisa Halliday, “The Art of Fiction No. 208,” Paris Review No. 195 (Winter, 2010): 158.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 158–59.
15. Ibid., 159.
16. Ibid., 160.
17. Michiko Kakutani, “Antelope Wife: Myths of Redemption Amid a Legacy of Loss,” Book of the Times, The New York Times, March 24, 1998.