Whatever may befall thee, it was preordained for thee from everlasting. Whatever happens at all happens as it should.
Marcus Aurelius
‘Princess Diana, she was my rival for the affection of your prince. We were at a dock. Charles had shown a very pointed interest in me. And Princess Diana was driving by in a speed-boat with one of those jaunty hats she wears with a little feather coming up. Charles kind of saluted her but didn’t really want to notice that he and I were becoming very attached. He was looking at my childhood scrapbook, my photographs and things like that. And she was very, very jealous and angry.’
The dreams come when she’s not writing, especially when she’s pregnant. She’s playing ‘First time ever I saw your face’ on the piano and Elvis Presley arrives to hear her. She doesn’t dream when she’s writing but the books are dreams.
A shopkeeper’s daughter is kidnapped on her wedding night, thrown out of a car and walks, her wedding dress turned inside out over her head ‘like an umbrella’, into a small Indian bar. ‘Two bare spike-heeled legs scissored with the ball, slashing lethal arcs.’
A woman visits a dying nun whose hair is like ‘a floss of dandelions’ and tries to grab a ladle from her that the nun once used to pour boiling water into her ears.
A boy, taking the easy way, rather than feed his grandfather, who’s been hollering like Tarzan at God, the traditional remedy for such ailments, bits of Canadian geese, gives him frozen turkey hearts and kills him.
A little girl dressed as St Joseph has a fit and hits the donkey with a mallet during the convent Christmas play.
A man sits in his car on a railway track, waiting to be hit by the next train.
A young Vietnam victim is mourned by a dance, the American flag in the belt of one of the dancers, his coffin covered by a tablecloth edged with blue windmills.
A girl waits by the radio New Year 1960 for the end of the world as promised by Our Lady of Fatima and hears only the Guy Lombardo orchestra.
Princess Di’s rival turns into the shadows of a small hotel room. She wears a dun trouser-suit and she is indeed beautiful, kaolin-faced, dark-haired. It is February 1988 and the hotel is not far from the Convent of the Benedictine Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Monmartre.
‘One of the reasons we get along so well is that we had very similar childhoods, very similiar adolescences. Everything seemed to have a bearing on the other, our lives were so alike. We both felt isolated in our families, in our towns and in our lives. Probably that sense is part of our books.’
Their voices so overlap in talking that afterwards, unless very directly personal, you can’t remember who said what, what person made which particular point and the effect in memory is like Louise Erdrich’s incandescent books where characters and epochs overlay one another like trails of clouds in Midwestern winter sunsets. Michael Dorris is direct, almost teacherly in manner, though in the best sense, helping you forward when you flounder a little, his face still having a very boyish outline. Louise Erdrich’s voice is quiet, mysterious, you feel she has suffered.
Talking to them in the room I sometimes imagined I was in their isolated New England farmhouse where they live with their six children, three of whom Michael Dorris adopted as a single parent when he was a very young man, he having been the first single adoptive male parent in the United States.
‘Some people fall right through the hole in their lives,’ one of Louise Erdrich’s characters says and I feel like that this February. It seems odd that I’ve met these people just now.
‘Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow, we have to play as best we can,’ we are told on a highway, the Canadian border coming up.
‘It’s a fatalism people carry around with them. It’s holding up standards against the odds. You wind up, it’s the very small details that become extremely important because these are the things that are under your control,’ the writers explain. Louise Erdrich was last in London when she studied here – at University College. ‘We do have our colonial aspects.’
They got married just after the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Di. To celebrate the royal wedding in Fargo where they lived there was a party on a double-decker bus at which Louise Erdrich was dressed in sandpaper and all the literati in Fargo went around to everything that was British, like Camelot Dry Cleaner’s, the Empire Bar, the Tunbridge Arms which was a bunch of condominiums.
She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, a small town on the Minnesota–North Dakota border, partly German, partly French, partly Chippewa, both her parents working in the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. He grew up in Kentucky, part Irish, his maternal ancestors being Mannions and McGarrys from the Mayo side of County Roscommon. His family were of ‘the novena-a-day, scapular medal and everything else branch of Catholicism’.
‘Where I grew up, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception at the racetrack they would have a living rosary where the horses run and it was a real honour to be a bead in the living rosary, and especially if you were an Our Father or a Mystery or a Glory Be.’
In the novel published under his name, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, people are forever fleeing families. A mother tells her departing daughter not to mix with ‘private eyes and gangsters’. Seattle, with its avenues of ‘Chinese restaurants and Korean markets’, is an escape from a Montana reservation. A woman fleeing her daughter and mother jumps into a car which turns out to be driven by her cousin. A family hand-clasp is an ‘animal-trap’.
‘We talk about something before writing it, show it after having written it. I tend to show Louise smaller chunks and she shows me slightly larger chunks and the other person goes over it and says this works, this needs expansion, this is not clear, this is dead in the water. And so forth. And it goes back and forth and back and forth to the point where, before we send it out, we read it aloud to each other and agree on every word.’
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water is the story of three women – daughter, mother, grandmother – as told, in turn, by themselves. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water is calmer than the books published under Louise Erdrich’s name, except perhaps Tracks; it is a Flemish triptych.
‘I went so many years without being a writer of fiction,’ Michael Dorris says. ‘I was a teacher. I write academic books. I hate my handwriting. If I can put my writing in front of me on a word-processor it looks pretty and it’s more encouraging.’
Louise Erdrich had until recently always written, in contrast, in long-hand.
‘Recently I’ve come closer to working with a word-processor. I put all the things I’ve written in long-hand on the word-processor, print them out, make notes in long-hand and transfer them back on. I always tend to think writing habits are just habits. Thomas Wolfe wrote on top of the refrigerator, because he was so tall.’
I’d visited Thomas Wolfe’s house two months earlier where, it being the Christmas party, a woman was playing ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ on the piano. It was during this American trip, riding around America on Greyhound buses, that I’d started reading Louise Erdrich’s books and the images I was surrounded with were like images in the books.
A heavy woman straddling on crutches was put on the bus in Knoxville, Tennessee, by a son and a husband. There had been two huge suitcases alongside her outside and she was travelling all the way to her native Iowa City for hospital treatment. ‘You speak American real good,’ she told me. During a thirty-six-hour stop-over at Chicago because of a snowstorm she collapsed and was taken away.
We are stranded in another snowstorm at Rollins, Wyoming, rescued by the American Red Cross, fat women in moon-boots, and put up in the McKinley Memorial Center for the night. I slept on the floor and was woken at dawn by an American ragamuffin.
On Christmas Eve a Cuban man showed me family photographs. From the East Coast he was emigrating with his children who wore almond-coloured coats, whose black hair was lustrous, the girls with magnificent red ribbons, to Sacramento, California. There was no mother in any of the photographs.
A plump girl just stared silently ahead. An orphan since birth she’d come from New York hoping to get a waitressing job in San Francisco.
One of the Greyhound stations I was stranded in, Cheyenne – eating pancakes with blueberry sauce – is one of the stop-overs in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Michael Dorris loved Greyhound buses too. He’d made a long Greyhound bus journey a few years before with three of his children after a visit to New Zealand.
‘In New Zealand, people, I found when we stood in the supermarkets to check out, never spoke to one another and in the States are always chatting. I decided to get on the bus when I got back and go all the way back to New England, which is a ridiculously long time. From Los Angeles to New England in January with fourteen suitcases and three children.’
One of his adoptive children is somewhat retarded, the effects of alcohol the boy’s Indian mother drank when he was in the womb, and since our meeting he’s published a book about this child, The Broken Cord.
‘I magnify and sustain those looks of understanding or compassion or curiosity that fleet across his face, fast as the breeze, unexpected at the voice of God …’
Perhaps it was the darkness in the room, the bleakness even, but we began talking about Catholicism.
‘It’s an inevitable part of the books. We think of ourselves – it keeps changing – we keep thinking of our estrangement. It becomes a metaphor for so much that happens in the lives of our characters. It’s undeniably part of our lives.’
For Michael Dorris growing up ‘it was complicated by all the martyrs that were killed by Indians and to be told how Isaac Jones’s heart was ripped from his body and consumed by an Iroquois who was there and then a nun looking at the class. What did she think was going to happen next? But it was a surviving kind of thing. To be a Catholic was to be a minority, an embattled, surviving attitude that was tough. It had its bizarre aspects. But there was pride in that.’
For Louise Erdrich people who in ‘an undramatic way are terribly faithful in their love for others’ very often turn out to be Catholic.
I was going through a very bad time and they were kind. I typed up an interview afterwards. It wasn’t very good. But then again there’s charity in Indian philosophy as well as Catholic. The Zunis, Cochitis, Navahos have a theory that humans can’t make perfect objects, to try for absolute perfection is an affront to the gods so they always make sure they have an imperfection in any work of art; weaving, pottery.
Before I left them, this couple who seemed almost, in Katherine Mansfield’s phrase, to have effaced themselves so others could live through them ‘in beauty and truth’, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris gave me a piece of Indian weaving.
On the street I was met by a mad-looking boy, a kerchief around his neck, who could have been one of their characters. He had rank but lovely green eyes and I thought of a passage in Love-Medicine where Lipsha Morissey, part Indian, part Irish, loses himself among the dandelions, and I entered that gilded landscape, that surrogate dream, and felt, protean within myself, Indian alcoholics, suicide cases and gawkish men who wandered around Ballinasloe mental hospital when I was a child, just over the border in Roscommon, hats pulled down on their heads like punctured footballs.
Outside, the sun was hot and heavy as a hand on my back. I felt it flow down my arms, out my fingers, arrowing through the ends of the fork into the earth. With every root I prized there was return, as if I was kin to its secret lesson. The touch got stronger as I worked through the grassy afternoon. Uncurling from me like a seed out of the blackness where I was lost, the touch spread. The spiked leaves full of bitter mother’s milk. A buried root. A nuisance people dig up and throw in the sun to wither. A globe of frail seeds that’s indestructible.