Interviewed by Lisa Halliday
When Louise Erdrich published her first story, “Saint Marie,” in 1984, she received two letters in response: one from an outraged priest and one from an admiring Philip Roth, who would later call her Plague of Doves a “dazzling masterpiece.” Few would disagree; since its publication in 2009, the novel has helped distinguish Erdrich, the author of twelve previous novels, as perhaps the leading writer of the “Native American Renaissance” of the last quarter century. In her engrossing Art of Fiction interview, an excerpt of which appears below, Erdrich describes her early life in Wahpeton, North Dakota; her matriculation at Dartmouth College as a member of its first coed class; her tumultuous marriage to her editor and agent, the late Michael Dorris; and the difficulty of balancing writing, a small business, and motherhood.
INTERVIEWER
What was it like to leave Wahpeton for Dartmouth?
ERDRICH
My father, rightly, picked out a paragraph in The Plague of Doves as a somewhat autobiographical piece of the book. Evelina leaves for college and at their part ing her parents give her a love-filled stare that is devastating and sustaining. It is an emotion they’ve never before been able to express without great awkwardness and pain. Now that she’s leaving, that love beams out in an intense form.
As the eldest child, I often felt that I belonged more to my parents’ generation than to my own. In the beginning of the book, Evelina is always scheming to watch television. My parents didn’t let us watch much television. Dad had us cover our eyes when the commercials came on. He didn’t want us to nurse any unnecessary desires and succumb to capitalism. Shakespeare’s history plays and The Three Stooges were major influences.
INTERVIEWER
What was Dartmouth like?
ERDRICH
For one thing, the ratio of men to women was nine to one. And I was quite shy, so meeting people was painful. I’d be at a party and because I was so quiet, someone would say, You’re stoned, aren’t you, Karen? (My name was Karen then.) But I was only rarely stoned, just shy.
Recently I read a book by Charles Eastman, one of the first Native American physicians in Dakota, about going to Dartmouth. He described exactly how I felt: like I was being torn away. And yet, I wanted to go, I wanted to get away. Sinclair Lewis knew about the crazed feeling that you get when people think you’re a pleasant person. You get all this praise for your good behavior but inside you’re seething. I was fairly dutiful, and I felt that way. I’ve always loved that line from Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation”: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” In Wahpeton I was a graveyard-shift waitress who wanted to destroy my customers.
At Dartmouth, I was awkward and suspicious. I was in the first year of the Native American program. I felt comfortable with Chippewas and people from the Turtle Mountains, and I felt comfortable with Dakotas because Wahpeton is part of the Dakota reservation and I knew many Dakota people. It took me a while to get to know people from other tribes. People assume there is just one sort of Native experience. No. Do the Irish immediately feel comfortable with the Chinese? I was intimidated by the mighty Mohawks; it took me a long time to get to know my serene and beautiful Navajo roommate. Certainly I didn’t understand the non-Indians, the people who came from East Coast backgrounds. Until then, I had met three African American people in my entire life. I had never met an East Indian person, a Jew, a Baptist, a Muslim. I hadn’t left Wahpeton so I only knew a peculiar Wahpeton mixture of people, all smashed and molded into a similar shape by small-town life. I don’t have a thick skin, and I especially didn’t then. I obsessed over everything people said, ran it over forever in my mind. I still do that, but it’s better now.
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INTERVIEWER
Do you revise already-published work?
ERDRICH
At every opportunity. Usually, I add chapters that I have written too late to include in the original. Or I try to improve the Ojibwe language used in the book. As I learn more or I consult my teachers, I learn how much I don’t know. Ojibwe is something I’ll be a lifelong failure at—it is my windmill. I’ve changed Love Medicine quite a lot, and I wanted to reviseThe Blue Jay’s Dance. For one thing I wanted to take out the recipes. Don’t try the lemon-meringue pie, it doesn’t work. I’ve received letters. I can’t wait to change Four Souls. There are some big mistakes in that.
INTERVIEWER
Like what?
ERDRICH
I’m not saying; it is absurd and filthy—and this is a family publication. But I also feel the ending is too self-consciously poetic, maybe sentimental. I wouldn’t end it that way now. I am engaged these days in rewriting The Antelope Wifesubstantially—I always had a feeling it began well and got hijacked.
INTERVIEWER
Many of the books are hijacked by a child in trouble.
ERDRICH
When I had to go on my first book tour—those are the lowest points in my life, the times just before a book tour, when I have to leave my children—I was sitting on a plane next to a psychiatrist. I said to her, “I’ve just written this book and it has another abandoned child in it. Another loveless person abandons another child in the beginning. What is it about abandonment?” This psychiatrist, who had a deep, scratchy voice, said, “My dear, we are all abandoned.”
Abandonment is in all the books: the terror of having a bad mother or being a bad mother, or just a neglectful mother; letting your child run around in a T-shirt longer than her shorts.
INTERVIEWER
Every summer you drive several hours north to visit the Turtle Mountains, sometimes also Lake of the Woods. Why?
ERDRICH
Actually, I do this all year. These places are home for me. And I like to travel. Driving takes hold of the left brain and then the right brain is freed—that’s what some writer friends and I have theorized. But I can’t always stop when I get an idea. It depends on the road—North Dakota, no traffic. When I’m driving on a very empty stretch of road I do write with one hand. It’s hardly legible, but still, you don’t want to have to stop every time.
Of course, if you have a child along, then you do have to stop. By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. I hate to pigeonhole myself as a writer, but being a female and a mother and a Native American are important aspects of my work, and even more than being mixed blood or Native, it’s difficult to be a mother and a writer.
INTERVIEWER
Because of the demands on your time?
ERDRICH
No, and it’s not because of hormones or pregnancies. It’s because you’re always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way. You are alerted to any danger to your child, and by extension you become afraid of anybody getting hurt. This becomes the most powerful thing to you; it’s instinctual. Either you end up writing about terrible things happening to children—as if you could ward them off simply by writing about them—or you tie things up in easily opened packages, or you pull your punches as a writer. All deadfalls to watch for.
Having children also makes it difficult to get out of the house. With a child you certainly can’t be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can’t write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one’s inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I’d have written with less fervor; I wouldn’t understand life in the same way. I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I’d have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.
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