loving wrong - st. paul & the broken bones
Having pretty much finished the four classes I thought I had (Grit Class is back - but I'm standing my ground on wanting it to be an online class, trying to) this morning, I'm taking a wee break and focusing on my new Louise Erdrich project. There are three editions of Love Medicine where there is changing to the wording and structure of some of the stories - all of the rest of the editions, upon careful inspection, amounted to packaging. There is no significant forward written by any significant author in any of those editions. So the three I physically have are The Three. While my reference library hunts down that magazine version of the cat story, I decided to read the three editions in order.
Straight out of the gate, boom:
 |
| "written it this way" |
If you don't know who Michael Dorris is, the impact of that sentence and its particular wording wouldn't hit you in the face. But it slaps me hard.
There's an almost obscenely perfect line from Erdrich herself in 1997. Asked about the discrepancy between the celebrated marriage everyone thought they had and the marriage they actually inhabited, she said: “We're in the era when every marriage touted as ideal turns out to resemble a pathology report.”
The only novel of hers I didn't like is the one she wrote about a marriage. It made me nauseous in places, I had to force myself through it, and I swear I could feel her forcing herself through the writing of it.
Consequential is not synonymous with beneficial. Nor does acknowledging somebody's presence inside the made thing (art) (children) retroactively justify the toll they took / you paid.
I know the cats are not here yet in the first edition. So when did cats begin to show up? If you haven't read the story, you don't realize that it's all about mating. So. Put the timeline of the various editions next to the Dorris timeline - that is the kind of chore fuckergpt can do:
1984 — Love Medicine, first edition. No “The Island.” And that dedication explicitly names Dorris's “ideas, experiences, and devoted attention” and says Erdrich could not have written the book “this way” without him.
January–February 1991 — “The Island” appears independently in Ms. magazine. That's now verified bibliographically, not guessed. This is Lulu's first-person story of going to Moses Pillager on the island—the material that later gets folded backward into Love Medicine. And importantly, the Ms. text is not identical to what Erdrich subsequently puts into the novel. Chavkin [scholar] specifically compares the two and finds meaningful revision between the 1991 story and 1993 chapter.
And look what else is sitting right there in 1991: Dorris and Erdrich's eldest adopted son, Reynold Abel, dies at 23 after being struck by a car. The family subsequently relocates to Montana amid severe trouble involving another adopted son; they return to New Hampshire in 1993.
(side note if anybody's interested, there is a book and movie version of the adoptions - it's an important story because Michael Dorris is the reason we have the phrase "fetal alcohol syndrome" - in the film, he's played by jimmy smitts, and my favorite author, Louise Erdrich, shows up at the end of the movie, she was his student and she says something almost exactly like "I know this is crazy, but let's get married" - that's why I remember it)
1993 — Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version. “The Island” gets incorporated into the novel, along with three other new chapters and a new section of “The Beads”; Erdrich also resequences and alters existing material. This isn't a reprint with bonus material: scholarship describes it as a substantial rewriting of the 1984 book.
So the sequence is:
1984: I could not have written it this way without Michael Dorris.
↓
1991: Erdrich writes/publishes Lulu's missing history as “The Island.”
↓
1991–93: catastrophic family period, including Abel's death and major upheaval involving the children.
1993: she opens the already-finished Love Medicine and puts Lulu's story into it—while changing other parts of the old book as well.
↓
1994: Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris appears; publicly/intellectually they're still very much presented as a literary partnership.
↓
1994: Sava [other son] sends the threatening/demanding letter that leads Erdrich and Dorris to take him to court.
↓
1995: Erdrich and Dorris separate.
1996: divorce.
1997: Dorris commits suicide.
So “The Island” does not belong to the post-Dorris Erdrich. That's important. It arrives inside the marriage, four years before the separation, during a period when their literary partnership was still publicly active.
But it's also not the 1984 marriage preserved.
It's written seven years after that dedication, during the beginning of what becomes an extraordinarily difficult family period, and then Erdrich takes that story and changes it again before inserting it into the marriage-produced book in 1993.
<giant fucking pin here>
The character she chooses to write back into Love Medicine is Lulu.
Not simply additional plot. Lulu gets a past she did not have in the 1984 textual object. And that past concerns mother, abandonment, institutional removal, language, sexual/kinship connection, and the attempt to locate where one comes from. The Ms. version is actually more explicit about Lulu believing she had turned her back on her mother and needing forgiveness; Erdrich makes that relationship subtler when she absorbs the story into the 1993 novel.
And that's where the cats enter.
Which means the cat trail has unexpectedly landed exactly where your Dorris trail lands: in material Erdrich wrote in 1991 and then deliberately used to reopen and alter the 1984 book in 1993, while the marriage that was “so much a part” of the original book was still intact but the family's history was accumulating weight far beyond the 1984 book.
And it's LULU (I think she's my favorite literary character ever, if I had to pick one), that slinks her way into that shit and onto the page...
It's funny how life keeps working like that for me these days. I was just like "cats, siiigh" and then decided to follow that thought/feeling to wherever my mind took it. I like this Erdrich project so far. The overhaul of my standing classes I also like very much, I think it makes it possible ( not probable but possible ) that a record incoming class of freshmen survive the fact that only one full time English professor exists there. But no matter what I make now came at a very high cost to me as a human being.
"Andy" is the first man encountered in Love Medicine, the first edition. I knew that although I had forgotten his name. What I remember is that's not his real name, and he's got his own book later. In that book, it turns out that what "really" happened is they got married the night they met, the night the woman (June) commits suicide in every version that same night. I ask fuckergpt to confirm dates in a line with the dorris-erdrich marriage. I've read all of these novels at least twice, but I didn't memorize the dates of their publication obviously. When does a CATASTROPHIC MARRIAGE slink its way in? I know for a fact that no edition of Love Medicine includes that. But it does happen, so in which novel and when does it?
1984 — Love Medicine
June + “Andy.” No marriage. Andy is essentially an anonymous mud engineer.
1991 — “The Island,” Ms.
Erdrich begins supplying Lulu with the history absent from the original novel.
1993 — expanded Love Medicine
“The Island” enters Love Medicine, along with substantial revision elsewhere—but June's encounter with Andy still does not become a marriage.
1995 — Erdrich and Dorris separate.
1996 — Tales of Burning Love
Erdrich goes back to the very first scene of her first novel, reveals that anonymous Andy was Jack Mauser, and gives June and Jack something that had never existed before:
a marriage.
1996 — Erdrich and Dorris divorce.
👁 huh
I am two pages into this project and feel like I am uncovering a writing process of continually folding life in. This is what happened in real life / this is what I made out of it. #witchcraft
