Novel Route to Discovery of America

For Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, the discovery of a new world began 10 years ago on a dreary, rain-soaked drive through the plains of North Dakota.

Pulling into the little town of Minnewaukan for a break, the two young writers checked out the local library--a basement room--and began thumbing through an old copy of Christopher Columbus’ journal that was gathering dust on a table.

Like millions of Americans, they had the grade-school rap down cold: In 1492, he sailed the ocean blue. The world was round, he came aground and discovered America, too.

But Erdrich and Dorris were also American Indians, and they had another perspective on the explorer whose 500th anniversary will be celebrated next year. For them and thousands of other surviving Indians, Columbus was a killer and a cheat. A man who lusted after gold, swindled trusting natives and became the first slave trader in the New World.

“We became obsessed with him,” says Dorris. “Who was he really? What was he after, and why were there such contradictions in his story? This was a man who started out with a utopian vision and ended up being responsible for thousands of deaths. We wanted to know why.”

The result of their explorations is “The Crown of Columbus” (Harper-Collins, $21.95), an exhilarating novel of risk, redemption and discovery by two of America’s most respected writers. Blending past and present, it is unlike anything ever written about the famous voyager, and it also marks a major change from Dorris’ and Erdrich’s previous works.

Apart from its provocative theme, the book is a bona fide collaboration between two distinct voices--something almost never done in the egocentric world of literary fiction. Dorris and Erdrich have worked actively on each other’s books in the past, swapping ideas and suggestions. But they decided from the start that this novel would carry both of their names.

“The book came to us both, and it never occurred to either of us that we wouldn’t do it together,” says Dorris. “It’s been a real partnership, but I guess the best thing to say is that we’ve always been freely involved in each other’s work, and this is no different.”

So far, the reaction has been mixed and occasionally hostile. Several critics have complained that the new book--fast-paced and filled with humor--is not like their earlier works. Others wonder how two authors could possibly combine on a novel. Like Columbus himself, the couple have learned the perils of risk-taking in a world fixed on old and familiar ways.

Dorris, 45, is best known for “The Broken Cord,” a wrenchingly personal account of his battle to raise an adopted son with fetal alcohol syndrome. He also wrote “A Yellow Raft in Blue Water,” a much-praised novel chronicling three generations of American Indian women.

Erdrich, 36, has written an acclaimed trilogy of novels--”Love Medicine,” “The Beet Queen” and “Tracks”--that crackle with human drama and hypnotic imagery. She is also an accomplished poet and short-story writer, appearing regularly in the New Yorker magazine.

Both authors are of mixed American Indian descent. Dorris, who is part Modoc, grew up on a reservation in Montana and also in Kentucky. Erdrich, part Chippewa, grew up in North Dakota near a Sioux reservation. The two met at Dartmouth University in the mid-1970s, where he directed the Native American studies program and she was a graduate student. They were married in 1981.

Since then, the couple have pursued their writing careers with success. Each has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and has appeared on bestseller lists. It would have been easy to keep producing books in the same vein, yet Dorris and Erdrich wanted to try something new.

“This book will surprise a lot of people,” says Erdrich, relaxing with her husband in a Manhattan hotel suite at the start of a national tour. “I’m not a Columbus scholar, and neither is Michael. But we wanted to raise important questions in this novel.”

Dorris nods, and when he speaks it’s almost a natural extension of his partner’s comments, as if the two are incapable of interrupting each other. Although they are different--Dorris is more outspoken, while Erdrich can be quite shy--they share a deep and obvious bond of affection.

When Erdrich begins a comment about 1492, for example, Dorris glides into the conversation and picks it up smoothly. Less than 20 years from the day Columbus reached land, he notes, most of the Arawak Indians who lived on the islands where he arrived were dead, either from smallpox and other diseases introduced by the Europeans, or through war and enslavement.

The discoverer’s conquest was complete--but he would never be satisfied.

“Columbus couldn’t see what was in front of him,” Dorris says. “Years after the fact, he insisted that he had found a sea route to Japan and China, instead of the New World.

“And that was his real tragedy. He was static. He was stuck in the European world view and kept trying to transform what he found into something else. He died an unhappy man, when in fact he had changed the world forever. He was full of contrasts and contradictions.”

The same could be said about “The Crown of Columbus.”

Although the book revisits European and American Indian history, it is set in present-day America. A meditation on power and betrayal, it is also a thriller and love story with appealing characters. Written in a light, engaging style, it contains a serious, 15-page poem about the troubled explorer who was looking for India but found Indians instead.

In a nutshell, the novel tells the story of two academics who embark on a quest in the Bahamas for the lost journal of Christopher Columbus. The version available today, like the one Dorris and Erdrich read in North Dakota, is an abstract that was written by a friar some 38 years after the admiral’s first voyage. Finding the original journal, which mysteriously disappeared years ago, would shed much light on Columbus’ activities and intentions.

The book turns into an old-fashioned treasure hunt, with clues, false starts and dramatic twists. But the two characters leading the search couldn’t be more different. Vivian Twostar is a savvy American Indian scholar who yearns to bring Columbus down a notch or two and set the record straight. Roger Williams is a pompous English professor writing an epic poem about Columbus to commemorate the 500th anniversary of his first voyage to America.

The two agree on nothing. But somehow, they fall in love and have a child. In the book’s stunning conclusion, they dig up a forgotten gift left by Columbus to the New World that symbolizes the tragedy and missed opportunity of his first encounter with American Indians. At that moment, Vivian ponders her discovery on a small island in the West Indies:

“I pictured myself the center of a compass. To the east, Ireland and Spain. Equidistant to the west, the reservations in New Mexico and Idaho. Water to the north and south. Columbus’ gift lay at the crux, the fulcrum of balance. There were 500 years of questions, too many for any single answer, too much sadness and loss for any repayment.”

“The Crown of Columbus” is a poignant, multilayered book, but in their initial comments many critics have overlooked its rich complexity and symbolism. Indeed, they have focused more on the novelty of Dorris’ and Erdrich’s literary collaboration than on the novel itself.

To the writers, however, working on a book together is hardly a radical notion.

“I think a lot of people work together,” says Dorris. “We’re out of the closet, but others do it, too, and it’s just not acknowledged. There isn’t a vocabulary to describe it in a way that is comfortable . . . and so in describing it, it may seem stranger than it really is.”

More important, he says: “People shouldn’t think we’re the Doublemint Twins, each of us holding the pen at the same angle. This process has to allow for us to be private, yet also together. It’s one of the key requirements.”

Erdrich and her husband sketched out ideas for the book years before they actually began writing it in 1988. At first, the book was to be told in Columbus’ voice, but then the authors hit on the characters of Vivian and Roger. Soon, they were ready to start writing.

Each began with chapters they were most interested in and retreated to separate offices in the New Hampshire farmhouse where they live with their three young daughters. There were no gender barriers, because Dorris and Erdrich have written in male and female voices before.

“We dealt with Roger and Vivian the way we do with a lot of characters, and that is, we picked out what they would choose from a Sears catalogue; we picked out what they would order on a menu,” says Dorris. “Our children got to know them very well, and we had a definite sense of who these people were. We got to know them so we could both write about them.”

Then came the hard part. Dorris and Erdrich would swap computer disks and read what the other had written. The process of rewriting, altering and in some cases eliminating the other’s copy was painful but necessary. There were arguments, sulks and tantrums, but ultimately a meeting of the minds.

When they finally had a manuscript, Dorris and Erdrich went through 17 drafts, honing, rewriting and agreeing on a completed version. But they were still not out of the woods.

“It’s very scary to do something different,” says Dorris. “We’ve both had good fortune in our previous books in terms of reception and critics, and the temptation is always to do the same thing again, the easy temptation. For us the real risk was to treat a serious subject in accessible language with some humor and not make it trivial.”

Critics may quibble with the results, but readers will have the final say. On a rainy night this week, more than 200 of them jammed into a Manhattan bookstore to hear the authors read from their new work. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and when they were done, Dorris and Erdrich were surrounded by well-wishers and autograph-seekers.

As the crowd pressed forward, two customers who had just read the book said it conveyed an irony about Columbus that was new to them. In particular, they recalled a passage that describes the arrival of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria from the viewpoint of American Indians who have gathered on an island shore and suspect nothing.

Up to that point, the authors write, life was a beach for people who rarely fought with each other, wore no clothes, tolerated different religions and had plenty of food:

“Then one particular dawn, there’s a novelty. The sails of three Spanish caravels appear on the horizon of the world. It’s a new entertainment, and just as you’d expect of a people who had never had much to worry about before, they all run down to the shore to say hello. They’ve got no reason to expect it’s not more good news.”