The Death Of A Native Son

MICHAEL DORRIS AND LOUISE Erdrich were the poster couple of multicultural literature--the best-paid, best-selling, best-reviewed Native American authors of the '80s and '90s. Their books won awards and got sold to Hollywood. She was quiet and beautiful, he was handsome and effusive, and together they charmed just about everyone they met. Even when the marriage went sour in the last few years, their friends couldn't help observing that it seemed to sour with style. How many men, after all, would dedicate a book to an estranged partner, "For Louise who found the song and gave me voice"?

In light of all that, the news of Michael Dorris's suicide in a New Hampshire motel room on April 11 came as an ugly shock. Even friends who had known of the 52-year-old author's depression were surprised. "He was despondent," said Suzan Harjo, a friend of 30 years who last saw Dorris a month ago, "but he never mentioned he had contemplated taking his own life." Even more shocking were reports that the author had been under investigation in Minneapolis, where the family now lives, for sexually abusing one of his children. To those few intimates with whom he discussed the investigation, Dorris denied any guilt but thought that the allegations, if made public, would destroy him and his family. He was convinced, according to his friend Douglas Foster, that suicide would forestall the publicity that would harm his children.

In the week since he died, the different aspects of Michael Dorris's persona seemed to multiply and darken. There was Dorris the optimistic, hardworking writer and champion of Native American issues. This Dorris was also a loving husband and father of six children, three of them adopted by him while he was still single. Then there was the more sinister figure portrayed in the news leaks about the alleged sexual abuse of a young daughter.

There is at least one more Michael Dorris. According to Louise Erdrich, her husband's suicide had nothing to do with charges of sexual abuse. Dorris, she insists, was "suicidal from the second year of our marriage." His public cheerfulness "was only the third floor of a building with a very deep basement." In an interview with NEWSWEEK, she said, "He committed suicide because he was in pain. No one commits suicide to protect their children. Obviously, he needed to believe that. His suicide will be more painful for them to handle than any coming to terms with reality."

Erdrich's description of Dorris's chronic depression astonishes some of his friends. But author Robb Forman Dew, a friend of both Dorris's and Erdrich's, thinks "it makes a lot of sense. Michael wanted to keep his despair private. He was presenting himself as what we all want to be, comfortable and successful. That's an exhausting chore." On at least one occasion he suppressed a key fact about himself. NEWSWEEK has learned that Dorris's own father committed suicide upon returning home from World War II. Michael learned about the suicide when he was in college, yet in a 1989 essay he said his father was killed on "an icy mountain road" in Germany during the war.

The almost-too-good-to-be-true image that Dorris and Erdrich cultivated has always drawn a certain amount of benign gossip. After she won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for her first novel, "Love Medicine," interviewers were surprised to find both Erdrich and Dorris answering the questions, insisting that they wrote together, that he deserved as much credit as she did. The gossip had him pegged as a sort of Svengali, or, worse, an opportunist riding his wife's coattails. After Dorris published his own novel "A Yellow Raft in Blue Water" in 1987 and got glowing reviews, the gossip subsided.