Interesting Emendations: Louise Erdrich's "The Painted Drum"

This post marks the first of what I hope will be a series of “Interesting Emendations,” in which I compare articles and stories originally published in The New Yorker with later versions published in books. I find this form of analysis interesting because sometimes it sheds light on the compositional process. Today, I begin with a look at one of my favorite New Yorker short stories, Louise Erdrich’s “The Painted Drum,” which first appeared in the March 3, 2003, issue, and was later published, as chapter two, in Erdrich’s 2005 novel of the same name.

“The Painted Drum” is about an article of American Indian material culture, namely, a large, decorated, painted drum, and the profound effect it has on a woman of partial Ojibwe descent, a specialist in estate sales work, when she encounters it amongst the possessions in an old estate. It’s a fictional first person narrative written so skillfully and realistically that it has the flavor of authentic memoir. The first difference between the magazine version and the book version that you notice is the change from past tense (magazine) to present tense (book). More crucial is the substantive change in the decoration of the drum. In the magazine story, Erdrich describes the drum as follows:

The head of the drum glared out, huge, three feet across at least. The moose that was skinned to make it must have been a giant. Yet there was something delicate about the drum, for it was intricately decorated, with a beaded belt and skirt, hung with tassels of pulled red yarn and sewn tightly all around with small tin cones, ot tinklers. Four broad tabs were spaced equally around the top. Into their indigo tongues, four crosses were set, woven with brass beads. On the face of the drum, at the very center, a small bird was painted, in lighter blue. That was all. But the bird detail, the red flowered skirts, the tinklers, combined with the size of the drum, gave it an unusual sense of both power and sweetness.

Here is the description of the drum in the novel:

The head of the drum glares out, huge, three feet across at least. The buffalo or moose skinned to make it must have been a giant. In spite of its size there is something delicate about the drum, though, for it is intricately decorated, with a beaded belt and skirt, hung with tassels of pulled red yarn and sewn tightly all around with small tin cones, or tinklers. Four broad tabs are spaced equally around the top. Into their beaded tongues of deep indigo four white beaded figures are set. They are abstract but seem to represent a girl, a hand, a cross, a running wolf. On the face of the drum, at the very center, a stripe is painted in yellow. That is all. The figurative detail, the red-flowered skirts, the tinklers, combined with the size of the drum, give it an unusual sense of both power and sweetness.

The two passages are similar, yet they contain significant differences. Note the addition of “buffalo” in the book version as a possible source of the drumhead. Note also the book version’s change of the beadwork from brass-beaded crosses to white-beaded figures that “seem to represent a girl, a hand, a cross, a running wolf.” Of course, the most notable change is in the drum’s painting: in the magazine version, the painting is of a bird; in the book version, it’s of a yellow stripe. I find this change in the painting on the drum very interesting. After all, as is mentioned later in both versions of the story, “A painted drum, especially, is considered a living thing and must be fed as the spirits are fed – with tobacco and a glass of water set nearby, sometimes a plate of food.” In both versions, when the woman (identified as Faye Travers in the novel) mentions the drum to her mother (named Elsie in the novel), her mother asks, “Was it painted?” In the magazine version, Faye replies, “There was a bird. A little blue bird.” In the book version, she replies, “There was a yellow line.” In both versions, Faye’s reply draws the following response from Elsie: “She closed her eyes, pressed two fingers to the space between her eyebrows.” Elsie is then moved to talk “a long time” about the significance of a painted drum in Ojibwe culture.

What accounts for the difference in the painting on the drum in the two versions of the story? Perhaps it’s a matter of The New Yorker’s editorial preference for something a little more specific, a bit more vivid than a yellow stripe? Maybe in the time between the story’s publication in the magazine and its appearance in book form, Erdrich reconsidered her conception of the drum? Later in the novel, she traces the source of the yellow stripe back to Faye’s grandfather, the maker of the drum:

My grandfather put his hand up to test the wind and the sun struck his hand a bright, startling red. He thought of the wolves and of the one that had watched him. He saw pictures. There they were. Little girl. Hand. Wolf. The bowl of reflecting water cut in half by the yellow strip of light would be the design on the head of the drum. All was still in the four directions. He saw the whole thing in his mind.

After you read the novel, it’s difficult to imagine the drum painted in any way other than with the yellow stripe. Even so, that pale blue bird of the original story appeals to me mightily. Both versions are wonderful. I highly recommend them to anyone who is delighted by stories about what Erdrich calls the “afterlife of stuff.”