Interview: Edmund Morris
By Eric Wittmershaus
In talking with Ronald Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, it's hard not to get the sense of a confident man who's spent a good deal of the past few weeks defending himself.
When asked about the irony of a publicity stop in Berkeley — the city over which Reagan, as governor in 1966, presided during one of the ultimate clashes between University of California, Berkeley, students and authority — Morris went on the defensive.
"I don't find it ironic at all...I'm not his apologist. Should I promote my book only in cities where Reagan is loved?"
And defend himself is precisely what the author of "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" (Random House, $35, 874 pages) has had to do.
He is the one who, with the aid of a much-criticized literary technique of fictionally projecting himself backward into Reagan's past, has had to deal with Reagan loyalists blasting him for calling the former chief executive an airhead.
"I called him an 'apparent airhead,'" Morris correctly points out, though the subject was not even specifically addressed in a recent telephone interview. "The first news leak in the Washington Post dropped that adjective, and that has caused all sorts of trouble.
"The whole point of the book was to show he was anything but an airhead."
And that is just the first in the litany of Morris rebuttals. The writer's defenses against would-be critics can be found in the book's very pages, starting on the ninth page of its prologue, when he issues what could be a pre-emptive strike against critics.
"I'm not a historian," he recounts to Robert Tuttle, the White House director of personnel who helped pursue Morris as Reagan's biographer.
And that's the trouble with "Dutch." Despite having written a brilliant narrative, Morris isn't a historian at all; yet because he's writing the only biography ever authorized by a sitting president, much of his audience expects a straight story. Could the book be anything but contentious?
"I knew from the start it was going to be controversial because it's original," he confirmed. "And originality in this world always creates a violent response."
While Morris' defense against the "airhead" comment is as simple as explaining an out-of-context quotation, he has had a more difficult time answering detractors of his technique, including vaunted New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd — herself guilty of lifting "airhead" out of context.
In her Sept. 29 column, Dowd blasted the book and talked of publisher Random House's efforts to present "Morris' lunacy as virtue." by carefully explaining and lauding his technique on the book's jacket.
Sharpening her claws, Dowd continued, saying Morris has "pioneered the Ally McBeal school of historiography, in which we regularly cut away from the action for wacky out-of-body fantasies."
In the Oct. 4 issue of Time magazine, critic John F. Stacks was one of many who hypothesized Morris had "cut away" so he could fashion a readable biography of a man best known for inward reflection, vacant stares and not remembering.
Morris half backed up this contention, but said something about Reagan necessitated this kind of storytelling.
"I certainly did not want to write a dry book," he said. "Its method grew directly out of Reagan's own way of seeing the world. He was the central character in a lifelong movie, and I could only write about him from a view of a lifelong spectator.
"To refine the metaphor, (Morris needed to be) a projector, projecting the documentary movie of Ronald Reagan's life."
Lost in much of the uproar over Morris' fictional past are the two other "projectors" he creates to tell Reagan's story: columnist Paul Rae and Morris' fictional son, Gavin.
Paul Rae, who Morris describes as the smallest projector "exists to provide humorous commentary." Mostly, Paul is delightful, especially in his oft-cited correspondence with the fictional Morris.
Gavin, however, is a bit trickier. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, during Reagan's governorship of California. There, he helped write the Students for a Democratic Society's Port Huron statement and became actively involved in the riots of the '60s. The reader gets to know Gavin through a series of letters he writes to his fictional father.
Morris says a character of Gavin's age was essential to properly portray then-governor Reagan.
"When I got to the 1960s," he said, "when Reagan became governor and began to deal with student protests, I began to realize that another projector was needed — a smaller projector with a completely different angle — because by then my projector, the narrator, had become impressed with Reagan.
"Another projector was required to project the passionate hostility of young people toward authority figures like Reagan during the '60s and '70s. That projector was Gavin."
Morris' use of different projectors does an excellent job of creating "Ronald Reagan: The Screenplay." In "Dutch," the author has created a formidable (and, at 874 pages, heavy) portrait of one of the late 20th century's tallest political giants. What he hasn't done, though, is properly document his work.
It's hard to separate out what is fact and what is fiction, though Morris maintained it's really quite simple.
"It's all there in the notes," he said. But what he did not say was that the notes, which include extensive references to communications with the fictitious Rae and Gavin, fail to mention these men do not exist.
What's more, the notes are not footnotes, or even end notes, per se. Morris makes no reference to them in the text whatsoever. It's entirely possible for someone to read the whole book before running into the 153-page notes section at the book's end, realizing only then what was missed.
The book is what Dowd referred to as a "Forrest Gump biography," though anyone watching that film needs not be convinced of its fiction. "Dutch," however, has baffled enough of its readers that you would expect Morris to back down just a bit from his staunch defense of his biographical method.
Morris is to be applauded for creating a wonderful, deliberate, accurate and surprisingly readable portrait of our 41st president. It's only too bad he and Random House didn't spend a little more time trying to figure out how to handle it.
Well, there's always paperback.
[This article previously appeared in the Oakland Tribune]
E-mail Eric Wittmershaus at ericw at flakmag dot com.
