Good Writing Gone Bad
Dear Dinesh,
I am pleased to have the opportunity to discuss this
book with you, although as we both know, the book has already been so widely
discussed that we are already part of a much larger conversation. And while I
suspect we may disagree in some ways in our evaluation of Reagan as president,
and of his legacy, it seems we agree in many ways on Morris' book.
It is almost impossible to start reading
Dutch (which, because of the Random House embargo,
I was able to begin doing only on Friday) without focusing--at least at
first--on Morris' unusual biographical techniques. There has already been a
storm of criticism of his innovations, and I'm sure there will be many readers
who will begin with some hostility toward him on the basis of the mostly
uninformed reports they have read. I have to say that the prospect of reading a
biography that tried to break with the fairly rigid forms of the genre was
appealing to me, as strange as Morris' approach sounded, and I approached this
book eagerly.
The test of an innovation in any kind of writing, but
particularly in nonfiction writing, is what contribution the innovation makes
to our understanding of the subject the author is trying to illuminate. And
there are times in which Morris' quasi-fictional narrator, his film scripts,
his invented encounters, his blurring of the line between fantasy and reality,
and his many other tricks of the trade do offer some interesting points of
entry into Ronald Reagan's elusive inner life. But I have to say that, on the
whole, and like you, I found these devices intrusive, omnipresent, and highly
distracting from what should have been the central task of the book. It's not
just that these techniques make it hard to know what is real and what is made
up, although they do. It's also that they make it very difficult to concentrate
on Reagan and much too easy to concentrate on the made-up cast of characters
flitting around him, improbably preoccupied by him even in the years before he
was important, writing back and forth to each other about their fictional
encounters with him and with each other, telling the story of their own
families in almost as much detail as they talk about Reagan's. I was
particularly disturbed, as a scholar, by the presence of invented footnotes for
the fictional parts of the book. But even without them, there is a surreal
quality to this biography that makes it hard to focus on Morris' real views of
Reagan's personality and place in history--which are also somewhat bizarre
(although more about that later).
Morris is not, of course, the first person to try to
blend fiction and fact. Some very distinguished historians have experimented
with doing so in recent years, some with great success. John Demos, an eminent
historian of early America at Yale, wrote a fascinating book several years ago
called The Unredeemed Captive , about a white woman
in colonial New England who was abducted by Indians and lived much of her life
among them. Demos augmented the known story of this woman with an imagined
story of how she might have viewed her life with the tribe--something for which
no evidence exists. It stirred some controversy, certainly, but it was a
serious, inventive, and in the end I believe successful experiment. My Columbia
colleague Simon Schama's Dead Certainties , also now
several years old, was a deliberate effort to play with the elusive boundary
between fiction and history and to suggest how the two might be fruitfully
joined. That book, too, seemed to me very provocative and interesting.
But Morris' potentially interesting effort to expand
the boundaries of biography seems to have gone out of control. Partly, I
suspect, because Morris is such a good writer--once he started experimenting at
the edges he couldn't help himself from going all the way. Partly, perhaps,
because he was genuinely puzzled by Reagan's apparent opaqueness--although as a
biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, it seems strange that he would be surprised
by a politician giving others little access to his own inner life. (I've spent
much of my scholarly life working on and around Franklin Roosevelt, who is
similarly opaque but has nevertheless been the subject of excellent and
penetrating biographies.) In the end, though, I think Morris' real problem is
that he doesn't understand American politics well enough, and doesn't know
enough American history, to be able to make sense of Reagan in anything but
personal terms--and that in the absence of an accessible personal story he was
left, in effect, with nothing. The result is this hodgepodge of distracting
literary techniques that are only intermittently effective and mostly deeply
distracting from, even destructive to, his principal goal.
After today, I'll try not to talk about this already
overanalyzed aspect of the book and comment, as you have already begun to do,
on what it says about Reagan himself.
Alan Brinkley
