98
PARTISAN REVIEW
the prism of perception until each facet gleams with its own special rev–
elations. far more than Dos Passos's trilogy, Morris's narrative displays
and discloses Reagan through a boundless proliferation of genres–
romances, Horatio Alger and Frank Merriwell success stories, adven–
tures, mysteries, poetry, one-act plays, film scripts, documents, samples
of penmanship, drawings, news clippings, movie posters, woodblocks, a
scholar's notes, letters, headlines, examples of typing, diaries, cables,
transcriptions of tape recordings, and invitations to parties. The pho–
tographs are part of the text, not set-aside illustrations of ir. Thirteen
ways of looking at a blackbird? Rather say thirteen times thirteen! To
get at Reagan's simple reality you have to construct a vast web of fictive
complexity. Morris mentions that an early possible title for the book
was
Searching for JlIpiter-an
obscure planer. The fictive narrator sug–
gests the title
to
the actual screenwriter, Philip Dunne. "How so?"
Dunne asks. "Well, it's an attempt
to
fix on a large, diffuse, amorphous
object with a huge gravitational force." That's Reagan. Another genre–
an astronomy lesson. Perhaps Reagan could be seen right side up only
by an astronomer, in a telescope's upside down lens.
Dos Passos sought
to
write novels that would give us political reality.
Morris simply turns this around; through the materials of political real–
ity, he discloses the true fiction that was our president. Did Ronald Rea–
gan dream that he was president? Or did the presidency dream him?
True biography is "informed artifice," Edmund Morris recently
remarked. The artifice Illust be suited
to
its subject. Morris's biography
of Teddy Roosevelt is composed in the form of the traclitional biogra–
phy of sight followed by insight; it is a book driven by curiosity in which
Roosevelt is the most treasured curio. When in
19i1l
Morris was first
approached
to
write the Reagan biography, he was not curious:
If I'd been as curious abour Reagan las about
T.
R.I
in
19X
I,
I might
have written the orthodox biography people were expecting. But it
would have been as unrevealing as any other, because he simply
deflected
scrutiny. Not until I understood a few years later, that he
was
reflectil'e
rather than deflective-i.e., actively reflecting us
rather than himself, did I become intrigued, and felt "that little
click ...which makes the solitude of
~cholarship
tolerable."
Dlitch
is a very American book, and our best portrait of the political
personality in the age of electronic media.
Bill Turque understands AI Core
to
be "one of Washington's
inscrutable men," and his title,
Inventing
AI
Core,
points
to
the dual
