HOW TO RECAPTURE SELECTIVE IvlEMORIES
95
observation ... vividly and honesrly. And alii ask of my reader is
to
accept my presence as unquestionabl y as we accept that of any
truthful storyteller who acts as an intermediary between what he
knows and what we want
to
know.
(I
would rephrase Morris's "truthful storyteller" to "narrative con–
structor of fictive truths," and modulate his final phrase into "what he
has selected for us to know, and what he teaches us
to
want to know.")
When we go to Morris's book itself, my reformulation is already pre–
sent. Let us start with the dust jacket. The title,
Dutch:
A
Memoir of
Ronald Reagan
evokes, first, Reagan's ability to take on another name
and role-not Reagan himself hut the parts he enacted. Morris suggests
that his nickname, his pseudonym, is really himself, a fictive identity for
a player of parts. "Memoir"-the book is not a Morris biography, but
a fiction of remembrance....
Below the title is the striking jacket photo by Pete Souza-reproduced
as a frontispiece. Reagan is hurrying away from us, his face hidden, escap–
ing our inspection. Is he waving "Hello" or "Good-bye"? Does he want
us to follow him? We can't tell. rluid, moving, caught in a balletic posi–
tion, he dances away, all motion; by contrast, the door, the fan window,
the piers, and the shadows are all fixed and geometric.
If
in the book we
are to catch up with him and try ro look him in the face, it cannot be done
directly; he is roo fast, too chameleon. He gives us only his back. But we
must gain insight into him by being as fictive as he is. We must, to see
him, get inside the book which this dust jacket wraps. Whitman said of
Leaves of Grass
that the book is the man; in
Dutch
the man is the book!
Then the blurb.
In
it Morris continues
to
give us fictive cues and
clues. He tells us he had "complete interpretative freedom" in giving us
the inside narrative of the "inscrutable" president and of the characters
in his drama-Uthe book's enormous dramatic personae." The biogra–
pher went on a "pilgrimage"
to
uncover the "mystery" of the president,
as Bunyan progressed toward the "Shining City," Reagan's country of
the blue. But instead of the Shining City, Morris found himself "in an
odd Dantesque reversal of roles....as if I were now the leader rather
than the led." ror thirteen years of research and writing, Morris lived,
he says, "a
doppelganger
life" that issued into "a literary technique" in
which" Morris's biographical mind becomes in effect another character
in the narrative," recording early events in Reagan's life from the same
point of view "as he later lemploys
to
describel ... the great dramas of
Reagan's presidency, and the tragedy of a noble life now darkened by
dementia." Reagan is deemed to be a "character," about whom Morris's
