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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Edmund Morris has conceived the life of Ronald Reagan as a movie. And it's a bomb.
Oct 7, 1999 | I was sitting at my desk in the anteroom outside the office of Bob Loomis, the famous Random House editor. It was the summer of 1995 -- an unusually hot summer -- and after a 10-year wait, Edmund Morris had finally delivered the opening pages of his biography of Ronald Reagan. "Edmund," I heard Bob cooing into the telephone. "It's brilliant ... Yes, really: absolutely brilliant! I always knew you would pull it off."
I knew how nervous the silence of Edmund's word processor had made my boss over the previous decade. Three million dollars of Random House's money was riding on this project, and because of the unusual wording of his contract, Edmund was entitled to every penny of it even before he delivered a single word. Until a few days earlier, we had had no idea whether he would be able to write anything at all. I waited a few minutes to disguise the obviousness of my eavesdropping; then I entered Bob's office, eager to share in his relief.
"So," I said, "Edmund has finally done something wonderful."
Bob was silent for a moment, staring glumly at the pages stacked in front of him. "No," he replied. "It's unreadable. A clip job punctuated by hallucinations. It's the strangest thing I've ever read. But if he can just keep writing -- and we don't tell anyone else how bad it is -- we can still put an elegant cover on it. And pray that it sells enough to earn back half of his advance."
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Except for a couple of facts I've cribbed from the public record, like the amount of Morris' compensation, I have no idea whether anything in the preceding paragraphs is true. It certainly might have happened that way. But I never worked for Loomis, and I never spoke to him about "Dutch," although I did meet him once at a dinner party in the Hamptons. However -- contrary to the spin that Random House has tried to put on his work -- the technique I have employed is actually far more factually based than the "literary device" that Morris invented and Loomis, who really was his editor, inexplicably acquiesced in. For reasons comprehensible only to them, Morris, as nearly everyone knows by now, has repeatedly inserted a fictional version of himself (as well as a fictitious son from the '60s) into the first two-thirds of this endless tome. According to his editor, this method is designed to enhance the author's intimacy with his subject.
But in reality, these invented characters do nothing but confound the reader. They flaunt Morris' narcissism, emphasize his ignorance of the '60s idiom, destroy any semblance of narrative and make it impossible to distinguish between fact and fiction. Apparently Morris encountered writer's block after he realized he had nothing interesting to say about his subject, even though he had been granted unprecedented access to the president and practically all of his closest associates. But his solution -- the creation of a fictitious alter ego whose exploits read like a series of out-
