'Dutch': an Object Lesson for History and Biography

Taken as a profession, history deserves no more respect than any other. Historians haven't figured out how to articulate the values and methods of our discipline so that

ALSO SEE: Join the debate: What lessons does the controversy over the new biography of President Reagan provide for historians? Is it legitimate to create fictional characters within a biography? (The responses)

non-historians are even faintly interested in them. The only brands of history that truly engage the world outside the academy are biography and books about battles and wars -- a small portion of what historians write, but the staple of all "history buffs."

We claim expertise over matters not subject to expertise (like whether Bill Clinton ought to have been impeached) and expose ourselves to ridicule. Fearful of appearing pedantic, we fail to criticize blockbuster movies that make a hash of history. We base museum displays on good scholarship, but duck when politicians and right-wing groups go for the jugular.

To be fair, it's often difficult to know how to respond to the barrage of intellectual flotsam passing for history in the public culture. Journalists use history as a grab bag of stories, paying little attention to schools of thought except to make fun of "revisionists." When one's discipline is so thoroughly mocked, though all the while given such lip service -- there's even a History Channel on television, with an endless stream of cookie-cutter biographies and so-called "military" histories -- the powerful (if ignoble) impulse is to head for the stacks and hunker down.

Enter the phenomenon of Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 1979). What are we to make of his new book, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan? It's tempting to defend any biographer against the dudgeon of such columnists as George Will, Dinesh D'Souza, and Maureen Dowd -- she used her column in The New York Times to trash not just Morris, but also history, historians, and universities "riddled with professors who deny that objectivity is possible." (That "objectivity" has been under fire for a century evidently comes as news to Dowd.)

But it would be a mistake to hang too much on a defense of Morris or his weird and nutty book. Certainly not the practice of writing history.

For as history or as biography, Dutch is above all ludicrous. Everything you've heard is true, and worse. It's not only the merging of real characters with invented ones -- including the now-infamous "older" Morris who supposedly knew Reagan as a young man -- but also the raw emotion of the author (whoever he is), his intrusive narcissism, and the plain silliness of his dramatizations.

In the first chapter, for example, Morris (I think) does a slow cinematic dissolve into his fictional alter ego, a screenwriter who will write the memoir to come. "He" presents the decision to become Reagan's authorized biographer as a bid to counteract "loss, the biographer's torment." He mourns not just "treasures unrecoverable," but also:

"... opportunities unblown, breasts not cupped in my hand, scripts unfilmed and books unfinished, a marriage in ashes, a boy gone underground. Loss of youth, of middle age, of Time itself. Sydney Ann. Gavin. Father."

The lament goes on, with names fabricated to fit the life of the fabricated narrator.

Understandably, Morris grabbed the brass -- or should I say (enviously) golden -- ring. Few of us would be able to resist a $3-million advance to write anything (including a screenplay for South Park), much less a book requiring us to attend sensitive White House meetings, fly on Air Force One, regularly interview the President of the United States, and rub shoulders with powerful people. If Morris is telling the truth, Reagan's people pursued him, not vice versa. What's more, he notes that "I'm not a historian" -- one of the few reliable bits in the book.

But there the defense rests. Dutch's other narrative techniques, dropped more or less randomly into the text, include quotations from fabricated letters, telegrams, and diary entries, facsimiles of real letters, invented debate, authorial memoir, fabricated reminiscences of non-existent people backed up by fabricated footnotes, and much, much more. The memoirist's "I" is ever present, repeatedly wondering about his own importance -- perhaps because Reagan often seemed to forget who Morris was from one meeting to the next. Only with great care can a reader be pretty sure who's supposed to be saying what, and based on which authority.

The book, in short, employs a messy agglomeration of techniques to create a fictionalized memoir pretending to be an imaginatively constructed biography.

So what can those of us engaged in history or biography salvage from this spectacular train wreck of a book? First, Edmund Morris broke the rules and fell in love with his subject. Like a lover, he invested every gesture of his beloved with exceptional significance, and felt hurt when his attentions weren't returned.

All biographers know the temptation. Unlike most political, social, economic, or even cultural histories, historical biography promises the kind of connection to individuals that we enjoy in "real life." To devote years to the life of another person, it helps mightily to like or at least admire the subject.

But if scholars don't keep their distance on the page, they don't produce scholarship. Like a teacher who fell for a student and ignored the alarm bells, Morris stopped caring about distance and wrote an infuriatingly untrustworthy book, a love letter to Ronald Reagan. His biography of Theodore Roosevelt similarly reads like hero worship, reminding us that popular subjects cast a powerful spell, on readers and Pulitzer Prize committees as well as on writers.

Second, purporting to be inside people's heads, and employing the annoying device of cutting chapters into sections of wildly unequal lengths -- a technique found in both Roosevelt and Dutch -- suggests scenes in a life-long screenplay rather than consecutive prose argument. That is no accident. Well-chosen vignettes make few demands on readers and require little explanation, so that the author can avoid entering debates about such historical issues as civil-service reform and the class politics of the Gilded Age.

Third, doing history well -- including historical biography -- is extremely hard work. I sympathize with Morris over the mountain of material he had to absorb, the hundreds of interviews, and the challenge of assembling it into an engaging, coherent narrative. I'm writing a biography of the antiwar minister William Sloane Coffin, Jr. Like many other biographers, especially those of us writing about living figures, I agonize over whether I have a bead on my extroverted subject's "inner life"; over how much my own feelings about class, politics, sex, or religion intrude into my narrative; over whether I am drawing enough larger import from the story of his life.

Those are tall orders, and most of us fail. Often our narrative styles can hold only specialists' attention; we restrict our reach; tell ourselves we aren't "popularizers"; and dream secretly of selling film rights to a studio headed by a one-time history major.

There's nothing wrong with historical novels. I'd give a lot to have written a book as good -- or as popular -- as Gore Vidal's Lincoln or Burr. But such books have integrity: They don't pretend to be anything other than what they are. Dutch does.

The failure of Dutch, moreover, should remind us of the history of doing history. Doing it well is so difficult that, in every generation, many of us abandon it, at least temporarily. I don't mean just popularizers like Morris, but professionals, scholars who opt for the latest methodological fad, whether it's the social psychology of the 1950s, the number-crunching "new social history" of the 1970s, or the postmodern "cultural studies" -- with an occasional dollop of fiction -- in our own decade.

Such blessedly finite waves of writing history have similarities across the decades: a specialized language befitting an "in group"; a cresting excitement promising to recast all history in a new mold; crashing contempt for dimwitted "old-school" skeptics. In the end, as the waves recede, they leave a few memorable books -- and most working historians trying to remember what the fuss was about.

Think of the truly great works of history of the past half-century or so -- and notice how few of them owe their stature to methodological fads. While our lists would surely differ, I'll bet all of them would include books accessible to a general, educated reader who knows no jargon; and all would embed a sophisticated historical argument in a narrative of real people's lives. They are books like E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), books that tell riveting stories, all the while keeping their sights on the big conceptual game. Those are the books that stand, and all of us ought to be aiming to do what they do. History at such a level is so far beyond the skills of most of us that we lose our nerve at one time or another, and follow the siren's call to try the latest fad.

Dutch, then, could turn out to be an object lesson for historians and biographers alike. Not the one that Edmund Morris or his publisher wanted, perhaps, but one that should inspire members of our sometimes faint-hearted profession. If Dutch reminds us to stick to what we do best -- prose narratives about our subjects (and not about ourselves); if it prompts us to refuse to fabricate conversations or characters or events (no matter how tempting) and to exercise a little self-discipline regarding our emotions and fantasies, well then, the book may well have been worth the three million bucks that Random House paid for it.

Warren Goldstein is an associate professor and chair of the department of history at the University of Hartford.

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