EM: Oh no, not at all. I knew the method was going to be very controversial, I knew that from the start, and I greatly enjoy the controversy. I think the art of biography does need shaking up.

THC: The question nobody seems to be asking is "What is biography?" Biography is usually a pretty staid genre.

EM: Well, yes, you're right, that's what I meant by [the above answer]. I think biography should take advantage of all these new communicative techniques we've got these days. The technique of the screenplay, sound effects, and computer techniques. Several chapters in Reagan's life were so cinematic that I've actually written them cinematically. Why not? It's the truthful way and the appropriate way to describe that they were episodes almost cinematic in themselves. He remembers them as cinema, so I write them as cinema.

THC: Do you think Dutch will change the way other people think about biography, and lead to other more experimental kinds of biography?

EM: Oh I hope so. Any art form is going to be a dying art form if experimentation doesn't continue. Some of the devices I've used are actually not new but they had been forgotten. For example, the technique of dialogue, of a dialogue chapter, is a Victorian form where two erudite men, say, would have a long conversation that would be written out in chapter form. There's a dialogue that Oscar Wilde wrote, for example, which discusses socialism. But the discussion is conveniently couched as two very articulate men talking. And it's a fascinating form which has fallen into disuse, and I've revived it. I have a whole chapter of dialogue between myself and Philip Dunne, which is a new way of telling the story of Reagan's political radicalization. It comes out in conversation rather than in orthodox biographical style.

THC: What was the impetous for the fictional narrator in Dutch--that you felt you couldn't get at Reagan in another way, or that this was the appropriate way to understand him?

EM: Well, I observed him in the White House so close-up and I had the luxury of being able to write about him in such detail, that I wanted to be able to use the same closeness and vividness for the years when I was not at his side, the seventy years where I was not. And this device enabled me to obseve him with that kind of closeness. The device of an omnipresent spectator of whom Reagan is unaware, but who is very much aware of Ronald Reagan. Somebody called Stanley Fish, who's a professor at Duke University and often writes on scholarly subjects, wrote a piece in the New York Times Book Review 6 weeks ago, just before my book came out, saying that all biography is actually autobiography, in the sense that it always reflects the prejudices and sentimentalities of the biographer...I must say I think [Dutch] is more honest; the narrator actually comes out front.

into Saks...

THC: You spoke about biography being autobiographical. There's a lot in the biography that has a lot to do with you--references to Clare Booth Luce, to Teddy Roosevelt, and the musicality of the text. How much is this also a book of you, and how much is it a book of the United States during this century?

EM: Yes, yes, Reagan was the all-American. Well actually there's not as much of me in it as you'd think. The narrator is rather unlike me, he's mathematical and Germanic, I am neither of those things. Also well-born and elitist, which I am not. The musical part is me--I couldn't help that because I think in terms of music. I only incorporate things like the TR book because it's directly related to how I became Reagan's biographer, and when I do talk about myself it is for structural reasons. And you are absolutely right about Reagan representing all aspects of America. Indeed, what draws me to people like him and Theodore Roosevelt, as an immigrant, is that in studying men like that it's an education for me [about] the actual folk character of my adopted country. The midwest, which seems so banal and blah to most native Americans, to me as an immigrant is very exotic and strange.

THC: In the biography you don't talk about Reagan's children very much at all. Is that indicative of Reagan's treatment of them?

EM: Yes. I paid about as much attention to his children as he paid.