Edmund Morris's four-story townhouse stands on a quiet block in the Capitol Hill section of Washington, D.C., an apt location for a writer whose biographies depict two of America's most powerful and popular presidents. Morris's first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 and garnered the former advertising copywriter an invitation to become the official biographer of a sitting president. The long-awaited Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, just published by Random House, took Morris 14 years to complete and has already whipped up a storm of controversy.

The 59-year-old author is somewhat shell-shocked on this rainy Tuesday morning. His phone has been ringing off the hook since the previous Saturday (Sept. 18), when the New York Times ran a front-page article about the unusual narrative device he employs in Dutch. Because of a first-serial sale to Newsday, Random House circulated advance copies only to publications willing to sign a confidentiality agreement stipulating that no coverage would run before the book's publication on September 30. (PW's Forecast department, whose reviews appear prior to publication, did not receive a copy.) But interest in Morris's much-delayed work, sold to Random in 1985 for a $3-million advance, was so intense that it seems obvious in retrospect that some enterprising journalist -- the Times's Doreen Carvajal, as it happened -- would get hold of the text and break the story early.

What she reported was unusual enough to trigger an avalanche of subsequent media attention. In Dutch, Morris has invented a first-person narrator, born in 1912, who meets Ronald Reagan in 1926 and follows his career over the subsequent decades. Even more boldly, Morris -- himself born in Kenya in 1940 -- grafts his own life onto the narrator's in later years, his firsthand observations of a sitting president in the 1980s thus forming a seamless whole with the comments of his imaginary alter-ego on Reagan's early years. This blending of fictional and nonfictional material, as evidenced by remarks reported in Carvajal's article, makes many traditional historians deeply uneasy.

"I've known since I first got the idea that this was going to cause burst blood vessels in academe," says Morris. "I don't care at all. Biography is an art that needs new thinking and new techniques; I welcome the controversy." Though slight of build and soft in tone, the writer is also confident, at times even a trifle self-important about his work; he articulately defends his controversial methodology with only an occasional note of defensiveness. He was initially upset that the Times jumped pub date, he admits, but he found Carvajal's article "fair" and concludes that "as it panned out, it was excellent publicity."

"The device [of the invented narrator] grew out of my longing to be as intimately associated with Reagan in the past as I was in the present," Morris explains. "When I began writing, after he left the White House in January 1989, I struggled for about two years with an orthodox biographical style. He just kept evading me. I had the insuperable problem of reconciling my close-up observations of him as president, when I could look at his fingernails and clothes and watch the expression on his face when he spoke, with the fact that I was not there observing him closely during his early life. When I hit on this device in 1992, it just seized me, it felt supremely right, and what feels good in one's heart is usually sincere writing."

Morris's first-person narrator is not the only invented character in Dutch, which also includes impassioned letters written by the narrator's son Gavin, a student revolutionary, and gossipy ones penned by Paul Rae, an imaginary syndicated columnist who gets a footnote ("PR to author, July 13, 1927") that will undoubtedly burst more academic blood vessels, since it "documents" a letter from someone who d sn't exist to someone who would not be born for 13 years.

"There is such a thing as a sense of humor in a biography," comments Morris of the footnote. "Paul is another commentator, and the reason I used the device of multiple subsidiary narrators is that I felt Ronald Reagan, like most leaders of nations, is a very large figure about whom many points of view are possible. One of the weaknesses of biography as an art is that the biographer tends to restrict himself to only one point of view. I myself, rather like the narrator of this book, came to admire Reagan slowly and gradually but eventually wholeheartedly. However, throughout his life he's had people who passionately detested him and what he stood for. Therefore I created the character of Gavin to express the genuine hatred and fear that young people felt in the 1960s; it's a view that has to be included in the biography. Paul Rae interjects a note of cynical, dishy humor."

Along with multiple points of view, Morris employs a multitude of styles. At one point, the text becomes a documentary film script, complete with camera angles and sound effects. Reagan's life-threatening attack of viral pneumonia in 1947, his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the premature birth and death of his daughter with first wife Jane Wyman, and the couple's break-up are chronicled in the form of "Four Short [Movie] Scenarios." Morris reproduces interviews with various people in question-and-answer format, and in the chapter "Album Leaves" he reprints excerpts from notes he took during 1987. Although he winces at the term "postmodern biography," the writer argues that these unconventional formats were as necessary as the invented narrator.

"Ronald Reagan is a man who resisted traditional analysis and traditional narrative. Being by nature an actor, his life is a series of performances: sports broadcaster, screen actor, Army bureaucrat, corporate spokesman, governor, all the rest. In between careers, Reagan was completely opaque and empty. My biographical method grew out of the character of this man. Insofar as he was a creature of the cinema, I wrote cinematically. Insofar as he was a hard politician in the late 1960s, I wrote some hard political chapters. By the time of 'Album Leaves,' the presidency is winding down, Reagan is becoming old, and the reader is becoming tired. There is always a point in a long book where you need to develop a galloping momentum toward the end; you can't maintain an exhaustive, slow pace. The book needed to be accelerated, and I conceived of the idea of album leaves to convey the multifaceted nature of presidential life, with things coming at you from all directions."

This impressionistic approach is in part an effort to avoid over-analyzing his subject, says Morris. "All people are au fond fundamentally mysterious, and I don't like biographers who suck on their pipes and explain everything for us: 'I, Mr. Biographer, have worked out this man to my entire satisfaction; this is the truth about him.' I always find that irritating, because I know they're faking it -- Leon Edel being the prime example, after five volumes on Henry James in which he spends most of his time telling us how well he understands Henry James!"

Citizenship Lessons

Morris is no particular fan of conventional biography, nor d s he have the academic background of most conventional biographers. He did go to college -- two, in fact: Rhodes and Natal Universities, both in South Africa -- but instead of getting a graduate degree he "bummed around, became a nightclub photographer, wrote catalogue copy for a menswear store" before heading to London in the mid-1960s en route to the United States. "Growing up in Africa I felt deprived of the real world," he explains about his departure. "I was there on the equator looking at these stupid thorn trees, while all the books being written, all the movies being made, were being done in Britain and America; that's where life was happening."

"I've wanted to live in America since I discovered Tom Sawyer at age 10. It always seemed to me a place where if you had any talent, chances are it would be rewarded. But when I came here, in 1968, everything was falling apart; the whole country was poisoned with self-doubt about the American way of life. That lasted right through the 1970s and climaxed with the malaise of Jimmy Carter. Then when Reagan was elected, almost literally overnight the national mood changed. He rescued us from a really bad period, and I think he deserves historical credit for that. That's why the lifeguard is the biggest symbol in the book." (Student Dutch Reagan held a summer job as a lifeguard for several years, and Morris refers to his subject in the book's closing paragraphs as "the old Lifeguard.")

His biography of Theodore Roosevelt, he realizes with hindsight, was an attempt by a recent immigrant "to understand America through the personality of this quintessentially American person; it was a self-education." It was also a voyage of self-discovery for the author, who considered his wife, an English teacher when they met, to be the scholar in the family. "I encouraged Sylvia to give up teaching and write biographies; it never occurred to me that I might do it too. [Sylvia Jukes Morris is the author of books about Edith Kermit Roosevelt and Clare Boothe Luce.] I wrote a screenplay about Roosevelt, which was bought by a producer who never managed to make a movie. Then my agent, Ann Elmo, said, 'Since you've done all this work, why don't you write a short, popular biography?' ''

Elmo sold the idea to Coward, McCann & Geoghegan for $7000. (Georges Borchardt handled the auction of Dutch; Morris is currently represented by Andrew Wylie.) The next thing Morris knew, his "short, popular" biography had turned into a massive project. "I discovered that I loved research and scholarly burrowing; it just came naturally. As soon as the book began to develop gravitas, I saw that it was going to be a trilogy: the first volume ending with a cliffhanger as he gets the news that he's going to be president; the second the presidential years; then the final 10 years." It seems only appropriate that Morris became a U.S. citizen in 1979, the year The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt was published.

His adopted country welcomed the book with critical acclaim, a healthy run on the bestseller lists and finally the Pulitzer -- nice ways to encourage someone embarked on a three-volume marathon. Morris had written two-thirds of the second Roosevelt volume, Theodore Rex, when he agreed to become Ronald Reagan's official biographer. "It was an extremely difficult, painful decision. I had to make a conscious decision not to think about TR anymore, not to look at the manuscript, because to put aside something living and growing was awful. But Reagan was irresistible. This was a big moral drama being played out, this was history, and I felt I should be observing it and writing about it."

As for the personal qualities that draw him to a particular subject, Morris can't say exactly what they are. "It's a mystery. Reagan and Roosevelt had superficial similarities -- their charm, their use of humor, their personal sweetness, their physicality -- but they were totally different spiritually, culturally and intellectually.... I wouldn't write about some people, Mozart, for example, because I'm simply soppy about him. I think it's dangerous to write about somebody one loves, and extremely dangerous to write about somebody one hates." He'd like to write "something short and elegant" someday, Morris remarks, "but the subject determines the proportions." At the moment, he's happily re-immersed in the epic tale of Theodore Rex -- "in which there is no vestige of a narrator," he notes with a sardonic twinkle in his eye. "The personality of the author is excluded to an almost pathological degree!"