In essence, so I gather, Clark inserted himself into the report -- something that's journalistically questionable in and of itself -- as a figure in the narrative alongside Superman. The only way that isn't deliberate journalistic fraud is if he's delusional and actually believes he's two people, which is a whole lot scarier.
I'm reminded of Edmund Morris' biography of Ronald Reagan,
Dutch. As with all of Morris' work, it's a gorgeous work of prose, and his scholarship is beyond reproach.
There's just one thing, though.
Morris wrote himself into Reagan's life story as a character, someone who knew Reagan
all the way back and whose life and career intersected with Reagan across the decades.
Morris, of course, wasn't a contemporary of Reagan at all; he wasn't born in the same decade, let alone on the same continent.
There's a reason why Morris did this, however. It was to comment on Reagan's life, the vacuity of it, the shallowness of it. People who had known Reagan for decades admitted that they never really
knew him, and Morris' research never really brought Reagan into focus. By becoming a character in Reagan's life story, by being a viewpoint character basically, Morris' reader could feel the same sense of confusion that Morris, the writer, felt in researching Reagan.
It's a fairly interesting conceit for a biography, and Morris is a gifted enough writer to make it work and it works beautifully, but it's a literary technique he's not repeated. His Teddy Roosevelt biographies are far more conventional, and I'm looking forward to reading the just-released third (and concluding) volume,
Colonel Roosevelt.
