When we moved onto our farm in Hawaii I found a gem of a book among the
rubble. It was Mark Twain’s book Roughing it In The Sandwich
Islands. What a find. It further enamored me with the genius that was Mark Twain.
This morning upon hitting author-zone.com #amwritingakasthomas, I found a link to Mark Twain. Could I not
follow it? Nope. I did, and found the following essay “Concerning the Interview.”
It's a must-read.
Enjoy!
Thanks to the Mark Twain Foundation and its trustees, the PBS NewsHour
brings you for the first known time in print an essay by the American literary giant on a topic dear to our hearts -- the journalistic interview. In the
course of Twain's career, he was frequently interviewed by reporters. The
10-page handwritten essay has been sitting for more than 40 years in the
archives of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley.
It was written in either 1889 or 1890, a time that coincided with the rise of
"yellow journalism."
“Concerning
the ‘Interview.’”
No
one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers
are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not
be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware
afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of
the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering
village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything
but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not
conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a
cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a
cyclone’s idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it
because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though
disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of
harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he
is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him
is by his intentions, not his works.
The
Interview was not a happy invention . It is perhaps the poorest
of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer
is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. You know by
experience that there is no choice between these disasters. No matter which he
puts in, you will see at a glance that it would have been better if he had put
in the other: not that the other would have been better than this, but merely
that it wouldn’t have been this; and any change must be, and would be, an
improvement, though in reality you know very well it wouldn’t. I may not make
myself clear : if that is so, then I have
made myself clear–a thing which could not be done except by not making myself
clear, since what I am trying to show is what you feel at such a time, not what
you think–for you don’t think; it is not an intellectual operation; it is only
a going around in a confused circle with your head off. You only wish in a dumb
way that you hadn’t done it, though really you don’t know which it is you wish
you hadn’t done, and moreover you don’t care: that is not the point; you simply
wish you hadn’t done it, whichever it is; done what, is a matter of minor importance
and hasn’t anything to do with the case. You get at what I mean? You have felt
that way? Well, that is the way one feels over his interview in print.
Yes,
you are afraid of the interviewer, and that is not an inspiration. You close
your shell; you put yourself on your guard; you try to be colorless; you try to
be crafty, and talk all around a matter without saying anything: and when you
see it in print, it makes you sick to see how well you succeeded. All the time,
at every new change of question, you are alert to detect what it is the
interviewer is driving at now, and circumvent him. Especially if you catch him
trying to trick you into saying humorous things. And in truth that is what he
is always trying to do. He shows it so plainly, works for it so openly and
shamelessly, that his very first effort closes up that reservoir, and his next
one caulks it tight. I do not suppose that a really humorous thing was ever
said to an interviewer since the invention of his uncanny trade. Yet he must
have something “characteristic;” so he invents the humorisms himself, and
interlards them when he writes up his interview. They are always extravagant,
often too wordy, and generally framed in “dialect”–a non-existent and
impossible dialect at that. This treatment has destroyed many a humorist. But
that is no merit in the interviewer, because he didn’t intend to do it.
There
are plenty of reasons why the Interview is a mistake. One is, that the
interviewer never seems to reflect that the wise thing to do, after he has
turned on this and that and the other tap, by a multitude of questions, till he
has found one that flows freely and with interest, would be to confine himself
to that one, and make the best of it, and throw away the emptyings he had
secured before. He doesn’t think of that. He is sure to shut off that stream
with a question about some other matter; and straightway his one poor little
chance of getting something worth the trouble of carrying home is gone, and
gone for good. It would have been better to stick to the thing his man was
interested in talking about, but you would never be able to make him understand
that. He doesn’t know when you are delivering metal from when you are shoveling
out slag, he can’t tell dirt from ducats; it’s all one to him, he puts in
everything you say; then he sees, himself, that it is but green stuff and
wasn’t worth saying, so he tries to mend it by putting in something of his own
which he thinks is ripe, but in fact is rotten. True, he means well, but so
does the cyclone.
Now
his interruptions, his fashion of diverting you from topic to topic, have in a
certain way a very serious effect: they leave you but partly uttered on each
topic. Generally, you have got out just enough of your statement to damage you;
you never get to the place where you meant to explain and justify your
position.
Read by permission of
Richard A. Watson and JPMorgan Chase Bank as trustees of the Mark Twain
Foundation.
P.S. In those days long paragraphs were common. Now they say that readers don't have the patience to follow long verbiage.
What do you think?
