Mark Twain, "Concering the Interview"

Anyone who asks to be granted or submits to the interview will see the truth to Twain's essay. It seems to protest that this is not the case, that there are levels of care, of caress, makes the enterprise sound even worse. It is what it is. A snip:

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.

...

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.

Comments

[David]

Too bad Twain is no longer around, as I would like to ask him more about this.

[Nancy Rommelmann]

Ha!

[Matt Davis]

It's a fascinating essay, and remains relevant of course.

"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."

Yes.

I was very surprised recently with the negative reaction of one interview subject to something I'd written. Of course I've tried to carefully phrase this so as not to identify them...

Oddly it had nothing to do with what I quoted the person as saying, but with the fact that I described what they were eating during the conversation. "You made me look fat," they said, after shouting themselves through a profanity-laced tirade for 20 minutes. Never mind being a "cyclone," sometimes I wonder if an interviewer is simply a Rorschach blot for the subject's rather sad insecurities.

Then again, of course, that's exactly what a cyclone would say.

[Zev]

Interesting the way he absolves the interviewer of all responsibility. He's just a cyclone, a force of nature, can't be blamed or held responsible for the damage he does.