The Interview

The text presents several compelling positive arguments for interviews:

1. Supreme Vehicle of Truth: In its highest journalistic execution, an interview serves as an authentic, direct, and unvarnished source of contemporary truth.
2. Art and Communication: It is an indispensable art form through which people communicate their core philosophies and personalities.
3. Denis Brian’s Verdict: The interviewer holds unprecedented power and influence because almost all significant knowledge about major contemporary figures reaches the public through “one man asking questions of another.”

Celebrity writers despise interviews for several psychological reasons:

1. Invasion of Privacy: They view the interview as an aggressive, unwarranted trespass into their intimate personal sanctuary.
2. Sense of Diminishment: They feel that being dissected by interviewers wounds their dignity, resembling primitive folklore where having a portrait made steals a piece of one’s soul.
3. Sensational Distortion: Interviewers often twist words, reducing complex intellectual thoughts into superficial soundbites. Authors like Saul Bellow felt choked, describing interviews as “thumbprints on his windpipe.”

In certain primitive cultures, it is believed that if someone takes a photographic portrait of you, they are essentially stealing a part of your soul. Christopher Silvester uses this anthropological belief to explain why modern celebrities instinctively recoil from intrusive media interviews, feeling that the process depletes their spiritual individuality.

Lewis Carroll: Carroll had a passionate, lifelong horror of being “lionized” (treated with celebrity adulation). He vehemently refused all interview requests, autograph hunters, and admirers, cherishing his quiet anonymity as an Oxford don.

Rudyard Kipling: Kipling condemned the interview in the fiercest moral terms, calling it “immoral, a crime, an assault on the person, and cowardly and vile.” He maintained that no respectable gentleman would ever consent to be interviewed (though he had ironically interviewed Mark Twain years earlier).

Umberto Eco manages his prodigious literary and academic output through his mastery of “interstices”—the small, empty intervals of time that exist in everyone’s daily life. Eco illustrates this by explaining that while an interviewer is taking an elevator up from the ground floor to his third-floor apartment, those sixty seconds represent an empty interstice. Instead of waiting idly, Eco utilizes that brief window to write an article or draft a concept. By capturing and filling these fragmented gaps of time, he achieves extraordinary productivity.

Umberto Eco explicitly considered himself an academic scholar and university professor first, and a novelist only secondarily. He explains:

1. He spent his entire career teaching semiotics at the University of Bologna and participating in academic seminars, not literary pen clubs.
2. He published over forty scholarly, non-fiction treatises on semiotics and philosophy, compared to writing only five novels.
3. He took up fiction writing late in life (at age 50) and wrote novels strictly “on Sundays” as an intellectual relaxation.

While publishers initially predicted The Name of the Rose would fail because modern audiences supposedly demand trivial entertainment, the novel sold over 10 to 15 million copies worldwide. Eco explains:

1. Intellectual Depth: It was a captivating detective mystery that also explored profound medieval history, metaphysics, and theology, satisfying readers who crave challenging literature.
2. Unpredictable Timing: Eco admits that the timing was an inscrutable mystery. Had the novel appeared ten years earlier or ten years later, it might not have resonated. Its runaway success proved that readers are far more intellectually curious than cynical commercial publishers assume.