An Encounter with an Interviewer

Mark Twain (1835–1910)
From Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852–1890

Interesting Links

Audio: “Mark Twain’s Interview Tips from Beyond the Grave” (Scott Simon and Calvin Trillin, NPR)

“Mark Twain and George Washington Cable: The ‘Twins of Genius’ Tour” (Library of America)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “An Interview with Mark Twain,” Rudyard Kipling
• “The Recent Tragedy,” James Gordon Bennett
• “Meeting ‘Father Abraham,’” Lois Bryan Adams
• “The Greatest Man in the World,” James Thurber

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Autochrome of Mark Twain, 1908, by British American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966). Published as a frontispiece in Archibald Henderson’s literary biography Mark Twain (London, 1911).

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It is a “pest,” The New York Times insisted in 1873, “an evil that has existed for some years in our midst, and which, we regret to say, is getting constantly worse.” The editors at The Nation condemned it as “a means of getting attention,” a technique “as inefficacious as the revelations of spiritual mediums.” The New York World denounced it as “a modern and American Inquisition.”

They were all complaining about the latest journalistic fad: the interview.

Four years earlier, in 1869, the campaign against interviews had been launched by The Nation:

In short, the “interview,” as at present managed, is generally the joint production of some humbug of a hack politician and another humbug of a newspaper reporter. The one lives by being notorious and the other seeking out notorieties and being “spicy”—by stringing together personalities about them. . . .

When it merely serves to make some politician clumsily ridiculous in the eyes of all discerning people, the interview is bad enough; . . . The lesson that there are limits to people's endurance of printed impudence is one that should be taught the conductors of the press by their own sense of moral responsibility for all the damage done by anything to which they give publicity. It is because “interviewing” helps to establish the curious device of looking on the correspondent, whether interviewer or not, as a person who may be disgusting, to be sure, but who is his own keeper fortunately, and not at all under editorial control, that it is chiefly to be condemned.

There continues to be disagreement among historians over when the interview was “invented.” Some cite James Gordon Bennett's conversation with a brothel owner while he was reporting on the Helen Jewett murder in 1836; others award the honor to Horace Greeley, who transcribed his talk with Brigham Young in 1859. Joseph “Mack” McCullagh, the Washington correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial, probably wrote the earliest journalistic interviews as we now think of the form: first, he recorded former Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens’s criticism of Jefferson Davis in 1867 and he then published Andrew Johnson’s self-serving defense during the impeachment trial the following year. (In the latter case, Johnson himself invited McCullagh to the White House and thus became the first President interviewed by a reporter for publication.) Virtually everyone agrees that the on-the-record interview is an American invention—and one of the nation’s unsung exports. In any event, the traditionalists were swept aside, and by the end of the century interviews were ubiquitous in the press—including many of the magazines and newspapers that had earlier condemned them.

Mark Twain rarely passed up the opportunity to latch onto the latest novelty, and “interviewing” was no exception. In 1869, when he lived in upstate New York, he published in the Buffalo Express a short fictional sketch entitled “The Wild Man Interviewed,” in which a “member of the press” goes west to wrangle an exclusive conversation up with a ape-like man “living in the woods like a wild beast.” In 1874, soon after Twain and his family moved into their new home in Hartford, he wrote a parody, “An Encounter with an Interviewer,” and contributed it to a fundraising volume for the Lotos Club, an arts and literature society that had been founded in 1870 (and that still exists). He reprinted it in two of his collections, Punch, Brothers, Punch! and Other Sketches (1878) and The Stolen White Elephant Etc. (1882). In at least one printing of Punch, Brothers, Punch!, Twain added a postscript to the selection: “I thought I could make this interview as unreliable and incoherent as the average newspaper interview. But that was another of my mistakes.”

The story became a staple of Twain’s speaking engagements, and it was part of the program when he went with George Washington Cable on the “Twins of Genius” tour in 1884. “Mark is on the stage reading (reciting) his ‘Desperate Encounter with an Interviewer,’ and the roars of laughter fall as regularly as a surf,” Cable wrote to his wife during one performance. “I think it’s a great thing to be able to hold my own with so wonderful a platform figure.”

In Europe, Twain’s short piece took on a life of its own. A newspaper in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century referred to the “famous legend” about how Twain thwarted a nosy interviewer; a French critic seven decades later included it in a shortlist of Twain’s best-known works in France. The late Twain scholar Louis J. Budd, intrigued by such remarks, hunted through European books and periodicals and discovered that “the foreign printings of ‘Encounter’ I have managed to find are impressive for their number and spread.”

Many of Twain’s contemporaries who reprinted or discussed the piece assumed it was an account of an actual incident or, at the very least, that it was inspired by his own experiences with interviewers. When he wrote the piece, however, he was not yet the kind of celebrity that might have attracted the journalists practicing this new-fangled method of reporting. Although nearly three hundred interviews with Twain would be published during his career, none of them had yet to occur. As it happens, his first full-fledged interview occurred the month the “Encounter” parody was published. In November 1874, he and his friend J. H. Twitchell, a local minister, got the idea of walking from Hartford to Boston by the old stage road—a trip of more than 100 miles—ending with a dinner hosted by William Dean Howells. The walk seems to have been designed as a publicity stunt, both for Twain’s debut that month in The Atlantic Monthly, which Howells edited, and for Twain’s new play, Colonel Sellers, which had become a surprise hit in New York and would go on to earn him well over $100,000 as it toured the country. The newspapers learned of the adventure and began to report it, but on the second day Twain’s knee began to swell up. Having completed less than forty miles, the pair caught a train at North Ashford to Boston. The celebratory dinner was held anyway, and an enterprising, unnamed Hartford Times journalist scored an interview with Twain about the “feat.”

Twain’s attitude toward interviews and interviewers would change over the remainder of his career. “Mark Twain usually hated them,” writes Mark Scharnhorst, who compiled a collection of 258 Twain interviews. “Often he required interviewers to paraphrase his comments rather than quote him directly because, as a professional author, he preferred to sell his words rather than give them away. . . . Still, Twain understood the utility of interviews for purposes of self-promotion.” He was often disappointed with the results, sometimes bitterly so, and would turn his dealings with journalists into subjects for ridicule. When a St. Louis Dispatch reporter asked him in 1882 if he disliked “the interviewer” as much as he seemed to, Twain responded, “I have never yet met a man who attempted to interview me whose report of the process did not try very hard to make me out an idiot, and did not amply succeed, in my mind, in making him a thorough one.”

Much of the information and several of the sources quoted in the above introduction are gleaned from “Mark Twain’s ‘An Encounter with an Interviewer’: The Height (or Depth) of Nonsense,” Nineteenth-Century Literature (September 2000), by Louis J. Budd (1921–2010), who edited both Library of America volumes collecting Mark Twain’s shorter works.

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The nervous, dapper, “peart” young man took the chair I offered him, and said he was connected with the Daily Thunderstorm, and added,—

“Hoping it's no harm, I've come to interview you.” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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