In 1904, a young woman named Florence Brooks interviewed Henry James for the New York Herald. James had never given an interview before. “One’s craft, one’s art, is his expression, not one’s person,” he said, stressing that his stories were supposed to leave the reader with questions—questions that he was not disposed to answer in conversation. His distaste for the interview process was such that Brooks herself began to doubt the purpose of their meeting. “Why should the public want him to splash himself, reveal his person on paper?” she wondered in her write-up.
James had been a famous novelist for thirty years. No twenty-first-century writer could avoid an interview for so long. Unless you’re Thomas Pynchon, you’ll be giving interviews after the publication of every book: to newspapers and Web sites, on the radio, in bookshops, and at literary festivals. Not that writers these days are any more pleased about giving interviews than James was. “A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him,” Joyce Carol Oates said in a Washington Post interview earlier this year.
No doubt most of Oates’s contemporaries have felt something similar. But the Post interview was different. Oates was interviewing herself, and she made her fictional interviewer a gossipy, sensationalist hack who wants to know his subject’s most embarrassing moments and complains when her answers aren’t snappy enough to tweet. Oates’s mock interview is her answer to Florence Brooks’s question. The public, and even the interviewer, want the author to reveal herself for the same reasons that we click and click again on the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame: because they—we—are nosy and celebrity obsessed.
Naturally, those doing the interviewing take a rather different view. John Freeman is a former editor of Granta and the author of “How to Read a Novelist.” The book brings together fifty-five of his profiles of novelists, originally published in dozens of newspapers and magazines. Nobel Prize winners and octogenarians appear alongside newer names, such as Jennifer Egan and Kiran Desai. The profiles are short, but Freeman is keen to invest them with meaning, and to distinguish meeting a novelist from “running into a celebrity.”
In this aim, he mostly fails. Freeman sketches the writer’s biography and throws in a few sentences linking life to work. Sometimes he quotes other critics; sometimes he offers his own, reasonably perceptive, criticism. Often we get a description of what the writer happened to be wearing that day. The profiles are notable for Freeman’s absence. He’s there, of course, shaping proceedings, but there’s little sense of a conversational back-and-forth between interviewer and interviewee. As he says in the introduction, this was deliberate: his intention was to make it “easier for a reader to step into the frame and imagine themselves there.” The result is weirdly artificial. Too often the profiles read as if the writer is sitting alone in a restaurant or, sometimes, in her glamorous apartment, addressing occasional comments to the atmosphere.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times shortly after the publication of “How to Read a Novelist,” Freeman said that interviewing novelists in their homes is “obviously” best, “because you get to look at their stuff.” I’m as interested in Peter Carey’s “large, airy Lower Manhattan loft” as the next Carey fan. But I try not to kid myself that it’s an interest any more profound than a fan of Gwyneth Paltrow wanting to know the details of her latest cleanse. The desire to know about writers’ homes is not new; in fact, it predates author interviews by several decades. Literary interviews became popular in the eighteen-eighties, but Richard Altick, a late professor of Victorian literature at Ohio State University, traces the public fascination with writers’ homes at least as far back as the eighteen-forties, when there was a vogue for books describing the houses and landscapes of famous authors, complete with engravings and, later, photographs.
In the early eighteen-nineties, Henry James wrote in his notebook about “this age of advertisement and newspaperism, this age of interviewing.” He was planning a short story about a “man of letters” who is tremendously famous, “yet with whose work … not one of the persons concerned has the smallest acquaintance.” (This is the fear behind Oates’s Washington Post self-interview: that the author interview does not ask the author to talk about her work but, rather, to replace it.) Some sixty years later, a new age of interviewing dawned. The first issue of The Paris Review, published in the spring of 1953, contained a lengthy interview with E. M. Forster that would set the pattern for the magazine’s legendary “Writers at Work” series. But, though the series has become the gold standard for the form, the initial reason behind the Forster interview was financial rather than literary: it was a way to get a famous name on the cover without having to pay for that famous name’s work. In the nineteen-eighties, as newspapers got longer, and again in the aughts, with endless online space to fill, editors of large publications began favoring author interviews for the same reason. Chain bookstores and literary festivals have also found that author interviews a good way to increase sales.
It makes good commercial sense for publishers, journalists, and bookshops to promote author interviews. But these do not explain public interest in such interviews, or why we want our novelists to be celebrities. We have, after all, so many other celebrities to think about—celebrities whose jobs, if they have jobs, make for better stories than sitting alone moving words about on a screen. So why not spare novelists the burden of becoming public figures? Why not let them slope off to write their books in private, for the few souls left who read them?
Ramona Koval is an Australian broadcaster who has made a career interviewing writers, both on radio and at book festivals. For her, the author isn’t a celebrity at all. In the introduction to “Speaking Volumes,” a collection of Koval’s conversations with writers including Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and Jeanette Winterson, she describes herself as a “seeker of wisdom.” When Koval interviews a novelist, she’s interested in nothing less than “how one evaluates a life, the getting of wisdom, facing death, the meaning of love, whether a book ever changed the course of history.” Elsewhere, Koval has said that she only interviews writers about whose work she is “totally passionate”—with the result that her “big questions,” as she calls them, sometimes seem more like flattery than investigation. Some of the best parts of her interviews are those in which she comes at such questions aslant, as in her conversation about jigsaw puzzles with Margaret Drabble, or engineering with Norman Mailer.
By Koval’s reckoning, we read or listen to author interviews for the same reason we read novels: to find out how to live. But where novels are often opaque in their wisdom, declining to tell us how to live as plainly as we might like, the interview offers clarity. There will be questions, there will be answers, and if the answers are a little elliptical—well, the interviewer can keep asking until the matter is resolved. The E. M. Forster Paris Review interview sets the tone for this kind of truth-seeking. “What was the exact function of the long description of the Hindu festival in A Passage to India?” “Would you admit to there being any symbolism in your novels?” Interviewer and novelist collaborate in isolating, condensing, and, finally, spoon-feeding the novel’s meaning to the audience. It’s been a long time since Barthes declared the author dead, but we’re more eager than ever to hear the corpse speak.
As creative-writing courses and online fiction forums swell and it gets easier to self-publish, interest in writers’ routines increases. Anyone who has attended a staged author interview will be familiar with questions from the audience like, What time do you start writing in the morning? Do you write longhand or on a computer? Do you work from a plan or make it up as you go along? As the series title “Writers at Work” suggests, the Paris Review interviews have always concentrated on this aspect of their subjects’ lives, asking as much about writing routine and process as about literary form or subject. What people really want to know is what it is that the writer does that enables her to transform ordinary words—the same ones non-writers use all day, every day—into art. Everyone has a book in them, the saying goes—not a sculpture or an arabesque. If you, like Haruki Murakami, could rise at 4 A.M. every day and write for five or six hours straight, perhaps you too could write “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” (On the other hand, the knowledge—as revealed in Mason Currey’s recent book, “Daily Rituals”—that Patricia Highsmith loved her pet snails so much that she once went to a party with a hundred in her handbag might reassure you that you’d rather be sane than a novelist.)
For the most part, novelists submit to interviews good-humoredly enough, pretending not to notice the demands that interviews make of them, or the fact that interviews undermine as much as validate their work. But alongside the history of traditional author interviews, smoothly unfolding in the past hundred and thirty years, runs a seam of fictional interviews in which writers probe and mock and complain about the form. In November, Granta published “Dead Interviews,” in which living writers interview famous dead people. Cynthia Ozick takes tea with Henry James, Rebecca Miller visits the Marquis de Sade in the Bastille, and so on. The interviewers are often ignorant or crass, and the interviewees are puzzled, evasive, or angry—as if the live writers are using dead ones to say what they’ve been suppressing for years.
Nor is Joyce Carol Oates’s Post interview the only instance of a writer complaining about interviews through interviewing herself. The front page of the second issue of The New York Review of Books, which appeared in June, 1963, carried an interview with the critic Edmund Wilson, by Edmund Wilson. The headline was “Every Man His Own Eckermann”—a reference to Johann Peter Eckermann, whose published conversations with Goethe are a kind of author-interview prototype. “The Visitor” (Wilson’s interviewer figure) asks Wilson to “contribute some opinions” about art and music. “Gladly: I know nothing whatever about them,” says Wilson, before holding forth for several paragraphs.
To mark the magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Gore Vidal wrote a sequel, under the title “Every Eckermann His Own Man.” Here, the Visitor returns to interview Eckermann himself—whose attitude toward interviewing is resigned. “In a thousand years no one will know who wrote what or why or if at all,” he predicts. “So let’s keep those questions moving right along.”
Hannah Rosefield works for the British Library and is an editor at Review 31.
Photograph of Toni Morrison by Alberto Bernasconi/LUZphoto/Redux.
