The Case Against: The Interview as Intrusion

Silvester notes that many celebrities have seen themselves as the interview's victims, despising it as an unwarranted intrusion into their lives or feeling that it somehow diminishes them — much as some primitive cultures believe that a photographic portrait steals the subject's soul. He assembles a striking range of hostile voices. V.S. Naipaul felt that some people are "wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves." Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice in Wonderland, is said to have had "a just horror of the interviewer" and never consented to be interviewed. Rudyard Kipling was harsher still: through his wife Caroline's diary we hear him call the interview "immoral," "a crime" and "an assault" that deserved punishment — though, ironically, he had himself once interviewed Mark Twain. H.G. Wells referred to "the interviewing ordeal," and Saul Bellow, who did consent to be interviewed, nonetheless described i …