Your United States | Page 6

I am conscious that my sympathy with one particular brand (perhaps not numerous) was at times imperfect. The brand in question, as to which I was amiably cautioned before even leaving the steamer, is usually very young, and as often a girl as a youth. He or she cheerfully introduces himself or herself with a hint that of course it is an awful bore to be interviewed, but he or she has a job to do and he or she must be allowed to do it. Just so! But the point which, in my audacity, I have occasionally permitted to occur to me is this: Is this sort of interviewer capable of doing the job allotted to him? I do not mind slips of reporting, I do not mind a certain agreeable malice (indeed, I reckon to do a bit in that line myself). I do not even mind hasty misrepresentations (for, after all, we are human, and the millennium is still unannounced); but I do object to inefficiency--especially in America, where sundry kinds of efficiency have been carried farther than any efficiency was ever carried before.
[Illustration: THE DOWN-TOWN BROADWAY OF CROWDED SKY-SCRAPERS]
Now this sort of interviewer too often prefaces the operation itself by the remark that he really doesn't know what question to ask you. (Too often I have been tempted to say: "Why not ask me to write the interview for you? It will save you trouble.") Having made this remark, the interviewer usually proceeds to give a sketch of her own career, together with a conspectus of her opinions on everything, a reference to her importance in the interviewing world, and some glimpse of the amount of her earnings. This achieved, she breaks off breathless and reproaches you: "But, my dear man, you aren't saying anything at all. You really must say something." ("My dear man" is the favorite form of address of this sort of interviewer when she happens to be a girl.) Too often I have been tempted to reply: "Cleopatra, or Helen, which of us is being interviewed?" When he has given you a chance to talk, this sort of interviewer listens, helps, corrects, advises, but never makes a note. The result the next morning is the anticipated result. The average newspaper reader gathers that an extremely brilliant young man or woman has held converse with a very commonplace stranger who, being confused in his or her presence, committed a number of absurdities which offered a strong and painful contrast to the cleverness and wisdom of the brilliant youth. This result apparently satisfies the average newspaper reader, but it does not satisfy the expert. Immediately after my first bout with interviewers I was seated at a table in the dining-saloon of the ship with my particular friend and three or four friendly, quiet, modest, rather diffident human beings whom I afterward discovered to be among the best and most experienced newspaper men in New York--not interviewers.
Said one of them:
"Not every interviewer in New York knows how to _write_--how to put a sentence together decently. And there are perhaps a few who don't accurately know the difference between impudence and wit."
A caustic remark, perhaps. But I have noticed that when the variety of interviewing upon which I have just animadverted becomes the topic, quiet, reasonable Americans are apt to drop into causticity.
Said another:
"I was a reporter for twelve years, but I was cured of personalities at an early stage--and by a nigger, too! I had been interviewing a nigger prize-fighter, and I'd made some remarks about the facial characteristics of niggers in general. Some other nigger wrote me a long letter of protest, and it ended like this: 'I've never seen you. But I've seen your portraits, and let me respectfully tell you that _you're_ no Lillian Russell.'"
Some mornings I, too, might have sat down and written, from visual observation, "Let me respectfully tell you that _you're_ no Lillian Russell."
Said a third among my companions:
"No importance whatever is attached to a certain kind of interview in the United States."
Which I found, later, was quite true in theory, but not in practice. Whenever, in that kind of interview, I had been made to say something more acutely absurd and maladroit than usual, my friends who watched over me, and to whom I owe so much that cannot be written, were a little agitated--for about half an hour; in about half an hour the matter had somehow passed from their minds.
"Supposing I refuse to talk to that sort of interviewer?" I asked, at the saloon table.
"The interviews will appear all the same," was the reply.
My subsequent experience contradicted this. On the rare occasions when I refused to be interviewed, what appeared was not an interview, but invective.
Let me not be misunderstood. I have been speaking of only