What people think of interviews

'The Interview' has two parts. The first, from Christopher Silvester's introduction to 'The Penguin Book of Interviews', looks at what people think of interviews.

The interview was invented a little over 130 years ago, and today it is a normal part of journalism. Opinions about it differ.

• Some people see it as a source of truth, and, at its best, even an art.
• Many celebrities dislike it. They feel it invades their private lives and somehow makes them smaller. Some primitive cultures believed that taking a photograph of someone stole their soul; some celebrities feel the same about interviews. V. S. Naipaul felt that some people are wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves.

Famous writers have hated them. Lewis Carroll, who wrote 'Alice in Wonderland', never gave interviews: he had a 'horror of the interviewer'. Rudyard Kipling called the interview immoral, a crime, an assault. His wife, Caroline, wrote in her diary that their day had been 'wrecked by two reporters from Boston', and Kipling told them a respectable man would never ask for an interview, much less give one. (The irony: Kipling had himself interviewed Mark Twain only a few years before.) H. G. Wells called it an 'ordeal'. Saul Bellow, who gave many interviews, said they felt like thumbprints on his windpipe.

Yet interviews are very useful. Denis Brian wrote that, today, most of what we know about the people of our time comes to us through interviews. So the interviewer holds great power and influence.