Stephen McGinty: Unravelling art of the interview

It is now an integral part of journalism, but, at its genesis, it was treated with contempt and disdain, writes Stephen McGinty

ON THE 14th October, 1892 two gentleman from Boston came to call on Rudyard Kipling, the great chronicler of the British Empire, then at its height. Sadly, they were not welcome, but being newspapermen were ever so versatile.

Their intent was to conduct "an interview" with Mr Kipling, a prospect the author viewed as if he had been approached by ruffians wielding a cudgel. On the doorstep he declared: "Why do I refuse to be interviewed? Because it is immoral. It is a crime, just as much of a crime as an offence against my person, as an assault, and just as much merits punishment. It is cowardly and vile. No respectable man would ask it, much less give it."

His wife Caroline recorded in her diary that the encounter had "wrecked" their day, but the two gentlemen from Boston went off content enough to record his reasons not to be interviewed as an actual interview. Curiously Kipling himself had already perpetrated just such "a crime" four years earlier when he interviewed Mark Twain, a fact which in the heat of the moment he preferred not to recall.

The news that the BBC is planning a year-long season, entitled The Art of the Interview and offering master-classes on the skill by veterans such as Mark Lawson, Huw Edwards and Evan Davis has prompted me to remind the corporation that when it comes to interrogation either by radio or print they as broadcasters are but Johnny-come-latelys, even if they do, perhaps, hold the key to its survival. A number of the BBC's events are scheduled to be open to the public with others broadcast online and are sure to be well worth watching, but it is important to remember that the interview was born on inky pages.

Historians of journalism differ on the date of the interview's birth. There are those who peg it to 1839 when James Gordon Bennett Snr, owner of the New York Herald interviewed President Martin Van Buren, but others argue that as it was only a few scant paragraphs long with practically no actual "quotes", it failed to make the grade.

Instead, the rightful founder was one Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who in August, 1859 sat down in conversation with Brigham Young, founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints and Mormonism. The interview, which included the first use of the Question and Answers format (Q&A) outside of court reporting, was deemed a success with the readers and quickly took off as a regular feature in the American press during the Civil War, which broke out two years later. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term to 1869.

For the next 15 years, the British press looked on sniffily from the sidelines, viewing it as a dangerous American fad. The Daily News of London informed its readers "a portion of the daily newspapers in New York are bringing the profession of journalism into contempt so far as they can, by a kind of toadyism or flunkeyism, which they call ‘interviewing'". While there were those who argued that the origins of the interview lay with Socrates and his philosophical dialogues, others dismissed them as a means of making "fools of great men".

Today when publications agree to copy-approval for interviews they are merely continuing a tradition first suggested by the Liberal politician WE Forster who was the first English public figure to submit to the practice, but agreed only on the condition that: "First no interview should even be published until the proof or the MS (manuscript) has been submitted to the person interviewed for his corrections; and, secondly, the fact that the interview has been read before its publication by the interviewee should never be revealed to the world."

By 1887 the Pall Mall Gazette was a century ahead of OK! and Hello! in running "Celebrity at Home". For newspapers, the special genius of the interview was a means of obtaining for free that which they had previously had to pay in commissioned articles, mainly the thoughts and opinions of great men. "My God," declared Wilson Mizner, who had been pursued by a female interviewer, "am I to be held up for intellectual plunder all the way to my office?"

In print the art of the interview has often been to persuade the subject to open up on their life by elaborating on their own. The most celebrated case of this was when Truman Capote interviewed Marlon Brando for the New Yorker, after which the actor retorted: "The little bastard spent half the night telling me all his problems. I figured the least I could do was tell him a few of mine."

This is an approach not easily permitted in the radio or television interview, the later of which came of age in America in the 1950s with Mike Wallace, and in Britain with James Freeman's stern, staccato-fire questions to his brow-beaten subjects. Yet even the likes of Jeremy Paxman's interrogation of Michael Howard in which he asked the home secretary the same question repeatedly, was almost a mirror of a New York reporter's exchange with President Grant who replied to eight questions, including a final "Good morning" prior to the reporter's departure, with: "I have nothing to say on the subject."

So what is it about the oral interview that allows us, when at its best, to have a view, as if through a smudged window, into a person's interior life? It can be better than the written essay because when we talk from the heart and with sincerity we do so with a natural eloquence. Speech is our primary form of communication, not writing, so there is an immediacy, a truthfulness that comes across, either in print or on television that resonates with the reader or viewer.

In the case of the former I would point to the book-long interview, Salt of the Earth that Pope Benedict XVI gave to the German journalist Peter Seewald while still Cardinal Ratzinger, and, for the latter, Melvyn Bragg's interview with the dying Dennis Potter when the playwright extolled the immediacy of life just as he was leaving it. Yet the explosion of TV channels may yet lead to a rebirth of the interview and the BBC is well placed to achieve this, particularly with Mark Lawson's hour-long insightful but polite interrogations, but ITV has also done well and I am not among those who knock Piers Morgan, who, I thought, did an excellent job with his life stories series.

The problem is that few interviewees actually wish to be honest. If we began on a negative note from Rudyard Kipling we should close on a more understanding attitude from our kinsman, Robert Louis Stevenson, who truly understood the art. When an interviewer from the San Francisco Examiner turned up at his home in Polynesia, in 1893, he greeted him: "Come in and see what there is to be seen, and ask us all sorts of questions. Then run riot with your pen, and when the paper comes, I'll read the article, damn till the air is blue, and everything will be all right."