NCERT Book Class 12 English (Flamingo) Prose 7 The Interview

7 The Interview
From the Introduction to The Penguin Book of Interviews edited by
Christopher Silvester.
About the Author
Christopher Silvester (1959) was a student of history at
Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was a reporter for Private Eye for
ten years and has written features for Vanity Fair. Following is
an excerpt taken from his introduction to the Penguin Book of
Interviews, An Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day.

Part I
Since its invention a little over 130 years ago, the interview has
become a commonplace of journalism. Today, almost everybody who
is literate will have read an interview at some point in their lives,
while from the other point of view, several thousand celebrities have
been interviewed over the years, some of them repeatedly. So it is
hardly surprising that opinions of the interview — of its functions,
methods and merits — vary considerably. Some might make quite
extravagant claims for it as being, in its highest form, a source
of truth, and, in its practice, an art. Others, usually celebrities
who see themselves as its victims, might despise the interview as
an unwarranted intrusion into their lives, or feel that it somehow
diminishes them, just as in some primitive cultures it is believed
that if one takes a photographic portrait of somebody then one is
stealing that person’s soul. V. S. Naipaul1 ‘feels that some people are
wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves,’ Lewis Carroll,
the creator of Alice in Wonderland, was said to have had ‘a just
horror of the interviewer’ and he never consented to be interviewed —
It was his horror of being lionized which made him thus repel would
be acquaintances, interviewers, and the persistent petitioners for his
autograph and he would afterwards relate the stories of his success

1. Known as a cosmopolitan writer. In his travel books and in his documentary works he presents his
impressions of the country of his ancestors that is India. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature
in 2001.