Mark Twain: "The interview was not a happy invention."

A hundred years after his death, Mark Twain’s three-volume autobiography will finally be published later this year. It’s pretty much Mark Twain fever everywhere all the time now. Can you feel it? No?!? But I can feel it. Aw, forget it. I give up with you.

They have the fever over at that PBS site, where a previously unpublished Twain essay (screed) called “Concerning the Interview” is online. You have to think Twain sat for some pretty excruciating interviews in his day. An excerpt:

“No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a cyclone’s idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works.”