interviewer often makes a most unfavorable impression by his
inexcusable insistence and even impertinence , funeral proces sions are halted by the interviewer , he appears as an unbidden guest at wedding ceremonies , he rouses from sleep late at night a weary visiting foreigner that he may secure his impressions of
the American press,32 he asks gratuitously for what may have a very considerable commercial value to the person interviewed , and the greater the expert is the person interviewed the more
time he must give the interviewer in order to avoid errors. The interviewer may, indeed, have his own troubles that handi
cap his report. Hemay find that unconsciously to himself he has been the person interviewed rather than the one interviewing.
The person interviewed may be self-conscious and the inter viewer, therefore, be no more successful than is the camera in catching the spirit of the person before it. Henry James once
said , “ What is written aboutme has nothing to do with me,my me. It is only the other person 's equivalent for that mystery ,
whatever it may be. Thereby if you have found anything to say about our apparently blameless little time together, it is your
little affair exclusively," 33— this baffling mystery must always face the interviewer. It is again Henry James who probably best expresses the opinions of persons who object to being interviewed ,
and therefore unconsciously discloses one phase of the difficul
ties that beset the interviewer. An interview granted in regard to his work as Chairman of the American Volunteer Motor Ambu lance Corps is best described in the words of the interviewer : “ ' I can 't put,' Mr. James said , speaking with much considera tion and asking that his punctuation as well as his words should
be noted , 'my devotion and sympathy for the cause of our corps more strongly than in permitting it thus to overcomemy dread of
the assault of the interviewer, whom I have deprecated, all these years, with all the force ofmy preference for saying myself and women visiting American colleges gave an interview to an undergraduate in
a university open only to men . He stated to them his own views in regard to the undesirability of college education for women and then attempted to force their acquiescence in them . The distorted interview was indignantly denied , but truth seldom overtakes error. The entire story may be found in
the Vassar Miscellany News, January 25 , 1919. 32 T . W . Reid , Richard Monckton Milnes, II, 314 -315 .
83 W . H . Rideing,Many Celebrities and a Few Others, p . 335 .
