From Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852–1890
In 1889 Rudyard Kipling prefaced an interview with Mark Twain for readers back home in India as only an over-exuberant 23-year-old probably could: “You are a contemptible lot, over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners, and some Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar—no, two cigars—with him, and talked with him for more than two hours!”
Nobody outside of British India had yet heard of Kipling, who had published six (!) story collections, containing 41 new tales, during the previous year. “He was a stranger to me and to all the world,” recalled Twain in later years. “I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any person he had met before — though he did not say it, and I was not expecting that he would.”
It is proof of Kipling’s personal charm that Twain remembered him fondly at all. Mark Scharnhorst has collected and edited a volume of 258 Twain interviews yet notes that “Mark Twain usually hated them.” Before Twain was famous enough to attract the attention of reporters, he wrote a story that was a parody of an interview, which at the time (the early 1870s) was quite the new thing in journalism.
At our Story of the Week site, we present Twain’s parody, “An Encounter with an Interviewer,” with an introduction that explains both when interviewing as a journalistic technique seems to have been “invented” and how Twain’s mockery of it became a staple of his stage appearances.
