I recently asked a question of some of the KR editors, and now I’m interested in a wider take. The issue is literary interviews and where they belong. We’ve featured them occasionally in The Kenyon Review for many years. In fact, I have conducted one myself with Ian McEwan which will appear in our summer issue next month. And therein lies the dilemma.
I actually interviewed McEwan, a genial, wonderfully interesting man, in New York last November. He was about to receive the KR Award for Literary Achievement, and we hunkered down in the studios of Bloomberg News to chat beforehand. An audio version will be available for podcast download at kenyonreview.org fairly soon. But transcribing an interview, proofing and editing it, and so on, not to mention getting it ultimately into print, takes considerable time. Is it worth the wait, or should we restrict interviews to the website, either in print or audio, because we can post there more speedily?
There’s no question that many readers love these interviews. And some magazines have made them a signature item, most famously of course The Paris Review. I wouldn’t want to do away with them entirely.
So first there’s the issue of timing: does it matter that Ian McEwan actually held this conversation with me more than six months before it appears in print? On the surface I think not. There’s nothing particularly timely about his comments, nothing that seems dated or irrelevant after a few months. Our discussion, after all, is mostly about his art, not about politics or weather.
But if timeliness isn’t an issue, repetition may be. I’m not saying that Ian McEwan wasn’t sincere or fully engaged in speaking with me–I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. But today there are so many interviews of this sort. Believe it or not, author interviews were something of a novelty when Plimpton and Matthiessen began to do them in a serious way back in the 50s. Before then they had mostly been more gossipy, newsy, or, to use a wonderful new word, snarky.
These days, however, well known authors are interviewed at every turn, unless they run for cover like Thomas Pynchon or J. D. Salinger. Such public performances are a necessity of the book tour, of various awards, of pestering by students, friends and strangers. As a result, I sometimes sense as I read an interview that the author is recycling answers to questions they have been asked many times before. Isn’t that natural? How could they not? But the results can feel a bit warmed over.
Again, I’m not suggesting that literary interviews are bogus or that KR, let alone other journals, should no longer publish them. But maybe–and here’s the point I’ve been toying with–they’re best suited to the new resources and the new media of the Internet. Since our print pages are so few and so precious, maybe we should reserve those for stories, poems, and essays that make best use of them.
And maybe interviews might come to be most at home on our website, where they can be archived, where famous writers can more easily rub shoulders with newer authors, where we can offer audio as well as print versions.