Interviews used to be one of the (occasional) perks of the writing life. A keen, or at least hard-working reader would approach you, after you’d written a book, and tell you things about yourself you didn’t know. Why did you use the metaphor of romance and not of war for the meeting of civilisations, this sharp-eyed agent for the public might say. Why does your prose shift into the third person every time things get personal? Don’t you ever tire of saying the same things that everyone else always says?
When my first book came out, almost 20 years ago, I often savoured the fencing matches that ensued: Isn’t the traveller inherently an enemy of commitment, even of loyalty, someone asked me? Why does the issue of trust come up so often in your writing?
Then came Google — and a million listings (literally) ordered in terms of which are most important. Except that the ones that come up most readily are the ones that have come up most often before, and (in the absence of a recent scandal), those are the ones that have been posted longest.
Since search engines entered the world — and replaced what formerly was known as research or inquiry — interviews have become a circular form in which almost every interviewer asks the same questions as every previous interviewer, so that the previous interview he’s found online remains ever more on top of your Google listing, and every future interview is ever more in debt to it. And the interviewee (I write from painful experience) either has to give the same answer as before (which causes his interlocutor to yawn as much as himself) or come up with a new answer, which is almost inherently false.
I know, in short, that wherever I go and whatever I’ve written, I’m going to be asked about Van Morrison. This is because once, more than six years ago, I met a kindly and very literary soul in the back room of a bookshop just before a reading on a many-city book tour. I was as ready to turn out sound bites on automatic pilot as any other book tourist, and my interviewer — who had never seen me before and had read only one of my books — doubtless felt that it might be refreshing for us both if he eased us into the conversation by fastening on one of the many names he’d found in the acknowledgments of my latest work.
He asked me about Van Morrison and now, because his interview was posted before most people had thought of posting, every time I visit a university campus or meet a journalist in Bangkok or see an old friend, I know I will be asked about Van Morrison.
In China not long ago, in Australia last year, from businesspeople and academics, whether they are old or young, the questions I get are the ones that appeared on these two most common Google entries — and I am obliged to address once more how I feel about “Tupelo Honey” or why I keep returning to Los Angeles airport. But I wonder what it’s doing to what books are all about, which used to be called, once upon a time, reading.
Six years ago, in Los Angeles, I saw Susan Sontag being interviewed. Her very sophisticated and literate questioner made the mistake of asking her about something she’d said once in an interview about television. The late Sontag rose to the full height of her pre-post-literary hauteur and said, in effect: “How dare you ask me about a stray comment in an interview when you could be talking about the texts I have spent decades labouring to make clear and precise? This occasion is, itself, in a certain light, nonsense. I am speaking loosely and thoughtlessly in part to get you to pay attention to books on which I have lavished the best years of my life.”
In the age of the celebrity culture, she might have added, a writer is encouraged to talk about books more than to write them, and to turn herself into a commodity the books promote (and not the other way round).
I heard in her response the last gasp, perhaps, of the last generation that grew up with a sense of books — and not the chatter about them, the TV profiles or Google listings, really mattering, or having the power to speak. But that was six years ago, an eternity in techno-time. Not many people had heard of Google then and search engines were much less a feature of daily life. After all, six weeks before, an interviewer had surprised me and perhaps himself by asking me a question about Van Morrison — the first I’d ever heard — gleaned from the pages of something called a book. — Â