What I Saw in America — Chapter 04 Part 2 Irish and Other Interviewers

I have generally found that the traveller fails to understand a foreign country, through treating it as a tendency and not as a balance.

But if a thing were always tending in one direction it would soon tend to destruction.

Everything that merely progresses finally perishes.

Every nation, like every family, exists upon a compromise, and commonly a rather eccentric compromise; using the word 'eccentric' in the sense of something that is somehow at once crazy and healthy.

Now the foreigner commonly sees some feature that he thinks fantastic without seeing the feature that balances it.

The ordinary examples are obvious enough.

An Englishman dining inside a hotel on the boulevards thinks the French eccentric in refusing to open a window.

But he does not think the English eccentric in refusing to carry their chairs and tables out on to the pavement in Ludgate Circus.

An Englishman will go poking about in little Swiss or Italian villages, in wild mountains or in remote islands, demanding tea; and never reflects that he is like a Chinaman who should enter all the wayside public-houses in Kent and Sussex and demand opium.

But the point is not merely that he demands what he cannot expect to enjoy; it is that he ignores even what he does enjoy.

He does not realise the sublime and starry paradox of the phrase, _vin ordinaire_, which to him should be a glorious jest like the phrase 'common gold' or 'daily diamonds.'

These are the simple and self-evident cases; but there are many more subtle cases of the same thing; of the tendency to see that the nation fills up its own gap with its own substitute; or corrects its own extravagance with its own precaution.

The national antidote generally grows wild in the woods side by side with the national poison.

If it did not, all the natives would be dead.

For it is so, as I have said, that nations necessarily die of the undiluted poison called progress.

It is so in this much-abused and over-abused example of the American journalist.

The American interviewers really have exceedingly good manners for the purposes of their trade, granted that it is necessary to pursue their trade.

And even what is called their hustling method can truly be said to cut both ways, or hustle both ways; for if they hustle in, they also hustle out.

It may not at first sight seem the very warmest compliment to a gentleman to congratulate him on the fact that he soon goes away.

But it really is a tribute to his perfection in a very delicate social art; and I am quite serious when I say that in this respect the interviewers are artists.

It might be more difficult for an Englishman to come to the point, particularly the sort of point which American journalists are supposed, with some exaggeration, to aim at.

It might be more difficult for an Englishman to ask a total stranger on the spur of the moment for the exact inscription on his mother's grave; but I really think that if an Englishman once got so far as that he would go very much farther, and certainly go on very much longer.

The Englishman would approach the churchyard by a rather more wandering woodland path;

but if once he had got to the grave I think he would have much more disposition, so to speak, to sit down on it.

Our own national temperament would find it decidedly more difficult to disconnect when connections had really been established.

Possibly that is the reason why our national temperament does not establish them.

I suspect that the real reason that an Englishman does not talk is that he cannot leave off talking.

I suspect that my solitary countrymen, hiding in separate railway compartments, are not so much retiring as a race of Trappists as escaping from a race of talkers.

However this may be, there is obviously something of practical advantage in the ease with which the American butterfly flits from flower to flower.

He may in a sense force his acquaintance on us, but he does not force himself on us.

Even when, to our prejudices, he seems to insist on knowing us, at least he does not insist on our knowing him.

It may be, to some sensibilities, a bad thing that a total stranger should talk as if he were a friend, but it might possibly be worse if he insisted on being a friend before he would talk like one.

To a great deal of the interviewing, indeed much the greater part of it, even this criticism does not apply; there is nothing which even an Englishman of extreme sensibility could regard as particularly private; the questions involved are generally entirely public, and treated with not a little public spirit.

But my only reason for saying here what can be said even for the worst exceptions is to point out this general and neglected principle;

that the very thing that we complain of in a foreigner generally carries with it its own foreign cure.

American interviewing is generally very reasonable, and it is always very rapid.

And even those to whom talking to an intelligent fellow creature is as horrible as having a tooth out may still admit that American interviewing has many of the qualities of American dentistry.

Another effect that has given rise to this fallacy, this exaggeration of the vulgarity and curiosity of the press, is the distinction between the articles and the headlines; or rather the tendency to ignore that distinction.

The few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seen in American 'stories' have always been in the headlines.

And the headlines are written by somebody else; some solitary and savage cynic locked up in the office, hating all mankind, and raging and revenging himself at random, while the neat, polite, and rational pressman can safely be let loose to wander about the town.

For instance, I talked to two decidedly thoughtful fellow journalists immediately on my arrival at a town in which there had been some labour troubles.

I told them my general view of Labour in the very largest and perhaps the vaguest historical outline; pointing out that the one great truth to be taught to the middle classes was that Capitalism was itself a crisis, and a passing crisis; that it was not so much that it was breaking down as that it had never really stood up.

Slaveries could last, and peasantries could last; but wage-earning communities could hardly even live, and were already dying.

All this moral and even metaphysical generalisation was most fairly and most faithfully reproduced by the interviewer, who had actually heard it casually and idly spoken.

But on the top of this column of political philosophy was the extraordinary announcement in enormous letters, 'Chesterton Takes Sides in Trolley Strike.'

This was inaccurate.

When I spoke I not only did not know that there was any trolley strike, but I did not know what a trolley strike was.

I should have had an indistinct idea that a large number of citizens earned their living by carrying things about in wheel-barrows, and that they had desisted from the beneficent activities.

Any one who did not happen to be a journalist, or know a little about journalism, American and English, would have supposed that the same man who wrote the article had suddenly gone mad and written the title.

But I know that we have here to deal with two different types of journalists; and the man who writes the headlines I will not dare to describe; for I have not seen him except in dreams.

Another innocent complication is that the interviewer does sometimes translate things into his native language.

It would not seem odd that a French interviewer should translate them into French; and it is certain that the American interviewer sometimes translates them into American.

Those who imagine the two languages to be the same are more innocent than any interviewer.

To take one out of the twenty examples, some of which I have mentioned elsewhere, suppose an interviewer had said that I had the reputation of being a nut.

I should be flattered but faintly surprised at such a tribute to my dress and dashing exterior.

I should afterwards be sobered and enlightened by discovering that in America a nut does not mean a dandy but a defective or imbecile person.

And as I have here to translate their American phrase into English, it may be very defensible that they should translate my English phrases into American.

Anyhow they often do translate them into American.

In answer to the usual question about Prohibition I had made the usual answer, obvious to the point of dullness to those who are in daily contact with it, that it is a law that the rich make knowing they can always break it.

From the printed interview it appeared that I had said, 'Prohibition!

All matter of dollar sign.'

This is almost avowed translation, like a French translation.

Nobody can suppose that it would come natural to an Englishman to talk about a dollar, still less about a dollar sign--whatever that may be.

It is exactly as if he had made me talk about the Skelt and Stevenson Toy Theatre as 'a cent plain, and two cents coloured' or condemned a parsimonious policy as dime-wise and dollar-foolish.

Another interviewer once asked me who was the greatest American writer.

I have forgotten exactly what I said, but after mentioning several names, I said that the greatest natural genius and artistic force was probably Walt Whitman.

The printed interview is more precise; and students of my literary and conversational style will be interested to know that I said, 'See here, Walt Whitman was your one real red-blooded man.'

Here again I hardly think the translation can have been quite unconscious; most of my intimates are indeed aware that I do not talk like that, but I fancy that the same fact would have dawned on the journalist to whom I had been talking.

And even this trivial point carries with it the two truths which must be, I fear, the rather monotonous moral of these pages.

The first is that America and England can be far better friends when sharply divided than when shapelessly amalgamated.

These two journalists were false reporters, but they were true translators.

They were not so much interviewers as interpreters.

And the second is that in any such difference it is often wholesome to look beneath the surface for a superiority.

For ability to translate does imply ability to understand; and many of these journalists really did understand.

I think there are many English journalists who would be more puzzled by so simple an idea as the plutocratic foundation of Prohibition.

But the American knew at once that I meant it was a matter of dollar sign; probably because he knew very well that it is.

Then again there is a curious convention by which American interviewing makes itself out much worse than it is.

The reports are far more rowdy and insolent than the conversations.

This is probably a part of the fact that a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and to some vulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal.

It must always be grasped that this vulgarity is an ideal even more than it is a reality.

It is an ideal when it is not a reality.

A very quiet and intelligent young man, in a soft black hat and tortoise-shell spectacles, will ask for an interview with unimpeachable politeness, wait for his living subject with unimpeachable patience, talk to him quite sensibly for twenty minutes, and go noiselessly away.

Then in the newspaper next morning you will read how he beat the bedroom door in, and pursued his victim on to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore from him replies to all sorts of bald and ruthless questions printed in large black letters.

I was often interviewed in the evening, and had no notion of how atrociously I had been insulted till I saw it in the paper next morning.

I had no notion I had been on the rack of an inquisitor until I saw it in plain print; and then of course I believed it, with a faith and docility unknown in any previous epoch of history.

An interesting essay might be written upon points upon which nations affect more vices than they possess; and it might deal more fully with the American pressman, who is a harmless clubman in private, and becomes a sort of highway-robber in print.

I have turned this chapter into something like a defence of interviewers, because I really think they are made to bear too much of the burden of the bad developments of modern journalism.

But I am very far from meaning to suggest that those bad developments are not very bad.

So far from wishing to minimise the evil, I would in a real sense rather magnify it.

I would suggest that the evil itself is a much larger and more fundamental thing; and that to deal with it by abusing poor journalists, doing their particular and perhaps peculiar duty, is like dealing with a pestilence by rubbing at one of the spots.

What is wrong with the modern world will not be righted by attributing the whole disease to each of its symptoms in turn; first to the tavern and then to the cinema and then to the reporter's room.

The evil of journalism is not in the journalists.

It is not in the poor men on the lower level of the profession, but in the rich men at the top of the profession; or rather in the rich men who are too much on top of the profession even to belong to it.

The trouble with newspapers is the Newspaper Trust, as the trouble might be with a Wheat Trust, without involving a vilification of all the people who grow wheat.

It is the American plutocracy and not the American press.

What is the matter with the modern world is not modern headlines or modern films or modern machinery.

What is the matter with the modern world is the modern world; and the cure will come from another.