Fiction Writer Interviews: Some are comfortable giving interviews, but others are not, depending on whether they have a reliable host personality.

Since I am currently reading a novel by an author who is famous for not giving interviews, it is a good time to review how giving vs. not giving interviews relates to multiple personality.

Some people with multiple personality have a robust host personality, who is designed to deal with the public. This personality may not have been directly involved in writing the novel under discussion, but it can discuss the novel intelligently, as long as serious questions, such as what the novel really means, are evaded.

A valuable feature of the host personality is consistency. It will answer the same questions the same way—such as questions about the author’s personal life—from one interview to another.

However, other people with multiple personality cannot depend on a host personality to take full charge of all interviews. Other personalities may be inclined to come out during some interviews. Interviewers may not realize they are speaking to alternate personalities (who almost always remain incognito), but alternate personalities may answer questions differently, because each one has its own perspective. 

For example, William Faulkner’s alternate personalities had given different versions of his military record in different interviews, which had embarrassed him. The following past post does not mention Faulkner’s military record, but discusses his general fear that interviewers might ask personal questions.

February 9, 2014

William Faulkner, lacking a good Host Personality, inadvertently implies that he has Multiple Personality

Faulkner’s interview by Jean Stein in Paris Review (New York City, 1956) begins as follows:

INTERVIEWER: Mr. Faulkner, you were saying a while ago that you don’t like being interviewed.

WILLIAM FAULKNER: The reason I don’t like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different.

Most people would take the above to mean that since Faulkner likes his personal privacy, he will not cooperate with questions that invade his personal privacy, and so he will either refuse to answer such questions or he will give unreliable answers out of spite.

On the second and third pages of the interview, asked how a writer becomes a serious novelist, he says the following:

FAULKNER: …An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done…If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

Most people would take this to mean that Faulkner is totally dedicated to his writing, as any serious writer would be. But he seems to be in an obnoxious, irritable mood.

I would interpret the above differently. “If the same [personal] question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different” because you may be talking to a different personality.

Regarding “An artist is a creature driven by demons,” we should keep in mind that Faulkner had continued to read the Bible since childhood. And when they say “demons” in the Bible, they don’t mean it as a metaphor for being determined or irritable, they mean being possessed, which psychiatry now understands to be multiple personality.

Why does Faulkner have such problems with interviews, in contrast to other writers like Doris Lessing, Sue Grafton, and Mark Twain? If you look at videos of interviews with Lessing or Grafton, they are pleasant, polished, and consistent. If you read interviews with Twain, he was similar. My answer is that, with those three, the interviewer would be speaking to their host personality (discussed in previous posts), a kind of personality that Faulkner evidently lacked.

[It may be an oversimplification to say that Faulkner totally lacked a host personality. However, his host personality was not sufficiently robust to always prevent other personalities from coming out during interviews.]