When Mark Twain went on his first assignment as a 15year-old cub reporter to interview the madam of a Mississippi brothel, his opening question was, "How many fallen women do you have?" History does not record the answer.
The interviewing arts have come a long way since then. "He still has a trace of a Mayo accent," wrote Vincent Browne last Saturday in his interview with incoming TCD Provost John Hegarty - "his hand gestures and general body language and the inflections in his speech are very much those of the repressed Catholic of the 1950s and 1960s (like many of us). But unlike many of us repressed Catholics, there is an appealing openness about him."
Now I know why my own attempts at interviewing people for the newspaper have always ended in pathetic failure. I might once in a while identify a strong Cork or Kerry accent or recognise that someone came from vaguely north of the Border, but damned if I could ever go through the State county by county and pin a fellow down with a trace of a Mayo accent or Tipperary or Leitrim or anywhere else. I did tentatively ask on one occasion if my interviewee had "any Clare connections maybe" only to be informed by the fellow after a long and meaningful pause that he was a fifth-generation Dubliner with a complete aversion to culchies and countryside and was I perhaps hinting he had even the vaguest hint of a bog accent?
Worse, it never even occurred to me that hand gestures, body language and speech inflections were dead giveaways to the interviewee's religious affiliations, current or past, open or hidden, expressed or repressed.
Anyway, I have been learning fast in the past week and armed with this new knowledge, I went off the other day to interview a man who is about to take up a major ecclesiastical post. After the usual preliminary chit-chat - not very much of this, actually, he is not a great man for small talk - I had him down from his accent as coming from the Tipperary village of Toomevara, or perhaps a halfmile south of it. "You are not far wrong," he replied kindly, "I was born and raised in Calcutta, grew up in Cayenne, French Guiana, and my mother is actually from Tulsa City." He added helpfully - "that's in Okla homa."
Much encouraged, I got down to business. "I noticed," I began, "the way you scratched the back of your left hand with your ring finger, and pronounced the word `precisely' - are you perhaps a repressed Anglican?"
My interviewee said nothing at all in response to this, at least not for three minutes or so. I could see he was not a man to make an unconsidered response. I also deduced from the way his mouth fell open (a little to the right) that he had toyed with apostasy for a brief period in the 1930s, that he had covertly supported General Franco in the Spanish Civil War and that he was a strong supporter of Eden during the Suez crisis. I rapidly took notes. Already, I could see a strong interview emerging.
When we resumed, my man crossed his legs, mopped his brow with a linen handkerchief, leaned forward and invited me to ask him about his beliefs, his background, his achievement, his ambitions and his hopes - "you know, all the normal interview stuff," he added disingenuously.
I was a bit too sophisticated to fall for this. Quite obviously, the hearty inflections of the man's language were purporting to welcome a genuinely investigative interview, while his body language was delivering the opposite message, clearly telling me to back off.
I decided to go for the jugular. "Is the duality of your existence," I asked him, "as reflected in the conflicting signals you are emitting, predicated on something in your upbringing, perhaps a state of fear as yet unadmitted even to yourself, or does it have its origins in some atavistic desire to return to the Roscommon of your grandparents' youth, that golden time and place still to be visualised in your faint trace of a west of Ireland accent?"
My man was silent for a moment. Then he spoke. He uttered only one two-word admonition, not printable here, but heavily inflected. He then uncrossed his legs. Then he stood up. Then he put one foot in front of the other, and repeated this action a number of times, the pace gradually increasing. Carefully reading his body language, I concluded he was "leaving", and shortly after that, he was gone.