The Popper Study of My Kind, or, The Open Sesame and Its Enemy, or, The Poverty of His Story: A Schism, or, Le philosophe se parle à lui-même, or, Karl Bühler's Day Off

Michael Ignatieff in 1998, round the time of his Isaiah Berlin biography, in the closing passage of a public colloquy at Berkeley with two of the leading literary lights on the faculty, the Hebraist Robert Alter and Michael André Bernstein:

"I don't mean to cast aspersion on Popper, who was a great man, but I once went to interview him for British television. And Popper was in his late 80s/early 90s, and he greeted me at the door in a kind of blue running suit and Nike trainers, a tiny little man, like a sort of bantam cock, and he says, 'So pleased to see you. I am ready for your interview. Here are your questions.' [laughter]

"I'm not kidding. He had written up on longhand, which I will treasure and sell for a vast price, an eighteen-page interview including all 'my' questions and all his answers. All I had to do was turn on the tape recorder and we would read it. That is what he thought an interview ought to be. And I can't imagine Isaiah doing that in a million years. It is the only time I've had to stand up for myself. I said, 'I am terribly sorry, Mr. Popper. I'm not reading that script.'"

Mr. Aristophanes, a wasps' nest to see you, sir: for two actual self-interviews by other lions in winter, see Edmund Wilson, in a winkin', blinkin' non-Homeric nod to Goethe in the second issue, for June 1, 1963, of The New York Review of Books, "Every Man His Own Eckermann", and from that paper's twenty-fifth anniversary issue from October 27, 1988, the Virgilian Vidalian nod back at him that was "Every Eckermann His Own Man", for what they ... CATVLLVS about such an ancient roamin' for(u)m. 📜