© Richard Kerris
“I DIDN'T WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD. I JUST WANTED TO TASTE IT, SEE IT, SMELL IT, AND BRING THOSE STORIES HOME.
13 min read
For over thirty years, this acclaimed American author has not only explored every corners of the world, but also all the possibilities that travel narrative has to offer, from in-depth investigative journalism to the obsessions and deepest longings of the people he portrays. His tanned skin reveals his physicality, his love for the sea and the outdoors, and his preference for wearing white shirts reminds me of the classic reporter who travels mainly to listen. Incisive, evocative, committed. Reading Carl Hoffman is to remember Ryszard Kapuściński’s words, “A journalist can’t be a cynic, can’t forget his humanity and that of the people he meets.”
VANESSA MARTÍN QUINTANA: You were born in Washington in 1960, and your father, Burt Hoffman, worked as a journalist for The Washington Star. I can’t imagine anyone growing up in that time, place, and environment and not wanting to be a journalist. How would you describe your upbringing?
CARL HOFFMAN: My father worked mainly as an editor and I remember going to The Washington Star newsroom as a child. There were always journalists at home too. My mother was a huge reader so I grew up in a house full of books. My father always gave me the literary journalists, such as John McPhee or The New Yorker people, and my mother gave me novels. So it was inevitable, I guess. But also, my parents divorced when I was very young. My mother was a severe alcoholic and there was a lot of fighting, and screaming, so I got into this kind of literature about real people living fantasy lives, you know, T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom or Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands. Those magnificent people who crossed borders into new worlds to gain knowledge and wisdom they brought home. They were my way of escaping. That is what stories are about: escapes and inspiration.
That explains why, from the very beginning, you focused on travel writing and wrote about places such as Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Gobi Desert. What made you choose a life outside a newsroom?
I never wanted to be a reporter. My parents were super political, and my dad eventually left The Star to work in politics directly as part of the press section for Sargent Shriver, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, during the 1972 Presidential Campaign. After that, he worked on Capitol Hill for Tip O’Neill, a former speaker of the U.S House of Representatives. But I never thought I wanted to change the world. Instead, I wanted to taste it, see it, smell it, and bring those stories home.
After graduating in Social Thought and Political Economy, I met a woman, and we went on a journey around Europe, then Egypt, Israel, China, and from there took the Trans-Siberian from Beijing to Moscow. It changed my life. And when I came back, all I did was write about that journey and try to sell it. I sold my first story to The Boston Globe. It was about sailing up the Nile in a traditional felucca and I got $150. I didn’t have credentials. I had never taken a class in Journalism. All I wanted was to be V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux… and slowly, for many years, I made my way into magazines.
You wrote a book titled The Lunatic Express: discovering the world via its most dangerous buses, boats, trains, and planes. At first, I thought it was quite a masochistic premise for a man looking for trouble, but it is full of joy and struggle often happens in between journeys, at home. It is also your first venture into travel memoir following your debut with a book titled Hunting Warbirds: the obsessive quest for the lost aircraft of WWII…
Of course, writing a book was the big goal, and Hunting Warbirds just came out of a series of magazine stories that I had done about those crazy guys who tried to fly those B-29 bombers from the WWII era out of Greenland. It was 2001, and I felt it was a big accomplishment, but nobody read or reviewed it, although it boosted my career in magazines. I started traveling all over the world to write pieces for Outside, National Geographic Traveler, and also Wired, where I became a contributed editor on contract.
Then, in 2007, I wrote a story for Outside magazine about an American named Tim Roman, who was a jet pilot in the DRC. At that time, two Kabilas ruled the region. The father took over after the war against Mobutu. Later, he was assassinated and his son took over. Tim Roman helped the Kabilas win that war and in exchange got mining concessions, built roads, and started an airline. He became this wild Kurtzian figure. I spent a couple of weeks with him in Kinshasa and traveled around. At some point, we flew the Nigerian Ambassador and the Congolese minister of finance to Abuja in a tiny plane, and I had to pretend I was the flight attendant! We got stuck there... It was a wild, crazy story, and my editor loved it. So he called up one day, and I suddenly came up with the idea, “What if I flew around the world on the most dangerous airlines?” To which he replied, “What about traveling around the world in the most dangerous everything?” My reaction was, “That is not a magazine story, that is a book.”
I got my first big book contract. It was my dream come true, and at the same time, my marriage of twenty-five years, and my life were falling apart. That journey of five months and 50,000 miles coincided with all those changes. The result is that Lunatic Express became deeper, and had a lot more soul to it than Hunting Warbirds, which was a pretty straightforward journalistic book. Lunatic Express became one of the ten best books of 2010 by The Wall Street Journal.
In 2014, you published Savage Harvest: a tale of cannibals, colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s tragic quest for primitive art, in which you retrace Michael Rockefeller’s steps to understand his mysterious disappearance. The book, half investigative journalism and half travel memoir, became a bestseller. You said after the first trip to New Guinea, you realized you would have to risk much more, both financially and physically, and go back and immerse yourself completely. Why did you feel it would not work otherwise?
I had always been fascinated by the story of Michael Rockefeller's disappearance in New Guinea in 1961. He was a very famous person and the son of the governor of New York at that time. When I first researched online, I realized there were only a few early references, nothing substantive in 55 years. I thought that maybe the time had come and people would be willing to speak. I hired a researcher from Amsterdam. He went into the archives and immediately found details, real data that pointed to Rockefeller being killed and consumed by the Asmat tribe. But this was only the official version. I had to find out if it was true. So, I went to New Guinea for two months, made two trips to the village where the story happened and I really hit a wall. They weren’t speaking to me. Asmat is a difficult place, a 10,000 square-mile swamp with no roads around. When I came back, I tried to write with the material I had, but I realized that I had committed the cardinal sin in journalism: to parachute into someplace and expect people to tell me their darkest secrets and everything about their most important rituals and culture, and do it through an interpreter. To answer your question simply: I had not given enough, not committed enough.
There, I had hired an interpreter and his assistant, the boat guy and his assistant, the cook… I needed seven or eight people. I realized that I had to go back to Asmat alone and speak the language myself. I found an Indonesian woman in the States and took a seven-month crash course.
Afterwards, I came back and approached things differently. I didn’t ask questions about Rockefeller. I lived in a house in the Asmat village with an elder named Kokai. I smoked with them, drank coffee with them, listened, watched, and let people get to know me and take care of me. And when I started to ask questions, they were very different from the ones that I had asked before.
Michael Rockefeller working in Papua, New Guinea in 1961. © President and Fellows of Harvard University/ Peabody Museum
Was your love for Indonesia a consequence of that experience, or was it one more reason to write that story?
My father lived in Jakarta in the late ‘80s, and I used to visit him. At that time, I read Where the Spirits Dwell by Tobias Schneebaum, and my fascination with the Asmat started. I had watched Robert Gardner’s documentary film Dead Birds, which Michael Rockefeller had worked on. It was released in 1963. That was the film that had brought both of them to the Baliem Valley and Wamena. Working on that film led Rockefeller to the Asmat. In those days, it was too hard to get to Papua and I didn’t have the money either, but I went to Borneo through the Mahakam river which lit my fire. And when I was writing Lunatic Express, I learned that crowded Indonesian ferries sailing across the archipelago had a long history of sinking, killing thousands over the years. So it became logical to make Indonesia part of that journey.
So, I knew about Rockefeller and the Asmat because of those experiences, and that led me to travel there and learn the language. It is like you with the Himalaya. You keep coming back and you know more and more, and one new thing reinforces another.
I know how you opposed Trump and how vocal you were about his presidency, and in the middle of the chaotic Trump presidency, you decided to write a book about his followers. Liar’s Circus, which as the subtitle describes, is a strange and terrifying journey into the upside-down world of Trump’s MAGA rallies. So you approach the story the story much as you had approached your previous adventure books set in remote places. It seems to me those rallies were more dangerous and hostile than any tribe or jungle. How was that experience?
Going into the Trump rallies and inhabiting daily life with the most obsessive Trump supporters was like getting into the Heart of Darkness of my own country, but it never felt particularly dangerous. It is about a middle-aged white guy hanging out with middle-aged white guys. However, I admit it was physically demanding and emotionally draining. For instance, I spent fifty hours in a parking lot in Tupelo, Mississippi, to be the sixth person in line. I also spent days camping on chairs next to my car, sometimes in the cold or rain, and finally, listening to Trump is a terrible and exhausting experience itself. It was interesting to travel through my country speaking to all kinds of people without the language or cultural barriers.
Afterwards, I came back and approached things differently. I didn’t ask questions about Rockefeller. I lived in a house in the Asmat village with an Elder named Kokai. I smoked with them, drank coffee with them, listened, watched, and let people get to know me and take care of me. And when I started to ask questions, they were very different from the ones that I had asked before.
Reading your books, I get a strong sense of your passion for travel, nature and spirituality. I know you are also an accomplished Ashtanga yogi. Why did you start practicing, and how has Ashtanga yoga influenced you?
I was raised as an atheist, but, you know, life becomes more complicated as you get older and experience grief and loss. You try to come to terms with it and find your place in the world.
My experience with the Asmat became a defining moment for me. They were intrinsically spiritual and had such a complex religion, and although some are nominal Christians or Catholics, that is like a light veneer over deeply held spiritual practices. The traditional religions associated with hierarchies never interested me and threw me off. But seeing the Asmat drumming and singing for 24 hours straight all through the night was like a doorway for me. Seeing people untouched by the outside world hold such powerful and insightful beliefs made me understand those beliefs are intrinsic to the human soul. After that, I became interested in authors such as Joseph Campbell and read The Power of Myth and understood the universality of it all.
However, my yoga practice is not part of that, to be honest. It is more physical. It keeps me strong and flexible. It is good, though, to have a daily practice that grounds you.
You have just written your first novel. What is the story about?
The working title is Borderland, and it is about some of the themes we have talked about. There is this old cliché that says that everybody writes just the same book over and over again. My story is about borders: physical and mental, but also the imaginary ones. It is about distant lands and the impact of love, books, and stories. I think it also tells a bit about white Western hubris.
You told me once you didn’t enjoy reading travel memoirs so much anymore because you were too aware of their structure and narrative devices. How would you compare working on this novel to working on your previous books?
They are very different. Fiction is much harder. The books I had written were built on extensive investigative reporting. The more information, the more you can live the story, and then it all gets down to rearranging it, creating a structure and telling the story in an elegant way that moves the reader and allows you to put your finger on a kind of truth. Yet we all know there is nothing truer than fiction. Made-up stories are truer. Writing a novel from scratch means I will use what I have seen, read, said, and experienced, and assemble it differently. It requires a different way of thinking, and it is almost like lucid dreaming for hours on end. Writing some parts is like trying to tear off my skin, digging into a truth, admitting it, saying it. But there is also magic in it. You sit and describe a scene without having any plan, and when you look back later at what you came up with, the symbolism, for instance, can be striking.
