Tony Horwitz hardly looks like the hardy, hard-drinking adventurer his books make him out to be. Greeting PW at the door of his 19th-century farmhouse, he stands five foot nine in stocking feet, with red hair coming out at all angles and a couple of days growth of facial hair. But as soon as he gives a broad, toothy smile, welcoming his guest, he offers him a beer. It's all in the spirit of conviviality.
His latest book, Blue Latitudes (Holt), follows in the figurative footsteps of the 18th-century English sea captain James Cook, who at the time navigated more ocean than any other explorer before him and was among the first Westerners to set foot in Australia, New Zealand, Alaska and numerous South Pacific atolls, including Bora Bora and Tahiti. Cook's discoveries ended when he was killed by hostile Hawaiians, after becoming the first Westerner to land in the archipelago in 1779. In Blue Latitudes, Horwitz set himself the ambitious task of retracing the explorer's tracks across the oceans to see what remains of Cook's presence. By offering his interviewer beer, he's merely adhering to custom: beer was an essential part of the ration on Cook's ship.
Horwitz shares his home with his wife of 20 years, the Australian journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks; their five-year-old son, Natty (named for Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans); and two energetic sheepdogs, Milo (adopted during their most recent trip to Australia) and Shiloh (bought during Horwitz's book tour for his book Confederates in the Attic). "We didn't intend to have dogs with rhyming names, but it just happened that way." The couple treats PW to a lunch of roast chicken, a salad of avocado with yellow and red tomato from their garden, and iced tea. "I get spoiled by my wife," admits Horwitz.
Like many things in his life, serendipity has smiled on Horwitz. While many New York writers, especially young ones, remain lovelorn, Horwitz met the woman who would become his wife while they were both graduate students at the Columbia University journalism school. Later, he followed her to the Midwest, where Brooks wrote for the Wall Street Journal in Cleveland, and Horwitz, who wanted to remain relatively nearby, became the education and metro reporter for the Fort Wayne News Sentinel in Indiana. Brooks got homesick, and the two married before moving to Australia, where Horwitz reported for the Sydney Morning Herald, hitchhiking across the continent, writing about aboriginal affairs and crocodile attacks. These dispatches became his first book, One for the Road. "An Australian publisher offered me the princely sum of $1,000 Australian dollars and I thought, 'What the heck.' I wrote it on weekends and after work. The Australian publisher folded the week before the book was to come out, and I ended up distributing it from my car. I was lucky enough to have it picked up over here by Vintage Departures in the '80s, so at least I had a book in print."
Brooks was assigned by the Wall Street Journal to cover the Middle East from Cairo, and Horwitz accompanied her. This trip led to his second book, a humorous travelogue through the Middle East entitled Baghdad Without a Map. "We were there when the intifada broke out, the Lebanese civil war, the Iran-Iraq war," he says. "Once you covered one of those sorts of conflicts, you get asked to do it again. We moved to London, but as soon as we got there the Gulf War broke out." Baghdad Without a Map was published just before Operation Desert Storm and was propelled onto bestseller lists. "It's terrible to profit from war, but Saddam Hussein was good for me," says Horwitz.
All the while Horwitz was moonlighting as a writer of books, he was also working as a full-time freelance journalist and making a name for his offbeat stories, often featured in the Wall Street Journal's middle column. Though the couple did spend a lot of time jetting off to various trouble spots—including Sarajevo, Bucharest and Belfast—Horwitz says the travel started to take its toll. "I was a bit frustrated as a freelancer, partially by the feeling that my journalistic career wasn't going anywhere fast," he says. "We would go long stretches without speaking to each other and had no home life to speak of. I started to get burned out and looked at book writing as an alternate existence. That's how we ended up here."
"Here" is the small but historically significant Virginia town of Waterford, founded by Quaker abolitionists and populated by freed slaves. Finding the town and its environs rekindled a childhood fascination with the Civil War and inspired Horwitz to write the bestselling chronicle of Civil War reenactors, Confederates in the Attic. "I got here and felt marinated in the Civil War. You can't walk two blocks without running into it," Horwitz says. The book was a huge success, "but the one piece of advice I give people is to never write anything you're not willing to live with for the rest of your life. I'm on a number of listservs and still getting tons of e-mail about the Civil War, even though it's of no direct relevance to my writing now."
Some time after returning to the U.S., Horwitz joined the staff of the Wall Street Journal, where he indulged his attraction to the offbeat, and often dispossessed, in American life. He won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about low-wage workers that took him undercover on the kill floor of chicken-processing plants in Mississippi and Arkansas. He later served a short stint on the staff at the New Yorker under the editorship of Tina Brown. Only after the financial success of Confederates was he able to break all contracts and concentrate on writing just books.
"Once the war in Afghanistan started, I felt a little pull. There's something horribly magnetic about conflict. But I knew Daniel Pearl from my time on the Journal, and once I saw what the journalists were going through there, I thought, I don't want to do that again. When you have a kid, you're a lot less cavalier about being shot at and you lose your appetite for all-night rides in the back of trucks." He calls his transition from journalism to book writing "slow and strange," but sees a practical advantage in having trained as a journalist first. "I think a lot of people imagine writing is a mystical exercise, and you need to get your aura in just the right place and then somehow, it all magically spills out," he says. "The reality is that what it's really about is getting your bum in the seat, day after day, in a very disciplined way and simply cranking it out. As a journalist, you learn to write quickly and without a lot of melodrama. If you can't, you don't last. You learn to write in airport lobbies, in noisy rooms, in uncomfortable circumstances. I think that's useful. I've never experienced writer's block. Sure, I've hit places where it's just not working, but the words keep coming."
The craft of journalism also taught him the confidence to pursue a story with little preparation and to ask many questions, meet as many people as possible and trust one's instincts: "I almost never read too much about a place before taking off to write about it," Horwitz says, but his research often comes intermittently. Patience is a lesson he's had to learn: ""Journalism is instant gratification, you write it one day and see it the next morning. When writing books, you need a long attention span: there are weeks, even months of research and writing that gets tossed out. You often have to cut out 90% of what you write just to keep the narrative interesting."
Blue Latitudes took him nearly three years of travel, research and writing to complete. In addition to the extensive travel for the book being ambitious and grueling—much of it taking place in remote and exotic corners of the south Pacific— Horwitz freely admits that it was "ruinously expensive." He says it took lobbying by his agent—and a strong proposal——to convince a publisher to trust him to come back with a story deep enough to fill a book. He says that he put as much of the advance money he could back into the book and has also learned to be economical whenever possible. For example, one of his research trips to Australia was combined with a gig covering the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney.
Fortunately, his wife Geraldine welcomed the fact that much of his research would take place in the southern hemisphere. The couple have spent a full half of their son's life in Australia, which is evident when Natty returns from school around three in the afternoon accompanied by his mother; not only does Natty, have a distinct Australian inflection to his voice, but Horwitz points out "He was wearing shorts until November last year," he says, before the boy and his mother curl up in their sunroom with a copy of The Three Musketeers.
The home in Virginia provides the stability the couple need in their peripatetic lives. It is a quirky structure, with rooms on different levels, as if added to as needed over the years. Above all, though only a 25-minute drive from Washington Dulles airport and an hour from Washington, D.C., the area where Horwitz was raised, the house feels isolated. It's fitting that here Horwitz now writes about the confluence of tradition- bound and modern civilizations. What he accomplishes in Blue Latitudes is to document how great was the impact Cook had on the indigenous people he encountered in his travels: the world Cook sailed into has vanished, destroyed by modernity, much of it introduced by Cook himself. Appropriately, Horwitz himself has settled in Waterford, a place within the U.S.—arguably the most progressive, dynamic country in the world—that has managed to actually beat back time. The colonial-era town of 250 has just one shop, a dusty general store, and no chains; it was the first town in the country to reject cable TV. The lack of overnight accommodation has kept it off the tourist maps.
The lack of distraction means that the family reads a lot. The house is filled with books, but not overwhelmed by them. Rather, the books, like much of the house, lie in slightly off-kilter, yet methodical piles, as if composed by a higher consciousness that was distracted in the middle of the act of shelving. The couple say that though they listen to a lot of NPR, the foreign news coverage they get through the media and papers is sketchy, and often leaves them feeling detached from the rest of the world. Horwitz says he feels more "plugged in" in Australia than in the U.S.
A symbiotic relationship clearly exists between Brooks and Horwitz, who have now shared much of their adult and writing lives together. "Geraldine is the first and last one to read the work," he says. "We work about 15 feet from one another, which is both wonderful and maddening. I work for 45 minutes at a time and then get up and have a look around, make some coffee, whatever. Geraldine puts her head down and can really get into her work. I'll be sitting there listening to her typing away."
The couple's offices are on the top floor of their house, with only a bathroom between them. Brooks's is cozier and darker—like her recent novel, A Year of Wonders (Viking), which chronicles a single year in the life of an English town struck by the bubonic plague. Horwitz's office is larger and filled with light from a pair of large picture windows, opened, and showing a view from the back of the house. The windows look over a beautifully cultivated vegetable garden, featuring a stone well and a flat, 10-foot-by-10-foot slab of concrete: the foundation for a writing shed Horwitz plans to build. "Geraldine is just waiting for me to get that shed done so she can move into my space," he says. In his office are shelved copies of his past books—all published with different editors and publishers—as well as a worn edition of Cook's own travel journals and boxes of legal files filled with research. Overall, it's less stuff than you might expect from a man who sailed, drove and flew tens of thousands of miles in the course of his research.
Paradoxically, it's the very closeness of Brooks and Horwitz's relationship that allows them the individual freedom to pursue their own interests. "As a book writer, you need to be self-sufficient. It's not the job for someone who needs supervision," says Horwitz. "In the later stages of a book, you've already bored your friends and family, and there comes a point when there's no one else to talk to—except for yourself and the few fellow fanatics you've met along the way.
