Interviews
An Exclusive Interview with Sebastian Junger
Barnes & Noble.com Science & Nature editor Laura Wood met Sebastian Junger at his New York City restaurant, The Half King. This interview was conducted later via email.
Barnes & Noble.com: In the introduction to Fire you make an interesting observation about humans' fascination with danger. Rather than simply a morbid fascination, you speculate that instead there is a feeling of amoral awe. Can you elaborate on that?
Sebastian Junger: Humans are curious, and I think that curiosity can be mistaken for lack of compassion. A fatal car accident or a forest fire or war -- or a human birth, for that matter -- are rare events to witness. As uncomfortable as these things can make us, in some ways we should consider ourselves lucky to have been at the right spot at the right time. We can learn a tremendous amount from these things and apply them to our lives in ways that could be very positive. The criterion I use is: Am I actually making a situation worse -- am I increasing the total amount of human suffering in the world -- by
doing what I'm doing? Clearly, turning my head to see a car accident doesn't hurt anyone, but taking photographs at a private funeral might. One is immoral and the other amoral and, possibly, a source of understanding.
B&N.com: As you point out in the title essay, "Fire," smoke jumpers don't exactly make a huge salary (I love the calculation that the actual jump earns them 21 cents!), but since it's so competitive there are obviously people who would rather risk their lives than make more money sitting behind a desk.
SJ: Frankly, I can't think of something that should be less interesting to a 22-year-old than money. The 22-year-olds who have lots of money -- movie stars, heiresses, the occasional musical genius -- invariably seem to lead tragic, unfulfilled lives. That a 22-year-old would prefer -- for a few years, at least -- to jump out of airplanes and put out fires seems to me to be the most natural thing in the world. Of course, there's a time in a person's life to stop doing those things, but that comes much, much later. Ask smoke jumpers if they're happy. Then ask a 22-year-old behind a desk in an office if they're happy. Take their blood pressure. Check their pulse. Ask how much they drink or smoke, and whether they are happy with the relationship they're in. Then decide which is the richer life.
B&N.com: Physical danger is one thing, but there are other kinds of dangerous pursuits. Writing itself can be thought of as dangerous. What do you think the risks of writing are?
SJ: There are risks to writing, mainly failure. The other risk is wasting your time. Think of all the interesting things you could have been doing -- like working as a smoke jumper -- while you were at home struggling to find something interesting to say. Writing isn't an end in itself, like yoga. It's a way to express ideas. If you haven't yet acquired the ideas to express, you're risking all kinds of things by pursuing a career in writing. Get dirty and come back to it later.
Sebastian Junger Catches Fire
From the September/October 2001 issue of Book magazine.
Sebastian Junger’s bedroom -- the one in his parents’ house, where he still sleeps from time to time -- looks out on a lush, verdant landscape. Above a small desk are the bows and arrows he crafted when he used to build lean-tos in the woods to see how long he could survive in the wild. There are summer camp photos here, books about Native American tribes and aboriginal peoples, as well as one book Junger no longer needs -- about how to make a living as a professional writer.
This is where Junger grew up -- on a tree-lined lane in a Boston suburb, where SUVs careen around cul-de-sacs. Here, Junger wrote some of his first stories, in Belmont, Massachusetts, founded in 1630 and known as "the town of homes," where every house looks like a bed-and-breakfast.
It’s only a half-hour drive between Belmont and Gloucester, Massachusetts. But that distance defines the contradiction of Junger. Gloucester, America’s oldest seaport town, was founded in 1623. It is a partly quaint, partly hardscrabble village where muscular fishermen shoot pool, glug Budweiser, and listen to the Allman Brothers Band on the jukebox in a bar called the Crow’s Nest. It is the town from which the crew of the Andrea Gail set off on a fishing expedition in 1991 and never returned. That tale was chronicled in Junger’s 1997 book, The Perfect Storm. Junger, with his permanent five o’clock shadow, weatherbeaten good looks, loping gait, and vaguely punch-drunk patter, could pass for an able-bodied seaman in a Gloucester oceanside bar. Junger might have liked to come from here. But he didn’t.
Straight Out of Belmont
"It was a hard place for him to be," John Vaillant says of Belmont. Vaillant has known Junger since the two were five years old (they attended grade school together). "It was really staid and suburban and prosperous and extremely quiet. He felt like a Martian there."
"He’s always had troubles with the fact that this is the suburbs, and an elegant house in the suburbs is not what he likes," says Junger’s mother, Ellen Sinclair.
In Belmont, Sinclair sits in her living room with her husband, Miguel Junger. The Junger house is filled with antiques and books. One shelf is stacked with volumes about fine artists; another contains leather-bound antique manuscripts inherited from Miguel’s family, who lived in a passel of European countries. Miguel, a retired physicist who ran a consulting company and taught at MIT, is currently reading three books in three languages (he speaks six): One, Peter Nichols’s A Voyage for Madmen, was purchased for Sebastian. Inside it, he has written the following inscription: "For Sebastian, my good shipmate. From the ancient mariner, Miguel."
"We live very, very well, very comfortably," says Sinclair, an artist whose family used to own and operate an amusement park in Canton, Ohio. "But Sebastian doesn’t like this house."
The Perfect Dorm
Sebastian Junger ("Seb" to his buddies), age 39, war reporter, bestselling author, is heading home to his Manhattan apartment to pack for Macedonia. Vanity Fair is sending him to investigate the looming conflict between the Slavic majority and the Albanian minority, as well as the human trafficking there. Loping up the stairs of his Lower East Side walk-up, Junger stops to greet a workman in a white undershirt and soiled jeans.
"You go on vacation," the man says, smiling.
"No, no," Junger says, intent on making his point. "Not vacation. I’m going on assignment."
"Vacation." The man smiles again.
"Not vacation," Junger repeats. "Work."
Junger walks with the purpose and determination of a man who thinks all eyes are upon him but will not allow himself to be distracted. He has a focus and intensity -- which clash with his predilection for self-deprecation -- suggestive of someone who recently discovered he has a secret power but is still uncertain of what it is or how he can harness it.
Arriving on the third floor, Junger slaps loudly on a door.
"Hey!" he shouts, still slapping. The apartment belongs to journalist John Falk. Junger and Falk recently co-wrote a screenplay with Scott Anderson, author of The Man Who Tried to Save the World. The screenplay, which concerns the three writers’ experiences in Bosnia when they were mistaken for CIA agents, was sold to Intermedia. The original title, Risk, has now been changed to Springtime in Sarajevo.
"He usually sleeps during the day," Junger says of Falk. "I want to freak him out."
He rings the bell a few times.
"Hey, what’s the matter? You chicken?"
No answer.
"I guess he’s not there," Junger says, somewhat disappointed, and strolls over to his place.
According to Junger’s agent, Stuart Krichevsky, The Perfect Storm sold more than 600,000 copies in hardcover and over 2 million in paperback; the paperback rights sold for $1.2 million, the film rights for $500,000. The Wolfgang Petersen-directed film starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Diane Lane was the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2000, raking in approximately $180 million. People has tagged Junger one of the sexiest men alive. Oprah has drooled over him. Fire, a collection of Junger’s articles -- mostly previously published -- about Idaho smoke jumpers, Afghani rebels, the Caribbean’s last whaler, and other people involved in dangerous activities in the world’s hot spots, is rolling out this fall.
"Things have gone very well and very smoothly for him," says Anderson. "Whether it’s prescience or luck, he’s repeatedly in the right place at the right time."
Nevertheless, Junger’s apartment is sparse and unassuming, more Gloucester than Belmont, more skid row than Gloucester. It’s a cozy two-bedroom (in any city other than New York, this would be called a one-bedroom), and it looks as if it’s still awaiting the next shipment of moving boxes. The living room contains three pieces of furniture -- a mushy couch the color of a very thin gravy, a chair and a table, atop which is a chessboard and a gag lighter in the shape of a bikini-clad woman (the bikini lights up when you flick it). A window is propped open with a hatchet that his sister Carlotta -- now an art director for a London publisher -- once found in the woods.
Junger divides his stereo equipment between the living room and his office; in the living room, there’s a Sony Discman, in the office, a boom box. In the living room, wooden crates house several dozen cassette tapes, most of them hand-labeled (artists include Harry Belafonte, U2, Los Lobos, Bruce Springsteen, and Portishead). CDs, some out of their cases, are stacked haphazardly on the floor. So are printouts of articles about Macedonia downloaded from the Web. There’s a smattering of artwork on the floor and the walls -- photographs and paintings by some of his friends, a couple of iron curiosities he found on the beach at Cape Cod and on the streets of New York.
The bedroom is sparser. True, the mattress is no longer on the floor (a recently purchased bed frame is a concession to his girlfriend, a science journalist). But aside from one of his mother’s paintings and a half-read copy of Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau, it’s basically the only thing in the room.
The most cluttered room is the office. A low shelf filled with reference books. A desk strewn with papers. A laptop. News clippings tacked to the walls -- an obituary of a matador, a picture of a sinking oil tanker. Here and there, other odd items: a temporary ID from Afghanistan, maps -- some on the walls, some rolled up and shoved into corners -- family pictures, snapshots with curling corners depicting Junger, arms around his buddies. (Note to burglars: The checkbooks are lying on the floor.) The window above the desk looks out onto a seedy, profoundly unspectacular New York cityscape -- a dingy Mexican restaurant, cluttered little grocery stores, wholesale clothing shops, their wares spilling onto the sidewalks.
"Luxury just isn’t interesting," Junger says. "I really don’t buy expensive things. They just depress me; they always have." (Adam Langer)
