A Life in Waves

AS A CONTRIBUTOR TO and staff writer for The New Yorker since 1984, William Finnegan has reported on apartheid, organized crime, Latin American military coups, Moldovan sex trafficking, fast-food labor activism, civil wars in Mozambique and Sudan, the plight of Kosovo, and the fax machine. He has written detailed, sensitive portraits of teenage skinheads, Mexican wrestlers, Peruvian gold miners, and Barack Obama (back when he was still a state senator). In other words he travels a lot, and under circumstances that might be generously described as tense. Often, while working on these stories, or back home in New York, he has alleviated the stress of the job by surfing. 

Finnegan, who grew up in California and Hawaii, has only occasionally written about the sport, but his forays into surf writing have been hailed as seminal. His 1992 story “Playing Doc’s Games,” for instance, has been called, by Surfer Magazine, “the best-written piece (all 39,000 words of it) ever penned about surf culture.” With his new book Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, he has gone much further, delivering a profound, decades-spanning meditation on surfing that is also a memoir of his development as a writer and citizen of global capitalism.

“All surfers are oceanographers,” he writes, and one of the great pleasures of the book is Finnegan’s ongoing attempt to wrestle into prose the strangeness of surfing as a cerebral activity, an opportunity to spend hours in the ocean thinking deeply about water. Waves are described as a “column of orbiting energy,” and “not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds,” but “quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction.” But the Finnegan of this book is not yet an award-winning journalist — he’s an aspiring young novelist. He occasionally lives out of his car. He drops acid and surfs Honolua Bay. He goes to Southeast Asia, to Australia, to Africa. The world, he says, “was full of news, but all of it was oblique, mysterious, important only if you listened and watched and felt its weight.”

When I emailed him to set up this interview, he responded, “I’m in Mexico now, in the boondocks with no phone and iffy internet,” which was more or less what I’d expected. He went on to explain that he was “in a middle-of-nowhere fishing village in Baja,” and that it felt strange to be in such an idyllic spot, because he’d reported so often from Mexico on “big, dark institutions” like the security forces and drug cartels. He’d begun to wonder, in this tiny fishing village, whether he’d gotten it all wrong. When we later spoke on the phone, I asked what he’d been working on this time, thinking it might be a continuation of his ongoing reporting on the drug wars or illegal immigration. He laughed and explained that no, he was only there to surf.

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WILL STEPHENSON: At one point in the book, you have a conversation with a South African political activist about topics worth writing about. Surfing is suggested but only sort of jokingly. This would have been in the late 1970s, which means you’ve been essentially avoiding writing this book for over 30 years now. Why did it take so long, and why the anxiety toward writing about surfing? 

WILLIAM FINNEGAN: In that conversation, I think surfing was just an example of something not political — a pastime, a hobby. It came up because she and I were hitchhiking around South Africa, and we had landed on a beach in a really underdeveloped, poor part of the country. There was some surf, and we borrowed boards and I pushed her into some waves. So we were joking around about surfing, that’s how it came up.

A few years later I was back in the US. I’d written a couple of magazine articles about South Africa, including one about my experience teaching in a black high school in Cape Town, and I had gotten a contract to write a book about that — 20 publishers had turned it down, but finally one gave me a small contract. So I was living in San Francisco, writing that book and freelancing, and I wrote a piece about Nicaragua and submitted it to The New Yorker — it was the first thing I had submitted to them — and they took it. Then somebody in the editor’s office there said that if I wanted to do a longer piece, now was the time to propose it. I couldn’t think of anything, so I quickly proposed a profile of this guy I was surfing with at the time, Mark Renneker, a big-wave surfer and physician. It was really a borrowed conceit. I’d been reading The New Yorker since I was a kid, and I saw Mark as a perfect John McPhee hero — a big, smart, charismatic, outdoor-superman type. So what I was really proposing was a McPhee piece about this guy I knew, and his unusual world. Of course, I wasn’t John McPhee.

I got the assignment, and suddenly I had this big break, but I’d never actually seriously considered writing about surfing. The piece (“Playing Doc’s Games”) took me seven years to write. It was very long, quite complicated, and part of the story was an ongoing dialogue between me and Mark about surfing and its importance to each of us. He was a true surf evangelist. He thought surfing was a wonderful thing to do with your life, and he could talk quite convincingly about how it informed his work as a doctor. But I was relatively diffident. My attitude was, “What’s to take seriously?” I only did it because I grew up doing it. There was really nothing more to say about it, I thought. But here I’d signed on to write this big piece, and the more I thought about it the more interesting the material became. Also, there was the considerable challenge, both technical and creative, of writing about surfing for non-surfing readers. Still, I had various inhibitions, one of which was concern that Mark wouldn’t like the story I came up with.

Meanwhile, during those seven years, I moved to New York, wrote three books, and started churning out political pieces for the magazine. I got nervous about coming out of the closet as a surfer. Nervous that people would say, “Oh, you’re just a dumb surfer, you can’t write about politics.” That didn’t happen, but Mark actually did hate the piece. 

In the book you describe that story as “disfiguring.”

That’s actually a reference to the way I felt as a reporter. By then I’d been working as a journalist for a few years and was used to adopting a certain professional passivity. You know, people say outrageous things and you just say “uh huh” and write it down. You don’t argue with them or obstruct the flow. I was doing that same thing with Mark, but it was often in a situation where I also needed to act, to be my real self. We were surfing, after all. I didn’t exactly risk my life to get the story, but I was definitely hanging very close to him, sometimes paddling out just because he paddled out. I did end up going out with him on one very big day that I might have otherwise skipped. But surfing was my world, my home scene, and here I was acting within it like a reporter, which felt disfiguring. It wasn’t a normal reporting job. I was being passive where I couldn’t afford to be. 

The piece, when it finally came out, got a surprisingly big response. A lot of readers liked it, and my publisher wanted to bring it out as a book. I said no, partly because Mark was unhappy with it — I didn’t want to rub his face in it anymore — but also because I started thinking that, if I were going to publish a book about surfing, it wouldn’t be about San Francisco. I had surfed a lot of other places (with a lot of other people) including some that meant a lot more to me than Ocean Beach, San Francisco, did. So my publisher and my agent said, “Great, write that book.” And that’s how I backed into Barbarian Days. Those conversations took place in the 1990s. So I really took my sweet time about it — again. 

I usually write about politics, war, organized crime, economics, race — all these hard-edged subjects. It was difficult to justify writing about a subject so soft, an activity so completely useless, in the face of things that really demanded coverage — famines, wars. Those things took precedence. I just couldn’t justify sitting around sucking my thumb about surfing. Then, in 2001, our daughter was born, and I stopped doing war reporting. And I slowly realized that you could actually tell a lot of different stories through the lens of surfing. So I stopped running away from the memoir. Still, the urgency of it never seemed comparable to the stories I was doing for the magazine. 

I noticed that on your New Yorker contributor’s page, you recommend Bryan Di Salvatore’s Merle Haggard profile “Ornery.” It occurred to me that you’ve never done a story like that, a celebrity profile.

No, I don’t think I have. I took a vow a long time ago not to write about anyone who has a press agent. Which is silly. Somebody might come along who’s terribly interesting to me who has a press agent. In fact, Bryan’s piece shows just how great a celebrity profile can be. I did do a profile of Barack Obama. But that was in the first half of 2004, just before he got famous.

There’s a line that stuck out to me, where you and a friend are bumming around the country and you see flyers for Woodstock, but decide not to go because it “sounded lame.” You write that your “newsman’s intuition” was “never great,” which seems like an odd thing for you to say. Do you really think that? 

I said that because, while I don’t really do news, I often work with news reporters, and find myself at press conferences, and so on. And I always feel like I’m a step behind real news-people, who all seem to have such a sharp sense of the news moment, the news narrative. That’s what I mean by “newsman’s intuition.” I’ve been around a lot of pros, and they have it, and I just don’t. I work for a weekly magazine with a relatively slow metabolism. 

Which often puts me on a divergent track. Here’s one example: I went to Somalia in ’95. This was after there’d been a famine, a civil war, a UN intervention led by the US, and then a low-level war between the US and local warlords. The UN and the US were giving up and pulling out. The pull-out was a big news story, and there were a bunch of reporters there, filing stories. But after the international forces left, I looked around and thought, what am I going to write about? Somalia still existed. There was an economy, a society, but it was impossible to find out anything about it. There were no banks, no government, no authorities to go ask questions. So it was difficult reporting. But it was an interesting subject: How does this place work? What will become of it? What’s going on? So I kind of turned my back on the news story, and instead wrote about Somalia qua Somalia. I’m often around news-people, but I just as often end up writing about something quite different from what they cover. 

You also write about having interview-like conversations with strangers, which you even took notes on, long before you aspired to be a journalist. That’s a part of the job a lot of journalists seem to dread. Has that always come easy for you?

Well, if you dread talking to strangers, journalism may not be for you. I feel that too, of course, sometimes — shy, withdrawn. But you have to find people who engage you and whom you can engage. I do see that early note-taking of mine as a kind of proto-journalistic impulse. I love going to a place and trying to figure it out. I’m into maps and logistics and topography and language and especially local history and just how things work in a given place. I think that sort of stuff interests most people, but I really get into it — drawing people out, asking them how they get by and what’s happened to them and their families. I like to find common ground with people who come from very different backgrounds from mine. There’s something comforting, and exciting, about convincing them that you’re interested and then making them feel heard. 

Of course, there are plenty of places where people don’t want to talk. Some parts of Mexico, for example, are very hard to report from now. I did a Letter from Michoacán (“Silver or Lead”) a few years ago, during a period when the cartel had really captured the state. People were just terrified about talking, and as I started to understand the situation, I saw that they were right to be afraid. For me even to show up at their offices or their houses was dangerous for them. It was terrible. Some of them actually suffered consequences for having spoken to me. Nobody was hurt or killed, thank God, but people had to go into hiding after my piece came out. It was probably the worst episode of my journalistic career. 

Then there are the situations where people are happy to be drawn out, where starting a conversation is like opening a book that turns out to be full of great stuff. I guess I did get into that well before I got into journalism. On that long surf trip through the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, I often found myself hanging out with fishermen who would take us to these small islands, where we were looking for waves. Listening to them talk about their lives, it was like a new form of poetry to me, something I’d been looking for without knowing it.

The book is also incredibly honest, to a painful extent, about the emotional complexities of male friendship. In one section you refer to the “subterranean dynamics” of a relationship. Was that something you were interested in exploring?

I was, definitely, although I feel now like I sometimes pulled my punches. In my experience, the stuff that happens between guys is so often raw, confusing, unfinished, upsetting, partly because so much is left unspoken. Some of the most important male friendships in my life have formed largely around surfing, and I write about them as clearly as I can, but the deeper I got into some of them, the more unresolved stuff I found, and some of it I decided just to leave alone. I have a couple of old friends who are probably dreading this book, wondering whether I’m going to write about, say, some big fight we had in Mexico, when I split and he didn’t have money for gas, and all the issues underneath that episode. But I didn’t! I decided not to. 

And I’m glad you asked about it. I was trying to paint a full picture of a few male friendships, how rewarding they’ve been, but also how wrenching and complicated. If I were writing fiction, I could have gone farther, I think. But it’s the problem of memoir, especially for a journalist. Everything that happened was off the record, it was private life. And now I’m, what, giving myself license to depict these friends and loved ones, often many years later? It’s a dicey and presumptuous thing to do. With women just as much as with men, of course. Even more, in my case.

What’s different about your approach to writing, when the subject is your own life?

As a reporter, you have to get people to trust you, and then you have to work to not betray that trust. I sometimes make an exception for powerful people, public figures whose actions affect a lot of people — the same rules may not apply. They can look out for themselves. But I generally tend to write about people who are, if not dispossessed, at least not powerful. When I went to Peru, as I did last February, for instance, to write about gold mining, I didn’t look for gold barons or mining executives, I looked for miners. The poor — those at the bottom of the pyramid, doing the work — those are the people who interest me. And when people in that position trust you enough to spend time with you and share their stories, you really have a heavy responsibility to not let them feel betrayed in any way. 

In a memoir, the same issue is present but heightened. You have these shared, unguarded moments with old friends and loved ones, and a lot of it is incredible material for a story. But how is it going to make them feel to see it in print? And what’s your responsibility to them at this remove, particularly if you’re not close friends anymore? There are a lot of difficult judgment calls. I eventually realized that there were all kinds of great, revealing episodes that I simply couldn’t include. Maybe in a novel, but not in a nonfiction narrative that uses real names. 

How much research was involved? 

A lot. I didn’t expect to have to do any. I figured, this is my life, I was there, I’ve got journals, and that’s that. But instead, you know, I’m a reporter, so I started investigating my own memories. I started reporting out of my own past. And it turns out I had tons of things wrong. Books set me straight. Contemporary newspaper accounts. I’d dig up old letters or ask people for my letters back, or to see their journals. I have a couple of old friends — Caryn Davidson, my first girlfriend, and Bryan Di Salvatore, who I traveled with in the South Pacific and Asia — who were better writers and journal-keepers than I was. Their journals were incredible. Not only richer than mine, and a tremendous mnemonic device for me, but also corrective. Memory is unreliable. I had exaggerated so many things, especially about friends. 

Another strain in the book is your development as a writer. It seems like Bryan, in particular, was a big influence on your writing; I loved the scenes of you guys trying to collaborate on travel pieces in Australia and of the “outback test,” where you’re reading things out loud and rejecting them if they feel overwritten or whatever, “in the harsh no-bullshit desert light.” 

Yes, and that test was mainly applied, ironically enough, to The New Yorker. We had all these old New Yorkers stuffed under the front seat of our old Falcon as we drove across the center of Australia and we’d read a short story or essay aloud and, in many cases, just say, “Nope.” Even Norman Mailer failed the test, which was horrifying to me. Suddenly you’d look at a writer you’d loved, look at the work from a different angle, and see all the sagging joists and think, “Nope, you’re full of shit.” 

All writing is a kind of performance. The fact that it’s been published in some important magazine doesn’t necessarily mean it worked. Look again, look hard, judge for yourself. That outback test was funny partly because we both ended up writing for The New Yorker — and of course you know very well that your own stuff is completely fallible.

You’ve been associated with that one magazine, The New Yorker, for most your career. The benefits are obvious, but have you ever felt constrained by that relationship? 

I do write for a few other magazines, but mainly, you’re right. At this point, I think I’ve completely internalized many aspects of the magazine, including its house style. So writing a book is partly a giddy, guilty pleasure, at the level of punctuation, breaking out of that style. I’m aware of every comma I don’t put in. 

Things like spelling teenager with a hyphen: that’s the New Yorker way. I lose the hyphen in the book. In fact, the magazine ran an excerpt of this book, in which things were put back, naturally, into house style. All these commas appeared (in front of the word “too,” at the end of a sentence, for instance), and I actually liked seeing them. They’re like old friends. Then there were all the tiny fixes — reversing the order of two words, say — that just lift a sentence. They improve it 5 percent but it feels like 105 percent. By the time that was done, just a few weeks ago, it was too late for the book, which had gone to press. So I look at the book now and it’s this flawed thing. [laughs] Without Mary Norris’s little switcheroo in that sentence, the thing sags!

A lot of things that work in the magazine don’t work as well in a book. The use of white space, for instance, between sections. In the magazine, for instance, you can use that space to change subjects, to shift gears, sometimes very abruptly. But in a book you often have to write transitions, to connect the sections in some narrative or explanatory way. The contract, the understanding, between writer and reader is simply different. 

I’ve written several books that first appeared in some form in the magazine. When I joined the staff, in the 1980s, a little publishing cottage industry of long New Yorker pieces reissued as books was still thriving – books by Janet Malcolm, Jonathan Schell, John McPhee, a lot of people. The articles and the books were virtually identical. I found I couldn’t manage that.

That San Francisco piece (“Playing Doc’s Games”) was the basis of a chapter [in Barbarian Days], and it was the hardest chapter to write. The one I had already written! It was the hardest because that first version was made of magazine DNA, which simply would not take as a graft, or, to mix metaphors grossly, an organ transplant, in the book. I changed it and changed it, until finally not a single sentence was the same. At least that’s how it felt. But still, something would seem rotten. I kept falling through the floor. I’d go back and, sure enough, there would be some passage where I’d lazily thought, “I’ve described this already, I’ll just reuse it.” It didn’t work. The body rejected it. I had to rewrite it. 

I noticed that with Cold New World. I read the “Deep East Texas” story online, the magazine version, before I read the book chapter, which was fairly different. 

That was a tricky edit, because the magazine was changing rapidly then. Tina Brown was the editor, and pieces were getting dramatically shorter — no more multi-part stories — and I had this baggy monster of a piece. The magazine version ended up being about a white sheriff — he was the main character — and the black people in the community were relatively minor and shadowy. In the book version, the main characters are a black family, the Clarks. The book, you may remember, was about downwardly mobile families. The Clarks belonged front and center in the book. So that was a complete, inside-out editing job for the magazine. In the end, I thought it worked fine. All credit to John Bennet, who is brilliant and fearless. He’s been my editor at the mag for 28 years.

In Barbarian Days you describe the Cold New World reporting as “deeply disturbing.”

I didn’t feel that way about most of the book. But the last section, yes — that’s what I was referring to. That section is set in a community called Antelope Valley, a northern LA exurb. I was writing about racist and antiracist skinheads. Reporting on those kids got really difficult. 

In a review of that book, Robert Christgau wrote, “The most remarkable of William Finnegan’s many literary gifts is his compassion.” What do you think about the role of compassion or empathy in nonfiction writing? 

It’s pretty crucial if you’re doing long form narrative writing that’s not rooted in the drama of events, but in daily life. For that book, I was spending months with people, waiting for something to happen, so it’s obviously important to find people whom you can stand to be around. I was writing about struggling, disadvantaged kids, and the only way to do that is if you feel a powerful sympathy for them. You never want to resort to special pleading or condescension. You want to try to see people clearly. And pity, you hope, never comes into it. I actually don’t think — in that book or, really, anything else – that I’ve ever ended up feeling pity for anybody that I’ve written extensively about; certainly none of the main characters in Cold New World. Even this miner in Peru [in “Tears of the Sun”], Josmell Ilasaca. I felt terrible for him as I left Peru, almost like he was a condemned man, heading back into these hellish mines. But still, the main points for me about him are his spiritedness and his intelligence. His circumstances are incredibly tough, but he makes the choice to be a miner. He doesn’t see himself as a victim, and neither do I.

The first part of Cold New World is about a street kid in New Haven. That story came out first as a piece in the magazine and it got quite a bit of attention. The drug war was hot and heavy at the time, and I was accused by some drug warriors of having produced a sympathetic portrait of a drug dealer, which they considered a terrible thing to do. I was sympathetic. I was guilty. 

One of my favorite of your stories is “Doubt.” What do you remember about reporting that story, and how did you decide to approach it the way you did? 

I was on a jury, and when it was over — we convicted the guy, it was a mugging case — I went to the sentencing, which I didn’t need to do. I was the only jury member there, but I was curious about how it would turn out. The defendant got sentenced to, I think, seven years, and in the elevator on my way out, one of his alibi witnesses recognized me and started cussing me out, saying that we had railroaded her friend. She said she had been planning to become a lawyer, but was so disgusted by the whole process that now she wasn’t anymore. I thought, you were going to be a lawyer? In the jury room, we had her pegged as a street kid who hadn’t finished high school. Now she was going to be a lawyer? On a jury, everybody pegs everybody, as far as I can tell. Everybody thinks in terms of stereotypes.

So I got her to have lunch with me. And it turned out that she was from this fancy background; she was a United Nations kid, both her parents were lawyers, both her sisters were lawyers, and she was studying Romance languages in college. And I thought, Uh oh. This whole other version of what had happened on the night of the crime began to come out as we talked, including a lot of facts that hadn’t been presented in court. So that’s what made me decide to go back and report it out. I eventually turned up a lot more stuff that we hadn’t heard, or been allowed to hear, in court. The piece ended up being, in part, a meditation on juries and uncertainty, on how we make these important decisions on the basis of incredibly limited information. 

After the piece was published, Martin Kaplan, the guy we’d convicted, wouldn’t leave me alone. He thought I’d written a piece vindicating him and saying he didn’t deserve to be in jail. So he called me collect from prison like five times a week for the next seven years. That might be an exaggeration, but it was just constant. I started sending him little goodies, occasionally, on request, and when he finally got out he came straight to me, asking for money and help. It went on forever, the aftermath to that piece. 

The final twist was a letter from someone I didn’t know, which I recently came across in my files. It said, “I’m another girlfriend of Martin Kaplan’s” — he had a lot of girlfriends — “and I just want you to know that, while I know you did your best to figure out what really happened and you did your best to help Martin … he really did that crime. He did the mugging and he was laughing at you the whole time. You just should know that.” And I thought, fuck. In the end, maybe there was no doubt. 

You describe surfing as paradoxical in that it represents both a desire for total isolation and an equally strong desire for an audience. Couldn’t that also apply to writing? 

With surfing, there is a sense in which, just to speak for myself, you’re always pursuing waves that are farther and farther out there, waves off some reef or beach around the next point, some place where nobody is around and the surf is pumping. Those are the great spots, where it’s just you and the ocean. Then there’s the opposite compulsion: you want to surf well and you want people to see you surf well. It’s a performance, like a dance. It’s quite strong, that paradox, at least in my surfing.

Writing, too, is, on the one hand, a solitary activity, just you and the page. You’re in your office or at your desk — I’ve never understood how people could write in a newsroom. There’s this in-your-head-aloneness to it. But then you’re also performing. You’re addressing, or trying to address, a large number of people, strangers, many of them skeptical. You’re trying to be truthful to what you saw and felt, which is still private, and yet be public about it. So yeah, they’re similar. And there are other parallels. Riding a wave well feels very much like putting together a sentence that works. Figuring out how to read a wave, how to tell what a wave is doing, is like figuring out a story.

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Will Stephenson is the culture editor of the Arkansas Times. He has also contributed to the Oxford American and The FADER.