Surfing memoir: William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days from Hawaii to Fiji

He might be a highly regarded feature writer for The New Yorker, but William Finnegan sees himself more as a 'sunburnt pagan'.

Barbarian Days author William Finnegan, right, at Kirra in 1979 with Bryan Di Salvatore.

Most kids who discovered surfing in the 1960s did so by accident. They werenÂ’t spoonfed it by glossy magazines or dazzled by TV into thinking it was a high-profile, glamorous sport. Instead, they found it at the beach at the bottom of their street, and their laissez-faire parents gave them all day to immerse themselves in its intriguing delights.

To most, it was an obsession with a significance they didn’t fully understand. Was it, as their parents invariably thought, just a passing childhood amusement, or did the older surfers who had already earned their driver’s licence and were seeking adventures up and down the coast know something deeper?

William Finnegan was granted an emphatic answer to that question at 14, in 1966, after he’d been surfing in Los Angeles for three years. His dad, a former assistant director on the television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., was appointed production manager of a new half-hour variety show in Hawaii, starring Don Ho. The family moved to a beachside suburb just beyond Waikiki’s crowded tourist strip.

It was here, while surfing alongside older Hawaiians, that Finnegan learned surfing could be more substantial than the “subversive and imported” version he’d encountered back on the mainland. Rather, it was “deeply woven into the fabric of the place”, which was apparent whenever the unpredictable swells and trade­winds combined to create good surf and all generations of locals dropped everything to ride it.

Surfing became a “clandestine” life Finnegan lived away from his parents. The more he surfed, the less they knew about him. In one stunning passage in the first chapter of his memoir Barbarian Days, he recalls slowly paddling back from his favourite wave, a moody reef break called Cliffs, across a lagoon at low tide. His fin gently bumped the mossy lava heads as he drifted in the spring sunshine, passing Chinese ladies collecting eels from the exposed reef.

“I felt myself floating between two worlds,” he writes. In this dreamy, weightless state, he realised with blinding clarity which world would eventually consume him. “I was a sunburnt pagan now. I felt privy to mysteries.”

In that last five-word sentence, Finnegan expresses a powerful feeling of belonging and a profoundly youthful positivity, and implicitly acknowledges that, despite feeling privy, nothing in this journey would come easily.

Few professional surfers start out like this; and if they do, they soon replace such humble notions with an aggressive self-belief. The pro tour is a narcissistic, commercial parody of everything that is cool and constructive about surfing, and those who spend their formative years prostituting their passion for podium appearances and money often do so at the expense of a deeper understanding of surfing’s more enchanting powers. You can see it whenever one of them is interviewed at a contest. Despite being world-class exponents, they are comically restricted to a cheesy lingo that barely explains even the physical, let alone metaphysical, forces at work. Finnegan crossed paths with several famous surfers in his travels, but he mentions them only in passing because this book is not about surfers like them.

Finnegan initially pursued two ambitions: surfing and writing fiction. He and a fellow literary aspirant, Bryan Di Salvatore (they met when Finnegan noticed him carrying a copy of Ulysses in a carpark in 1970), embarked on an epic three-year journey (1978-80), working on their novels while discovering secret breaks that later became world famous. Finnegan calculates he and Di Salvatore were among the first nine people to ride Tavarua, Fiji, which now has a private resort and hosts a stop on the pro tour. They did it by camping on the nearby deserted island for two weeks, eating canned food and discovering the outermost limits of joy that an abundance of world-class waves could bring.

Attempts to describe surfing can be embarrassing even in the hands of great writers, but Finnegan knows how to avoid cliches. One wave he rode there, at twilight, bent inexplicably away from the reef, forcing him against his instincts to chase it towards the channel as it seemed to relax the laws of physics. It was a test of faith and sanity, a gift of “magical realism” that only he could know about. He didn’t recall it later to Di Salvatore. Sometimes not even another surfer is going to understand your experiences.

The flip side to all this magic, of course, is that it is elusive. Dreams form like waves over a perfect tropical reef, then disappear. The next ride might break in a different direction entirely, and take you to places you hadn’t expected. In these circumstances, intimate relationships are fraught, and usually one-sided. Finnegan deftly weaves it all together with candour and introspection that eschews vanity. His has been one of the great surfing lives, but he recalls it with humility, as if merely following something much bigger than him.

After a period in Australia that coincided with the glory days of Kirra Point, Queensland; surfing the wild, remote waves of Cactus, South Australia; and venturing into Indonesia to become, again, among the first people to ride the now famous waves at G-Land and Lagundri Bay, Finnegan and Di Salvatore parted ways (they remain friends). Finnegan wound up in post-apartheid South Africa, teaching at a black school in the townships.

Now in his 60s, he still surfs obsessively, and has also long since achieved his ambition of becoming a successful writer, although not in fiction. I remember when I discovered his work. It was 1992, and I was visiting a friend at the Herald Sun in Melbourne. She had the current copy of The New Yorker on her desk. “There’s a piece about surfing in here,” she said. I was gobsmacked, and sceptical. What would The New Yorker know about surfing?

In it was the first instalment of a two-part feature called “Playing Doc’s games”, about a small, hard-core crew of surfers who took on huge, cold, dangerous, shifty waves at Ocean Beach, San Francisco. The leader of the crew was a doctor, Mark Renneker, who had a pathological urge, possibly related to his work dealing with terminal cancer patients, to push his small group of friends into the most hostile surf conditions they could endure. The story’s prosaic style was Dickensian; its immersion in its subject recalled Steinbeck. It certainly wasn’t like the rubbish surf mags were churning out at the time, sometimes under my own byline as a freelancer. I eagerly awaited, then devoured, the second instalment as soon as it arrived at the newsagent a week later.

“Playing Doc’s games” is rewritten for this book, and has lost little of its original charm.

I was curious to learn, though, that the story was based on Finnegan’s time in San Francisco from 1983 to 1986, seven years before the story appeared. Why the lag in publishing such a great yarn?

After leaving San Francisco, Finnegan moved to New York and finally landed a steady gig at The New Yorker, writing about apartheid, war, race, politics and other serious topics. Often his stories were opinion pieces, read by people in suits in big offices in Washington. He sat on the Renneker story because he thought “coming out of the closet as a surfer” would damage his standing in political circles. “Other policy wonks might say, ‘Oh, you’re just a dumb surfer, what would you know?’ ”

Yeah, right. What would a surfer know.

Finnegan resists adding too much philosophical weight to his obsession. The closest he gets is to compare his recklessness in dangerously large conditions that are possibly beyond his limits, which continues into his 60s, and has almost killed him on more than a few occasions, with his tendency to take unnecessary risks while reporting on wars, corruption and gangs for The New Yorker. He sees no parallel. “Surfing was an antidote for the horror,” he says.

Of all those mysteries he felt privy to as a 14-year-old in Hawaii, this might be the best.

Fred Pawle is The Australian’s surfing writer.

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

By William Finnegan

Corsair/Constable & Robinson, 447pp, $29.99