William Finnegan wins most prestigious prize in
journalism for his book Barbarian Days…
One year ago, the New Yorker staffer
William Finnegan loosed his two-decades-in-the-making surf memoir
Barbarian Days.
At the time, I expected a genteel read, a not particularly
rigorous examination of a part-time surfer, a big-city fucker who
dared to assume that he could reveal the mysteries of the game.
Instead, I was thrown under the bus of a two-day obsessive read.
As I wrote at the time, I’d only penetrated three chapters into the
book when we suddenly camping on Maui waiting for Honolua Bay to
break and, shortly after, camping on the empty beach at Tavarua for
a week and surfing a new discovery called Restaurants.
Soon, Grajagan in 1979, Africa and, later, among the big-wave
surfers of Ocean Beach, San Francisco, and, then, spending long
vacations on Madeira, waiting for Jardim Do Mar’s heavy deep-water
right to break.
Photos scattered through the pages showed the author to have
visible obliques, was long-haired and tanned. Finnegan was, is, a…
stud?
I wasn’t the only one in thrall to Finnegan.
The Wall Street Journal called it “gorgeously
written and intensely felt… dare I say that we all need Mr
Finnegan… as a role model for a life, thrillingly, lived.”
The LA Times said, “It’s also about a writer’s life
and, even more generally, a quester’s life, more carefully observed
and precisely rendered than any I’ve read in a long time.”
And, announced only thirty minutes ago at Columbia University,
Barbarian Days has won the Pulitzer Prize for
biography. The prize committee praised it as, “A finely
crafted memoir of a youthful obsession that has propelled the
author through a distinguished writing career.”
The Pulitzer Prize, of course, is America’s most prestigious
award in journalism. It also includes ten thousand dollars in prize
money to each category winner.
Last year, when I asked Finnegan if he thought surfing was
elevating or just another pointless pursuit he wrote, “It’s
supremely useless, I think, and not at all ennobling. Which is not
to say that a great many people, starting with you and me, don’t
get a great deal out of it – even a reason to live. It just
does nothing, obviously, for anybody else. It’s the ultimate
selfish pursuit. You could argue that it teaches its devotees a few
things about self-reliance and the grandeur of Nature – maybe even
a little humility – and I guess I wouldn’t argue with that.
But in the end surfing, in my opinion, does little or nothing to
build or improve character. As we all know, a lot of assholes surf,
and some of them surf well.”
On the plus side, “a lot of my best friends surf, and it can be
a great deep thing to share with people you really like,” he wrote.
“Non-surfers are certainly never going to understand it.”
Read about Barbarian Days, here.
