"So fucken slick," says Nick Carroll.
Depending on your love of literature you may,
or may not, know, or care, that Tom Wolfe has died,
aged eighty-eight.
That name mean anything?
If you’re a fan of the better surf writers, Nick Carroll and so
on, you owe a little something to the father of New Journalism, a
style of writing that brought the writer, and the dramatic
techniques favoured by the novelist, into straight journalism. Its
arrival was as exciting as colour television.
Years back, when I got my first job at Surfing Life,
I figured I better learn how to write (I’d cribbed stories out of
old Tracks magazines and presented ’em as samples of my
work) and I’d remembered Nick had listed his favourite writers:
Hunter ST, Earn Hemingway, Ev Waugh, John Steinbeck and…Tom
Wolfe.
Over the course of the year, I read most of their books. Hunter
for gonz, Hemingway for muscular writing, Waugh for satire,
Steinbeck for storytelling and Tom Wolfe for reporting.
And exclamation marks. Want to know the source of our
exclamation marks? Blame Tom Wolfe! Of course! (And the use of “Of
course!”)
And, in case you didn’t know, Tom Wolfe got into a little surf
writing himself. In 1968 he wrote an essay called The Pump House Gang (which was
included in a book of essays of the same name) where he wrote about
a gang of La Jolla surfers.
An excerpt:
The [surfers] are not exactly off in a world of their own,
they are and they aren’t. What it is, they float right through the
real world, but it can’t touch them. They do these things, like the
time they went to Malibu, and there was this party in some guy’s
apartment, and there wasn’t enough legal parking space for
everybody, and so somebody went out and painted the red curbs white
and everybody parked. Then the cops came. Everybody ran out. At [a
party] in Manhattan Beach . . . somebody decided to put a hole
through one wall, and everybody else decided to see if they could
make it bigger. Everybody was stoned out of their hulking gourds,
and it got to be about 3:30 a.m. and everybody decided to go see
the riots. These were the riots in Watts. The Los Angeles Times and
the San Diego Union were all saying, WATTS NO-MAN’S LAND, but
naturally nobody believed that. Watts was a blast, and the Pump
House gang was immune to the trembling gourd panic rattles of the
LA Times.
According to the Encyclopedia of
Surfing, after the story came out La Jolla locals
spray-painted “Tom Wolfe is a dork” across the cement beachfront
pump house structure that gives the story its title.
Surfer magazine later called “The Pump House Gang” a “bit of
low-rent pop sociology,” but acknowledged that the Windansea
surfers, who once dressed up as Nazi storm troopers and
goose-stepped down to the beach for a laugh, were in fact viewed as
“savages” by the rest of California surf society.
Earlier today, I asked Nick Carroll, whose early work used many
of Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism techniques and whose influence across
surf writing is without equal, why he was so into Wolfe.
“I just got excited by that whole genre of magazine writing of
the 1960s, it felt a bit musical to me in a way, like an injection
of flow and energy and emotion into the culture and how it was
being observed. Like it was putting new things at centre stage.
Above all it felt American to me, like it was describing a bigger
and more viscerally entertaining world. So much lively
curiosity!
“Plus so fucken slick and skilled with the language.
Writers observing closely and doing the best work of their
lives.
“I really paid attention, especially to Wolfe’s
introduction to the collected volume,
The New Journalism, which
included a lot of the best operators in the field. It’s basically a
journalism primer. Like you don’t have to do four years of
“Journalism” at Uni, you can just read that, then go and practice
it.
“The Pump House Gang was interesting but not
as interesting as some of the car racing stuff. The Right Stuff was
all time I thought.
“The big thing about Wolfe, Gay Talese, and most of
the NJs is that they were still mostly classically trained journos,
they were never post-modern about things, they were actually
interested and curious in the subject, not just in their reaction
to the subject. They wanted to get hold of both — to describe what
people were actually up to. Not just what they thought those people
were up to, or would like them to be up to, which is the modern
“commentary” trend. You can’t beat actual interest in people.
“In surf writing now, I think it’s actually a pretty
dynamic time but I don’t see much Wolfean prose, the detailed
observation and curiosity isn’t quite there in a lot of otherwise
very entertaining stuff. It’s a fucking high bar though, and
surfing’s not as new as it used to be! It’s hard to find anything
new to write about.”
