My Friends in the Pre-dawn Silence

"We had known each other for eight years at that point, and our flat, fierce disagreement over virtually every line of this ditty for Tracks (an Australian surf mag) made me wonder when our literary differences had become so pronounced. When we first met, in Lahaina, what drew us together was discovering we loved the same books. In fact, the first words I ever spoke to Bryan were, "What are you doing with that book?" He was crossing a post office parking lot with a Ulysses in hand, and the familiar prongs of the big "U" on the Random House paperback cover had caught my eye. We stood there in the sun talking about Joyce, and then the Beats, for an hour or two -- while Dominic waited impatiently in the shade -- and it seemed inevitable that we would meet again. Of course, our tastes had never been exactly the same. I was the more dedicated Joyce fan -- I later spent a year studying Finnegan's Wake with Norman O. Brown, an exercise in masturbatory obscurantism that Bryan would have never undertaken -- and he had an eye for genre fiction, including westerns, that I lacked. I liked Pynchos; Bryan thought his prose awful. And so on. But we were always turning each other on to new writers and, more often than not, finding the same virtues in their stuff. Bryan tended to be years ahead of the reading public -- he was extolling Cormac McCarthy's work long before most critics had heard of him -- and I was glad to follow his leads. In Australia we were digging into Patrick White and Thomas Kenneally and turning up our noses at Colleen McCullough. So why did every sentence he write about Aussie surfing annoy me, and vice versa?

We were headed in different directions, clearly. I had started as a teenage lyric surrealist, language drunk a la Dylan Thomas, and had been slowly trying to sober up. I was now more interested in transparency and accuracy, less enamored of showy originality. Bryan remained enchanted by the music of words -- what he once called the 'incredible foot-stomping joy of a well-turned phrase'. He loved pure captured dialect, cracked vernacular humor, vivid physicality, and a knockout metaphor, and he disliked nothing more than a lazy stock expression."

- William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life