Master of the Well-Turned Line

Bryan Di Salvatore, a writer’s writer, died on New Year’s Day 2024. He was 75. He wrote for this magazine, among others, and nobody wrote about surfing like he did. He saw surfers paddling for waves cast “quick backward glances, like lake-lapping impalas.” 

Bryan and I met in Lahaina in 1971. He was fresh out of Yale and had an obscure favorite surf spot west of town. “Compared to the angel palace of Honolua, these waves seemed under construction,” he wrote for TSJ. “Skipping across one of those faces felt like riding a bike over a railroad crossing. They were creatures of a careless god. I loved them every one.” Bryan celebrated imperfection, but he never wrote an ordinary sentence. 

He grew up in Southern California, “in a part of greater Los Angeles so far inland that Valley Cowboys called us Valley Cowboys.” He and I chased waves together across the South Pacific, and in 1978 we stumbled on an uninhabited island called Tavarua, where we camped and surfed a left that had few imperfections—and Bryan, lucky bastard, was a goofyfoot. Later, he wrote about how surfers out at a secret spot feel squirrely, like “convicts arm-guarding their dinner plates.” That pretty well nails it.

Bryan was the walking definition of a stand-up guy. Once, four of us got dropped at a remote point in Java by fishermen from a village across the bay. We discovered, too late, that most of the water we’d brought was undrinkable; the jerry cans had been used to carry fuel. We were looking at a week or more with far too little water. With no discussion, Bryan was put in charge of doling out the potable water. We all knew the accounting would be scrupulously fair, down to the last parched drop.

He loved baseball and wrote a terrific biography of a nineteenth-century National League player, A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward (Pantheon). He loved country music and wrote a New Yorker profile of Merle Haggard that will be read for centuries. He wrote many other fine pieces for the New Yorker, including brief sketches and massive multiparters. 

In his thirties, he moved to Missoula, Montana, a river town he once described as “the only spot in the world I have ever felt remotely at home,” and he lived there for 40-odd years, writing and teaching writing at the University of Montana. He wrote wide-ranging, hilarious columns that were putatively movie reviews by an aggressive alter ego he called Cine-Man. Sometimes he drove a school bus. He married Deirdre McNamer, a novelist, in 1988 and became the most uxorious husband I’ve known, devoted utterly to his Dee. 

Bryan was the last of the world’s great correspondents. I got hundreds of letters from him, and that’s just me. He loved his friends and seemed to have a thousand of them. He surfed less as the years passed—Missoula is not near the coast—but he remained fascinated by surf culture, writing nonfiction and fiction about surfing into his final years. He read constantly, with a fierce, discerning eye, and was teaching himself Italian when he died unexpectedly. He will be missed, unutterably, by family and friends—not to mention by readers who relish a well-turned line.

[Feature image: Snapshots from Di Salvatore and the author’s surf jaunts: Tavarua, Fiji, 1978. Photo by William Finnegan.]