Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
by Richard Farina (Dell Publishing)
by J. Hoben
Been Down So Long was published in 1966, one of the many books overlooked from that decade. Richard Farina is a wizard; he has the missing puzzle piece in his back pocket from page one- of this he makes no secret. I was dragged in, a victim of his literary seduction, simply by scanning the table of contents:
“Chapter 2 The Fraternity Smoker Type Thing. The Paregoric Pall Mall. The Saga of the Enema Bag Begins. Pamela Watson-May: Hurray and up she Rises.”
The story begins with our hero – or antihero, depending which side of the bread you like buttered – Gnosses Pappadopoulis returning from a year of cross-country rambling; a year which most of his friends in Athene thought had left him dead by the yellowed teeth of an Adirondack Grizzly, or the cold shiver of a Mexican desert night, or anything else they could weave a little folklore around. Gnosses (as much as I hate the phrase) is a free spirit who openly and without remorse pisses in the visened eyes of social grace, a would-be “beat” if he could be political with any intention besides getting in good with a chick. As the back cover states, “he’s the guy who’s been down so long it looks like up.”
Half hallucinated love triangles that drop off into angry stiletto tangents, piercing rabbit foot-filled-ruckshacks and shattering the springwork of rusted Captain Midnight Code-O-Graphs. Bald headed Masochistic hip cats with names like “Heap” and “Mojo” sporting glasses and missing teeth who abandon universal causes to marry English oil heiresses. Cuban conspiracies, drug running and vis a vis confrontations with the infallible Buddha. From true love (not as cheesy as it sounds) to universal disease, Gnosses sees and does it all.
Farina’s writing is a force to be reckoned with. If he wants you to share a state of dream-like confusion, you share it. If he wants you to laugh, you laugh. Hell, he can even make you shit your pants. He has the profound poetics of Rimbaud (“In the cobalt night he dreamed of disaster to come and cursed her sweetly into the sulfur cauldrons of hell”) and the profane everyday-ism of an average joe (“a two page exposition on the aesthetic value of an eagerly awaited turd.”)
But the real kicker of this book – the romantic, James Dean kicker – is conveyed in the Editor’s Note: “On the night of April 30, 1966, returning from a party celebrating the hard-cover publication of his book, Richard Farina was thrown from the back of a motorcycle and killed.”
Even if you think Farina’s book didn’t live up to its title, Farina’s life undoubtedly did. The endings of both are so frighteningly similar, I probably won’t be able to sleep tonight. No big deal. I’ll just start reading the book again.
