{"id":97527,"date":"2016-04-29T12:03:55","date_gmt":"2016-04-29T16:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=97527"},"modified":"2016-04-29T12:50:07","modified_gmt":"2016-04-29T16:50:07","slug":"a-maker-of-mirrors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/29\/a-maker-of-mirrors\/","title":{"rendered":"A Maker of Mirrors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard\u00a0Fari\u00f1a\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me\u00a0turns fifty.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

Mimi and Richard Fari\u00f1a, at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965. Photo: David Gahr<\/p><\/div>\n

I am gazing, as I write, at a black-and-white photograph of Richard Fari\u00f1a with his wife, Mimi (n\u00e9e Baez) Fari\u00f1a, taken backstage at the Newport Folk Festival nine months before his death\u2014fifty years ago this week\u2014at the age of twenty-nine. To call the photo romantic would be an understatement. Mimi, her face a dark flower offered to an invisible sun, appears to be literally bursting out of her flip-flops as she executes some twirling, Isadora Duncan-y ballet step; while Richard, swarthy and black-haired, his eyes fondly delta\u2019d (the Ray-Bans in his hand having apparently proven useless against all this brightness), looks like he can\u2019t quite believe his luck, to have aligned his future with this lovely, exuberant sprite, a princess in folk\u2019s royal family. He\u2019s having a pretty good run of it for a guy who plays the dulcimer. And technically he doesn\u2019t even play it that well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, there\u2019s something about his self-taught, feverishly percussive style\u2014his modal tones, his Latin and Irish cadences, his propulsive intensity\u2014<\/em>that strikes people as original and fresh, and turns the instrument into a natural extension of his irrepressible lyricism and buoyancy of spirit. (\u201cThat was Fari\u00f1a, man,\u201d a musician friend attested later: \u201cyou thought he was full of shit, then he delivered the goods and knocked everybody out.\u201d) He may not be a musician, exactly, but he\u2019s an artist of some sort. Perhaps, as David Hajdu\u2019s intriguing group portrait of the Village folk scene, Positively 4th Street<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0suggests, an important one. It\u2019s not simply a matter of his talent and facility, his sturdy work ethic and prodigious charm; it\u2019s his intuitive feel for the currencies of his time, along with his gift for friendships and\/or competitive rivalries with his peers that make him seem in retrospect one of those magnetic, necessary figures whose sheer force of personality draws everything in his ambit into convergence. He\u2019s a kind of super-connector, a not-so-invisible bridge between the fifties and sixties, folk and rock, and, via his elective affinities with them both, arguably the two most influential American artists of the last half century: Bob Dylan and Thomas Pynchon.<\/p>\n

But what sort of artist, or performer, was Fari\u00f1a himself? Novelist? Poet? Songwriter? Supreme bullshitter? None of this is clear that afternoon in Newport. Fact is, he\u2019s been performing for years, telling tales, fabulating adventures, improvising a persona, or a succession of them, from the smoke and mirrors of his own mock-heroic bravado (\u201cHe walked and talked as if he had been born wearing a cape,\u201d a college friend tells Hajdu), and practicing, it must be said, no small share of brazen opportunism along the way. Like Dylan, who shares many of the same traits\u2014minus the sexual charisma and gregarious warmth\u2014you get the sense that for Fari\u00f1a the folk scene will be just one station on the journey. Other destinations await, not least among them an airy illuminated terminal called Literary Fame. All along he\u2019s been writing like a madman, sending off chapters of his novel in progress to his college pal Pynchon, publishing poems and short stories in magazines, no longer hanging out at the White Horse with the other Dylan Thomas wannabes, as he used to, but working seriously and hard to make good on his promise.<\/p>\n

And why not? Who better? Sheesh, look <\/em>at the guy. Half Irish, half Cuban, he\u2019s like some fiery, bristling Heathcliff, only more mischievous, more fun. <\/em>He\u2019s the life of every party. That PERFORMER<\/small> badge on his belt is like a superhero\u2019s insignia. Even the dimpled cleft on his chin seems a kind of grace note, the ornamental touch of God\u2019s own finger. No wonder, signing copies of his just-published novel the following April, he\u2019ll inscribe each one with the same brazen four-letter word: Zoom.<\/em><\/p>\n

That Fari\u00f1a will in fact be dead six hours after he leaves that signing\u2014killed in full zoom<\/em>, as it were, in a motorcycle crash on the Carmel Highway\u2014is of course tragic and inconceivable: not just an unforeseeable tragedy but an unseeable<\/em> one, a darkness that refuses to take shape no matter how hard you squint.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Me, I knew nothing about it. I was eight years old when Fari\u00f1a died; I had no idea who he was. It was not until 1972, when I chanced upon a copy of that one and only novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me<\/a>,<\/em> that I fell under his spell.<\/em> I had stumbled upon his book the same way I stumbled upon everything else in those days, in the act of browsing my older brother\u2019s shelves for pornographic inspirations. Happily, the good people at Dell had emblazoned the cover of Fari\u00f1a\u2019s book with the pale, sinuous geometries of a naked woman, and chosen a cool lowercase typographic font for the title\u2014which looked like, and indeed was, a line from a blues song I\u2019d never heard by an artist I\u2019d never heard of. Above it ran a jazzy PR tagline claiming the book\u2019s relevance to \u201ctoday\u2019s turned on, hung-up youth,\u201d a claim that while misleading for a novel set in the late fifties managed to nail precisely the two salient features of my youth. There was also an audacious author bio that would be criminal to paraphrase, so here it is:<\/p>\n

\n

Richard Fari\u00f1a was born of a Cuban father and Irish mother, both of whom came to this country during the thirties. He spent time with them in Brooklyn, Cuba, and Northern Ireland. At eighteen, he worked with members of the Irish Republican Army but eventually had to leave the country. Much the same for Cuba, which he visited often when Castro was still in the mountains, and again during the heavy fighting in Santa Clara and while the revolutionary army was entering Havana. After he left Cornell in \u201959 until late \u201963, he lived in London and Paris. The author writes that he made his living from \u201cmusic, street singing, script-writing, acting, a little smuggling, anything to hang on. Lost thirty pounds.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Naturally, I believed every word. No doubt I needed<\/em> to believe it. I was a fourteen-year-old Jewish kid in the suburbs, a failed athlete, an indifferent musician, an uninspired student; I was desperate for a little audacity in my life. So far things did not look promising. All I had going for me was an addiction to books and a small, more or less self-generated reputation among the other spades-playing potheads in the cafeteria for gloomy wit, radical posturing, and formidable hair. Oh, and I sort of nurtured the idea of being a writer someday. I conceived of the vocation not in the narrow, literal sense but on a more platonic, metaphysical plane\u2014that is, from the standpoint of someone who did not write much at all.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, I wanted to be a writer. And not just any writer: I wanted to be Richard Fari\u00f1a. Not a writer like<\/em> Fari\u00f1a, but Fari\u00f1a himself. By then that damn book of his, which I\u2019d read six or seven times already, had laid siege to my head, planting its colorful little flags all over the gray matter until I could no longer tell where Fari\u00f1a\u2019s sensibility left off and my own, such as it was, began. I was conversant not just with its sex scenes and politics and wealth of musical references but with its phantasmagoric weirdness of style. I had long since worn out the grooves, with my blunted stylus, of his two gorgeous folk albums with Mimi. I had resourcefully snagged a copy of his posthumous collection, Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone<\/em> and committed most of its not-entirely-publication-worthy pieces\u2014pastiches for the most part of Hemingway and Dylan Thomas\u2014to memory. An alarming quotient of my imaginative territory was ceded over to Fari\u00f1a. So why not just go ahead and be<\/em> the guy? To write Fari\u00f1a\u2019s book, play Fari\u00f1a\u2019s music, marry Fari\u00f1a\u2019s wife, live Fari\u00f1a\u2019s life; perhaps even on some level I wasn\u2019t ready to acknowledge, die Fari\u00f1a\u2019s death. But mostly, write Fari\u00f1a\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

I took Been Down<\/em> So Long<\/em> very, very personally\u2014so personally that I\u2019d resisted rereading it for the past thirty-odd years, lest I discover it was not in fact all that good.<\/p>\n

As it happens it is<\/em> quite good. A darkly comic picaresque in the vein of J. P. Donleavy\u2019s Ginger Man<\/em>, a campus satire\/roman \u00e0 clef of a barely-fictionalized Cornell, Been Down<\/em> So Long<\/em>, like its hipster protagonist Gnossos Pappadopoulis, gurgles and fizzes like a fountain of youth. In its mists are bountiful dispensations of sex (polymorphous), drugs (hallucinogenic), cocktails (potent), music (Miles, Mose Allison), pop-culture references (Captain Midnight, the Shadow), revolutionary politics (suspect), weird Pynchonian names (Louie Motherball, G. Alonso Oeuf, Oswald Mojo), and a showy vocabulary (the word phthisic<\/em> gets a workout), along with a sense of occult evil, paranoid suspicion, and incipient defeat. Though Gnossos begins in full mock-heroic mode, returning like Odysseus from a long litany of exotic adventures, \u201cmind awash in schemes,\u201d his return to the campus womb proves to be not quite the spiritual safe haven he expected. An occult shadow of Thanatos hangs everywhere, some foul emanation of the culture to which, it being the late fifties, no one seems to be paying proper attention. Fari\u00f1a, in one of the songs he wrote around this time, \u201cChildren of Darkness<\/a>,\u201d sniffed some of this sulfur in the air:<\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s once I was free to go roaming in
The wind of the springtime mind
And once the clouds I sailed upon
Were sweet as lilac wine
Then why have the breezes of summer, dear
Enlaced with a grim design?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Gnossos, like any good superhero, wades forth to do battle, but for all his cool and his pretense of exemption\u2014\u201cI am not ionized,\u201d he proclaims, \u201cand I possess not valence\u201d\u2014he proves no more immune, in the end, than anyone else. A letter from the draft board arrives. All his careless ecstasies turn rancid. Fari\u00f1a worked on the novel for half a dozen years; possibly given the progression, if we can call it that, of the era\u2019s politics, it darkened somewhat over time. Or is it only the lens through which we read it that\u2019s darkened? Whatever the case, the novel, for all its lyric high spirits, turns out to be something more of a bummer than I remembered.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also blatantly derivative, racially simplistic, full of smug, often bullshit insights\u2014\u201clife is a celluloid passion\u201d\u2014and rather promiscuous in its embrace of what one character calls \u201ca whole lot of doodley-shit.\u201d But so what? It\u2019s a very pleasurable read. Like a lot of foundational first novels we love, its appeal remains primarily sonic and chemical, atmospheric. We don\u2019t succumb to them in spite of their flaws and excesses, but because<\/em> of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou want it all without the discipline,\u201d an older mentor figure tells Gnossos. Maybe the author was talking to himself a little, too. Anyway, Fari\u00f1a was only twenty-nine. He was growing; he had plenty of time. \u201cYou know what I want to be when I grow up?\u201d Gnossos asks at one point. \u201cA maker of mirrors, that\u2019s what.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Maybe Gnossos, had Fari\u00f1a lived long enough for a sequel, would have wound up on a commune in Canada, nibbling feta and blissed out on retsina, exhaling paregoric joints in some lush and fragrant garden. Or maybe Fari\u00f1a would have ditched him altogether, and become, like Pynchon, a visionary, entirely original novelist. Or he might have given up fiction altogether, moved back to Paris, taken up painting or sculpting or developed some new computer code that braided all other previous computer codes together. Anything with that guy seems possible, except the idea of him as a long-lived mediocrity, an eighty-year-old man with bad knees and an air of disappointment.<\/p>\n

But he died in his twenties, like a lot of energetic young men of his era. It was the kind of romantic death we feel we understand almost too well, a promising talent suspended, that sense of exemption he wrote about\u2014from mediocrity, from bourgeois compromise and midlife disappointment\u2014a membrane forever intact. Discovering Fari\u00f1a when I did, his death looked not so much like a random accident as a function of some vast subterranean conspiracy, a counter-counterculture comprising uptight engineers and military technocrats pulling levers behind black curtains, turning off lights, snuffing out all the hard, gemlike flames.<\/p>\n

At the time, I fancied that I was nurturing one of those flames myself, way down deep. So I took Fari\u00f1a\u2019s death, and his life, but most of all that wild, corrosive novel of his, which seemed to have been brewed from that same smoking cauldron of neo-Manichean paranoia, weirdly personally. To me, the paradoxical duality it represented\u2014the intersecting parabolas of a vital, daring sensibility and a heavily foreshadowed, multiply determined death\u2014looked like the ominous geometry of the adult world: a net comprising\u00a0as many holes as string. But the strings, wow, there was a buoyancy that surprised you. Even years later you looked down and there they still were, holding you up.<\/p>\n

Robert Cohen\u2019s novels include <\/em>Amateur Barbarians and <\/em>Inspired Sleep. He teaches at Middlebury College.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard\u00a0Fari\u00f1a\u2019s\u00a0Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me\u00a0turns fifty. I am gazing, as I write, at a black-and-white photograph of Richard Fari\u00f1a with his wife, Mimi (n\u00e9e Baez) Fari\u00f1a, taken backstage at the Newport Folk Festival nine months before his death\u2014fifty years ago this week\u2014at the age of twenty-nine. 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