Hey man, slow down
-Radiohead, “The Tourist”
Avathoir: Welcome everyone back to the Spiral! After our marathon Gravity’s Rainbow entry (and because I can’t find a copy of Vineland just at this moment), we’ve decided to take a quick interlude into new territory, with the only book in this series that is NOT written by Pynchon, instead the lone novel of his college best friend, Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up To Me.
To catch everyone up to speed, I’ll provide some quick biographical detail on Fariña: He was an Irish-Cuban folkie who Pynchon (as detailed in his lovely introduction) became friends with at Cornell. After college, he moved to New York City, where he married Joan Baez’s younger sister and became friends with Bob Dylan. Doing some initial recordings and showing immense promise and writing this novel all the while, it all came to a tragic end when the day after this volume was published he died from a motorcycle accident (although accident is a loaded word, and I want to talk about it as it related to the introduction and Pynchon’s feelings about Fariña a bit later). Given that Fariña wasn’t even 30, it becomes alongside Otis Redding and Buddy Holly as one of the great What-Ifs of 20th century American pop culture. What if this guy had lived? What could he have become had he finished it?
But I don’t want to talk about Fariña just yet, because I feel if we start too early we’re going to do just nothing but talk about him and how he relates to Pynchon (he is the one Gravity’s Rainbow was dedicated to. More on this later.) and is one of the few times the man has seemed to write about his private life (or about his life at all). I think that this is a book that deserves an actual conversation by us, though it’ll be only the first half of this conversation.
Anyway, enough throat clearing. My basic thoughts on this book is that it’s somehow both what I wanted V. to be but written in a style similar to the one Pynchon was working towards in GR. I know Pynchon reveres On the Road (much to my displeasure) but he’s never written a book like Kerouac’s. This genuinely feels like a book in that tradition: Fariña’s prose is almost musical in how he chooses to construct the book, riffing on motif, mood, and improvising to craft his story. I observed, at one point maybe 40 pages in, that it felt like a book with no expository sentences. It’s a movie edited into having nothing but smash cuts.
At the same time, this isn’t really a book that I consider to be as good as Pynchon’s works (but really, what is? Even a skeptic like me is in awe of the man), and even more than that I think that Pynchon has totally misunderstood what this book even is. I didn’t find it particularly fun, or sexy, or even very profound except that it seems that Fariña, whether he knew it or not, was cataloging the failures of the Beats and the Hippies before they even happened. Whether its what happens to poor, pitiful Pamela Watson-May or the sheer repulsiveness of his stand in, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, one gets the sense that Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up To Me isn’t a book that has its title because it sounds like something a stoner would feel but a genuine observation of how unhappy the speaker of the title truly is. They really are so depressed they seem happy.
wallflower, you were the one who agreed to my suggestion we insert this book into the series, and like me, you came into it blind. Did you know anything about Fariña and his relationship to Pynchon going in? Was this detour justified, especially since we broke chronological order? But perhaps most importantly: am I being overly mean to this book, characterizing it this way, or am I on to something?
wallflower: My prior experience with this book consisted entirely of pulling a library copy off the shelf sometime in the 1990s, flipping through Pynchon’s introduction, thinking “hmm. That’s interesting,” and putting it back. Also, sometime since then I read Positively 4th Street (David Hajdu’s book about Mimi ‘n’ Joan Baez, Fariña, Dylan, and the early-60s NYC folk scene) and came away mildly impressed with Fariña but hardly stunned; he seemed like another figure who gets canonized on the basis of dying young, when one can be all promise, no failure. I suppose there’s a correlation there to Been Down So Long, the story of a moment in life when you can be all promise, and Gnossos’ fanatical determination to stay in that moment.
Reading this novel, I was struck by how utterly mean-spirited it is, and what that does to Pynchon’s introduction. I kept flipping back to the intro thinking, wait, did Pynchon really say that? He wrote “Not that this is a typical ‘college’ novel, exactly,” which deserves a reply from the first scene of Chasing Amy: “oh, but it is.” It’s all here: snobs (or at least administration) vs. slobs, asshole (or, if you prefer, free-spirited) protagonist, lots and lots of cultural references, drugs, drinking, sex (entirely from a man’s perspective), climatic riot (based on an actual event, but that doesn’t make it less of a trope). Pynchon concedes that Gnossos “is not Mr. Perfect by any stretch. . .[he] gets publicly abusive with women” which doesn’t even come close to what this guy does. Pynchon achieves something that his old teacher Vladimir Nabokov would have done (actually, he did do it in Pale Fire), but it’s a dubious-as-fuck achievement: he writes an introduction that makes him an unreliable narrator.
Like you said, Been Down So Long demonstrates the failure of the Beats, and I don’t see any awareness that Fariña knew that’s what he was doing; it feels like it could have been written by V.’s Slab. The smarts, the self-awareness without any desire to do anything about it, and that excludes awareness of anyone else: this is what Pynchon caught earlier in the decade with V.; actually, he had this down as far back as 1960’s “Entropy.” I enjoyed reading about the Whole Sick Crew, but once was enough, and I certainly didn’t want to spend an entire novel stuck in the experiences of one of them.
I’m knocking Fariña on his (lack of) awareness, not his skill. On a technical level, the guy knew what he was doing, and Pynchon sez of his writing “It was a radically different voice, one that seemed to come from the outside world, surer, less safe.” I like your description of the novel’s musicality, and the way it’s composed of jump cuts; what compelled me the most was the disjunction between the lushness and awareness of Gnossos’ inner monologue and the crudity, even clumsiness, of his speech. In musical terms, it’s a bitonal work, something that’s going on in two different keys, a continual dissonance that draws you to it. Also, in other hands, that kind of jumpiness can become disorienting, but that’s never true here unless the characters are equally disoriented–Gnossos and Kristin get pursued by a monkey and it’s never clear, to them, us, or anyone else, how real it is; what matters is the effect it has on them, and Fariña gets that across.
Skill can only get you so far, though, and it can’t get past the simple problem here: Been Down So Long is entirely about a complete asshole, and a boring one. Gnossos wants only to be Immune or Exempt (both are capitalized), to never change, and lives pretty much by every other character’s assistance with never a hint of gratitude. (His one source of income is 169 silver dollars, won before the narrative’s start in Vegas.) The sex scenes–well, they’re a great demonstration of what happens when neither the character nor the author has heard of consent. After the first one, the woman (Pamela) is apparently so in love with Gnossos that she flips out when he ignores her, and then later, she marries a higher-level drug dealer and Gnossos goes into a murderous rage when he only then finds out she’s rich. The second sex scene involves his longer-time girlfriend Kristin, whom he impregnates by secretly cutting off the tip of a condom. Oh, and then he calls her father to brag about it (but hey, he works for President Eisenhower, whatta square), and, in her last scene in the novel, he forces her down and shoves a heroin-loaded suppository up her ass (Tom, “not Mr. Perfect, by any stretch” describes someone who returns library books late. This guy is a sociopath). Hey, though, she had sex with someone else, what do you expect?
There are ways to make this work–anyone, like me, who’s a fan of Dostoevsky, Ellroy, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Jody Hill could tell you that. You need at least two things to bring this off. First, something’s gotta push against these characters; pure vice doesn’t make things any easier for you than pure goodness. Gnossos has the occasional bad trip or vengeful spirit, but there’s never really another character who challenges him (the draft notice ex machina ending doesn’t count, because it could have happened at any time) and since we only see the world through his self-centered consciousness, we don’t really understand anything about any other character. Second, the character has to have some kind of interesting going on. Gnossos is critical about damn near everything and everyone, continually perceiving and evaluating, but he doesn’t develop, doesn’t learn, doesn’t grow. The Gnossos of chapter one is the same as in chapter twenty-one. So, in summary, you’re not being overly mean here.
Although there’s more to talk about the book itself, let’s get back to that introduction. It’s dated 1983, so it’s either from the same time as or before the intro to Slow Learner. How do you see Pynchon reading this book? Honestly, how and why does he get it so wrong?
Avathoir: I actually have a theory on this, but it’s going to get ugly and there’s a greater than zero percent chance that people are going to get very angry at me for saying this, but I’ve been thinking about exactly how Pynchon has bungled his case for this book (it’s such a well written case that I bought this book based on it. Seventeen dollars I will never get back. I will banish this book into the used bookstore next time I have to sell.) and why he did so. I think there’s two reasons: Pynchon’s memories of Fariña/what Fariña meant to him, and the second is his refusal to accept what Fariña’s death might very well have been.
The first one is the easiest explanation: It’s clear I think, reading this book and Pynchon’s introduction, that Fariña was writing something (I hope anyway, if only for the women) based on their mutual time together at Cornell. Fariña, like Gnossos, took a year off to wander around, and came back to a place that had seemed to change in his image. He then (according to Pynchon) seemed to dazzle everyone and was the life of the campus. I think what we’ve got here is a clear case of someone missing a dear friend, one who expanded Pynchon’s own world and who in turn probably made him the writer he is. I don’t think Gravity’s Rainbow exists without this book, and so in the end that probably makes this book worth it, in the grand scheme of things.
But I think there’s a darker explanation, and one that may in fact, be total bullshit, but I think we have to consider, and that’s that this is just as much a suicide note as it is a novel.
Before you recoil in disgust and horror, please allow me to make my case: Gnossos is a character who refuses change, who wants to be as free as possible, and yet who is constantly confronted by a depression in himself and the world. He’s always unhappy and things don’t really work out for him. All the women in his life hate him by the end of the book, his friends are all off doing other things, he’s been called up by the draft, and he doesn’t want anything anymore. In a small but clearly vital scene, he sees a nuclear detonation outside of Vegas (a real thing that used to happen, if you can believe it) and it causes him to have a panic attack. It might be the trauma of which that causes his refusal to change. At the same time, the places he could take comfort in he clearly is not happy with (this goes down to the very epigraph, which is about quitting a scene, which might as well be a metaphor for death).
Richard Fariña died at seemingly the height of his promise, with a beautiful wife (Pynchon was best man at their wedding) and a novel so new it hadn’t been reviewed. He died on a motorcycle going 90 in a 35 zone. At night. He wasn’t driving it, but he knew how fast he was going, and what the road going home was like. That’s not something you do without thinking about it. Even at the very end of the introduction, Pynchon is talking to a friend, who cracks a dark joke about how if this was Fariña almost dying and somehow miraculously surviving he would never shut up about it, and I think that’s key. I think in some part of himself, maybe not intentionally, Fariña was looking to die, and Pynchon cannot accept that the friend he loved so much would do such a thing.
Is this me just trying to rationalize what a downer this book is, and how betrayed I feel by Pynchon’s introduction? Am I a monster to armchair psychologize like this? Or is this book really a death rattle like I think?
wallflower: Pynchon’s calling Fariña’s death an accident sent me back to the end of Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: a Strange and Terrible Saga, where he talks about his own experience riding motorcycles, how it was like “the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon,” and then he’s riding the same roads as Fariña, in the same year even, at 80, 90, 100 miles per hour, “when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates back along your arms. . . .letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge. . .The Edge. . .There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” [First ellipsis mine.] What happened to Fariña wasn’t an accident in the same way that someone who’s walking down a sidewalk and gets killed by a semi that jumps the curb is an accident. This is a man who engaged in smuggling and was with Castro’s army in Cuba. Even if Fariña’s last words were slow down slow down slow down, this was a man who, if he wasn’t looking to die, wasn’t trying all that hard to stay alive.
Neil Gaiman, asked to summarize The Sandman in twenty-five words or less, replied “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his choice.” Been Down So Long, we both agree, is a novel about paralysis, about a guy who can’t move on to the next step in his life–and yeah, that can be classified as depression–and all the ways he’s trying to avoid it, some incredibly dangerous. Putting together the novel with his life makes me think of Christopher McCandless and Into the Wild, another young man who made another persona out of himself (“Alexander Supertramp”), was a charming, sometimes rude, sometimes distant, always enigmatic figure to those who knew him, didn’t have much regard for his own safety, and went over that Edge. McCandless’ and Fariña’s writings are both symptoms of youth, of a moment when you imagine you can search endlessly without cost. A lot of people do that, and most make it back. McCandless and Fariña didn’t. In this regard, the most poignant passage of Been Down So Long comes when Beth, wife of the Buddhist Calvin (and Gnossos’ LSD connection), warns Gnossos: “You have to come back. . . .Go into as many pebbles or artichokes as you choose, but you have to return to what you are. The torment is inside you to begin with.”
What’s missing from the Introduction, what Pynchon seems that he’s not getting, is how much was lost when Fariña died, and that he doesn’t see or won’t acknowledge how ugly this novel is. I believe (and it’s not a particularly deep insight) that artists have to continue down their mistaken path, that they have to work through their early ideas and inspirations to get to the better ones–Pynchon certainly did. Been Down So Long is a novel, like V., that’s half aware and half symptomatic of a particular moment in history and in Fariña’s own development, and it hurts to know that he would never get the chance to get past it, never get to write his “Secret Integration” or Gravity’s Rainbow. We talked about how, in writing the Introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon tried to write a better version of himself as a writer for the future–and I think he succeeded with Vineland. With this Introduction, I’m thinking written at around the same time, he tried to do that backward: introducing a different book than Been Down So Long and retroactively make Fariña a better writer and person than he was. Time doesn’t work that way, and Pynchon knows it.