Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME

Richard Fariña was killed in a motorcycle accident in Carmel, California, on April 30, 1966—two days after the publication of
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
. Mr. Fariña was born of a Cuban father and Irish mother, both of whom came to this country during the 1930s, and 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 happened in Cuba, which he visited often when Fidel Castro was still in the mountains and again during the heavy fighting in Santa Clara and while the revolutionary army was entering Havana. From the time Mr. Fariña left Cornell University in 1959 until late 1963 he lived in London and Paris. The author wrote that he made his living from “music, street-singing, script-writing, acting, a little smuggling, anything to hang on. Lost thirty pounds.” In 1963 Mr. Fariña married Mimi Baez and returned to California, where he finished
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
. His shorter work appeared in such magazines as
Poetry, The Atlantic
, and
Mademoiselle
, and his plays were produced at Cornell and at The Image Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Also a respected folk-rock singer and composer, Mr. Fariña appeared with his wife at the Newport Folk Festival and on tour, and two of their record albums were released. The first was chosen as one of the ten best folk records of 1965 by
The New York Times
, and that newspaper called the second,
Reflections in a Crystal Wind, “
wild, imaginative, poetic, surprising.” A posthumous collection of his writings,
Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone
, was published in 1969.

Thomas Pynchon is the author of the novels
V, The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow
, and
Vineland
.

BEEN DOWN
SO LONG
IT LOOKS LIKE UP
TO ME

Richard Fariña

INTRODUCTION BY
THOMAS PYNCHON

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First published in the United States of America by Random House, Inc., 1966
Published with a new Introduction by Thomas Pynchon in Penguin Books 1983
This edition published in Penguin Books 1996

Copyright © Richard Fariña, 1966
Introduction copyright © Thomas Pynchon, 1983
All rights reserved

PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Excerpts from the following are reprinted by permission: “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” from
Collected Poems
by Vachel Lindsay; copyright 1913 by The Macmillan Company. “Good Mornin’ Blues,” new words and new music arranged by Huddie Ledbetter and edited with new additional material by Alan Lomax; copyright © Folkways Music Publishers, Inc., 1959.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Fariña, Richard.
Been down so long it looks like up to me.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: Random House, 1966.
I. Title.
PS3556.A715B4   1983   813’.54   82-15090
ISBN: 978-1-10154-952-0

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In a dim way, I had been aware of Richard Fariña before I actually met him. It was the winter of 1958, toward the end of the school semester, and I was a junior editor on the
Cornell Writer
, which was the campus literary magazine. At some point these stories and poems began to arrive. It was a radically different voice, one that seemed to come from the world outside, surer, less safe, of higher quality than the usual run of submissions. Not many of the staff could tell me much about this “Fariña” character, except that he’d been away from Cornell for a while, out traveling around.

Soon, in the back spaces of classrooms I happened to be in, I would sometimes detect this dangerous presence, not wearing a jacket or tie, more hair than was fashionable, always sitting with the same group of people. Quiet, but intensely
there
, checking things out. Eventually I connected him with the other, literary presence.

We ran with different crowds, so our paths only crossed now and then. One day in the spring I was crossing the Arts Quad and spotted Fariña, reclining on the green grass with an open book. We nodded, said hello. “Listen,” Fariña said, “I’m having a party Saturday night at my place on College Avenue, if you want to fall by.” Which was how I first encountered his remarkable gift of civility. As we chatted, a strange thing was also happening. Coeds I had lusted after across deep lecture halls were actually altering course, here, out in the daylight, to stop and talk to Fariña. He was inviting
them
to his party too. Oboy, I thought to myself, oboy.

1958, to be sure, was another planet. You have to appreciate the extent of sexual repression on that campus at the time. Rock ’n’ roll had been with us for a few years, but the formulation Dope/Sex/Rock ’n’ Roll hadn’t yet been made by too many of us. At Cornell, all undergraduate women were supposed to be residing, part of the time under lock and key, either in dormitories or sorority houses. On weeknights they had to be inside these places by something like 11 P.M., at which time all the doors were locked. Staying out all night without authorization meant discipline by the Women’s Judiciary Board, up to and including expulsion from school. On Saturday nights the curfew was graciously extended to something equally unreal, like 12 midnight.

Curfews were not the only erotic problem we faced—there was also a three- or four-to-one ratio of male to female students, as well as a variety of
coed undergarments fiendishly designed to delay until curfew, if not to prevent outright, any access to one’s date’s pelvic area. One sorority house I knew of, and certainly others, had a house officer stationed by the front door on date nights. Her job was to make sure, in a polite but manual way, that every sister had some version of a Playtex chastity belt in place before she was allowed out the door. Landlords and local tradesfolk were also encouraged to report to the Administration the presence of coeds in off-campus apartments, such as Fariña’s. In these and other ways, the University believed it was doing its duty to act
in loco parentis
.

This extraordinary meddling was not seriously protested until the spring of 1958, when, like a preview of the ’60s, students got together on the issue, wrote letters, rallied, demonstrated, and finally, a couple of thousand strong, by torchlight in the curfew hours between May 23rd and 24th, marched to and stormed the home of the University president. Rocks, eggs, and a smoke bomb were deployed. Standing on his front porch, the egg-spattered president vowed that Cornell would never be run by mob rule. He then went inside and called the proctor, or chief campus cop, screaming, “I want heads! . . .  I don’t
care
whose! Just get me some heads, and be quick about it!” So at least ran the rumor next day, when four upperclassmen, Fariña among them, were suspended. Students, however, were having none of this—they were angry. New demonstrations were suggested. After some dickering, the four were reinstated. This was the political and emotional background of that long-ago spring term at Cornell—the time and setting of Richard Fariña’s novel
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
.

Not that this is a typical “college” novel, exactly. Fariña uses the campus more as a microcosm of the world at large. He keeps bringing in visitors and flashbacks from the outside. There is no sense of sanctuary here, or eternal youth. Like the winter winds of the region, awareness of mortality blows through every chapter. The novel ends with the death of a major character.

Undergraduate consciousness rests in part on a set of careless assumptions about being immortal. The elitism and cruelty often found in college humor arises from this belief in one’s own Exemption, not only from time and death, but somehow from the demands of life as well. It is Exemption—in a sense which Fariña interestingly broadens here—that so perplexes and haunts the novel’s main character, Gnossos Pappadopoulis.

For Gnossos, Exemption is nothing he can either take for granted or have illusions about. His life is a day-to-day effort to keep earning and maintaining it. In the course of the book, Gnossos looks at a number of possibilities, including Eastern religion, road epiphanies, mescaline, love. All
turn out to have a flaw of some kind. What he’s left with to depend on is his own coherence, an extended version of 1950s Cool. “Immunity has been granted to me,” thinks Gnossos, “for I do not lose my cool.” Backed up by a range of street-wise skills like picking locks and scoring dope, Cool gets Gnossos through, and it lies at the heart of his style.

There was a similar element of reserve to Fariña’s own public character. When he spoke, one of the typical expressions on his face was a half-ironic half-smile, as if he were monitoring his voice and not quite believing what he heard. He carried with him this protective field of self-awareness and instant feedback, and I never did see all the way through it, although I got to know him a little better during the ’59 school year. We were never best friends, but we did like each other, and each other’s writing, and we hung out some, at parties, at beer outlets on campus like the Ivy Room, or at Johnny’s Big Red Grill (called Guido’s in the book), which was the usual nighttime gathering place.