Richard Farina's decease

Wolf Kahn

My third reading of BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME (Richard Farina) happened forty-one years after my second. After shaking off the wonderment of considering what I must have thought I had been thinking during the first two readings, brightened by the light of my confidence that this third reading knoweth all, the pain of the novel's foreboding and death, and the tenderness of the romance in its soon-to-be dissimulated form have reminded me of an occasion in 1968 when too, in two ways, I had not known or may not have known how closely I was waxwinging toward the sun. (O sourest oblivion!) In Croton-on-Hudson I was staying overnight in the room of a friend of a girlfriend. As he slept, as was his habit, the radio loudly played WBAI, keeping me from sleep until 3 AM, when I asked him to turn it down. "Sure."
(The noise that bothered me surely was the sound of blood beating through the veins of the 1960s, had I ears to hear. Just as Catherine and I the year before had taken the train into the Village, and, when it rained, stepped into a diner for coffee and pie, instead of into the White Horse for beers.) But before the my Croton fellow host slept we had talked about Farina's death. He had been taking guitar lessons in the City from the person who had just a few years earlier given Farina guitar lessons. The teacher was convinced that (as the novel was being published) Richard had foreseen something awful - shall we not call it a certain kind of monkey? - and that he had reached forward and yanked the bars of the motorcycle, pitching himself into the utterest canyon of unknown possibility which some people call suicide [or] escape from suicide. Not long before he died, I had been speaking with Peter Kahn (David Grun) about the tepidity and the pallid surrender of, at least in groups, Cornell's students in 1996. It caused Peter to say a few words about Farina (he pronounced it Fa-reena) in 1958, but I missed the chance to ask him what he thought of the guitar teacher's belief. And Peter, a visionary, would have known.
Richard with Ruth Kahn