Richard Fariña: lost genius who bridged the gap between beats and hippies

On 30 April 1966, at around lunchtime, Richard Fariña sat down at a table at the Thunderbird bookstore and cafe in Carmel, California, to sign copies of his freshly minted first novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, published just two days before.

The sky was blue and California-cloudless, and Fariña, 29, had organised a surprise 21st birthday party for his wife Mimi, the sister of Joan Baez. Fariña signed copy after copy of his novel, the dedication page of which read: “This one is for Mimi.”

A little after seven that evening, Richard Fariña was dead, a motorcycle accident on the winding Carmel Valley Road had claimed the life of an artist bursting with potential, at the very beginning of his career.

Richard Fariña was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937 to an Irish mother and a Cuban father. He studied at Cornell University – sharing a room with Thomas Pynchon – and after leaving Cornell in 1959 he became a fixture of the nascent folk scene in Greenwich Village, befriending Bob Dylan and through him meeting Joan Baez and her sister Mimi, who Fariña married in 1963 when she was just 17.

Fariña and Mimi moved into a cabin in Carmel and made beautiful music together – quite literally, writing songs on guitar and dulcimer and releasing two albums in 1965, Celebrations for a Grey Day and Reflections in a Crystal Wind. If you know any of their songs, it’s likely to be Pack Up Your Sorrows, recorded since by the likes of Joan Baez, Johnny Cash and Loudon Wainwright III.

When I first read Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, on the recommendation of a friend back in the dog-end days of the 80s, I’d never heard of Fariña and was unaware of his folk scene fame. All I had to go on was my Penguin paperback (joyfully battered in front of me, right now), with a mischievous-looking curly-haired Fariña smiling toothily from the cover, and a brief biography at the front of the book that raised as many questions as it answered.

“At 18 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.”

More information on Fariña was hard to come by in those pre-internet times, so I had to content myself with the book. But oh, what a book. To call it perhaps the finest example of the American campus novel ever written does it a huge disservice. It bridges the gap between the beats and the hippies and the politically charged student protests, it’s drugs and sex and campus shenanigans with a puff of nightmarish magical realism and the long shadow of Vietnam. And at its heart is Gnossos Pappadopoulis, a libertine force of nature built on myth and rumour, who washes into Athené, a thinly disguised Cornell University, on a tide of disinformation.

“… rumors have him dead of thirst, contorted on his back at the bottom of Bright Angel Trail, eyes gnawed out by wild Grand Canyon burros; fallen upon by tattooed pachucos and burned to death in the New Mexico night by a thousand cigarettes dipped in aqua regis; eaten by a shark in San Francisco Bay, a leg washed up in Venice West.”

But Gnossos is alive, and how. Crashing back into student life, he takes rooms and warns his new housemate: “I’m a bit of a bore about noise.”

“You don’t like it?” she asks.

“He makes it,” helpfully supplies his friend.

There aren’t many books about Richard Fariña, but even if there were a hundred, the best of them would still be David Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street, which braids together the narratives of Fariña, Mimi, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. He says of Been Down So Long: “It’s exceptional. It’s a first-rate novel, it’s dynamic, it’s imaginative, it’s robust. In a way, it’s of a piece with Pynchon.”

But it also, in the creation of Gnossos Pappadopoulis, offers some clues as well as to the nature of Fariña and his own fascinating biography as a wanderer who threw in his lot with the IRA and Castro.

“Fariña had what you might call that James Dean mystique,” says Hajdu. “He had an acute sense of cool, and that isn’t to be belittled. That’s why he gravitated to music … he could tell that’s where the action was. And through sheer force of will he became a damn good songwriter. Take Hard Lovin’ Loser … you can take that as a manifesto for the quality of postwar songwriters. He was every bit as good as Gershwin, Cole Porter, you name it.”

Fariña, says Hajdu, had a determination to succeed and a desire to be famous. Which is why he created a carefully crafted mythology around himself, just as he had Gnossos do in the novel. “He was a serial fabulist,” says Hajdu. “He made up wild stories about his life. He created a persona, and in him you can see the mercurial identity we know so well in artists from David Bowie to Madonna to Lady Gaga.”

And, according to Hajdu, the stories about the IRA and Castro were just part of the persona. “I interviewed the family he stayed with in Ireland. He was just a quiet kid, didn’t do anything like that. And he just couldn’t have been even old enough to fight in the mountains with Castro.”

Half a century after his death, there are only a handful of people left who knew Fariña personally. The folk singer Judy Collins is one, someone who was extremely close to the man his friends called Dick. Speaking from New York as she waits for her flight to Nashville, she tells me: “The first time I met him was in 1960 at a folk festival near New Haven. He was married to his first wife Carolyn Hester at the time. He grabbed hold of me and proceeded to sing me two or three songs. It was just dazzling.”

She remembers Fariña as being “very dramatic, very impetuous”. Collins says: “At one time I was going through a very difficult period and having a custody battle over my son and Dick was saying: ‘Let’s go get him! Let’s go get him now.’ He was always ready for a fight.”

Collins wrote songs with Fariña and Mimi – “They were spellbinding together,” she says of the couple – and had her last recording session with them in the month that he died. It was that impetuousness, that sense of the dramatic, that led him to get on the back of a red Harley-Davidson Sportster owned by Willie Hinds, a friend of a friend who Fariña barely knew but who was persuaded by the exuberant writer to take him for a spin.

For his book, David Hajdu took Mimi – she died of cancer in 2001 – back to the winding roads where Hinds lost control of the bike when Fariña, unused to riding, failed to lean properly into the corners and unbalanced the Harley, throwing it into a barbed wire fence post. Hinds survived, though was badly injured; Fariña died outright.

Collins says: “I was in Colorado when I heard. His death had a huge impact on me. I dreamed about him for years after that. I flew into Carmel on the next plane to see Mimi, Joan was on tour in England, other friends came in and we spent a few days before the funeral holding each other, trying not to fall apart. Dick was very special. Those kind of friendships don’t come along very often. He was irreplaceable.”

Aside from a few pieces of journalism and some short stories, all we have of Richard Fariña is his music and his lone novel, published just two days before he died. Hajdu says: “If we look at any important writer, their first book is sometimes their best. But with Fariña’s promise, we can assume quite reasonably that he would just have got better and better.”

Despite knowing that Thomas Pynchon hasn’t given interviews for years – hasn’t even been photographed – I approached him through his wife and literary agent, Melanie Jackson. After some deliberation he returned a message saying he’d “said all he had to say in that introduction” – the foreword to my battered copy of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.

In it, after recounting his time with Fariña at Cornell, Pynchon talks of how he heard the news about the crash, on the news on a radio rock station. He called up a mutual Cornell friend and they talked late into the night. And even then, fabulist that he was, Richard Fariña had thrown doubt into the minds of his friends, even as they knew it must be true, that he had died at all.

“If that fucking Fariña has only been seriously hurt,” the friend told Pynchon, “if he goes up to the edge of It and then comes back – you realise we’re never going to hear the end of it.”