The Missing Link Between Beatniks and Hippies

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me is one of those novels like Naked Lunch that seems to have been written in a drug-induced frenzy. Though the word frenzy might suggest speed, it took Richard Fariña over five years to write this book. Sometimes I think that all would be revealed if I got high before reading it, sort of like getting high before a Grateful Dead concert. God knows it drags when you're straight and sober.

The main character, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, has long been cited as the missing link between the beatniks and the hippies. He evolves from beatnik into the original, archetypal hippie. He set out on the road and found nothing but did find the keys to inner enlightenment in the form of hallucinogenic drugs. Whereas the beatniks used drugs to escape reality the hippies used them to transcend reality. But in the end it all amounts to the same thing.

Although it was set in early 1958 at Cornell, it wasn't published until the spring of 1966. Fariña was ahead of his time and probably couldn't have gotten the book published before that, but the times were changing and rapidly catching up with him. But by the time the world had caught up with him, he was gone, killed in a motorcycle accident two days after the book was published.

His death only contributed to the cult status that the book would achieve, heralded as it was as being the Catcher in the Rye or On the Road of that decade. It might have been different--no, it would have been different if Fariña had lived to write again. In retrospect it would have been a first novel that merely showed promise rather than the voice of a unrealized genius snuffed out in the prime of life. Like James Dean dying at 25 after having made only three movies rather than growing old and bloated like Brando. Fariña is the James Dean of literature, he will always be young and good looking.

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