Farewell to Franz
August 5, 2002 | 12:00am
I hadn’t planned on sending in a column this week because of a lingering bout with the flu, but the death of National Artist Francisco Arcellana last Thursday quickly roused me out of my stupor. It was sad news, very sad news, but something his family and friends had been expecting to come sooner than later, given the rapid deterioration of Franz’s condition. Typically, I received word of his death by a text message on my cellphone, short and spare, a far cry from the rolling, melodious prose of the man whose company we had just lost.
If I ever had a literary father, it was Franz. It’s quite a claim to make, one easily rendered tenuous by the fact that our writing styles and concerns couldn’t be more dissimilar, and that I couldn’t say we were particularly close; I wonder if anyone was, to Franz, outside of his family; if so, it wasn’t me. But he was the one who took me under his wing and his literary tutelage when I gave up my job and returned to school at the age of 27; he became my tutor in fiction, and my adviser on my undergraduate thesis project (devoted to the work of another friend, since also gone, the playwright Bienvenido "Boy" Noriega).
Before and after I met Franz, I drew strength and inspiration from the examples of other literary men: Edilberto Tiempo, who in Dumaguete fired up my desire to write for life, and urged me to "save your soul" by going back to college and earning an honest degree; Bienvenido Santos, for whom I happily chauffeured one summer writers’ workshop and who impressed me with his gentle wit; NVM Gonzalez, a fellow islander who became a friend when we met late in his life; and Gregorio Brillantes, whose luminous prose I hold in the highest esteem and shamelessly try to ape.
But it was Franz who saw me home and saw me through to my first book, Oldtimer and Other Stories (Quezon City: Asphodel, 1984), for which he wrote a generous introduction. I still keep the original copy of that intro, written by hand in his trademark squiggly script in pencil on yellow legal pad paper. Whenever I finished a new story – and there were quite a few of them those heady days in the early ‘80s – there would be a fresh copy first thing the next morning in Professor Arcellana’s pigeonhole, and I could not rest easy until I had heard, one way or another, from him about the story. Often as not he would type his comments on his Underwood, his indents reaching halfway across the page.
I feel fortunate to have been around long enough to have had Franz as a mentor, and the best thing I’ve been able to do to let my own young students get a sense of him has been to have them read one or two of his stories – "Divide by Two" is my personal favorite, although Franz himself said he disliked it, for some reason or other – and to tell them what Franz told me and my classmates: "Write the story that only you can write." ("Get real!" was another of his frequent admonitions.)
I met Franz Arcellana when he was already in his late 60s (he died a month short of his 86th birthday), so it wasn’t too easy to imagine him as the enfant terrible he was in his time: an intense and brazenly talented young man born in Sta. Cruz, Manila in 1916 and schooled in Tondo before picking up a PhB (that’s right, a Bachelor of Philosophy) degree from the UP in 1939. He would go on to Iowa and Breadloaf, and take on a succession of jobs in journalism and academe.
He joined the UP Department of English and Comparative Literature in 1953, rising up the ranks to full professorship and becoming the founding director of the UP Creative Writing Center in 1979. In 1989, the UP gave him an honorary doctorate; not too long afterwards, he was named a National Artist for Literature.
What distinguished Arcellana’s prose was its musicality, its sense of rhythm; reading his fiction, you heard the words, which often soared or hovered above their earthbound meanings. It was like reading the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas: you never really knew what he was telling you; you just knew he was telling it differently, wonderfully. He was, said playwright Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio, "a poet trapped in fiction." He wrote, said poet Gemino Abad, "from passion."
"It is first a shadow," so begins "The Wings of Madness (I)", "the very faintest of shadows, you would think, the shadow of nothing at all. Then it is a breath, then a wind, then you see that it is the wind of the wing of madness. Then it is a bird. It is a huge bird with big powerful wings and yellow talons and a redblood beak. It is a bird that is always in your sky."
In a story titled "Thy Kingdom Come" which he published in 1935 (yes, when he was 19), Arcellana’s protagonist walks with his girlfriend to church on a cool Christmas night and is struck by a deep and sudden desire when he sees the church spires in the distance: "I would want to live to be eighty-four years old…. When I am eighty-four it shall be the millennium and Christ will come again…. And when we meet Him… I shall tell Him: I have always wondered about You, how You must look."
I think Franz knows now. Thanks, Franz, and fare thee well.
Nine more years and Christ will come:
or so you said: or so he promised
her in that overwhelming constancy
of her bespired and granite-anchored church,
and perhaps you, too, will see
Christ, and him, and her, and all
the fleeting angels of your young fictions:
All of you will gather, so you said,
in the early evening, and walk abreast
to the earth’s deep rim, and there await
the calm magnificence of His millennial dawning.
Will you be astonished then to claim the answer
to your keening hero’s doubts?
What will you have to say to those of us
who cannot wait for Christ, and so
must find Him now on vacant walls
and in fortuitous shadows, we desperate
text-makers believing only in our eyes?
Our stories, Franz, are churches, nothing more,
that scour the rock and graze the clouds
and in whose hollows scratch the thin Ave Marias
of intentest voices, and so, and yet
they occupy a space between true earth and sky.
We visit them to pray in hours most dim and joyous;
in them our crypted dead receive their flowers,
in them our pigeonfeathered loves roost high
among the eaves, pondering our mute sincerities.
They invite the tired of foot and heart to stay,
and now and then we sleep on narrow benches
of our own discovery. And so, and yet
these respites are forever briefer than
our lives, and the shrewdest catacombs we map,
and steepest spires, and our devoutest hymns
will not be beautifuller, not rarer
than the plain air of our breathed time, no
gracefuller than the waiting to be met,
than the believing.
FC 1036
September 6, 1991
BrandSpace Articles
<
>
