more from the maslin times article 'posit 4th st'

[mike j]

Mr. Dylan, who had been called "a promising hobo" by
Time, had enjoyed flirting with both sisters and also
putting Fariña in his place. A kind word from Mr.
Dylan, Fariña wrote, could fill him "with good feeling
from nose to kneecap," but such niceties became ever
more rare as the two men assumed the status of
unofficial brothers-in-law. And Fariña, who had
struggled for years with his then unpublished novel,
"Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me" (which Mr.
Pynchon admired), took it badly when he discovered
that Mr. Dylan and Joan had breezed on a motorcycle up
to a New York publishing house, held a contemptuous
15-minute meeting and sold Mr. Dylan's volume of
ramblings, "Tarantula," for a considerable sum. Yet
Fariña's book and his and Mimi's mournful, exotically
beautiful duets have also achieved their own kind of
immortality.

Much is known about Mr. Dylan's 1966 motorcycle
accident and its aftermath, which caused him to
withdraw from public scrutiny and change the course of
his musical career. Less widely recorded was the fact
that 60 days earlier, and two days after his book was
published, Fariña threw a surprise party for his
wife's 21st birthday. The novel's dedication — "This
one's for Mimi" — had struck her as cavalier enough to
make her wonder how many more birthdays they would
celebrate together, but she never had the chance to
find out. Fariña left the party to go on a motorcycle
jaunt with an acquaintance, and never came back. It
was Mr. Dylan who mythologized James Dean and had a
red "Rebel Without a Cause" motorcycle jacket in high
school. But it was Fariña who paid the price.

Mr. Hajdu reports that if Fariña had lived to write a
second book, it would have been a memoir about these
events. He offers a last word of sorts from Mr. Dylan,
who encountered Mimi two decades after the death of
her first husband (she subsequently remarried). "Hey,
that was a drag about Dick," he said. "It happened
right around my thing, you know. Made me think." This
mightily nostalgic story has that effect, too.

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