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It is the tragic fate of men and women of letters in this country that they die without being recognized for their contributions to the way we look at ourselves, without even being paid the slightest notice, while gods of glitter are given heroes' funerals, no matter whether they deserve it or not. And so last August 1, Francisco "Franz" Arcellana died, as they say, "like a ship passing in the night, like a star falling while everyone is too sleepy to stare at the sky" -- in the same way that only a few months before, Levi Celerio, who was distinguished not only for the beauty of his music but also for the poignant poetry in his lyrics, died. He died and his death did not hog the headlines as broken show business marriages and affairs so often do. He had but thirty-seven days to go before his eighty-sixth birthday. The wise have said it so many times -- it matters not how long one lived, what matters is how one lived her or his life. But the life of Franz Arcellana was both long and well-lived. As a man of letters Franz Arcellana was an iconoclast. He was one of the pioneers of The Veronicans, a group of thirteen avant-garde writers who started out before the Second World War. The Veronicans, according to Fr. Herbert Schneider of the Ateneo de Manila University, "make their writing bear the imprint of the Face of the Philippines." And sure enough, his written work bore stamps of the Filipino experience though by force of certain historical circumstances he wrote in a borrowed tongue. He also experimented with literary forms. He was one of those who spearheaded the development of the short story as a prose-poetry form. Unlike many other writers in English, he did not adhere to the philosophy which preaches that the writer should confine herself or himself to the ivory tower. He believed in a fiction that "is able to render truth, that... is able to represent reality." And it was this credo that guided him in his writing, that drove him to come up with the powerful stories that he wrote. As the first and founding director of the University of the Philippines (UP) Creative Writing Center and a regular panelist in the National Summer Writers' Workshop in Dumaguete City in the 1960s and 1970s, he imparted this philosophy to students of creative writing. Among his most noted short stories are "The Flowers of May", which won in the 1951 Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, "Trilogy of the Turtles", which won him membership in the UP Writers Club, "The Mats", which was reissued as a children's book in 1995, "Wings of Madness" and "Divide by Two", which have two versions each, "Frankie", "The Man Who Would Be Poe", "Death in a Factory", "Lina", and "A Clown Remembers". While it was as a short story writer that Franz Arcellana was most noted, he had other feathers in his cap. For one, he was also a journalist. Starting out as a transcriber, he eventually became the manager of the Manila bureau of the International News Service. He also became editor of the Sunday supplement of The Manila Chronicle. He also served as adviser of the Philippine Collegian, the official student publication of the UP, in the 1950s, the late 1960s, and from 1974-1977 -- at the height of student activism in the said university. He was also a poet -- not only in that his short stories were written in poetic language -- but also in that he wrote poems in verse. Among his most famous poems are "This Being the Third Poem This Poem is for Matilda", "To Touch You", and "I Touched Her". His written work was collected in such books as Selected Stories, Poetry and Politics: The State of Original Writing in English in the Philippines Today, and The Francisco Arcellana Sampler. Franz Arcellana had enough fortune to earn institutional recognition for his accomplishments. The UP conferred him a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, in 1989. A year later, he was named National Artist for Literature, which placed him side by side with such literary luminaries as Amado V. Hernandez and Nick Joaquin. The tragedy of Francisco "Franz" Arcellana lies not only in that by going away he left a great void; it lies also in that he went away largely unnoticed though he deserved so much of our attention. Such is the tragedy of another man of letters, Levi Celerio, who went away only a few months before he did. Such is the tragedy of most men and women of letters in this country. Such is the tragedy of most great men and women in this country. URL=http://bnext.bworld.net/A&E/2002/artsstory0812a02.html
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