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The realest Franz
by Jose Dalisay

PRAYER (1939)

Close all open things, Lord.
Open all closed things.

All those who have long received, let them give.
All those who have long given, let them receive.
All those too long apart, let them come together.
All those too long together, sunder them.

Let the wise be fools for once, Lord.
And let the fools speak their minds.
Affirm the long-denied, Lord.
Fulfill the unfulfilled.

The Department of English and Comparative Literature was Franz Arcellana’s home for the longest time. He joined the department as an instructor the year before I was born, in 1953, and was with us as Professor Emeritus to the end.

He taught more than writing; he taught art, the humanities, indeed, a way of looking at and living life the artist’s way.

He was father and teacher to us all. All conversation paused when he spoke. He spoke with authority—an authority that was more than artistic, more than linguistic, more than a product of his learning or his age: he spoke with that rarest of privileges, a deep and hard-won moral authority, by which he could demand honesty and nobility of every artist or writer he met, and certainly of his own work.

This way he was a difficult mentor and critic to please, which made our encounters with him always memorable and worthwhile, if sometimes necessarily painful. He looked for artistry; he looked for honesty; he looked right through you and your work, and he told you if he found you wanting in one thing or the other.

Unlike some of us who found ourselves embroiled in such mundane travails as public relations, political commentary, and commercial film writing, Franz managed in the end to achieve a clarity and a purity in his calling and his passion, defined only by his love for his God, his art, and his fellowmen. He aged a modest man; aside from his beloved cognac, which I suspect was often the gift of friends, Franz didn’t have what most of us would recognize and celebrate as worldly extravagances.

This didn’t mean that he didn’t know how to enjoy life or a good laugh; he could certainly laugh as hard as anyone else, and even his laughter had a rising cadence to it. He would tell jokes the way he wrote his stories—with the punch line repeated and incrementally rephrased, his laughter and excitement mounting with every retelling.
I hope we don’t get too solemn this morning that we forget what a living, breathing creature Franz Arcellana was, how engaged with the world he could be when he wanted to, what a sharp and saucy wit he wielded.

“Get real!” he would often admonish young writers at a workshop, his increasingly bushy eyebrows meeting like God’s own frown. But what is it to get real, and who and what was the real Franz Arcellana? In his summing up of Manuel Arguilla’s life some eight years after Arguilla’s death at the hands of the Japanese, Arcellana would say something that could very well be said of himself today: “The realest thing about him of course was his writing.”

If the writing is all that most of us, especially the young, can know and remember of Francisco Arcellana, it will still be enough, it will be more than enough.

Thank you, Professor, from your students, your colleagues, and your friends at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, thank you very much indeed.

Franz by Dr. Francisco Nemenzo
Tribute to a Writer and Teacher by Cristina Hidalgo
The realest Franz by Jose Dalisay
For Francisco Arcellana, National Artist by Gilda Cordero-Fernando
Memories of Franz by Marra PL Lanot

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Updated September 25, 2002
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