Re: Reading Phallos

Bill, here. Certainly I'm in for a group read of Phallos--though I
probably won't be able to start for another couple of weeks. But if
it's still going on, I'll catch up. I've read it four or five times in
the past two years. As I said, it's my Delany fave, right through here. 

Here's something to add a resonance to Delany's opening few pages
(just to get things started): a theory has been going around
recently--i.e., the last dozen years or so: Thomas Mann's novella
(about the same length as, or perhaps a little shorter than, Phallos),
Death in Venice, is a story that critics have now ascertained is, in
many, if not most, of its details practically a photographic
replication of a visit Mann took with his family on a summer holiday
to Venice in 1911[?]. (1912 was the publication year. This is all off
the top of my head.) Many of the details of the story are recorded in
Mann's journals: The aging queen on the boat to Venice, the Polish
family at the hotel, the progress of the cholera plague and the
government's attempt to suppress knowledge of it--these are all
directly taken from life. Also, there is the somewhat menacing
gondolier who takes Achenbach, the story's protoagonist, to his
hotel--who is notable because he is not Italian, but foreign. In that
same summer, we know, Frederick Rolfe (the English writer Baron
Corvo), in his late thirties, was working in Venice as a gondolier.
Someone, I seem to remember, did some research and ascertained that
there were only two non-Italian gondoliers working that year--so
there's a fifty-fifty chance that the non-Italian gondolier who
managed to snag Mann (and his family) for their ride to the Lido was,
indeed, Rolfe:

"He was a man of unpleasant even brutal appearance, dressed in sailor
blue, with a yellow sash; a formless straw hat, its weave partially
unraveled, was tilted insolently on his head. The set of his face, the
blond moustache beneath a curtly turned up nose, undoubtedly meant he
was not Italian. Although of somewhat frail build, so that one would
not have thought him especially well suited to his trade, he handled
the oar with great energy, throwing his entire body into each stroke.
Occasionally he drew back his lips from the excertion and disclosed
his white teeth."

The above is the Kenneth Burke translation, from Mann's finished
story. The point of the incident in Mann's tale is the mix up over the
hero's luggage, his torpor and inability to deal with the brusque
rower, who is quite sure he knows how everything should be done,
despite Achenbach's desires. (Famously, Rolfe had no social skills
what so ever, and was probably incapable of being a good servant to
anyone!) The gondola itself is, of course, equated in its discription
with a coffin, which is one of the early overt images of death in the
tale. And why is all this interesting in terms of Phallos? Well, Rolfe
and his partner at the time, Richard M. Dawkin, are "characters" in
the early pages of Delany's tale, and it is during their Venetian stay
(to have the pornographic novel published by Italian typesetters), or,
indeed, just after Dawkin's departure for Athens, that Rolfe, to pick
up extra cash, was known to be moonlighting as a gondolier. Because we
know of so many cases in Mann's novella where his descriptions
followed the reality with almost photographic exactitude (from
comparisons with his journals), we may, here, have another image of
the the man, which lends a certain stereoptical depth to the image
given in Delany's text. 

And for those who enjoy more rarified correspondances, both Mann's
story of repressed, tragic, and hopeless gay life and Delany's story
of an emotionally satisfying gay life make interesting use of the word
"psychogogue." (Burke translates it as "Summoner" [Modern Library
College Eiditions, p. 98] but the German [as does Helen Lowe-Porter,
in her more widely disseminated translation [Vintage Books]] uses the
Greek word--which means "mind-guide" or "soul-guide".)       
   
--Best,
Bill





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