Volume 16, Number 8 · May 6, 1971
The Inner Mann
By Stephen Spender
Letters
by Thomas Mann, selected and translated by Richard Winston, by Clara Winston
Knopf, 690 pp., $17.50
Thomas Mann's persona fits bulkily into much of his fiction, like an outsize old-fashioned oblong brass-tacked trunk—the sort that Gustave Aschenbach might well have had carried into his suite at the Hotel des Bains on the Lido, in Death in Venice. Mann was almost insistently conscious of this autobiographical presence. He writes to Felix Bertaux in 1923 explaining that Death in Venice is the autobiographical Tonio Kröger 'retold at a later stage of life,' while Tonio Kröger itself is the autobiographical continuation of Buddenbrooks.
Review, 3821 words
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