Mixed Fiction

YOUNG TOeRLESS, by Robert Musil (217 pp.; Pantheon; $2.95), helps explain one of history's more interesting paradoxes: how a civilization outwardly, as gay and waltzy as 19th century Austria could produce the stark theories and dark case histories of Vienna's Dr. Sigmund Freud. Austria's late Novelist Robert Musil, known in the U.S. for his ponderously brilliant masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities (TIME, June 8, 1953; Nov. 15, 1954), had a sharp eye for the moral decay behind Vienna's comfy fac,ades. His first novel, brought out in 1906 and now published in the U.S. for the first time, lights up some nasty corners of adolescence in an aristocratic military school just like the one Musil himself attended.

The boys were the young flower of the nation, but what went on after lights-out left a trail of rotten petals from attic to parade ground.

Young Toerless found the frustrations of growing up something he could explain to neither his doting parents nor the stuffy members of the school staff. That old devil sex was getting troublesome, too, and a visit to a local prostitute only added to his confused ideas. When a couple of sadistic pals decide to make a butt of an effeminate fellow student, Toerless is both disgusted and attracted. Up in a dark attic, the victim is systematically beaten to a physical and emotional pulp.

For one of Toerless' friends--a young baron who is a Storm Trooper in embryo--all this is philosophical proof "that merely being human means nothing." Author Musil is at pains to suggest that such dark impulses sprouting from the confusions of youth are part of growing up. Like a nightmare, the whole perverted episode has not really damaged young Toerless--or has it? The boy had briefly "lost his sense of direction [but] an indefinable hidden disgust never quite left him . . ." Readers of this odd but provocative book may wonder whether this sentence does not apply to Old Europe as much as to Young Toerless.

A DREAM OF KINGS, by Davis Grubb (357 pp.; Scribner; $3.95). Abijah Hornbrook was just a Virginia ne'er-do-well who left his family to fend for themselves, but his eight-year-old daughter, Cathie, was sure that he would return some day a king. So was Tom, the orphan with whom she was raised. Tom had a vision of Abijah "high and lofty on a frothing mare ... a giant printed on the sky." Tom tells his own first-person story of how he grows to manhood in the Civil War South, thinking he hates Cathie, but really loving her, of how he commits that "act of darkness--worse even than killing" with Cathie, while "winter crouches like a grey cat above us in the sky and gnaws the house like a cold, white bone." Tom flees in terror of what he has done.

He fights in the war under one human being who comes close to the Abijah of Tom's fantasy, Stonewall Jackson: "The "olonel from the western counties: who had drilled us the hardest... the one that seemed to have no laughter in him at all and whose eyes sometimes cursed us and sometimes grieved us and yet never blinked or broke their stony, steady regard of us each: like an oak-hewn Prophet seeking the weak among his sons." Novelist Grubb, author of a topnotch thriller, The Night of the Hunter (TIME, March 1, 1954), has now attempted what might have been a commonplace story of young love against a Civil War background. But he writes with such emotional conviction and lyric intensity that the book emerges as an authentic and haunting experience.

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