YOUNG TÖRLESS, 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 façades. 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 Törless 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, Törless is both disgusted and attracted. Up in a dark attic, the victim is systematically beaten to a physical and emotional pulp.
For one of Törless' 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 Törless—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 Törless.
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.