Nerve Specialist

LITTLE NOVELS--Arthur Schnitzler--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

Faintly reminiscent of the clinical casebooks of Freud and Stekel are these ten compact novels, no longer than short stories, written at various times in Schnitzler's career, now translated into English for the first time.

The Death of a Bachelor brings to his bedside a group of old friends who find a letter concerning their wives which changes their opinion of the deceased. Andreas Thameyer's Last Letter is a treatise on the effect of shock during pregnancy, written before his suicide, explaining to the world that the Negro child his wife had borne him was the result of such a shock. It is instantly amusing because between the lines one perceives that Andreas Thameyer knew his wife had made him a cuckold.

The Fate of the Baron is the tale of an aristocratic gentleman whose life's errand is to become the lover of a prima donna and whose ecstacy at her final acceptance is quickly changed to gentlemanly chagrin when she leaves him after their first night. Denouement: the Baron hears that his night of love was the result of a curse, muttered by the prima donna's previous lover on his deathbed. Upon hearing this the Baron can do nothing but die of shock, which he promptly does. Author Schnitzler's characters die easily, often.

Called "The essence of Vienna" by everyone but the Viennese, Author Schnitzler gained a reputation for gay cynicism before the War. Since that time his work suggests an aging literary "master," sitting in an old fashioned study with blinded windows, busy with devious, psychological speculations and memories. He is a doctor, and a literary nerve specialist.