Terrible Destiny

BOY GRAVELY by Iris Dornfeld. 212 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

"He had always listened. When he was three years old he began to notice what he heard, and he would stop in the middle of his childhood activities to attend the materials of sound, some of which were in the environment, some of which sprung from his head in flights of strange dream ascensions. It wasn't unusual to see him fall as if struck and begin a concentration which might last ten or 15 minutes."

Boy Gravely is a Los Angeles slum child, an unwanted bastard, and a musical genius. At five he steals a violin and teaches himself to play. At seven he sneaks into the empty Hollywood Bowl, sits down at the Steinway, improvises in an ecstasy that lasts all night. At 13, carrying a couple of stolen instruments, he heads east on a slow freight. He lands in New Orleans, immerses himself in jazz, and suffers a creative convulsion that brings him to the edge of madness. He follows his daemon to East Harlem, then on to Germany, where he composes an electronic symphony, scores it for soprano, orchestra, tape, women's high-heeled shoes, and vacuum cleaner. When it is performed back in the Hollywood Bowl, some cheer and some jeer, but he is accepted by the public as a genuine genius.

Surprisingly he is also accepted as such by the reader. This second novel by Iris Dornfeld (Jeeney Ray), who is the wife of Nation Editor Carey McWilliams and a musician in her own right, has many faults--among them a bifurcated plot structure and an occasionally cluttered style. But it has one peculiar and overriding merit. In the contorted, possessed character of Boy Gravely, Author Dornfeld has created a marvelously perceptive delineation of the terrible disease and destiny that is genius.

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