Thinking Can Make It So

THE INNOCENCE OF PASTOR MUeLLER (156 pp.)--Carlo Beuf--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

The first of the anonymous letters was received in Berlin by a Weimar Republic judge who had just pronounced sentence in an embezzlement case. "You are an ass," the letter read. "You have condemned an innocent man. The guilty party is the director of the bank." The director was investigated and found guilty.

When the judge acquitted a woman of poisoning her husband, he got a second letter. "Will you never learn anything? Didn't it ever occur to you ... to inquire whether or not the old cuckold had actually taken out a -L-200,000 insurance policy ... to be paid to the wife upon the husband's death?" The judge inquired. Sure enough, the woman had murdered her husband for the insurance.

After the ninth letter, the ninth reversal, the judge committed suicide in despair. But his fiendishly omniscient correspondent quickly found other victims --a bishop, a prince, a shipping magnate, the chancellor himself. The police were at wit's end. Who was the poison-pen man? How did he come by his astonishing information?

Corpse in the Ruins. Up to this point, The Innocence of Pastor Muller, by Carlo Beuf, reads like a witty piece of European detective fiction. But by the end of the book it is clear that Carlo Beuf has written a fable of the age, in a manner as gay as Aesop's, and with a meaning just as grave.

The omniscient penman turns out to be a man named Kuno Schiller, a brilliant photographer who has discovered the N-ray--something which can catch men's thoughts for him on sensitized paper. Schiller offers to photograph foreign diplomats, reveal their secrets to the German government. The government accepts his offer and, for a time, acting on Schiller's information, conducts a preternaturally successful foreign policy. (It is the era of the Locarno Pact, etc.)

All at once, Schiller disappears. For two years the government wallows along without him. Then a house burns down in a Berlin suburb, and Schiller's body is found in the ruins, along with the corpse of another man. His wife gives her evidence: in reading an N-ray photograph of her, Schiller saw the image of another man. Insanely jealous, he had dropped everything and devoted two years to finding the fellow. In the end. he had burned the house down around both of them.

Evil in the Mind. Author Beuf then lets an old acquaintance of Schiller, Pastor Muller, complete the story and point the moral: Pastor Muller, a man of great simplicity and directness, looks at Schiller's N-ray photographs and can see no more than is visible in ordinary ones. "You are too innocent," says a man of the world, who can see all sorts of strange shapes in them. "I can't say I'm sorry," the good pastor replies. "For my part I am quite satisfied with what I see ... In fact, I was just wondering whether the frenzy for dissecting and analyzing that is characteristic of our age is not the cause of much of the evil afflicting the world today."

In his first book of fiction, 57-year-old Carlo Beuf (who ranches cattle in Wyoming and paints as well as writes in his spare time) has written something very much like an anti-Candide. Voltaire presented his hero as a man who, against overwhelming evidence, continued to believe that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" -- and Voltaire found him ridiculous. Beuf's Pastor Mueller agrees, in effect, with Candide. He even appears to wonder whether, after all, Candide's simple faith was as simple minded as it seems.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.