Morality Whodunit

A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE (312 pp.)--Werner Bergengruen--Thames & Hudson ($3).

The evil that the people of Cassano did one Renaissance summer may not have lived after them, but it certainly mushroomed mightily for a while. What started it all was commonplace enough for an Italian city state of those Machiavellian times. The Grand Prince's political emissary, one Fra Agostino. had been stabbed to death, and in the Prince's own garden. The Prince, a handsome, subtle and benevolent tyrant, not only wanted to know who had done it but he wanted to know within three days.

The head of his security police, Nespoli, began the manhunt full of confidence. At the end of three days he was stumped, and in mortal fear that his failure to find the murderer would mean, literally, his own head. Reluctantly he tried to pin the crime on an innocent scapegoat, a halfwitted girl. When that failed, it was anybody's head. Cassano became a city of pointing fingers.

The Walled City. German Novelist Werner Bergengruen began writing A Matter of Conscience in 1929. By 1935, when the book was published, all Germany had become a kind of Cassano. But to Bergengruen's surprise, even the Nazi press praised A Matter of Conscience as "the Fiihrer novel of Renaissance times." Their mistake was probably not much greater than that of its readers who took the book as a sly but calculated assault on Hitlerism (500,000 copies have been sold on the Continent). The Grand Prince of this first of Bergengruen's 60 books to be published in the U.S. is not only without real kinship to the Fiihrer, but the evil that took place in imaginary Cassano is of the garden variety that can be generated in any time and place by the imperfections in man's nature.

In the walled city of Cassano, imperfection reaches a fine pitch. Policeman Nespoli's mistress is willing to put the blame on her husband, recently dead, to save her lover's head. Her stepson, Diomede, fearful of losing his inheritance, buys the testimony of a prostitute that his late father spent the murder night with her. The prostitute, egged on by a money-mad sister, sells conflicting testimony to the boy's aunt. A kindly priest is torn by the Prince's demand that he tell the secrets of the confessional. Alone among the townspeople, Sperone, a poor, Christlike dyer, loves his fellow men enough to try to end the orgy of hate and suspicion. He confesses to the murder he did not commit, and so brings on the climax and the solution of the murder.

Everlasting Need. The citizens of Cassano were surprised when the real criminal spoke up, but only the dullest reader will be. On the other hand, Author Ber-gengruen does not seem noticeably con> cerned with the mystery side of his morality whodunit. His novel's many-faceted problem embraces, besides conscience, might v. right, personal sacrifice, guilt, love and faith.

Bergengruen knows that the Sperones of this world are few indeed. But in lucid, formal, unhurried prose, he makes plain the everlasting need for decency and good faith among imperfect men. Perfect solutions for human problems, he once said, are possible only "in the presence of God; but that should . . . not prevent us from continually trying to find a solution within the limitations of our daily lives."

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