Storyteller's Story

EMBEZZLED HEAVEN--Franz Werfel--Viking ($2.50).

Few readers, insists Professor Mortimer Jerome Adler, know How to Read a Book. Equally important fact: few writers know how to tell a story. Story-weaving is a craft old as flax-weaving, decorative as peasant embroidery, difficult as silversmithing. Thus old tales like The Thousand and One Nights, the fabliaux, The Canterbury Tales, the Grimms' folk stories have a magic rarely found in latter ages. That this magic is less a patina than the product of skill and feeling is shown by the occasional appearance of a real storyteller's story. Such is Franz Werfel's Embezzled Heaven.

Like Chaucer and Somerset Maugham, Werfel himself sits in a dim corner in the role of storyteller: "I knew Teta. . . . It could never have entered my mind that I should one day attempt to record the history of this old serving-woman who could only barely read and write." Like the Grimms and W. H. Hudson, Werfel suggests the far away and long ago: "Yet now I am sitting here, at a strange table in an alien land, painfully evoking the memory of a world that has been submerged into the past. . . ." Like Scheherazade and O. Henry, Werfel is not afraid to use language decoratively: ". . . The morning came on swift feet and looked down upon us with astonished eyes!" Nor to ornament his narrative with observations: "Man, in accordance with his gloomy disposition, has far greater power to visualize horror than to visualize delights. Dante's Hell is much more realistic than his Paradise."

Embezzled Heaven is the story of an Austrian cook's attempt to win her salvationby"theological craftiness."She would pay for her nephew's clerical education so that, when he became a priest, his grateful prayers would win grace for her sinful soul. Indifferent to her nephew except as a part of her scheme, Teta answered his pleas for money for 30 years. One day she retired, set out to visit him. He was not, as he claimed, the parish priest in her home town in Moravia. After "a labyrinthine meandering through her nephew's long-forgotten past," she found him in haunted Prague. He was a peddler of horoscopes, fireworks, feelthy post cards.

But through a pilgrimage to Italy and a talk with a young priest in that "intricate warren of death," the catacombs, Teta Linek found her salvation again. Observes Werfel's young priest: "These so-called simple souls are more complicated than all your high-class psyches that are equipped with the latest modern conveniences." In this complicated psyche Franz Werfel finds the first & last need of the storyteller: plot.

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