The Step Beyond Failure

PRETTY TALES FOR TIRED PEOPLE by Martha Gel/horn. 221 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

Some of the best of people seem to lead the sorriest of lives; but failure can be a possible preface to maturity. This is the theme developed with witty grace in these three long short stories.

Each in its way makes a contrast between worldly and moral achievement. In A Promising Career, an inhumanly professional bachelor pursues his ambitions until his mistress, a Venus' fly trap passing as a violet, involves him in a scandal, ruins his career, sees him exiled to Ghana, where he hits the bottle, hits bottom, and discovers that he is human after all. In The Clever One, a successful, coldly unlikable lawyer meets an aging courtesan who marks him down for marriage and alimony, then sweet-cheats him at every turn until he finds her out, throws her out, and brokenly collapses--humbled, gentled, and j at last quite likable.

Best and most characteristic of the stories is The Fall and Rise of Mrs. Hapgood. An English matron, shocked to learn of her seemingly unassailable husband's chronic infidelities, looks long at herself and is repelled by what she sees: something between a nanny and a Girl Guide. She takes on a new face, a new wardrobe, a lover ("Why not have fun?"), and learns to fight for her real life "like a sane animal that wants to survive." Her husband, she realizes, had wanted her merely as a mother; her lover, she feels, is making an honest woman of her.

But in time she understands that her lover does not only want to love her; he also wants to own her, and this she cannot permit. A mature woman, she senses, cannot belong to anyone except herself. She therefore abandons both men, goes off to Spain to live alone in a rehabilitated villa--and apparently likes it. "It was rumored that she walked alone on the beach, at odd hours, just after dawn, just before nightfall." The neighbors could not understand why she did not marry.

Author Gellhorn suggests that her beach-haunting heroine has finished an education, but has only just started to live.

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