Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 17 Feb 2018

Pretty Tales For Tired People by Martha Gellhorn

I suspect that those people who know the name Martha Gellhorn do so for of one of two reasons: because she was Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, or, more positively, because she has a reputation of one of the 20th century’s finest war correspondents and a fine journalist. Her persona as a writer of fiction – short stories in particular – is far less prominent and she is not frequently included in lists of influential women writers.

Pretty Tales For Tired People might go some way to explaining why that is. The book contains three long short stories that revolve around the old cliché of pride coming before a fall – or maybe the illusion that the grass is always greener elsewhere. Adultery, sexual naivety and self-delusion are at the centre of these stories which have a sort of understated sharpness dressed in the clothes of the seemingly languid. The world-weariness and knowingly arched eyebrow that Gellhorn brings to the stories is perfectly captured in the title of the collection which suggests a sort of observational ennui. It would be easy to glide over these tales as being nothing much more than confectionary. Indeed, the book review site, Kirkus  does precisely that when it says of this collection:

All (the stories) provide a kind of temporal, feminine entertainment-- sort of like costume jewelry (sic), fashionable and not really valuable.

Admittedly Gellhorn’s social satire doesn’t carry the waspish, dark edge of Dorothy Parker or the stylistic skills of Alison Lurie or Alice Munroe but she has the ability to show you folly at its most self-delusional. In the first of the tales, A Promising Career, a highly regarded public school head teacher – Claud Roylands – falls into an infatuated relationship with a married woman that results in his fall from grace. He goes from the bright young man of his privileged social set to a hapless drunk exiled to Ghana and in the process loses not just his so-called friends, his new wife but also his dazzling future prospects. Without having to make any clumsy or direct commentary on the hypocrisy of the social set that relish watching his fall from grace while pretending to be appalled and concerned, Gellhorn paints a vivid portrait by the splendid manipulation of dialogue and inference.

The second story, which for me is the strongest of the trio, The Clever One, tells the tale of a single-minded and ambitious lawyer who comes from a Jewish immigrant background to find success in the States but who is brought low by his inability to see that the woman he fixates on is a brash gold-digger. And, finally, The Fall and Rise  of Mrs Hapgood  is a wicked little piece of writing that sees a middle-aged woman, abandoned by her husband, reinvent herself by rejecting her habitual ‘niceness’.

In her biography of Martha Gellhorn, Caroline Moorehead tells us that prior to publishing Pretty Tales the author was beginning to have real doubts about her ability to write fiction and was concerned that her work was getting ‘boring’ and that it lacked excitement and ambition. She was looking at what was coming from the likes of Updike, Bellow and Styron and judged herself badly by comparison. But Moorehouse contends, and I agree, she was worrying unduly:

The three long short stories published in 1965, Pretty Tales For Tired People, show none of this. They are Martha at her most astringent, the deft social miniaturist at work.

I’m not going to claim that these stories are top notch because they’re not – but they are very good and their treatment of the issue of sexual politics is something that will still have resonance for the modern day reader interested in the debates about everyday feminism.

Copies of the book are pretty hard to find and you’ll probably have to order a second hand copy from the States but you might find it worth the effort.

 

Terry Potter

February 2018