Made in Heaven?

Two BY Two (246 pp.)--Martha Gell-horn--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

Marriage, an ancient vaudeville joke has it, "is like a beleaguered fortress; those on the inside are trying to get out, and those on the outside are trying to get in." In her new book, Novelist Martha (The Trouble I've Seen) Gellhorn takes the reader on a skillfully guided tour of the fortress; it is her special merit that she observes the outside as well as the inside (including some rarely seen rooms), with equal sensibility. Two by Two contains four studies of the married state, each taking its title from a vow in the marriage service.

FOR BETTER FOR WORSE is about Prince Andrea Ferentino and his American wife Kitty. Long years in the Ferentino castello, doing nothing but wait for his old man to move on to a better world and give Heir Andrea a chance in this one, have sapped the prince's fibers; he pines feebly for "real" life. When the U.S. Army liberates the Ferentino village during World War II, Andrea's dream all but comes true: he flies away on a magic jeep as an Italian interpreter, worships the most ordinary G.I.s, shapes wonderful plans for starting a new life in Montana. With war's end Andrea's dream fades away, leaving him and Kitty to fall back into their old doldrums. This affecting little story is full of understanding of the Italian way of life and scores a bull's-eye in the portrait of Kitty, so long expatriated from the U.S. that she is more Italian than her Italian husband, and can conceive of Montana only as a "pink rectangle on the map, larger than all Italy."

FOR RICHER FOR POORER is 100% British and tells of the cold, calculating efforts of Rose Answell to push her unambitious husband Ian up and up in the Tory government. From a minor secretaryship in Agriculture ("He loved the Pig Scheme and he never had to make a speech") gentle Ian is thrust up the Rose-rigged ladder to the very verge of Minister of State for Colonial Affairs--where, abruptly, he rebels, resigns, retires to pig-farming and smashes his marriage. Author Gellhorn is working here in rather tired soil.

IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH puts a grim new angle on the old triangle. Annette is a fragile doll of a woman who has had a critical heart disease for more than 13 years; in Meredith's phrase, she is "a dying something never dead." In death's slow embrace she remains beautiful and virginal, tended in the peaceful New England countryside by a dedicated aunt and a Negro cook. This sunnily funereal household is subsidized out of the thin pocketbook of Annette's husband James, who shares one room in New York with his mistress and dreams of the day when death will free him to marry her. When the mistress becomes pregnant, James resolves to divorce Annette, but face to face with the supine, trusting invalid, he holds his tongue. The memorable story evokes a morbid doll's house in which death is pink with black edges, like some outrageous hybrid flower. Also outstanding: the thumbnail sketch of the prim, man-hating aunt, who all but says out loud that a marriage in which sex is prohibited by doctor's orders is a noncon-summation devoutly to be wished.

TILL DEATH Us Do PART is just the opposite of its title, Tim Bara is the prototype of a romantic fixture--the international photographer who covers wars and worlds with his Leica and lives mostly in planes, hotel rooms and jungle huts. Hungarian-born Photographer Bara invented his own name--as did the late, real-LIFE Photographer Robert Capa, also of Hungarian origin. Once, Bara was married to Suzy, who could shoot as straight with a camera as he. Since her death in the Spanish war, Bara, despite bedfuls of women, stayed faithful in his fashion until a sniper's bullet made him "something not to look at, and beyond all aid."

Graham Greene has praised Martha Gellhorn, onetime reporter, for "hard and clear" writing devoid of "the female vices of unbalanced pity or factitious violence." But the firmness of touch shown by twice-married Author Gellhorn-is not always flexible enough to cope with the agonies and intimacies of marriage. What supports these stories, apart from craftsmanship, is the vigor of the existentialist faith that Author Gellhorn expresses in her concluding lines: "What are you doing at that Wailing Wall? The only thing to do, as long as you are alive, is live."

* To Novelist Ernest Hemingway; T. S. Matthews, onetime editor of TIME.

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