September 18, 2009
Yesterday I read The Darts of Cupid, a collection of stories by Edith Templeton. The stories are lovely and lyrical, very funny and very sharp in their assessment and presentation of human nature, especially the matter of attraction and repulsion between the sexes. Templeton takes her time with her stories, allowing the plot to build slowly but keeping the style fast and even, full of intelligent writing and clever sentences that sear with wit or truth or beauty. Her stories don't end with sweeping conclusions but instead with true-to-life scenes about the natural (or forced) endings of things, of regret, loss, and sorrow, all tinged with the bit of happiness to have loved at all.
Set in Britain and Europe in the period of World War II and beyond, with the English Empire crumbling and Victorian morality in the very distant past, Templeton creates her atmosphere surely and seductively, an atmosphere of sophisticated weariness mixed with still-burgeoning hope. Her characters are open-minded in their pursuit of love and sex but caught by the strictures of their own hearts, by desire waxing and waning, and by longing for more, something to come or something lost. The best stories are complex with a layering of wit and verve hiding the deeper, tragic truth of what is going on in the story: war, betrayal, last chances at what has always been dreamed of, and lives cut short or cut off and dangling, incomplete and wasted.
My favorite stories are the first, "The Darts of Cupid", an absolutely stunning story of many dimensions, surprises, and an underlying tragedy that is even more sad for the characters' acquiescence to the inevitable, and "The Blue Hour", a bizarre but matter-of-factly told story of one husband's loyalty and another's pathetic efforts at adultery resulting in a cracked rib and a shaken household, and another man altogether, no husband at all but more desired than any husband, and more adroit as well: "I only make love in the late afternoon. In the gloaming, when the light must melt away and the dark has come to rule. It does not last long. It is the blue hour."
The stories of Edith Templeton are a must-read: they are in turns lovely, haunting, witty and always profoundly alive.
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