Books of the Month

'The Darts of Cupid' by Edith Templeton

This book was recommended to me recently by a friend. I'd never heard of Edith Templeton, and if I hadn't been prevailed upon specifically not to be put off by the title, I might never have read this curious collection of short stories. It does, after all, sound rather like an old-fashioned romantic read. But appearances can be deceptive...

Edith Templeton has had quite a life, and her fascinating background informs much of her writing. Born in Prague in 1916, she spent much of her childhood in a castle in the Bohemian countryside, and was educated at the French lycee in Prague. In 1938 she married an Englishman, and came to the UK to work in the Office of the Chief Surgeon for the US Army. She then became a captain in the British Army, working as an interpreter. Her short stories began to appear in The New Yorker in the 1950s, and in 1956 she went to live in India with her second husband, who was physician to the King of Nepal. Her novel Gordon was published in 1966 under a pseudonym and subsequently banned in England and Germany for its scandalous content. She now lives in Italy. Wouldn't she make a great dinner party guest?

They're slightly strange stories, these. At one level, they're quite shocking. Despite inhabiting a cosmopolitan world of castles, servants and hanging out with Barons, the narrator often finds herself in rather direct, and sometimes violent, sexual situations. In 'Nymph and Faun', for instance, we see a recently widowed woman, left wealthy but lonely in an Italian villa, who fondly remembers her first love in England - a man who, she abruptly says, 'violated me on a bench in the garden of a house in Kensington' before either of them knew the other's name. There's also a family friend who chases her round the dining table and later breaks one of her ribs while making a grab for her in a lift; and a mysterious man she meets in a coffee shop while on holiday in Prague and promptly begins sleeping with. These encounters make quite uneasy reading because of the strong sense (whether true or false) that they're based on real events.

But there's more to the stories than lifting the lid on the perceived sexual repression of the upper classes. Templeton has something to say about class, privilege, friendship, war, marriage, and the sadness of missed opportunities. The title story at first seems to be the tale of an office flirtation that looks as though it might become a dangerously unorthodox liaison, but ends up a meditation on the Second World War's ability to destroy not just life but relationships - even those that didn't have the chance to properly begin.

Templeton's stories frequently left me pondering just what it was I'd read. They're often a compelling window on an unusual world, a place rendered exotic by a gap of time, geography or wealth, but they're also often slightly unsettling. As well as the disturbing frankness of the narrator's sexual liaisons, there's also an uneasiness about her autthorial standpoint. Are we to sympathise with, or to censure her opinions? Is she a brave individualist or a misguided snob? In the end perhaps, it doesn't really matter. What's important is that by opting to not tie up all the loose ends, by refusing to write neat stories about nice people, Templeton draws the reader in all the more.

Susan Tranter

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