John Erskine’s novel Tristan and Isolde: Restoring Palamede ignores the Questing Beast and focuses solely on Palamede’s courtly love for Isolde. ‘Courtly love’ is the right descriptor for his devotion to Isolde, for Erskine is deliberately presenting, through the Saracen knight, an idealized and exaggerated view of love, a view that Palamede has adopted based on the stories he has heard from a Christian slave, a captured Crusader named Jaafar, in which, as in some of the medieval romances, ‘all the women became beautiful, and their admirers beyond reproach.’ Since Palamede is ‘a dreamer, his homeland seems bland and pedestrian compared to the country of Jaafar’s stories, and so he sets out to find such a place and, in turn, a woman worthy of the fabled devotion of the tales.
Palamede’s encounters with knights and ladies in Cornwall would be disillusioning to a less romantic person. Mark, who was mentioned in Jaafar’s stories, is neither courtly nor gracious; and Tristan is crude and boorish and is attracted to other women besides Isolde. But when Palamede sees Isolde, he knows instantly that she is ‘the woman he was born to worship’ and offers his love even if there is no hope that it will be requited. Palamede’s ideal view of love is tested repeatedly. He learns that Isolde does not love her husband, as he believes a woman should; but he accepts this because he believes Mark unworthy. Realizing that Tristan is also unworthy of her love, Palamede has himself baptized so that Isolde can love him without risking her soul. Palamede then goes to Tristan in Brittany and tells him that he will take Isolde from her husband. As a counter to Tristan’s argument that Isolde loves him and not Palamede, he suggests that he will inform her that Tristan has wed the other Isolde, a betrayal that will offend her ‘maiden soul’. But Tristan says Isolde is a maiden soul who is ‘at home in the world.’ As proof, he tells of her asking Brangain to sleep with Mark on the night of Isolde and Mark’s wedding, a charge that Palamede finds so offensive that he calls Tristan a liar. In the ensuing fight, Palamede gives Tristan a fatal wound but then agrees to return to Cornwall and to bring Isolde to her dying lover.
When Palamede learns from Brangain that Tristan’s account of Isolde’s wedding night is true, his faith in himself and in the world of Jaafar’s stories is undermined. Yet he can still say, ‘I did not come in vain! I have seen one woman, noble beyond hope, one flawless love, not for me!’ In the end, it is not his love for Isolde that supports his faith in an ideal love; rather, it is Isolde’s love for Tristan. Her willingness to sacrifice anything and anyone because of her single-minded devotion to Tristan is what allows Palamede to remain a dreamer and an idealist who can believe in courtly love.
***
Palomedes/Palamede needs some explanation. He was the insertion of a thirteenth-century author into the Arthurian mythos, the Stranger Who Calls and stays. He was the son of a pagan king who, being educated by his father’s Christian slave, decides to set off for Christendom and see what he can see. In Erskine’s beautifully wrought novel, Palamede is more honorable and Christian than that adulterous lout Tristan; in the antique version, he’s the close-second parfit gentil knight, the foil of His Perfectness Tristan.
I like Erskine’s version a lot better.
My Review: John Erskine published this book in 1932. It wasn’t a terribly optimistic time in American history, and that sense of gloom-and-doom is reflected in his use of the perfect outsider commenting on the foibles of the smug, self-satisfied host Westerners. They’re all nobility, so equivalent to the plutocrats who, in that more enlightened time, got the proper degree of blame and suffered the proper degree of economic punishment (unlike our own pusillanimous age, fearful of taxing the wealthiest entities at appropriate levels); Erskine isn’t in any way shy about blasting the bad behavior, selfishness, and all-around turpitude of these small-souled greed machines.
I *batten* on his outrage. I share it.
Well, anyway, should you read it? Yes. Yes indeed. It is beautifully, simply written, and it’s an evergreen plot. Marvelous stuff. [Richard Derus]
