Fellow Travelers and the Tristan story

I'm writing here about the Showtime adaptation of Thomas Mallon's novel, Fellow Travelers, which also was the basis of an opera by Gregory Spears (and which played here in Tucson, Arizona!).

I found the story very moving. I want to make this clear since what follows is an unemotional interpretation.

Let's focus on the trio, Hawkins Fuller, Tim Laughlin, and Lucy Smith. Hawk and Tim begin a passionate love affair, which is interrupted when Hawk marries Lucy.

Next, I want to retell the Tristan story as recounted in Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World.

Tristan is sent by his uncle King Marke to bring the Irish princess Iseult from Ireland to Cornwall to be his wife. Tristan and Iseult fall in love and commit adultery.

In the sources of the Tristan myth, there are two Iseults (a circumstance Wagner ignores in his opera Tristan und Isolde). After their adultery is discovered, Tristan and Iseult are sentenced to death but escape, and after various hardships and adventures become separated. Iseult might have gone back to King Marke. But a second Iseult enters the story. In Denis de Rougemont’s retelling, “Fresh adventures carry Tristan far away from Iseult, and he then comes to suppose that she no longer loves him. So he agrees to marry ‘for her beauty and her name’ another Iseult, Iseult ‘of the White Hand.’ And indeed this Iseult remains unstained, for after their marriage Tristan still sighs for ‘Iseult the Fair.’”[i] 

Tristan, wounded, awaits the arrival of Iseult the Fair, who will signal her arrival by hoisting a white sail. But he is deceived by Iseult of the White Hand, who falsely tells him that that the sail is black. Tristan dies, and when Iseult the Fair does arrive, she dies also. 

The focus in Matthew Arnold's tragic love poem, Tristram and Iseult, is not the adultery, which is little more than backstory, but the contrast with Tristram's feelings for his first love, Iseult of Ireland, and the woman he marries and has two children with, Iseult of Brittany.

There were two Iseults who did sway
Each her hour of Tristram's day;
But one possess'd his waning time,
The other his resplendent prime.

Tristram has adventures after leaving Cornwall. He is a knight to King Arthur. I can't resist quoting these lines from Arnold's poem:

At Arthur's side he fights once more
With the Roman Emperor.
There's many a gay knight where he goes
Will help him to forget his care

Tristram is wounded in battle. Back in Brittany he is attended by his wife, Iseult of Brittany.

                        Tristram
Soft - who is that, stands by the dying fire?

                        The Page
Iseult.

                        Tristram
 Ah! not the Iseult I desire.

The narrator says of Iseult of Brittany:

Joy has not found her yet, nor ever will—

Iseult of Ireland finally shows up and Iseult's says these last words to Tristram:

Tristram!—Tristram!—stay—receive me with thee!
Iseult leaves thee, Tristram! never more.

In Fellow Travelers Hawk is Tristram, Tim Iseult One, and Lucy Iseult Two. Hawk and Tim never cease to love one another, a circumstance Lucy suspects and finally comes to know.

There are any number of love stories in which the love affair is sudden, intense, and tragic. Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Brokeback Mountain, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. These stories locate a wedge that drives the lovers apart, in the social strictures against adultery, in a family feud, in societal homophobia.

Fellow Travelers, as in the original Tristan myth and the Matthew Arnold poem, introduces a third party, an unloved partner, Iseult of the White Hand, or Iseult of Brittany, or Lucy Smith. What kind of love story results?

A story in which love conquers all, literally. The second Iseults and Lucy Smith are emotionally starved. They are the collateral damage of an intense love. Wagner likens the love between Tristan and Isolde to a drugged state (the love potion). The lovers in Act II despise the day (society) and long for the night (anything goes).

The role of a love potion in Fellow Travelers is the chance meeting between Hawk and Tim in a Washington gay bar. Their eyes lock and nothing can stop them now. Imagine the famous Tristan chord played at that moment.

[See my piece on Hitchcock's Vertigo which also has a Tristan (Scotty Ferguson) and two Iseults (Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton).]

[i] Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (1940; New York: Fawcett world Library, 1966), p. 30.