LA BELLE DAME tells the story of the ill-fated love affair of Judd Gersham, a cabbie aspiring artist, and Sarah Kerwin, a bartender single mother trying to convert herself into an academic in post-Hippie San Francisco in the early 1970’s.
The title LA BELLE DAME indicates the central theme in this novel: the feminine mystique that propels Judd Gersham to barge ahead with his romantic notion of who Sarah Kerwin really is, — beneath her tough facade, — until in desperation he strikes to the core of her self-esteem.
The San Francisco city night with its mysterious, multi-colored lights and mystical connotations, as experienced by Gersham in his ever moving cab, is also a character here, as it amplifies the meanings of the “la belle dame” theme and leads Steward and his fellow driver, “cabbie poet” Sol Weinstein, to equate Sarah with the inscrutable character of Keats’ poem who said, “sure in language strange… ‘I love thee true’.”
Eventually the story reveals that, just as Gersham can accept criticisms of his impracticality but cannot accept being regarded as sexually inept, Kerwin can accept criticisms of her severity but cannot accept being regarded as less than her ideal of feminine beauty. After Gersham attacks that, Sarah can still forgive him in words, but not in her heart.
This is the story of two people who fall very much in love and who love and battle their way toward and away from one another until an unplanned pregnancy and abortion foredoom the relationship and preclude it from ever being rekindled. Yet, even at the end, Judd and Sarah still love one another from a distance, while being unable to repair their break in communication.