Judith Read online

  Judith

  A NOVEL BY

  Lawrence Durrell

  Edited and introduced by Richard Pine

  Contents

  Editor’s Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  1: The Secret Rendezvous

  2: A Landfall in Turkey

  3: Arrival in Darkness

  4: Pete

  5: The Kibbutz

  6: The Long Arm of Chance

  7: The Professor

  8: Daily Bread

  9: Operation “Welcome”

  10: The Cipher

  11: Grete

  12: David and Grete

  13: Jerusalem Interlude

  14: A Visitant

  15: The Paper-Chase

  16: Lawton and the Ambassador

  17: Enter Schiller

  18: Exit Isaac Jordan

  19: Across the Border

  20: Into Egypt

  21: Schiller’s End

  22: Pulling Out

  23: New Dispositions

  24: A Gift for Ras Shamir

  25: Lovers’ Meeting

  26: Love and War

  27: The Ultimatum

  28: The Kibbutz Embattled

  29: After the Battle

  30: The Decision

  A Biography of Lawrence Durrell

  Editor’s Introduction

  Judith is an adventure story which is both romantic and tragic, embracing twin love affairs, and it is also a political drama of considerable poignancy which contains resonances even for the geopolitics of today.

  This Introduction sets the scene in 1940s Palestine, on the eve of British withdrawal from the League of Nations Mandate (under which it administered Palestine from 1922 to 1948), with the impending invasion of the newly created state of Israel by its Arab neighbours. It describes the genesis of the novel, and the many elements in Lawrence Durrell’s mind as he was writing it, as well as explaining the discrepancies between the novel and the film of Judith, released by Paramount Pictures in 1966.

  The Genesis of Judith

  Following the appearance in 1957 of Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, and the republication of the Quartet as a single volume in 1962, Lawrence Durrell rapidly became one of the most celebrated and controversial novelists not only in the English-speaking world but also throughout Europe, thanks to translations of the Quartet into French and German.1 On the strength of this acclaim and notoriety, Durrell was approached in 1960 by Twentieth Century–Fox to write a screenplay for a film about Cleopatra, on which he worked throughout that year and 1961, although he eventually withdrew from that project, and is not named in the film credits.

  Then, in September 1962, he was in Israel, researching the background for another film, Judith, which would feature Sophia Loren in the title role. Little is known of the circumstances in which the film’s producer, Kurt Unger, commissioned the script from Durrell for Paramount Pictures; their correspondence appears to have been lost (it does not exist in either of the major Durrell archives) so that, as in the case of Cleopatra, we cannot establish precisely Durrell’s reasons for withdrawing from the film project, except to say that he was dissatisfied with the changes in the storyline made by subsequent writers.2

  Durrell worked on the first draft of Judith in late 1962 and early 1963, before meeting Sophia Loren. ‘A sweet creature, great dignity and style’, he recorded.3 Although he lost interest in the film studio’s revisions to his storyline, he went so far, in August 1964, as to visit Israel again during the shoot, where he and Loren made a short travelogue for CBS Television. ‘I acted her off her pretty little feet’, Durrell wrote.4 Given the nature of the political and paramilitary context of Judith, it is worth noting that Moshe Dayan, who, as Israel’s Minister of Defence, facilitated the CBS feature, had in 1939 been imprisoned by the British for his part in illegal arms importations by the Haganah (see below).

  As with so many of Durrell’s finished works, Judith began as a sketch, the substance and detail of which would be amplified and enhanced as the project developed. After his preliminary reconnaissance in Israel, Durrell wrote to a friend, ‘Just finished tracing the border without anything to boast about’.5 As I discuss below, this was typical of his method of constructing a story, prior to elevating it from a basic idea to a higher level of literature.

  In the first draft of Judith, the central character, Judith Roth, is a distinguished scientist in her own right, who has been ‘sprung’ from Germany by the Zionists, in order to work on papers by her late father, a Nobel Laureate physicist. Loren objected to the characterisation, telling Durrell ‘I am not an intellectual’, asking instead if Judith could be portrayed as a simple ‘woman of the people, not a doctor type’.6 As a result, Durrell completely rewrote the story, making Judith into a refugee/survivor of the concentration camps who has been married to a Nazi Colonel, Günther Schiller. Schiller is now aiding the Arab preparation for the impending attack on the new-born state of Israel.

  It is significant, from the point of view of this publication of Judith, that Durrell approached the storyline and the text in a quite different manner from that of Cleopatra. The extant versions by Durrell of Cleopatra are written in the conventional screenplay format: ‘stage’ directions describing atmosphere and movement, followed by dialogue:

  Open slowly on the dark town: palm trees, shadows, a waning moon. The camera enters a room in the palace through curtains stirred by the dawn wind, moves across the strange arabesques of tessellated floors towards a huge bed of fantastic design.7

  The text of Judith, by contrast, is written descriptively, and, while the dialogue is dominant, it is integrated into the narrative in a novelistic style. In the absence of any full treatment for the scenario of Judith, we can assume that, while, in the scenario for Cleopatra, Durrell was suggesting the way the director might use the camera’s eye, in Judith he was employing the eye of the reader to achieve his effect.

  As a result — it seems — of Loren’s intervention, Durrell had, by the end of 1963, written two versions of Judith, the second replacing Judith the scientist with Judith the victimised mother in search of her child by Günther Schiller. A copy of the second version is held in the archives of Paramount Pictures, and it is presumably from this text that the later scripts were derived. The Durrell archive at Southern Illinois University also contains a document labelled ‘Judith. Palestine 1947’, indicating that Durrell was actively involved in the early stages of the film treatment(s), with perceptive remarks as to the political situation, such as the following:

  Jerusalem: The holy city is like a symbol of the Palestinian political situation. The Arab and Jewish community sharing the town, each believing that it will be liberated in the near future for its own people. The Jews have always considered Jerusalem as their capital but they know that the Jordanian Arabs will try in every way to take this city from them.

  Durrell includes a note at the end of this document:

  We must keep in mind from the very beginning of the story the need of creating a sequence to show the threat hanging over the future of the emerging country. The threat, as will be made clear in the end, is the surrounding Arab States which are opposed to the creation of an independent Jewish state.8

  The film of Judith, directed by Daniel Mann, starred Sophia Loren in the title role, with Peter Finch as Aaron Stein and Jack Hawkins as Major Lawton.9 It is significant that Paramount succeeded in securing the services of both J. P. Miller and John Michael Hayes as screenwriters. Miller, who was principally a playwright, won an Emmy nomination for Days of Wine and Roses (1958). He worked on five versions of the script for Judith between 1 March and 9 July 1964. Hayes had previously worked with Alfred Hitchcock, one of his most notable scripts being Rear Window (19
53), for which he received an Oscar nomination, followed by To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much. He then went on to earn a second Oscar nomination for his adaptation of Peyton Place. Hayes took over the script from Miller on 1 August 1964 and continued with it (another five versions) until 12 March 1965.

  A curious anomaly is the fact that the story was serialised (two months after the release of the film) in Woman’s Own magazine as ‘The Epic Story of One Woman’s Torment’, but differs in several details from the episodes in the film (and the film contains elements that are not included in the story).10

  As late as 1972 — that is, after the publication of his next major novel sequence, Tunc and Nunquam — Durrell was still contemplating publication of Judith.11 We do not know at what stage he decided to merge the first two versions of the novella into one story, splitting the Judith character into Judith (still a scientist) and Grete (the wife of Günther Schiller) and introducing the character of David as Grete’s lover, to balance the relationship between Judith and Aaron Stein. This development almost certainly came after the release of the film of Judith in January 1966. Durrell’s title for the expanded novel was ‘Double Scenario’. This was presumably a working title, intended to indicate that there were now two storylines: that of Judith (as in the first version) and that of Grete, who replaced the ‘Judith’ of the second version. It is an unwieldy title, and I have therefore preferred to retain ‘Judith’ as the title of this expanded novel. The typescript (which was most likely prepared by a professional typist) contains some anomalies, which Durrell clearly did not have the opportunity to correct. Some of these have been silently corrected; others are discussed below.

  Durrell’s writing styles

  Throughout his career as a novelist, Lawrence Durrell wrote on two levels: intense, passionate, intellectual novels such as The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1959), and lighter, less serious, more easily written (and more easily read) stories, which he disparagingly referred to as ‘pot-boilers’. In fact, the chronology of his published work indicates that, in most cases, the ‘serious’ and the ‘lighter’ works alternated, as if, having completed a demanding undertaking such as the Quartet, he turned to story-telling which allowed him to continue in the obsessional writer’s craft without trying to reach for the literary stars.

  In 1937, Lawrence Durrell was living in Corfu, and had already published his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, and, under the pseudonym of ‘Charles Norden’, his second, Panic Spring; and he had written the novel which he later regarded as carrying the first sound of his true voice, The Black Book. (The pseudonym was used because Pied Piper of Lovers had not met with critical acclaim.) Having attracted the enthusiastic support of Henry Miller for The Black Book, Durrell wrote to him:

  My double Amicus Nordensis. He is a double I need ...You see, I can’t write real books all the time ...Once every three years or more I shall try to compose for full orchestra. The rest of the time I shall do essays, travel-books, perhaps one more novel under Charles Norden. I shall naturally not try to write badly or things I don’t want to: but there are a lot of things I want to write which don’t come into the same class as The Black Book at all.12

  To which Miller forcefully replied:

  Don’t ...take the schizophrenic route! ...You must stand or fall either as Charles Norden or as Lawrence Durrell. I would choose Lawrence Durrell if I were you ...If, as you say, you can’t write REAL books all the time, then don’t write. Don’t write anything, I mean. Lie fallow ...Why couldn’t you write all the other books you wish as L.D.? Why can’t L.D. be the author of travel books, etc.?13

  As a result of this retort from Miller, Durrell did ‘kill off’ his double, and continued to write the travel books, essays and novels under his own name: his memoir of Corfu, Prospero’s Cell (1945), was his next major prose work, and if we examine the chronology of his prose publications thereafter, the alternation of ‘real’ books and lighter stories becomes clear: Cefalù (later republished as The Dark Labyrinth) in 1946, Reflections on a Marine Venus (‘a companion to the landscape of Rhodes’, 1953), and Bitter Lemons (about his years in Cyprus during the Enosis crisis, 1957) led up to the appearance between 1957 and 1959 of the work with which his name is most frequently associated, The Alexandria Quartet.

  Of his works up to this point, The Dark Labyrinth is the least demanding: a didactic novel on a programmatic basis, with each character confronting his or her personal destiny within the framework of a Cretan labyrinth. When he was writing it, Durrell told Miller, ‘I have deliberately chosen a cheap novel formula ...A rotten book but with some small lucid moments and one or two good lines’.14 Readers of Judith will readily see that not only does this novel have ‘some small lucid moments’ — some of them of great beauty and, usually, poignancy — but that the Durrell hallmark of memorable phrases and acute insights is, though to a lesser extent than in his ‘real’ books, present throughout, in his commentary — sometimes cynical, always with a wry humour — on the behaviour of his characters.

  Durrell’s view of The Dark Labyrinth as ‘a rotten book’ is so self-deprecatory as to be absurd, especially when it has in fact been very highly regarded by the critics. This, and other books in the ‘cheap novel formula’ were, in fact, the product of what Miller had foreseen as his ‘fallow’ periods. Judith — unpublished until now — was written in the difficult years for Durrell between the completion of the Quartet and his struggle with its successor, the twin novels Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970), which were drafted in parallel with Judith under the working title ‘The Placebo’. In these ‘fallow’ years, during which he was preoccupied with the ill-health of his wife, Claude, he also produced his translation of the nineteenth-century Pope Joan by the Greek author Emmanuel Royidis, and most of his ‘Antrobus’ sketches of diplomatic life as he had observed it while working at the British Embassy in Belgrade, then the capital of the Yugoslav Federation.15 Yugoslavia had also given rise to his 1957 novel of espionage and suspense, White Eagles over Serbia — another example of his capacity for a storyline which grips the reader without making exceptional literary demands.

  In fact, almost all Durrell’s novels combine the dual elements of what Kipling called ‘the game’ and ‘the quest’, as exemplified in his Kim, which Durrell himself called his ‘bedside book’. The ‘game’ involves a secret which must be discovered in the book’s dénouement, and the ‘quest’, which runs parallel to the public ‘game’, is the individual’s pursuit of self-knowledge. The reader’s attention and loyalty are sustained by the author’s capacity to entwine the two within a single narrative structure.

  G. S. Fraser (a wartime contemporary of Durrell in Egypt), who wrote the first major study of Durrell’s work, recorded that ‘the Wodehousian humour of the Antrobus stories, the Buchanesque thrills of White Eagles over Serbia, have helped to keep the pot boiling. Durrell, with typical versatility, was working when I visited him in Corfu on the script and general advice for an American film, a documentary one, about the voyages of Odysseus’. In relation to Judith, Fraser remarked, ‘this was obviously a hastily novelized filmscript and one wondered even whether Durrell, who had written the script, had himself done the novelizing’.16

  The level at which the author can pitch his narrative depends on many factors, such as the basic material of the plot — which, as in the case of Judith, might be quite deeply researched — and the evolution of the characters as the writing progresses. But it also depends on the author’s emotional and material circumstances: financial and other necessities might dictate the composition of a ‘pot-boiler’ when the writer would prefer to pursue a more intimate and introspective line of enquiry (even though that would still demand a clear storyline). And the reverse might be the case, as it was with Durrell after the success of the Quartet, when he started to address the twin themes of Judith while considering its potential as a filmscript.

  Not only might Durrell denigrate the literary value of one of his minor w
orks, but he was also capable of reducing his masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, to its basic elements, referring to it as no more than ‘sex and the secret service’. In the simplest terms, this reduction accurately reflects the twin themes of the ‘quest’ — the search by several of the characters for the meaning and practice of love — and the ‘game’, the web of conspiracies, political and religious movements and chicanery which provides the context in which that idea of love is tested and pursued.

  When writing Tunc and Nunquam, Durrell noted that the ‘irresistible book themes are Quests, Confessions and Puzzles’17 and in doing so he expressed the elements which constitute the framework within which his — and any other author’s — characters act out their lives. Whether in a Proust or an Agatha Christie, quests, confessions and puzzles provide the author with the momentum of the book and the reader with the reason for continuing to read it. They are the writer’s stock-in-trade, and Durrell emphasised this in referring to what he called ‘the minor mythologies’,18 the genres of popular literature which have been consigned by critical prejudice to the status of ‘lowbrow’. But the creation of an art-literature rests on the foundations of a much more popular genre: the telling of a compelling story, and Judith is such a story.

  One of the most striking features of Lawrence Durrell’s writing, on any level, is his innate absorption of the context and his ability to bring it vividly to life. When writing Judith he conducted extensive research, as was his practice with any work which depicted actual events.

  Durrell’s knowledge of the Levant enabled him to create scenes redolent of specific times and places. Given greater consideration, it is likely that he would have deepened the characterisation of Judith, Aaron, Grete and Lawton, to match the charming and sympathetic caricature of Isaac Jordan with which the novel opens. But the main players in this adventure represent positions which had become somewhat institutionalised in the course of the Mandate situation: Judith as a scientist with a Zionist mission; Aaron as the speaker of the leitmotiv ‘Israel must get itself born’; Grete seeking her child and her warmongering husband; Lawton the reluctant soldier, caught between personal feeling and military duty. Lawton, in fact, in his hesitant performance of that duty, and his pathetic wooing of Grete, shows us that, besides being a political and human fiasco, the playing out of the last years of the Mandate was a great drama, which Durrell captures in both the general and the specific.