Lawrence Durrell
Judith
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.
