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 works, 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.
It is Durrell’s ability to create strong images both of concrete realities — such as the ambience of the kibbutz — and of emotional states that lifts Judith from a reportage to a work of suggestive and imaginative fiction. (Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, had said that his manifesto The Jewish State was not written ‘in the irresponsible guise of a romantic tale’,19 and Durrell was equally true to his craft in avoiding excess in the portrayal of the parallel love stories.) His ‘political’ background made it possible to include elements in the storyline, such as the unsuccessful blockade with which it opens, Günther Schiller’s meeting with Grete and his subsequent suicide, the encounter between the childhood friends Aaron and Daud, and the threat of deportation to Cyprus, all of which are linked thematically and organically to the situation in Palestine at that time.
It is remarkable that such themes and narrative devices recur in Durrell’s work: in The Avignon Quintet, for example, the wife of the psychiatrist Schwartz (as in the case of Schiller and Grete) is sent to Buchenwald, and his subsequent sense of guilt leads to his suicide. Another recurring feature of Durrell’s writing is his insistence that the story never ends, or that it may have multiple endings. In a memorandum to Paramount, he suggested that ‘my own story ends here, but there is no reason why one could not continue it along the lines already discussed’. And the novel ends with an ambiguity: ‘Or so it seemed’. Similarly, The Alexandria Quartet had closed with the penultimate sentence ‘Once upon a time’, and The Avignon Quintet ends with an ‘opening’: ‘the totally unpredictable began to take place!’ Such was Durrell’s interest in improbability and relativity that he resisted any definitive conclusion to anything he wrote.
The political context: Palestine, 1920–1948
Specific events such as the United Nations vote in favour of partition (29 November 1947) and the British military and administrative withdrawal from Palestine (14–15 May 1948) provide the pillars on which the personal fortunes of Durrell’s characters rest.
Despite two notable exceptions (discussed below) where Durrell seems to have nodded, his scenario for Judith is accurate in two very important respects: its portrayal of the political situation towards the end of the British Mandate in Palestine, and its awareness of the tensions between Arabs and Jews which had built up over the previous half century. As a former British diplomat and government functionary, with extensive experience in the Levant (Egypt, Cyprus and the Dodecanese) in addition to his observations of the Cold War while stationed in Yugoslavia, Durrell was in pole position to employ this experience in the service of a novel which would incorporate both a love story (in fact, two) and the elements of a political thriller.
An introduction of this kind is necessary because, as Albert Hyamson noted, writing shortly after the British withdrawal, his own account of Palestine under the Mandate would be for
the guidance, instruction and also warning of those to whom the welfare of Palestine present and future is of account, necessary as an assistance in dissipating the fog of propaganda in which the whole subject is shrouded and has been for the greater part of the past generation.
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The fact that little has changed, in the more than sixty years since Hyamson wrote that, underlines the need for readers today to appreciate the unhappy background to Judith.
The following pages therefore indicate the political context within which Judith is set, and the reasons for Durrell’s not merely providing political and religious tensions as background (as he had recently done in the Quartet) but bringing that context into the novel as a character in its own right. In fact, the points of history, from the inception of modern Zionism in the 1890s to the ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917 and the start of the British Mandate (from the League of Nations) in 1921–22, are matched meticulously by Durrell and woven into the fabric of the story which binds together Judith, Aaron, Grete and David; the Jewish Agency; the Haganah; and the impending vote at the United Nations to authorise the partition of Palestine.