Judith Read online

  Judith

  Nicholas Mosley

  To Marius and Jonathan

  Contents

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  A Note on the Author

  Part I

  Dear Bert,

  All right, I’ll tell you. But don’t tell anyone else. You’ll know this means – I might get it published one day.

  I can’t marry you. I can’t marry anyone else. Will you think this means – I might marry you one day?

  When I came to England (as a child I had been with my parents, as you know, in Hong Kong and Singapore) there was an extraordinary slowness and stillness on the road into London from the airport: it was as if some bomb had gone off: people sat in their cars like toys with spikes up inside them: in the streets they seemed dazed, as if they were looking for where their homes had once been and for food. Where I had been brought up people seemed always to know exactly where they were and what they were doing: they were getting on, getting power, getting money: everyone was in the business of owning a percentage of everyone else. In London people seemed to have been liberated from the wheel of all this; but it was as if some juggernaut had gone over them, and they were like new-born babies left lying on the edge of a bed while doctors tended to the dying earth, their mother.

  I went to that drama school, as you know, and got one or two jobs in fringe theatre. That was when you first met me. (Who am I writing this for? is it you? is it you?)

  Then I got a small part in the West End in a play called Judith. This was a breakthrough for me – not only because I was going to the West End, but because I was understudying the star who was a famous actress from whom I thought I might learn. I also thought that from the play I might learn something about myself: I am as you know (I mean you, not you!) called Judith.

  The story of Judith was taken from the book in the Bible or rather the Apocrypha. The Jews are being besieged in a town call Bethulia: the Assyrians are about to break in, and if they do they will sack the town and kill the inhabitants. The Jews are in despair; but there is in Bethulia a beautiful young widow called Judith, who gets the idea that God has called her to save her people. She announces she will go down to the Assyrians and will make some sort of offering of herself to their captain, Holofernes. The Jews agree to this, since it seems to be God’s will. So Judith dresses herself up and goes to the camp of the Assyrians; and there, because she is beautiful, she gets herself taken in to Holofernes. He is attracted to her; he arranges a dinner. But before he can make love to her he gets drunk and passes out (you have heard this story?) and while he is asleep, Judith takes down his sword and chops his head off. She carries his head back in her overnight bag to Bethulia and tells the Jews to hang it on the walls. Then in the morning when the Assyrian soldiers see the head they run away in panic.

  So this is a story, you see, about good coming out of an action that might usually be called evil: or about how you can call this coming-out-of-evil good, perhaps, so long as you can say it is God’s will.

  But then, what men have usually done, of course, is to use saying it is God’s will as justification for their own evil.

  But Judith was a woman. Do you think the story is about how good-coming-out-of-evil might be a special accomplishment of women?

  The play in which I was to understudy the star had been written some sixty or seventy years ago at a time when people had stopped making much use of the idea of God’s will – either as a belief, or as an excuse for their own purposes or desires. The playwright told the story without bringing in much about God; sexual passion has taken God’s place: it was this now, conventionally, that was seen as the force behind dramas about interactions between good and evil. When Judith went down to the Assyrian camp it was because she had become obsessed by fantasies about Holofernes: the saving of Bethulia was incidental to her sexual desires – it was almost admittedly her excuse. The Jews even seemed to accept much of this: sexual passion has its mumbo-jumbo, I suppose, almost as much as have ideas about God. So there, by the second act, was Judith all dressed up and taken in to Holofernes; and Holofernes was enthralled by her of course; but then – such were the conventions of the time – how could they show the uniqueness, the completeness, the eternality as it were of their love: they could not just do the usual, of course, because then where would be the magnificence, the drama? They had to start talking about death: was this not what lovers a hundred years ago always seemed to have to talk about – death as the only suitable and perfect apotheosis of love? So Holofernes didn’t even have to get drunk and pass out: Judith chopped his head off because in some fashionable manner she simply loved him so much and he loved her: this was their destiny: he would be hers for ever, and she could carry his head around in her bag. (Who on earth got hooked by this stuff? not you: not you?) Perhaps men in the audiences could go home (perhaps even as Jews and Assyrians might have gone home?) comforted by the enchantment of such a demonstration; their heads tucked up as it were in the bags of beautiful women, their mothers.

  When the revival of this play came to the West End some seventy years later it was of course more difficult to get away with this sort of thing; romantic passion was as much out of favour as ideas about God’s will. But there was a nostalgia about seeing great actors and actresses perform; and great performances could only be given in something of the style of these old dramas.

  The star whom I was understudying had as it happened become notorious in real life for something of this old style: in innumerable newspaper stories she was portrayed as a gobbler-up of men – someone who indeed might carry scalps home in baskets and hang them on her wall. She was a small fierce woman with big breasts. Sometimes her energy and rage seemed to get turned against herself: there had been photographs of her carried from her home on a stretcher with blankets up to her chin.

  For this production of Judith, professionally and personally, she had gone back to one of her ex-husbands who once had been a star in his own right. He was a tall gangling man who was known to be a drunk: he would sometimes spin about the stage like a top running down; lurch into furniture and footlights as if in search of some disaster to whip him up. He and his ex-wife came together, split up, came together again; the public loved these old-fashioned dramas when they were in newspapers and thus could be treated as occurrences that could not happen to them. So when it was known that ex-husband-and-wife were coming together again to be in this play Judith there was excitement and speculation. For had there not been a time when in fact she had gone at him (so the story went) with a carving knife? and he had been photographed later coming out of the door of a nursing home on the arm of his new girlfriend and saying – Yes, we still hope to be able to have children. So what might happen now when Judith took that sword from its sheath? Might there not be two heads, one false and one real – Holofernes having been caught flirting in the wings perhaps with one of the Assyrian slave-girls – rolling, when the time came, towards the footlights?

  I myself happened to be one of the Assyrian handmaidens: it was my job to get Judith dolled up for her big night with Holofernes. I used to think – Women have always known, even if they cannot talk about, the way in which good can come out of evil?

  There was a night – the play had been running for a few weeks – when it seemed that Holofernes was even more drunk than usual; he had been bobbing about in the corridors like a cork in a rough sea; he did not make his entrance until the second act, the scene of which was in his tent. This act started with the dolling-up of Judith: myself and another girl attended her with combs, scents and ointments. There was some rage within her this night like the mouth of a steel trap: there had been some row in the interval; shouting had been heard in her dressing-room; doors had slammed. When Holofernes did make
his entrance – coming in from a day of war in full and shining armour – it was evident immediately that whatever had been happening behind the scenes was to be carried on to the stage: Holofernes had his helmet on back to front: this might not have been noticed – it was one of those helmets with a crest that might go this way or that – except that after Holofernes had taken one look at Judith he walked to the front of the stage and winked and put a finger to his lips: then he raised and lowered his eyebrows several times. The audience began to laugh. Holofernes did not in fact have much to say directly after his entrance: he was supposed to stare at Judith passionately and silently while his generals discussed the battle and the handmaidens came to divest him of his armour. But now he seemed to have stopped acting. It is difficult to say of what this impression consists. He gazed at Judith ruminatively, as if he were wondering what he should do. There was the impression that he seemed to have a choice.

  The other handmaiden and I undressed him. During this scene it had always been as if we were preparing some victim. I had thought – Surely people will not for ever be getting their thrills from this?

  On this night Judith reclined on her couch with her mouth, her breasts, like some giant clam at the bottom of the ocean.

  When Holofernes did embark on his main dialogue with Judith he got most of his lines right: I mean he got the sequence of words right – the stuff about the fulfilment of love only being found perfectly in death, and so on – but it was as if he were also at the same time wondering about what he was saying; as if he might at any moment break off and exclaim – Listen to this! Or even – What frightful rubbish! He was still half turning to the audience as if to ask – Well what do you make of it? And the audience was becoming half hypnotised. There was something powerful about this acting or non-acting that I had not experienced before – there was an impression that what was really happening was going on elsewhere. And Judith, I suppose, was being upstaged; she was still trying to act in the grand style; but being on stage she could not get at Holofernes personally, it was as if she were trapped. Holofernes’s voice became dreamy, self-reflective, sing-song; he looked up at the sky; some of the audience continued to laugh. But for the most part there was an air of expectancy: was, or was not, something of a quite unusual kind about to happen?

  Myself and the other handmaiden finished the taking-off of Holofernes’s armour; we stood back; there remained on him just some grotesque metal codpiece fastened by straps at the back. He had somehow got the straps twisted and jammed; we had tried to right them, but the buckle would not move. When Holofernes went over to join Judith on her couch, the dialogue took on some ludicrous immediate relevance – what torments there were for people trapped by desire! what resolution might there be indeed except by giving up the whole charade! And so on. And then the time came for the removal of the codpiece.

  Holofernes, on Judith’s couch, had been pulling at the straps at his back for some time; he was getting nowhere; the audience began to sense they were on the edge of the catastrophe that they had (or perhaps after all had not?) desired. Their laughter went to and fro in gusts: there were sudden appalled silences. After a time Holofernes turned to the audience, his hands still on his straps, and made one of his comic wide-eyed faces with his eyebrows going up and down. Then he stood, came to the centre of the stage, and did, perfectly for a moment, one of those funny walks that Charlie Chaplin used to do of someone pulling himself up and along by the seat of his trousers. This, in the context, had an extraordinary effect. It was as if some comment were being made on the whole business of acting from as it were another dimension. I think at that moment I knew I would never be a great tragic actress.

  Judith got up from her couch, went to the centre of the stage, got hold of the straps at the back of Holofernes codpiece, and gave them a tremendous heave. Holofernes seemed to be lifted almost off his feet. Then Judith went back to her couch.

  She reclined on one elbow again, watching him. I thought – You mean, like this, the story of Judith and Holofernes might not after all have to end in a conventional blood-bath?

  Holofernes appeared to be immobilised – like an old horse dangled from a crane above a ship. There were one or two screams as well as laughter from the audience. From the back, bits of Holofernes’s flesh bulged out. I wondered – Has something appalling happened to his front?

  There was a time during which nothing much happened: Holofernes seemed to dangle with one foot half off the ground: Judith continued to size him up like meat. I wondered if, eventually, the curtain would have to come down. But it did still seem as if some electrifying performance was continuing. After a time noise from the audience stopped. I thought – But the point of this non-acting is still, yes, that one is somehow involved in choice?

  I left the back of the stage and went to Holofernes’s front: I saw that yes, indeed, one of his balls had come half out of his codpiece and was squashed against his thigh. It was like one of those globules that you can make from burst balloons; he was doing nothing to free it; he was I suppose getting some satisfaction, as an actor might indeed, from the enthralment of his audience. It might have been agony also, of course; do you not have to pay for such powerful effects? His face, anyway, seemed to be in pain. I knelt down in front of him and pulled at the bottom of his codpiece; his ball, like a sea-anemone, popped back inside. He said in a deep voice ‘Thank you, my dear.’ The audience remained hushed. I went back to where I had been standing.

  Now there was something extraordinary that continued here: Holofernes went on with his non-acting: I mean he said his lines, but it was as if at the same time he was showing that he knew this wasn’t the point: as if he expected you – you on the stage (myself) and you in the audience (you?) – to know that something quite different was going on: as if he expected you to be sharing his interest even in whatever it was that was really happening as it were off-stage. And this was working. I mean it seemed to be working for the audience: it was even working, now, for Judith too. She stopped her histrionics: she became caught up in some style that was quiet, ironic, self-reflective. It was as if she were saying her lines and at the same time saying – Well, you see, we have got through one absurd drama, haven’t we; and now we can calm down; so what about Judith and Holofernes? And the effect that this produced was curiously like some powerful moments in life: for do not humans for the most part, of course, talk the most fearful rubbish? But then, if they know this, are not the moments when this knowingness breaks through not to do with rubbish? The audience anyway seemed to catch the feel of this: Judith and Holofernes were, after all, giving uniquely extraordinary performances. They did their whole love scene, seduction scene, passion-and-death scene, in this style – as if this were indeed, yes, the sort of fix that poor humans found themselves in: but what an odd joke it was! and might there not still be something dignified in the fact that humans could see this? The two of them, after all, were perhaps for once being honest and even gentle with one another. And so at the end of this second act, when Judith and Holofernes went off to the alcove to go to bed or to the beheading or whatever it was, they had their arms round one another and it was as if they might really be in love, as they were supposed to be in the script and as I suppose they were in life; but they were not going to die; perhaps they would not even have to pretend to die; perhaps they would have a nice time even; this was, was it not, the unique theatrical experience.

  There was a long interval in which no one quite knew what was happening, neither behind the stage nor I suppose in front; no one talked about it much; what was there to say? what had happened did not seem to be much within the area of what could be talked about. Judith and Holofernes had barricaded themselves in her dressing-room; perhaps in fact they were making love; they did not come out; there was the sound, after a time, of someone crying. Eventually the stage manager got into the dressing-room, and when he came out he said the performance was over. He went in front of the curtain – the audience had remained largely seated dur
ing the interval – and announced that the leading lady was indisposed. It was interesting that he said it was the leading lady who was indisposed: I thought – You mean, she takes the responsibility? I sat on a fallen pillar at the side of the stage and wondered if I might have my chance now of taking over from Judith; but I did not think I would be asked to; and I found that I did not mind if I was not. In a sense I had taken over something (but what?) when I had stepped out of context and had helped Holofernes. But this had not helped, of course, the continuation of the play.

  The play ran for a few more nights, or a week even, and then it folded. I mean the audience on the night had been enthralled, but they probably could not remember except as a joke what they had been enthralled by; and the actors anyway could not or did not reproduce it. Judith and Holofernes went through the motions – half in the old style, half in the new – but they could not gather again the effects of that night, which perhaps after all had depended on chance and unique circumstances. So audiences, finding nothing now that they could enjoy, let alone put into words, became hostile to the actor and actress; and people stopped coming to the play.

  For myself – I was not sure if I wanted to go on being an actress: but then no one, for a time, asked me to. No one talked to me about the scene when I had stepped forwards and freed Holofernes’s ball: no one talked about the scene afterwards when Judith and Holofernes had acted as if they were not acting. I suppose I don’t quite know how to talk about this either. But this is the point, isn’t it? – you can’t talk much in real life about how things might be all right. When the play folded, Judith and Holofernes just sent me, from the two of them together, an enormous bunch of red roses.

  My dream in coming to London (I had spent time on the way at a university on the West Coast of America) had been that here I would find people who were sophisticated and witty – who were not in the business of owning a percentage of everyone else. To some extent I found this with theatre people; but they still seemed to have their eyes on bits and pieces of others; not so much it is true for the sake of money, as out of some need or even demand to be appreciated.