by Yehuda Koren
In his poem ‘Apples and Apples’, published in 2001, Wevill wrote: ‘Seven years between us./Seven planets, seven stones smeared with blood.’ But the age difference, his timidity and her worldliness, did not create a rift: ‘It was more two lives than two ages, I think, that Assia and I had to bring into focus,’ he explains. ‘I had always been drawn to people unlike myself, who were in some way different from those I saw every day.’ Assia and David spent most of the six-day voyage in each other’s company. He gave her books to read and they discussed Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Only for meals did they join Dick, who clearly sensed that his wife’s feelings for their travel companion were passionate and deep, involving body and soul. It was different this time from her customary behaviour, but he was not alarmed enough by the shipboard romance to try to stop it; he immersed himself further in his economics books. A day before docking at Liverpool, Assia declared her love to David.
Before leaving for their summer holiday in Canada, Assia and Dick had vacated their London flat and planned that, upon returning, they would stay with friends until they found a new place. Arriving at London, they went their separate ways – Dick, to one of his LSE colleagues, and Assia, presumably, to one of her girlfriends. He did not know that instead she booked into a hotel in Kensington with David. A few days later, David returned to Cambridge. The clandestine affair became easier to manage a month later, when Assia was offered a job away from London. On 29 October 1956, Britain, France and Israel launched a military campaign to stop Egypt from nationalising the Suez Canal. Reuters monitoring station in Dane End in Hertfordshire was desperately looking for people fluent in English, Hebrew and Arabic to monitor and translate broadcasts from the Middle East. It had been ten years since Assia had left Tel Aviv but her Hebrew was impeccable and she was assigned outright to the highly paid job. Living in the village of Dane End, she worked shifts around the clock, and Dick stayed in London at the Worsely Court Residential Hotel, which also provided meals.
The war was over in six days and, in November, things were already quieter in the Suez Canal. Assia, though, was as busy as ever. On cloud nine, she scribbled her infatuation on her 1936 edition of Pushkin’s poems, prose and plays. She had bought the book in 1950 in Vancouver, and autographed it ‘Assia Steele’. Now, she added the inscription ‘Assia and David W’, as if toying with new matrimony.
Just before Christmas, she informed Dick that she was grounded by Reuters and would not be home for the holiday. He celebrated with mutual friends but just before sitting for dinner, phoned to wish Assia a merry Christmas. He was taken aback when the operator told him that she had gone away. Inquiring further, he was told that Assia had gone off with a man, and it hit him that he might be the young man from the ship. Days later she returned to London and Dick confronted her with his suspicions. Assia admitted outright that she had spent Christmas in a hotel with David. Her initial discretion in matters of the heart enabled her husbands to turn a blind eye but, when exposed and her secret was out, she became mercilessly blunt. She spared no details, laying the problem at the feet of the miserable cuckold himself, enlisting his devotion to make him a tolerant ally.
In March 1957, after receiving international guarantees that the Suez Canal would remain open, Israel withdrew its troops from the Sinai. As the crisis ended Assia was laid off, and she joined Dick at the Worsely Court Residential Hotel. But the affair went on and she could not wait to introduce David to her woman friends. Liliana Archibald, the wife of Lipsey’s colleague from LSE, often gave Assia a ride to Cambridge to be with David. He was not allowed to have female guests in his lodging, so Assia waited in the Blue Boar Inn, or in other inns in the neighbouring villages. ‘It was an exceptional time, the sexual mores were like those of the Bloomsbury Circle,’ says Liliana Archibald, now Professor Emerita of Russian History and living in London. ‘Assia was not considered promiscuous, and her behaviour was not unusual, at least among poets and economists.’
It was obvious to the Lipseys that they were having a major marital crisis, but the possibility of divorce was not even raised. ‘Assia said, let’s get the hell out of London, and live in the country for a change – it might do our marriage some good,’ Lipsey remembers. His good friend and colleague Kurt Klapholz warned him that changes of venue would solve nothing and they would only take their problems with them, but Lipsey would not listen. They probed the To Let columns until they found a cottage in Great Hormead, Hertfordshire. The district was familiar to Assia from her recent job at Reuters and her romantic escapades with David. It was a charming, affordable house in a hamlet, a convenient twenty miles from London – Dick’s place of work at LSE – and the same distance from Cambridge, where David was studying. Without a car, and at the beginning, not being able to afford even a bicycle, it was a three-mile walk from Great Hormead to the railway station.
In the spring of 1957 Assia got a job at Notley’s advertising agency, as a secretary in Philip Mellor’s TV department. At that time David Wevill had completed his studies at Cambridge and moved to London, supporting himself as a copywriter. Now the ménage à trois operated in the following way: Assia travelled to London on Sunday evenings, joining David in his Hampstead bedsitter in Chesterfield Gardens. Dick left Great Hormead only on Tuesday mornings, and stayed in Fitzjohn’s Avenue with Chris and Liliana Archibald, his London friends. He did not know that Assia and David were actually living just a few streets away; somehow they never bumped into each other. Assia conducted the affair quite openly, taking David to her favourite jazz clubs, and introducing him to the films of Ingmar Bergman, Antonioni and Fellini. She met Dick only at weekends; often they made the journey back to the village together. Dick paid the rent and the household expenses in Great Hormead and Assia was keeping her salary to herself. Poet Peter Porter, who was grateful to Assia for getting him a job as a copywriter at Notley’s, came for a weekend in Great Hormead, and sensed that she and Dick were living in ‘uncomfortable tolerance of each other’.
Dick Lipsey was aware that he was sharing Assia with her lover but did not insist that she stop seeing him. Although he was younger than Assia by a few months, he perceived himself as a forgiving father of an unruly daughter. Playing the father figure loaded him with responsibility and anguish but rewarded him with a sense of purpose and significance: ‘I don’t think she ever grew up fully, she was still attracted to undergraduate things and undergraduate behaviour. She was damaged emotionally, my parents called her “the wounded angel”.’ In Lipsey’s eyes, Assia’s weekend homecomings from London were like those of a daughter coming home from university, unloading all her problems before recharging her batteries, and he found great strength in responding to her needs. ‘I was someone she could kick around, abuse in any way she pleased, abandon and then come back to for love and security. My place in life is to shoulder and support people,’ he said. Keith Gems, his close friend for many years, interpreted it more bluntly: ‘Dick has a masochistic streak. She treated him like a dog sometimes.’
Lipsey was rather content to have Assia just for the weekend: he was overloaded with his studies and hardly had time for her anyway. He was never the jealous, possessive type and believed in matrimony ‘for better or for worse’. So he did not give up on the marriage and did not view their status as any form of separation. They continued taking their winter holidays together, going skiing in Austria. Summer photos show Assia painting in the yard, wearing only a swimsuit, and Dick Lipsey dozing in a deckchair.
Wevill believed that Assia was virtually separated from her husband, though not without affection, and that she was all his. Neither man made a decisive move nor forced her to choose between them and she had no intention and apparently no need to do so. ‘She often spoke about loving two men,’ explains David Wevill. ‘If she was seeing two people, it was not out of fickleness, but because she loved them both, they answered two sides of her personality. She was open to life, and when encountering a new experience, she could not stay away. It may sound strange, bu
t she was a very loyal person. She was loyal to me, and she was loyal to Dick.’ At times Assia felt that the burden was too heavy, and she tried to leave David, only to come back.
One weekend, after returning from a week with David, Assia teased Dick, did he still love her? He paused and finally said, ‘You’ve been kicking me around for a long time now, and I am not sure.’ Assia threw the window open, leaned out and had an enormous fit of rage, screaming loudly so the entire village would hear her. Immensely jealous by nature, she made public scenes whenever she sensed some attraction around her husband. A year earlier, at a party at his parents’ home in Canada, she goaded him to kiss a girl. Dick initially refused but finally complied. Assia threw a fit and the party was called off, Dick having to walk her around the grounds for a few hours until she calmed down: ‘She liked to create scenes and then have a histrionic reaction to them.’
With David at her side, Assia now had a partner for everything that excited her: both art lovers, they drew a fair amount together and sketched each other. ‘She would pose for me, and I drew her, reading a book.’ At Easter, they travelled to the Lake District with sketching materials, leaving Lipsey in Great Hormead. Assia took evening classes with artist Derek Greaves, and one of her major inspirations was the English mystical landscape painter Samuel Palmer. She had an intense interest in life and all its forms: plants, flowers, trees, creatures and the like. Of her numerous paintings, some of them decorating her flats, only four have survived: an elaborate blue fruit dish with an array of apples, peaches, plums, cherries and a bunch of dark grapes lying on top. The fruit seem unappealing, their colours lifeless and sterile, the impression of repugnance enhanced by a bee and a cockroach that flank the dish. Another drawing bears the title ‘Bird from Nubia’ and is more exotic and aesthetic and, instead of insects, features a colourful bird. Another one, an incomplete watercolour sketch, shows a black woman at domestic work, her three children playing beside her. The fourth is an ink drawing of David Wevill, reclining and relaxed, gazing pensively.
Assia blossomed. They wrote poems to each other, and shared books – Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Lorca and Hart Crane – each of them underlining their favourite passages in turn. They read to one another and, with her gift for languages, Assia introduced David to Pushkin, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Günther Grass, Enzensberger, Rilke and Nietzsche. She translated poems for him from German and Russian and he gave her his old and cherished Robert Browning’s A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, dedicating it ‘To my sweetest Assia. D’. ‘Those years, when Assia and I were passionately together were a strange time in England. Rich but poor. Threatening but promising,’ Wevill recalls. ‘There was a spirit in the air, both malevolent and promising. And we were not English, but were of England.’
Notley’s advertising agency was famous for employing poets: Peter Redgrove, William Trevor and Edward Lucie-Smith were all working there at the time. Assia joined them for a drink at the pub, with David and other copywriter-poets who worked in the nearby agencies. It was Lucie-Smith who told Assia about the Group, and she was delighted: her old dream, and her father’s, of a literary salon, seemed to be within her reach. She asked if she and David could attend their weekly meetings.
The Group was established at Cambridge in 1954 by the undergraduates Philip Hobsbaum and Peter Redgrove. A year later, when Hobsbaum and his wife Hannah moved to London, the Group was reconvened at their flat and moved with them when they changed addresses. ‘The thing that bound us together was our belief that poetry could be discussed,’ recalls Philip Hobsbaum. The Group’s policy was to welcome anyone, not necessarily writers, but also lovers of poetry. They met every Friday evening around seven, each session devoted to the work of one writer, whose texts were cyclostyled and distributed by post a week earlier. ‘The discussion group would be a complete democracy. The moderator would undertake a purely technical function – keeping the discussion going on reasonably coherent lines,’ recalled Edward Lucie-Smith. He describes Philip Hobsbaum as ‘impatient and inclined to hector and browbeat, and the disputes would often go noisy and acrimonious.’ Several of the Group members were born outside Britain: Julian Cooper in South America, his wife Catherine in the United States, Peter Porter in Australia, Pat Hartz in South Africa, Lucie-Smith in Jamaica, Hannah Hobsbaum in India, Zulfikhar Ghose in Pakistan – no wonder David and Assia, with their foreign backgrounds, felt at home.
When Philip Hobsbaum first saw the slim, fair David, partnered by the dark, voluptuous Assia entering his basement flat in Stockwell, it struck him that she was ‘one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful woman’ he had ever seen, and David was about the only poet he’d ever met, ‘who actually looked like one’. Assia was wearing cream or white, which set off her dark good looks, and Peter Redgrove leaned across to Hobsbaum and whispered, ‘I know who she is. She has killed two men already, and will be the death of David.’ Hobsbaum believed that it might have been Redgrove’s way of calling her a femme fatale: ‘Like me, he was fond of David, and probably felt protective towards him.’ Assia did not speak much in the discussions but was especially lively socialising before and after. She stood out with her ‘sharp boss-class sort of accent’, and impressed Hobsbaum in being not only witty but a fabulous linguist: ‘and some might have resented her tendency to pounce argumentatively on points they had made.’
The London Group was modelled on university seminars and was certainly not a fashionable bourgeois or bohemian salon like those in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. Literature was then the first point for German Jews to melt into the intellectual milieu of their native country, and artistically minded Jewish women ran the most prominent salons, with grand style and opulence financed by their husbands’ wealth. The most well known were Henriette Harz (nicknamed ‘the beautiful Jewess’), Dorothea Schlegel and her sister Henriette, and Rachel Varnhagen, whose salon was favoured by Heinrich Heine and Alexander von Hamboldt. The social integration of these ladies was so complete that before long they all converted to Christianity.
No food and alcohol were allowed at the London Group meetings and, if badly needing a drink, members rushed to the nearby pub afterwards, or slipped out during the interval, which came halfway. Outsiders mocked this rule; the Group was characterised ‘as a band of severely puritan teetotallers’ and compared with the monthly open-house literary soirées that the critic George Fraser ran in his Chelsea flat, and which Assia and David sometimes took part in – a bottle party in an overflowing, smoke-filled salon. ‘Poets came with manuscripts, and read, drank, stubbed out their cigarettes on George’s first editions of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, etc., vomited on the Fraser carpets, quarrelled on the stairs, sometimes bashed one another with fists or bottles,’ remembered Peter Porter. In 1959, when Hobsbaum left for Sheffield, the meetings were convened in Edward Lucie-Smith’s two-bedroom flat in Sidney Street in the more fashionable Chelsea.
Though never a formal member of the Group, Ted Hughes attended several meetings. ‘Ted once scandalised my Rhodesian landlady by using her frying pan to fry a black pudding, which was his supper for the night,’ recalls Philip Hobsbaum. Hughes outraged the landlady even more by singing ballads in his fine Heldentenor, at two in the morning. Anyone who came to the Group was warned that the discussion was conducted on the basis of frankness. ‘Some writers, when it came to the point, have found us a trifle too frank for their taste,’ recalled Lucie-Smith. Hughes handed Hobsbaum four meticulously typed manuscripts of Sylvia Plath’s poems, which he realised ‘must have been some kind of audition for the Group’. Hobsbaum was not impressed and regarded it as ‘college girl stuff’, a verdict that resulted in coolness on Hughes’s part. Plath never came to the Group. ‘She could not accept criticism, especially public criticism,’ explains Edward Lucie-Smith.
David and Assia never met Ted Hughes at the Group’s meetings but, nevertheless, Hughes must have known of David Wevill through the magazine Delta, to which they both contributed. In 1958 all three poets, Hughes, Plath and Wevill
, were published in Christopher Levenson’s anthology, Poetry from Cambridge. Though they never exchanged a word, David remembered Plath from Cambridge, walking in Trinity Lane, standing out in her spring dress among students in their rumpled clothes. Hughes kept in touch with the Group during the two years he spent in the United States by sending some of his poems, which they read aloud. His poems acquired totemic status there and they all saw him as a scene-setter, a magical, mythical figure.
Being an ardent reader, sharing her life with a poet and being exposed to the critical, but supportive, atmosphere of the Group had an effect on Assia’s creativity:
… And I do praise the force that falls
With loosened stones and plunging force
Of clear ghost-rivers in dried beds.
And besides this watchful course
Of hours and currents, watersheds
Of welcome, do I praise the eye
That finds me welcome,
needing no reply.
This poem, ‘Magnificat’, was a love hymn for David and for nature. It is one of Assia’s two surviving poems, set in the same typing style of the Group. The other poem, ‘Winter End, Hertfordshire’, records the impact of seeing a tombstone of a pauper and his wife and child.
… To see again and no more