by Yehuda Koren
The black northern pond,
Its autumn spent,
Its eye burning with crippled cedar wings
And four black feet deep with
Summer’s rotting rooks,
Like Thomas Head’s and my time’s
Unlamented, spring less, passed.
David and Assia walked a great deal in Hertfordshire, drawn to the poignancy and mystery of cemeteries. David recalls that they saw the name Thomas Head on a headstone and a conversation ensued. Thomas Head was buried in the grounds of St Nicholas Church in Great Hormead, just a few yards from Assia’s window. Apparently, the place where she lived with her husband was not off-limits to David Wevill: ‘The poem records something coming to an end, the season, a phase of life too. The tone is grave and elegiac. I don’t find any poetic influence of mine there; the mood is almost like Thomas Hardy. Her marriage was soon to end, and her life to change, and though we were much in love, the future was not clear.’ Wevill sensed sadness beneath Assia’s humour and vivacity but did not think that she was prone to depression. Though optimistic by nature, she had a sense of catastrophe, but it did not stop her from moving into new experiences. Philip Hobsbaum finds in some of Assia’s lines, ‘a community of vision linking Hughes, Plath and Wevill’. Although she signed the poems with her married name Lipsey, Assia never showed them to her husband. Too intimidated and self-critical, she also did not use the opportunity to show her poems to the Group. ‘There was a poetic spirit in Assia, but she was not intentionally a poet or writing poems with a view to publishing them,’ recalls David Wevill.
During the summer of 1958, Dick Lipsey lived like a hermit in Great Hormead, working on his doctoral thesis on the theory of customs unions. He often rode eight to ten hours at a stretch on an old bicycle that Liliana Archibald lent him. Pedalling along, he composed chapters of his thesis in his head, and committed them to paper upon returning home. He christened those solitary months ‘my summer of discontent’. Assia extended her stay in London and returned for the odd weekend. At the end of summer, she and Dick had to vacate the cottage but decided to stay on in the village, moving further up the hill. They occupied one wing at the Great Hormead Bury, a large manor house that was shared by several tenants. Cold and damp, in a poor state of repair, the roof leaked and it was almost uninhabitable, but Dick, who had meanwhile resumed his work in London, remembers tender moments there, arriving on Friday evenings with Assia and lighting the coal fire. By bedtime, the place would have warmed enough to allow them to take off their coats. ‘We just enjoyed ourselves, the country was beautiful, and we walked around in it. Both of us needed the peacefulness before going back to the battle: I was fighting the intellectual battle, she was fighting whatever battles she had, and together we found a retreat.’
David Wevill was undecided about his career: whether to continue his English studies and aim for academia or to follow his childhood yearning for Japan and specialise in its language and culture. He applied for a teaching position with the British Council and settled for a two-year contract to teach history and British and American literature at the University of Mandalay. It was to begin in autumn 1958 and he hoped that Burma would also break the deadlock: ‘We thought that if I went east she would get a divorce and would follow.’
Assia made no steps towards a divorce and neither was Lipsey in any hurry. With David away in the East, Assia and Dick were left to themselves for the first time in two years. Although they enjoyed some intimate moments, Dick had no illusions about their future: ‘It was very clear that I was still a secondary figure, and her heart was out there, with David.’ Assia and David corresponded intensely, but her husband respected her privacy and did not pry into her mail. ‘My love, I’m so lonely – what have I done, I’ve gone thousands of miles away and could cry because I miss you,’ she read in one of David’s lovelorn letters. He tried to lift their spirits and eliminate time and distance by sending snapshots of the Burmese home awaiting her, describing the exciting future lying ahead of them. Her absence dominated his poems and they were all dedicated to her:
Wherever we walked together, there was
This assertion of melting. As if
Underneath, the cells spoke and begged.
The first dramatic move towards a resolution had been made but all three protagonists were too paralysed to proceed. Assia discussed the dramatic crossroads of her life with anyone who cared to listen: Peter Porter spent an entire evening with her, wandering around Bayswater pondering her dilemma, whether or not to leave her husband and follow her lover to Mandalay. She was insensitive enough not to spare even her sister-in-law, Thirell Lipsey. ‘All of a sudden, she confided in me that she was in love with a Canadian poet: “Oh, dear Thirell, what should I do, I really don’t know what to do”.’ Thirell thought the marriage was harmful for her brother and Assia dragged him down but, although tempted to grasp the opportunity to set her brother free, she refused to get involved.
If Assia was waiting for her husband to cut the umbilical cord, Lipsey was equally too inert to declare their marriage over: ‘It still didn’t get to the stage that called for a divorce, and anyway, I grew up in a world where people didn’t divorce. In retrospect it was hell. I was nuts, and should have broken it off and got on with living my life.’ And, for his part, David Wevill was too gentle to prod Assia into getting a divorce. In the midst of the turmoil, Assia discovered that she was pregnant. It was clear both to her and to Dick that she must abort the child, and he took her to a clinic in Harley Street. David Wevill was not consulted, or even informed of, either the pregnancy or its termination.
In the early spring of 1959, Lisa Gutmann was diagnosed with cancer. Lipsey borrowed money to cover the heavy cost of Assia’s trip home. To boast that she crossed the Atlantic on one of the majestic boats, Assia was willing to suffer great inconvenience, and travelled third class on the Queen Mary in a ghastly cramped cabin, though she would have obtained much better conditions for the same price on one of the less illustrious Canadian Pacific ships. She spent a month with her family in Vancouver and visited the Lipseys in Victoria, giving no hint to either set of parents that the marriage was on the rocks.
During Assia’s absence, Lipsey had a heart-to-heart conversation with his close friend Professor Kurt Klapholz. They recalled an incident in Cambridge with several American professors and their wives. Assia had stormed in late and announced loudly that they should all have some fun and go out to raise hell. Lipsey had been both humiliated and sorry for Assia for making such a fool of herself. The memory of that episode led to Klapholz’s firm advice. ‘Even after years of the ménage à trois with David, I was so steeped in the old ways, that it came as a shock that I might get divorced.’ After much soul searching, realising that his intense student days were behind him and he was on the verge of a major career move, Dick decided to end the marriage. On Assia’s return, picking her up from the port at Southampton, he told her of his decision. She agreed outright. Assia knew that Lipsey was close to a professorship with all the perks involved but, materialistic though she was, she opted for David, who had no career and no financial prospects, his future, vague. She was 32 but for love she was ready to start all over again from scratch.
Dick and Assia contacted their lawyer friend, Martin Graham, with whom they had spent holidays at the ski resort of Zermatt. Graham was invited for a weekend in Great Hormead and was not surprised at what he saw. ‘The marriage was an empty shell, with no intellectual or physical or any other sort of mutual interest, they were both rather disenchanted with each other. There was no violence and no arguments, just a drifting apart, though out of convenience they shared the same dwelling.’ But incompatibility and estrangement were not grounds for divorce at that time in Britain, and the court demanded indisputable proof of a matrimonial offence: namely, cruelty, desertion or adultery. Assia agreed to write down a detailed account of her affair with David Wevill, giving places and dates in Cambridge and London where the misconduct had taken place
. Since David was already in Burma, the court would have to do without a private detective’s report, and photographs of the guilty couple engaged in adulterous sexual activity.
Assia waited for Martin Graham to submit the application to the High Court of Justice and only then was she ready to leave. In June 1959, Dick drove her with all her luggage to London, and they spent the last night with the Archibalds. In the morning, on her way to the port, they bid each other farewell at the train station.
Eight
Third Marriage
Mandalay, 1959–London, 1961
Burma suited Assia like a glove. The ancient kingdom conquered by the British in the mid-nineteenth century had become a young, aspiring, independent republic, retaining remnants of its colonial past. Joining David at his house on the edge of the University of Mandalay campus, Assia faced strong competition: a brown, orphaned female monkey, which David got from one of his students to nurture and keep him company. ‘Monkeys are monogamous, and the little female monkey considered me her man. When Assia arrived, she jumped on her and tore her dress. Sadly, the monkey had to go.’
Other changes soon followed; Assia did not get along with David’s household staff, and she fired the cook and hired Francine, an Indian Christian woman, whose one-legged husband served as gardener. David’s two-room house was far from majestic, but still, for the first time in her life, Assia tasted the pleasures of comfort. She was exempt from the tedium of humdrum employment; the maid did all the housework and served the meals. Assia had ample time to paint and read and she brushed up her father’s native tongue with Hugo’s Russian in Three Months. Curious and enthusiastic, she developed a modest expertise in Eastern art, and began to take an interest in netsuke – miniature Japanese sculptures made of wood, ivory or bone – which later developed into a passion. She practised Burmese dancing and often wore a sarong, which she made into a sleeveless dress tied above her breasts or around her waist as a long skirt. She spent her time leafing through magazines and doodling designs, sewing her own clothes and dressing up for afternoon garden parties. Her photographs of the time show her in starched flowery dresses with a low décolletage, several strands of white pearls hugging her swan-like neck. Her crisp elegance contrasted with the other Western women, who wore Bermuda shorts and sandals, which were much more practical for the heat and humidity. ‘Assia stuck out in her long white gloves, which were too extravagant for the rest of us,’ remembers her friend Patricia Mendelson. ‘She presented herself as very glamorous, and was quick to adopt the colonial etiquette, wearing wide-rimmed hats, puffing on her cigarette, doing everything very stylishly and classy.’
At weekends, wicker chairs were set up on the lawn, around a table laden with muffins and marmalade and multi-layered chocolate cakes, and tea poured into delicate china cups. One of the party highlights was a game devised by a fellow teacher, anthropologist Alton Becker. Each of the guests impersonated a celebrity or a historical figure and, through Becker’s questions, they had to unveil the identity. David Wevill masqueraded as the poet Stephen Spender, who became a Communist in 1936 and reported the hunt for the Russian battleship Comsomol. Assia’s choice was especially perplexing. ‘I was interviewing her, and it went on and on, and none of us could guess who she pretended to be, until she said in a heavy German accent, “my husband, Adolf Hitler”,’ remembers Professor Alton Becker. Assia’s impersonation of Eva Braun, Hitler’s long-standing young mistress, whom he married just a day before their joint suicide in his bunker in Berlin, astounded all and left them too upset to continue the game.
At those garden parties, men always buzzed around Assia and David usually sat a bit further away. Many foreign academics used the weekends and holidays for picnics and sightseeing and Assia was always energetic and keen to join in, David more reluctant, resigned to staying at home. He had three seminar-size classes and regarded teaching English literature as both fascinating and baffling. Most of his students were older than him, and ‘their “Sir” falls a bit heavy,’ he wrote to Earle Birney, with whom Assia had once had an affair. He found it difficult to delve into English poetry and explain the merits of Gerard Manley Hopkins, while monsoon rain was swamping the ground outside his class. A common practice among students was to write a note detailing their life circumstances, the family income, their devotion to their loving mother and tyrannical father and to their country and, finally to the exam-subject they were worried about, and ask the examiner for mercy in advance. Wevill felt that he could not deafen his ears to their pleas, especially when he was ‘a visitor among them’, and had ‘no right (even in the interest of good English), to make their future even less certain than it was.’
It was a prolific time for Wevill and he wrote a great deal, publishing his poems in major British and American weeklies and magazines. He and Assia kept in touch with the Group, Lucie-Smith updating Assia on the recent gossip from Notley’s, and planning an entire session in absentia for Wevill’s new poems. The only cloud in their sky was the intolerable delay in the divorce proceedings in London. Assia had been assured, when leaving for Burma, that her letter of confession would make it a straightforward case and that her marriage would be dissolved in a few months. But justice took its course and Burma proved a problematic waiting room. There were whispers and frowns behind their backs; the illicit liaison of one of Her Majesty’s employees, living with a married woman, was unacceptable to Wevill’s employers. Alton Becker recalled that Assia and David were very upset when the British ambassador gave them an ultimatum. Assia tried desperately to prod Lipsey into action but her letters had no effect.
Wevill pondered his next move: if Assia’s divorce came through quickly enough, he could hope to be sent by the British Council to Japan or to extend his work in Burma for another year. If that failed, he thought of going to Vancouver to continue for a Ph.D. in English. In January 1960, Richard Lipsey finally informed Assia that the decree had been granted and that their marriage would be dissolved within three months. But it was too late: by then, the British Council had turned down Wevill’s application for Japan and refused to extend his contract in Burma. Disappointed at having to part from the East, they bought ivory carvings in the market, and Assia filled her crates with yards of colourful silk cloth and Burmese artefacts, including a number of Buddhas and a Burmese knife with a wooden handle.
On 16 May 1960, a day after Assia’s thirty-third birthday, she married David in Rangoon. It was her third marriage, once again without a white bridal dress and with her family absent. On the marriage certificate, Assia deducted three years from her age and, to balance David, who wrote down his profession as ‘lecturer’, she promoted herself to a ‘teacher’. The Burmese judge, in traditional headdress, handed her a book-shaped package. She thought it was his gift for the wedding and thanked him for it. ‘The judge said, no, don’t thank me, it’s the Holy Bible and you must swear on it,’ David recalls. Two days later the newly weds boarded the ship for the month’s journey through Ceylon and the Suez Canal to England. London was supposed to be a stopover before continuing to Vancouver in September.
Upon arrival in England, Assia again found herself pregnant. She welcomed the forthcoming child and for the first time in her life made no plans to abort it. Lonya and Lisa Gutmann were clearly overjoyed. ‘It’s high time,’ her mother wrote and urged the young couple to change their plans and settle in Montreal, where the Gutmanns were now living. Assia’s sister, who was expecting her third child in September, offered her own velvet maternity outfit, slacks and a few tops. ‘So, my children, save your money and hold on to every penny, we’ll help you a bit as well,’ Mrs Gutmann concluded.
A short while after Assia’s departure for the East, Richard Lipsey had renewed his friendship with John Bosher, which had been derailed because of Assia. Bosher and his wife were sharing a large Georgian manor with six other couples, and Lipsey joined the commune. Apparently, the tumultuous seven years with Assia had shaken his strict morality and soon enough he began an affair with
a fellow tenant, Diana Daniels, who was married with a child. In the winter of 1960, Diana left her husband, and moved with Dick into a large house in Marylebone. Like Assia, they were waiting impatiently for the divorce papers, since Diana too was pregnant. But in September, when Dick and Diana embraced their first son, Assia suffered a miscarriage and sadly lost hers.
By that time, David and Assia had decided to stay on in London and rented a garden flat in Holland Park. Wevill divided his time between writing poetry, polishing his Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies and grudgingly earning his living. He was a porter at Harrods furniture department, before finding a copywriting job at Ogilvy, Benson and Mather. ‘We never made plans for the future, and were living from one day to the next, working to make a living, with no sense of a career,’ Wevill summed things up. He preferred the pub counter at The Coach and Horses to his office desk and the novelist Fay Weldon, who was his copy group head, recalled that David ‘was upset at having to make his living, if only temporarily and perforce, writing copy’. Weldon kept him going and covered for him by adding his name to submissions he never made, since she regarded him as a good poet: ‘It was our duty to do what we could in the name of art.’
Assia and David were not allowed to work together since the policy in most advertising agencies was not to employ couples ‘because they breed politics’, as David Ogilvy, the head of the company, declared. She was welcomed back at Notley’s and promoted to copywriter, her salary as a trainee a mere £500 a year. The agency inhabited two Georgian houses – one of them a former brothel – at 15 and 17 Hill Street, Mayfair, ‘in discomfort and smartish squalor’, remembered her colleague Peter Porter. Douglas Chowns, an art director at Notley’s, remembers the agency as a mixture of leisure and work: ‘It was a wonderfully mad place with Beaujolais after lunchtime in the studio with members of the corps de ballet from Sadlers Wells, while a couple practised their fencing technique in the centre of the floor.’ The world of advertising depressed the introverted David Wevill, but Assia felt far from exploited, and blossomed in this blend of materialism and creativity. In a profession that requires charm and seduction in the selling of dreams and fantasies, the alluring, sometimes hedonistic Assia found herself in her element.