by Yehuda Koren
The Wevills exulted in the good fortune that had brought them together. Says David Wevill:
We were equals, sharing most things. We were partners, lovers, friends, companions. Assia taught me a great deal. She was more sophisticated and experienced socially, without being false. I don’t know what or how much I taught her; we exchanged ways of looking at things, at the world, at life. She was less shy than I, more willing to engage with others.
They encouraged each other, and he found Assia to be a good and precise critic of his poems, neither too harsh nor too gentle. ‘We were very much a couple, a pair, for the while that things went well for us.’
The sixth year of the marriage between Plath and Hughes, meanwhile, became increasingly stressful with the birth of their second child, Nicholas, in January 1962. Sylvia was steeped in the motherhood smells of milk and urine, and Ted was discontent. Poetic and critic A Alvarez observes that Ted was confined in Sylvia’s world, held fast in a union of ‘intolerable similarities’, and Lucas Myers asserts that Hughes was depressed, a prisoner, though a willing one, in his own marriage. Already in March 1960, in a pub near Chalcot Square, Hughes had told Myers about the difficulties of daily life with Sylvia. Like many of Ted’s friends, Myers believed that Hughes’s marriage was harmful to him and that Sylvia was draining him.
After the long, harsh winter’s siege of Devon in 1962, Ted and Sylvia decided ‘to have several couples [they liked] down in the next month’. On Wednesday, 2 May they hosted writer Alan Sillitoe and his American wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight, for a long weekend at Court Green. The tension between Sylvia and Ted was palpable and Ruth noticed that they avoided looking at or addressing each other directly whenever they thought it was not too obvious.
On that occasion Sylvia showed Ruth her latest poem, ‘Elm’. Written two weeks earlier, it explored a rift in a relationship. Love, Sylvia wrote in the poem, ‘has gone off, like a horse’. In Professor Diane Wood Middlebrook’s reading of the poem, ‘Plath was detecting a shift in the emotional dynamics between herself and her husband.’ Sylvia asked Ruth’s permission to dedicate ‘Elm’ to her, and wondered if it should be to Ruth Sillitoe – i.e., as a mother and wife – or to Ruth Fainlight, as creative poet. Together they decided on the latter.
Apparently, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath did not have many close friends, for among their few guests that spring in Devon were their tenants from Chalcot Square in London. Assia was ecstatic about the visit and she shared her enthusiasm with her colleagues. ‘Assia said in her rich deep voice, her green eyes challenging one to protest – I’m going to seduce Ted!’ recalls her boss Angela Landels, who took it with a pinch of salt and simply muttered, ‘I don’t care what you do, as long as you come back on Monday in a better mood.’
For decades biographical literature on Plath and Hughes has portrayed Assia as a kind of Lilith tempting Ted, her Adam, out of his Eden. Assia is consistently blamed for initiating the affair that ensued and frequently the events of the Wevills’ 48 hours in Devon are staged as a sinuous dance of calculated seduction on the part of Assia. In her every word and deed Assia seeks to ensnare her innocent Adam. With charm and attentiveness she plays up to the poet Hughes’s considerable ego or, in a negligée, she stealthily descends the stairs and creeps up behind Ted while he’s sitting alone at the kitchen table with his morning coffee. The story has Assia raising her nightgown up to her chin and then lowering it down over Hughes’s face and torso until the two of them are straitjacketed in its fabric.
In fact, the events that weekend were not so sensational.
A day before the Wevills were due at Court Green, Sylvia planned the menu for the weekend – ‘beef stew, corn chowder, ginger bread’ – and also reminded herself to wash her hair. The entry on her calendar for the following day simply reads ‘The Wevills’. When Sylvia anticipated a particularly exciting event, she would decorate the entry with a star, as she did for the Sillitoes. The Wevills, though, remained starless.
On Friday, 18 May at the end of their working day, Assia and David took the train from Waterloo to Exeter, where Ted was waiting to pick them up in his Morris Traveller. That evening they all dined in the big back room, at the round wooden table that the Wevills had loaned to Ted and Sylvia. David Wevill remembers: ‘during dinner and after, we talked a lot, satirising people we knew. It was a lively conversation, and Assia told stories from Burma and other chapters in her life. Sylvia was a good listener, and she also told anecdotes of her life in the States. She and Ted gave the impression of a very close and devoted couple that had worked out a life for themselves.’
Though she enjoyed the company, Assia clearly did not like Court Green, which she found damp, ‘with hideous grass gorging on the smooth brown stones. Grass almost grew in the house,’ she later wrote in her diary. She liked even less Sylvia’s whimsical decoration of the place – she seemed to have painted hearts and flowers everywhere – and Assia found the house to be ‘very secret, red, childishly furnished. Naively furnished. The whole look of it improvised, amateurish.’
Decades later, some of Hughes’s impressions of the Wevills’ visit, and particularly of Assia, would appear in his Birthday Letters poems. Assia’s silk orange dress, which she wore for dinner, emphasised her dark hair, and her carefully made-up eyes gave her ‘the gaze of a demon’. Her hosts were captivated not only by her striking appearance but also by the elusive self inside her multiple European identities.
Among the four of them, Assia and Ted stood out in their alluring physical presence and captivating conversation; they charmed the opposite sex effortlessly and they shared, too, an ability to draw out someone’s inner self and make that person feel as if she or he stood at the centre of their universe. Assia, though, was unaware of her magnetism, as Edward Lucie-Smith, her colleague and confidant, notes:
Unlike some stunning beauties, who know how to control the reactions they evoke, Assia, despite her striking beauty, was somewhat naïve about the way men reacted to her. Though sometimes she seemed to lead them on, it wasn’t deliberate. She was often panic-stricken when men misinterpreted her warmth and friendliness, and started to pursue her. Perhaps this was why she created so many explosive situations around her.
In ‘Dreamers’, Hughes marked the moment of his falling in love with Assia: it was around the breakfast table, when she recounted a dream that she had that night of a huge pike. He seemed to believe that, unlike him, at that stage she was not yet aware of her feelings towards him. Rather, so he hinted, the two of them got caught up in an inevitability as he fell in love with this exotic woman who was sharing his innermost world, the world of his dreams. (Of course, the claim of fatal attraction also served to exonerate Hughes from any responsibility.) At this point in Hughes’s life, pike – predatory fish that put up a fierce fight when hooked – figured significantly and recurrently in his dreams, and his best, most gratifying nights were filled with them. For the pike had become an integral part of his imaginative life, ‘always an image of how I was feeling about life’, as he would tell Thomas Pero of the American angling magazine, Wild Steelhead & Salmon. The night before his marriage to Plath, Hughes dreamt that he had hooked a pike and, when the fish began to surface, its head filled the entire lake. However weighty the dream’s portent may have been, Hughes proceeded with his marriage plans. That Assia, like Hughes, should have dreamt of a pike, to judge by his account in ‘Dreamers’, left Plath overwhelmed and jealous, knowing, as she did, the significance of this particular fish for her husband. In reality, it did not seem to affect her behaviour, however, and even months later, she did not say or write anything about Assia’s strangely sentient dream.
David Wevill does not remember that Assia recounted any dream at all during the visit. He and Assia commonly shared their dreams, but only with each other, not with strangers, he says, and anyway, ‘that dream is not typical of her. It’s loaded with mythic imagery, almost too much to go into.’ Assia by nature did not have an exceptionally vivid dream life but
, in any case, pike would seem to be an unlikely dream motif for an urban woman like her. Furthermore, judging by her surviving diaries and letters, Assia did not attach particular importance to her dreams, as she never bothered to write them down. Nor did she tell them to her friends.
If, however, Assia did discuss a dream, did she mischievously invent it to impress her host? A pike is the subject of one poem in Hughes’s much acclaimed volume Lupercal, which had been published two years before the Wevills’ visit and, in all likelihood, Assia had read it. But Lupercal considers numerous other creatures – birds, frogs, cats, dogs, horses – as well as a variety of fish and Assia could not have known the mythic, symbolic import – indeed, the fixation – that Ted attached to pike in particular. So did the scene in which Assia related a dream take place only in Hughes’s fertile poetic imagination?
On Saturday, after breakfast, Ted brought out air rifles, and he and David shot at blackbirds perching on the roof. Sylvia and Assia meanwhile did some gardening and prepared lunch. Later the two men decided to drive to the moor with little Frieda but halfway there they ran out of petrol. They were walking back towards Court Green when an army truck stopped and offered them some petrol for the return home. After supper, they listened to a recording of the American poet Robert Lowell reading his poem ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’. David recalls: ‘Sylvia spoke of my poems, we all spoke of one another’s poems, and Assia took an active part in the conversation. Ted, I believe, liked my work, and I his, very much.’ In the midst of the lively conversation, however, Sylvia abruptly arose and went upstairs. Ted did not follow her; evidently he preferred the company of his guests as he ignored Sylvia’s repeated calls for him to come up to bed.
Five months later Hughes wrote (but never published) the poem ‘Sunlight’, which, according to Diane Wood Middlebrook, would appear to recreate the Wevills’ visit and to suggest that by nightfall Assia already had Ted under her spell and ‘all night, he ached with desire for her’.
The first day and a half of the visit passed smoothly enough. Sylvia and Ted found time to write a letter to Ted’s brother, Gerald, in Australia about a fishing trip. Just a month earlier, in a letter to her mother, Sylvia had been vitriolic about weekend guests and their ‘ghastly children’, who ‘had no inner life’, and in another letter she had been complimentary about the Sillitoes, who had helped with the cooking and washing up. Apparently, though, Sylvia had nothing to write home about the Wevills.
‘On Sunday morning we got up late and hung about until lunch,’ David Wevill recalls. ‘Assia was in the kitchen making a salad, and Ted was with her. Sylvia and I were sitting outside chatting. We could hear Assia and Ted’s muffled voices, and suddenly Sylvia went very still. She touched me on the knee and said, “I’ll be back.” She jumped from her chair and ran into the kitchen as if she remembered that she had left some fire burning.’
David waited, but Sylvia did not return, and at lunch she was very quiet, ‘as if a door had slammed down on her’. David supposed that their hostess had had enough of company or else she had had a quarrel with Ted. After lunch she drove the Wevills to the railway station, with Ted in the passenger seat next to her. ‘She was very nervous, clashed the gears, and was on edge,’ says David, but nonetheless, he is certain that he and Assia were not kicked out of Court Green, and did not leave any earlier than they had planned, as has been sometimes suggested; they were due to leave anyway that afternoon, to make the four-hour train journey to London, towards another busy working week ahead.
‘We waved goodbye and as we were alone in the cabin, I said to Assia, “What happened to Sylvia? She changed completely, she was so friendly before.” And Assia answered, “Ted kissed me in the kitchen, and Sylvia saw it.”’ David did not probe any further and Assia did not elaborate as to whether Ted had merely lightly brushed her lips with his or had proffered her a more sensuous kiss; nor did she indicate if she had reciprocated. ‘It was the first time that something like that happened in our relationship, and it wasn’t characteristic of her.’ David had then put the fact of the kiss aside and minimised its significance. ‘I wasn’t terribly alarmed, and didn’t want to make a scene. Mild flirtations can happen among friends, and I thought that Ted made the move since boys will be boys. I got the sense from Assia that the kiss surprised her, and that nothing would follow.’
David thought that Sylvia overreacted: ‘I hadn’t seen her nerves act up before. Had I known her past history, we would have come to the weekend more cautiously.’ Assia was always remarkably outspoken with her friends about her love life; indeed, later in her affair with Hughes she would not spare them even the most intimate details of Ted’s bedroom manners. Yet, when she reported back to her friends about the weekend in Devon, she did not mention a kiss or any other kind of intimacy. Was the kiss Assia’s own invention, a provocative bit of drama created by her to rouse her husband, to kindle his desire and enliven their marriage?
Plath’s emotional radar was extremely sensitive to the slightest perceived invasion of her conjugal space by other women. She had made a particularly nasty scene when, just a few years into the marriage, she suspected that Ted had been overly friendly with an attractive college student at Smith College. At the end of January 1961, too, Sylvia had blown up after answering a call from Ted’s BBC assistant producer Moira Doolan, who had sounded entirely too cheerful to Plath’s wary ear. Sylvia had also retaliated; she had shredded plays and poetry Ted was working on as well as his precious, red Oxford rice-paper edition of Shakespeare. On holiday with Ted in France some months later, Sylvia had exploded once again, this time because of her suspicion that their hostess, Dido Merwin, was being too intimate with Ted.
And just a month before the Wevills’ visit, a suspicious and resentful Sylvia had confronted the daughter of the local National Provincial Bank manager. Nicola Tyrer was not yet sixteen, in fact, when she became a frequent guest at Court Green during her holidays from Headington School in Oxford. Sylvia, who ‘saw women as competition, even teenagers’, assumed an icy, rather intimidating attitude with the pretty, young girl, while Ted, warm and generous, introduced Nicola to his favourite books, music and films. The girl found him mesmerising, and ‘he remained the focus of my teenage dreams,’ Nicola recalls. Ted also used to go to the Tyrers for tea but he always went on his own and on those occasions he would engage Nicola in long conversation. One evening she accompanied him back to Court Green and, standing under the laburnum tree outside the house, they continued talking. Suddenly the door opened, and there stood Sylvia with baby Nicholas in her arms. ‘Oh,’ she said with blistering sarcasm. ‘Are you seeing Ted home?’ A frighteningly angry outburst from Sylvia ensued and Nicola, shocked and ashamed, fled home. The incident did not stop Ted from seeing Nicola again, however, and for her sixteenth birthday he presented her with a copy of his first book of poetry, The Hawk in the Rain, and his brand-new volume of children’s verse, Meet My Folks. In one of them, he wrote a poem, and the other he inscribed, ‘For Nicola, Who is not too young/Not too old/Just right, love from Ted.’ A few days later the Tyrers left Devon for the southeast of England.
In ‘Dreamers’, Hughes ascribed his fascination with Assia to a stroke of fate that affected Sylvia as well. The critic Erica Wagner would appear to agree: ‘Assia is a figure Plath has drawn from her subconscious, the dark fount of her work.’ Wagner reads Assia as an embodiment of an idea in Plath’s dream-self, with Sylvia assigning to Assia all the glamour that ‘Plath, in her college-girl incarnation, had chased, the European sophistication she herself could never achieve,’ and all the turbulence of the Jewish past with which both Sylvia and Ted identified. In Assia’s Germanness, which appealed so strongly to Hughes, Plath also found an echo of her own German-born father and Austrian-American mother. Plath herself took great pains to learn her ancestral tongue by tuning in every Monday and Friday to the BBC’s Keep Up Your German. Did the cosmopolitan Assia intrigue Sylvia enough to let down her conjugal guard, since nothing in her
journals and correspondence that weekend indicates that Assia provoked her anger? Or perhaps Ted was able to convince Sylvia that nothing had happened between him and their captivating house-guest?
Whatever happened in the kitchen had no immediate effect on any member of the quartet. The kiss, if a kiss there was, did not mark for any of them a turning point, not even for Plath. She wrote to her mother, ‘This is the richest and happiest time of my life,’ and after the Wevills’ visit, when Al Alvarez stopped at Court Green for a few hours on his way down to Cornwall, Sylvia seemed to him ‘solid and complete, her own woman again’ in a marriage that appeared to Alvarez to be strong and close. The poems that Plath worked on within hours of the visit do not in any way suggest her suspicion of a rival; they do not bear even a trace of the tremendous acrimony that informs the poetry written by Plath when the affair was full blown. Plath finished two poems by noon on Monday, 21 May, the day after the Wevills had departed and, while both of them – ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ and ‘Event’ – reflect a strained relationship, the origin of the injury precedes the entry of the Wevills into their lives in Devon by some while. Hughes’s ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, published 46 years later, clarifies the background of Plath’s poem of the same title. During a family picnic by the sea a few weeks earlier Sylvia had come across some rabbit snares. ‘Murderers!’ she had cried, and furious, she had torn them apart. Hughes, on the other hand, had spoken in defence of the poor peasants who had set the traps so that they would be able to put meat in the Sunday stew pot. It was an unfortunate incident and it served to heighten the diverse sympathies that had long been troubling the two poets’ marriage.
The rabbit in Sylvia’s poem may be related to the hare in Hughes’s morality play, Difficulties of a Bridegroom, about which he wrote to his friends Bill and Dido Merwin on 24 May, four days after the Wevills’ return to London. The play tells the story of a groom, Sullivan by name, who is driving to London to meet his mistress when he quite deliberately runs over a hare. Sullivan then sells the carcass to poachers for five shillings, which he in turn gives to his mistress. Appalled by the deliberate killing, she refuses to accept what she calls ‘blood money’. To make amends, Sullivan presents her with two red roses, which she reluctantly accepts. At the time, Hughes had been reading The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz by Johann Valentin Andreae, a seventeenth-century work that in the spring of 1962 influenced Hughes’s play more than did his marital tension with Sylvia or his recent attraction to Assia. By the time Bridegroom was broadcast by the BBC in January 1963, however, the play had been revised considerably and Hughes’s own personal drama was more clearly echoed in the text.