by Yehuda Koren
During the Wevills’ visit Sylvia had told Assia that she would love to do tapestry and described a particular pattern that she had once seen in a newspaper but could not remember which or when. Upon returning to London, Assia did some research and discovered that the pattern – Rose Bouquet – had appeared in the Sunday Times two years earlier. She found it at Harrod’s and, to save Sylvia the time and trouble of trying to find the materials in Exeter, she bought not only the pattern but also the thread in the whole range of colours required to complete the tapestry. In their monthly expenditure book, Assia put down the price of the gift: ‘£1.10.0.’ In an adjoining letter to ‘My dear Sylvia’, she offered useful tips and warned of the danger of becoming ‘seriously addicted’. The note was signed, ‘Much love, Assia’. It was undoubtedly more a thank-you present from a thoughtful, courteous guest than it was a gift to at once assuage Assia’s guilty conscience and further dupe her betrayed hostess. Assia’s friends attest to her generosity; they might merely mention an especial item that they coveted and, be it a book or a fur hat, Assia would go out and buy it for them.
So it was that Sylvia added needlework to her daily routine. She often worked on the tapestry while she listened to French and German lessons on the radio, and her calendar shows that she reminded herself to set aside time for the tapestry on 29 May and 1 June and then again the following week. On 7 June she notified her mother that she found the needlework ‘Wonderfully calming’. According to her calendar, she was still scheduling time for the tapestry on 1 July. Had she had any suspicions that Ted had been seriously attracted to, or been allured by, Assia, it is unlikely that Sylvia would ever have touched her rival’s present.
In the letter to Sylvia that accompanied the tapestry, Assia did not send her regards to Ted or the children. She did not mention Ted at all, whether she was idly thinking of him or not. It would appear that if Assia was contemplating what might happen next with Ted, she was also leaving it entirely in his hands.
Sylvia made a habit of meticulously recording every aspect of the Plath-Hughes household on her calendar. ‘9.45 – Nancy’, for instance, notes the expected arrival time of the cleaning lady Nancy Axworthy and the entry beneath it indicates which part of the house Nancy was to clean that day. Her calendar includes, too, menus she planned, chores she would attend to, doctors’ appointments to be kept, radio programmes not to be missed (‘10.25 – Bach’), language lessons that would be broadcast (‘3.10 – Italian’). Although she and Ted rarely left the house as they took turns writing and minding the children, Sylvia also entered on her calendar Ted’s every departure, such as his trips to the nearby town of Exeter. There is no entry for a trip to London until the end of June.
However captivated Hughes may have been by ‘the seven treasures of Asia’ and although he was a sexual stalker by nature, he was having difficulties in pursuing his prey. In the first week of June he was housebound as he was entertaining his parents and his Uncle Walt. The Hughes family enjoyed the visit and his mother Edith’s letter to Sylvia’s mother Aurelia makes no allusion to marital problems. In the second week Ted was suffering the effects of half a dozen slow-healing bee stings, which were still evident when his mother-in-law arrived from the United States on 21 June. Aurelia’s babysitting services enabled Ted and Sylvia to travel to London. So, five weeks after meeting the Wevills at Court Green, Ted had his first opportunity to see Assia on her own.
Ten
An Illicit Affair
London, summer 1962
In her dark blue domestic-expenditures ledger, Assia entered the purchase of ‘3 Penguin books for Ted Hughes’ on 17 June, for the price of £1.10s. It is unclear whether she bought the books as a gift or at his request but the entry does suggest that either by phone or by post there was some communication between Assia and Ted after the weekend in Devon.
Their first opportunity to meet came on Tuesday, 26 June, when Hughes and Plath drove into Exeter to catch the early express train to London. Ted had to be at the BBC by 9.30 for a rehearsal; he was narrating Creatures of the Air, a radio programme for schools that he had written. The programme’s assistant producer was Moira Doolan. At 10.45, just as Ted was finishing his rehearsal, Plath stepped into a different studio to participate in a recording of The World of Books. The recording of Hughes’s programme was scheduled for 1 p.m., so he had two free hours on his hands. He hurried to Berkeley Square, about ten minutes away by taxi, only to discover, when he arrived at the Colman, Prentice and Varley advertising agency, that Assia was not available. He scribbled a note and left it with the receptionist. Intimate though it was, Assia showed it to her friends. Suzette Macedo recalls that it read, ‘I have come to see you, despite all marriages.’
Having always preferred rough waters to smooth sailing, Assia could not resist the thrill of responding. But she wanted to do it in striking, memorable fashion. From her office window she noticed that a gardener was mowing the lawn in the square below, and therein she found her inspiration. She went down, picked up a single blade of the freshly cut grass and sent it to Court Green. As Hughes recollects Assia’s wordless message in the poem ‘Chlorophyl’ (from Capriccio), the blade of grass had been dipped in Dior perfume. Three days later an envelope arrived at Assia’s office: in it, the blade of London grass lay beside one from Devon. Assia did not hesitate to share Ted’s romantic gesture with her husband David. Indeed, not content with her husband’s tenderness, she flaunted it, in the hope perhaps of intensifying David’s desire or provoking his jealousy, or both. Assia would have revelled in being the cause of a duel between her devoted husband and her potential lover. David, however, remained his sweet, soft, loving and inert self.
Hughes and Plath revisited London on 3 July for a meeting and lunch at the BBC with George MacBeth and Douglas Cleverdon. Once again Hughes managed to slip away, only this time Assia was waiting for him. When she returned to the office after the rendezvous, their first, in amazement she told William Trevor, ‘We met for tea!’ Their next meeting was to take place on 19 July, the date of Ted’s next trip to London.
On Monday, 9 July, Sylvia went shopping in Exeter with her mother. She bought a black cashmere sweater and a full black wool skirt for herself as well as two shirts for Ted. Sylvia and her mother had wine with their lunch at the Royal Clarence Hotel, and they returned to Court Green ‘in high spirits’. Aurelia Plath was at the far end of the hall when the telephone rang. Sylvia picked up the receiver. The ensuing few seconds of silence prompted Aurelia to glance back at her daughter. Sylvia’s face was ‘ashen’, and she called shrilly, ‘Ted!’ He almost fell down the stairs in his haste to get to the phone, while Sylvia dashed up the stairs. In the poem ‘Words Heard, by Accident, Over the Phone’, written two days later, Plath hints at Assia’s name with the words ‘Now the room is ahiss’. Four months later Plath returned to the incident, and in ‘The Fearful’ she identified the caller as a woman who ‘says she’s a man’. Hughes, too, would allude to the phone call in ‘Do Not Pick Up the Telephone’: in this poem the telephone becomes a deadly device for ‘disguised voices’ for heralding one’s doom.
When a laconic Ted finished the conversation, Sylvia rushed back down the stairs and, in a fury, ripped the cord of the phone out of the wall and then raced back to the bedroom. Ted ran after her. The door to the bedroom slammed shut and, for several hours, Sylvia and Ted stayed in their room while Mrs Plath tried to calm her two grandchildren. She had no idea what had just transpired and ‘thought that perhaps they had had bad news concerning some work sent out for publication’. When she later peeped into their room, Sylvia and Ted were in bed.
The following day they all drove to Exeter and, before Hughes boarded the train to London, with a strange little laugh he said to his mother-in-law, ‘Well, I don’t know just when I’ll see you again, Aurelia, but have a good time.’ He knew that Mrs Plath was planning to stay in Devon for another month, but his own future with her daughter was unclear. Only later that day did Aurelia Plath learn the rea
son for Sylvia’s rage and Ted’s abrupt departure: ‘Ted had been having an affair for some time.’
Sylvia built a bonfire in the yard and to its flames she consigned Ted’s letters and manuscripts. Strangely, she spared the tapestry and Assia’s accompanying letter and although she stopped working on the tapestry from that day on, she did not dispose of Assia’s gift. She was so shattered by the betrayal, however, that she ceased listening to the BBC German language course and also demanded that Ted remove the Wevills’ table from Court Green. But the tapestry remained in the drawer of a desk in the sitting room. It was later found by Sylvia’s friend Elizabeth Compton (later Sigmund), who completed the large grey and white roses ‘as a kind of gesture of defiance against Assia, to say, this at least, will be completed’. Compton says that over the years the tapestry mildewed and finally crumbled to pieces.
It seems that Sylvia had detected an affair that had scarcely begun, the culprits having met only once. Ironically, it was Sylvia’s rage over the telephone call that enabled the barely budding romance to quickly bloom. Upon his arrival in London, Ted set himself up temporarily in the spare room in Al Alvarez’s studio, within walking distance of Chalcot Square. He told Alvarez that he was leaving Sylvia and that he was in love, but he offered no further details. He then went out and bought four bottles of champagne. He presented them to a very surprised David and Assia Wevill when he knocked on their door and asked them to join him in celebrating his birthday. In fact, his birthday was still five weeks away – on 17 August – so what he was celebrating was perhaps something more like a rebirth. He found his opportunity to speak in private with Assia when David went out to buy cigarettes. She was astounded to learn that Ted had left Sylvia. She also agreed with no hesitation to skip work and spend the next day with him.
Nathaniel Tarn, also known as Dr Michael Mendelson, the anthropologist and poet, was a member of the Group in London and had been a close friend of the Wevills in Burma. Without each other’s knowledge, both David and Assia made Tarn their confidant and, mesmerised by the unfolding drama, he recorded its progress almost daily. Observant and sharp-witted, Tarn added to the Wevills’ two separate accounts his own comments, analysis and opinion. After spending Wednesday, 11 July with Ted, Assia enthusiastically reported to Tarn that Ted was very virile and decisive: he did the kind of things that a man did and that David had stopped doing long ago. Assia, however, did make sure that she returned home at her usual time and told David nothing about her Wednesday escapade. Later that evening the two of them joined Hughes and Alvarez for a drink at a pub. One look at Hughes and Assia together was enough for Alvarez to realise that she was Ted’s new flame.
Two days after, on Friday, 13 July, at lunchtime, Ted took Assia to a hotel, where he made love – as Tarn, in gentlemanly fashion hiding the principals behind their initials, wrote in his diary – ’so violent and animal, he ruptures her. A. turns against him, goes quite cold’. Assia did not confide solely in Tarn on this occasion. She also made no secret of Ted’s ferocious lovemaking among her office friends. Equally repelled and fascinated, she told Edward Lucie-Smith, ‘You know, in bed he smells like a butcher.’ Hughes commemorated the occasion of their first lovemaking in ‘Capriccios’, the first of twenty poems about Assia that he published in 1990. The very same poem was published eight years later under the title ‘Superstitions’, at the end of Howls and Whispers, which focuses primarily on Sylvia. Famously drawn to the occult, Hughes joins Sylvia to Assia in the ill-omened date of Friday the 13th – the date on which he first went to bed with each of them – as he laments Plath, who ‘Forgot death’, and Assia, who ‘Forgot life’. Hughes gets the day wrong in Sylvia’s case, however: they first made love on a Friday but it was 23 March 1956. Hughes repeats the error in another poem, ‘18 Rugby Street’ (Birthday Letters), this time adding to the symbolic import of Friday the 13th an Oedipal twist as he conflates the day that he and Sylvia first made love with her father’s birthday. Otto Plath was indeed born on 13 April 1885 but 13 April that year fell not on a Friday but on a Monday.
At 8.30 p.m. on that ominous Friday in July Assia phoned David and told him she would be late because she had gone to see Ted off at Waterloo station. Armed with a knife, David hurried to the station but failed to find Ted. Overwrought, David returned to an empty house. His wrath battling with despair, he threw the manuscript of a new, not yet published, book of poems into the wastepaper basket and then swallowed twenty or thirty pink Seconal sleeping pills – afterwards he couldn’t remember exactly how many. Finally, gripping a silver-handled Burmese knife with which he hoped to end his misery once he found the necessary courage, he lay down on the couch.
Assia arrived after midnight and found him ‘lying so sweetly, so young (such contrast to fierce H). In bed’. He was barely conscious. She panicked. Shaking him desperately, she attempted to wake him. She called an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, while David lay in a semiconscious state, Assia was ruthless enough to announce that Hughes had raped her. David’s stomach was pumped and all night Assia walked him around the hospital corridors to keep him awake. As he later wrote in a short story, ‘Four Days’, ‘the details of his life and the reasons for his death had gone away … to wake among strangers was the greatest healing’. He was happy when, on Saturday afternoon, he had a visit from Assia, because she was ‘the one too intimate, the one never far enough from himself, who later went the way he had almost gone, and was not found in time.’ A taxi took them home on Sunday evening. David composed a short note to his rival: ‘If you come near my wife again, I’ll kill you.’
That weekend Hughes was called down to Devon urgently by a hysterical Plath: she’d had an accident and driven her car into a field. On hearing of David’s suicide attempt, Hughes groaned that Wevill was the ‘straightest man in the world’.
David recovered quickly enough, and the following weekend the Wevills travelled to Linsey, in Suffolk, where they were the guests of Royston and Celia Taylor. Royston headed the department in which David worked at Ogilvy’s advertising agency, but his wife and Assia had never before met. Nonetheless, Assia was extremely candid with her hostess about even the most intimate matters: she confided to Celia that Ted had raped her the previous week. Throughout the visit David was tremendously upset – indeed, murderously so. Royston Taylor recalls how he and his wife and Assia, all three of them spellbound, stood at the gate of a meadow and watched David, in the middle of the field, pound a broken-winged crow to death with a rock. Taylor was horrified as ‘David, pale and shaking a bit, said to me that he was putting the thing, which had been shot, out of his misery’.
The killing of a bird lies at the centre of Wevill’s poem ‘Body of a Rook’. This gregarious Old World bird is about the size and colour of its relative the American crow, but the verb ‘to rook’ also means ‘to swindle’ or ‘to cheat’. Wevill’s poem refers to the bird in the feminine and particularly emphasises her blue-black feathers – Assia’s colours – as she is:
gnawing, clinging, flesh-stubbed
Teeth in me, my remembrance of her mouth.
It is a killing but who dies?
The first-person speaker of the poem, no doubt Wevill himself, kills the bird slowly with a lump of flint until he has made a pulp of her head, face, body and nerves: ‘I know my own violence too,’ he admits. And he recounts how he:
… watched
Those last sufferings leave her body too
Twitching black and rook-supple before
I kicked my damaged violence into the woods.
The poem was published a year after the incident that conjured it, in Penguin Modern Poets 4, and then in the first collection of Wevill’s poetry, Birth of a Shark, which he dedicated to Assia. On the page facing the violent ‘Body of a Rook’ is the gentle, optimistic poem ‘In Love’, which begins with the words:
She touches me. Her fingers nibble gently,
The whole street leans closer
Echoing John Donne and the seventeenth-
century Metaphysical Poets, with elaborate metaphor, ‘In Love’ celebrates the sublime and consuming love shared by the poet and his wife:
And this is my Sunday lesson she teaches me.
Her texts are pillows, strong wrists and liquid ankles.
I could paint her as I fell on her,
And did, with my tongue, lungs, and my whole heart,
Each breath exploding its hot ether
Lash through our wills to their blind core.
If this is love, I grieve for God’s.
The poem holds no hint of any current or residual bitterness that David may have felt towards Assia, his tutor in love.
When Hughes returned from Court Green, Assia exulted in his declarations of hate for Plath: for four years he had been unable to write, he said, and then wrote Lupercal in ten days when Sylvia was away. Nevertheless, he returned to Sylvia on 26 July and together they travelled to Wales for three days, to see friends and attend a conference in Bangor. Indeed, almost weekly Ted returned to Devon and his wife and children. Resentful of the ties Ted maintained with his family, Assia confronted him, saying she didn’t want ‘a slinky affair’, but she did not cut herself off from him. The future of his marriage to Sylvia was still unclear, and Ted did not establish a foothold in London, not just because renting a flat in the city was an expensive proposition but also because it made too drastic and unequivocal a statement. To all intents and purposes, Court Green continued to be his home and for his correspondence he used his North Tawton address. For the present, all he wanted was some time off from his marriage and a bit of breathing space so that he could more freely savour the London literary life and nourish his affair with Assia.