by Yehuda Koren
Because Ted was moving repeatedly from one friend to another and intentionally not leaving any forwarding addresses, Sylvia rarely knew his whereabouts in London. His friends were evasive and reluctant to help when she telephoned. ‘Sylvia wanted to find out what I knew,’ Al Alvarez wrote in his memoirs. ‘Or maybe she wanted just to sniff around the lair where he had been. Anything to alleviate her terrible loneliness.’ Well before Hughes entered her life, Assia sensed that Alvarez was attracted to her. Alvarez was recovering from a disastrous five-year marriage to Ursula, the duaghter of Frieda von Richtofen, D H Lawrence’s wife, and Assia told her friends that he courted her ardently. He pleaded with her, so she said, declaring that if she did not join him on his forthcoming trip to the United States, he would not go. Assia declined. According to Assia, Alvarez then dramatically upped the ante from a trip abroad to marriage, but Assia was too smitten with Ted to even consider the proposal. Decades later, in his autobiography Where Did It All Go Right, Alvarez did not mention any of that, and described Assia as a woman who ‘made a pass at every man she met so automatically that it was hard to feel flattered’.
David’s suicide attempt had no effect on Assia’s affair with Ted. She usually met Ted during her much extended lunch breaks. Her colleagues covered for her by telling bosses and clients that she had just popped out to the toilet or was attending to urgent business. The love nest she shared with Ted was sometimes a 1950 white Ford van that one of Ted’s friends loaned him. Once, preparing for a date with Ted, Assia took a large brandy goblet and, with a teenager’s zest, placed inside it a stone, a feather and a seashell. Returning to the office some hours later, she recounted to Angela Landels how they had sat in the car, how Ted had held the glass in his hand and then flung it out of the window, how the glass had smashed against a wall. Landels was aghast, but Assia was ecstatic: ‘Don’t you see, it’s the loveliest thing he could have done.’ Frequently Assia and Ted went out to pubs and parties. On one occasion, at the Mendelsons’ large house in Hampstead, Hannah Hobsbaum, Philip’s attractive wife, was chatting with Ted when Assia, incensed, strode up to them and abruptly put an end to the conversation. Shocked by Assia’s rudeness, Hannah whispered to her husband, ‘If I didn’t know better, I would say that Ted is having an affair with Assia.’ The hostess, Patricia Mendelson – and Tarn’s wife – remembers that she herself was shocked, on opening the door of a room, to discover Ted and Assia locked in a passionate kiss.
Ted visited Court Green on Friday, 3 August, to bid farewell to his mother-in-law, who was returning to the United States. On Sunday, 5 August, Al Alvarez took Ted, Sylvia, and the Wevills by surprise when he published three new poems – one by each of the three poets – in the Observer. Alvarez was then the paper’s all-powerful poetry critic, and a great and early champion of Ted and Sylvia’s work. Indeed, he did much to establish their reputations. Plath’s ‘Finisterre’ was followed by Hughes’s ‘Mountain’ and then David Wevill’s ‘Clean Break’. All three poems had been written and accepted for publication months earlier, so they bore no hints of the affair. That they appeared together on the same page barely three weeks after Ted had left Sylvia was in all likelihood seen as Alvarez’s wink to the London literati, who had been buzzing with gossip about Hughes and the Wevills. Philip Hobsbaum finds in the poems by Hughes and Wevill both common and complementary characteristics: ‘Both thought in sensuous images, both were romantics, and Wevill offers a more feminine, minor-key variant of Hughes’s astonishingly thrasonic blast and bluster. Hughes was dramatic and thrusting, Wevill, lyrical and yielding.’
When Mrs Olive Higgins Prouty, Plath’s benefactress and godmother, who had travelled to London from the United States, invited Sylvia and Ted to be her guests at the Connaught Hotel, her daughter remembers that her mother was not surprised to hear of the marital problems. She recalls her mother’s words, ‘“Sylvia is so intense! She can’t be easy to live with, even for a husband whom she adores and who is himself a genius.”’ Years later, Hughes told Prouty’s daughter that her mother had tried to help but, regrettably, he and Sylvia disregarded her good advice.
Hughes celebrated his thirty-second birthday at Court Green and later in August, at the end of the month, he returned to Devon again, as Sylvia was bedridden with a severe case of influenza and a temperature of 103. During the latter visit he secretly opened a bank account in his name at Barclay’s Bank in Exeter. For this account he did not use his Court Green address but rather that of his parents – The Beacon, Heptonstall, Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire.
The two couples were drifting with the events; neither was ready to take the rudder and steer in a definite direction. Shuttling between Devon and London and moving between Sylvia and Assia, Hughes refused, or was unable, to make a firm commitment to either one residence or one woman. Similarly, Sylvia was contemplating a life on her own while at the same time planning a holiday in Ireland with Ted. The Wevills, too, were restless. Though David found himself cast in the reversed role – that of the cuckolded husband – he remained tender and affectionate in his day-to-day relations with Assia, and hopeful that her infatuation with Hughes would fade. It was, he says, ‘a part of Assia that I couldn’t explain, her openness to experiences, and her trust in her own feelings, that had to be followed. I was hoping it would die out, and Assia gave me the sense it was not a lasting thing.’ Tarn got the impression that David had ‘a mythical view of his marriage’ and needed to be told ‘a few truths about keeping on top of one’s woman’. As for Assia, she was torn between pity for her husband and infatuation with her lover. She told Tarn that she had decided to stay with David at least until he was able to get back on his feet properly. Although Tarn continued to be privy to – and to record – the juicy details of the affair, he was becoming sick to death of what he called the Wevills’ world of half-secrets, half-lies and half-confessions. He suspected that both David and Assia had ‘a compulsive need of gossip to keep them in the swim’.
On Thursday, 13 September 1962, Ted and Sylvia arrived by train in Galway. They rented a car from one of the garages and then drove the 57 miles to Cleggan, where the poet Richard Murphy was operating tour boats to the island of Inishbofin. They intended to stay with Murphy until the following Wednesday, as Sylvia wanted to investigate the possibilities of renting a cottage for herself and the children for the coming winter. In the visitors’ book for Murphy’s boat, Ave Maria, she gave as her address Court Green, North Tawton, Devon; Ted used his parents’ address. Both of them confided in Murphy about their marital difficulties. Hughes told Murphy that ‘the marriage had become destructive, and he thought the best thing to do was to give it a rest’. To that end, Hughes was planning to go to Spain for six months, which time Sylvia and the children would spend in Ireland. Murphy got the impression that Plath was still optimistic that ultimately nothing could destroy the union between her and Ted; she wanted a legal separation, not a divorce. Murphy advised her not to act hastily ‘on account of an affair that might not last’.
On Sunday morning Murphy went to the harbour to prepare his boat for the eleven o’clock sailing. Hughes seized the opportunity to tell Plath that he was leaving. He discouraged her from joining him – he was going grouse shooting with a friend, he said – and promised to meet her on Wednesday so that they could return together to Devon. He kept his departure a secret from the recently divorced Murphy, who would vehemently have objected to the situation – scandalous in village dominated by the Catholic clergy – of being left alone with a married woman. Murphy would insist that he took Plath with him.
Packing just a few things, Hughes headed for County Clare. There, in a small house six miles from the village of Quin, lived the painter Barrie Cooke, who shared with Hughes a preoccupation with the behaviour of animals and ‘a fascination with violence’, in the opinion of John L Sweeney, the mutual friend who introduced them to each other. Cooke had no telephone in his house, so Hughes was unable to notify him in advance of his visit. Taking his chances, Hughes set o
ut on a slow, three-hour drive over narrow, winding rural roads. He found Cooke at home and the following day the two of them drove north to the barren, windswept limestone plateau with its rocky terraces and huge megalithic tombs of the Burren. It was Hughes’s first visit to the wild, spectacular, eerily lunar-like place and Cooke remembers that in the evening, ‘we lay on our backs, hidden in slots of rocks, watching wild geese fly.’
Plath was meanwhile stranded in Cleggan, a tiny, remote village with no bus service or taxis. Eager to be free of Sylvia so as to avert any scandal, Murphy insisted that she join poet Thomas Kinsella, a weekend guest, on his return to Dublin. On Wednesday night, 19 September Plath waited in vain in Dublin harbour for Ted to arrive. At the last moment she boarded the mail boat to Holyhead. At home she found a telegram with an Irish postmark awaiting her. It was from Ted; he would be back within a week or two, he said. For the next fortnight Sylvia had no idea where her husband was. Not even her lawyer in London could trace him.
When Ted embarked on the Irish trip, he already knew that he and Sylvia would not be returning to England together. His visit to Barrie Cooke was little more than a subterfuge to get rid of her. Ted had a larger plan to pursue.
Eleven
Leaving Plath
London, autumn–winter 1962
The page for the second week of September is mysteriously missing from Plath’s wall calendar. Although it is unclear when or by whose hand the page went missing, its disappearance could hardly have been accidental. Most likely it was torn out because of some offensive notation Plath had written on it after she had been ditched in Ireland.
In the last week of August, Assia Wevill flew to Canada to visit her mother, who was again struggling with breast cancer. She had not seen her family in three years, so she had much news, but none so dramatic as that of her affair. Her sister Celia recalls, ‘She told us that she met this fabulous man who was married. She let me read her diary, and it was clear that she was madly in love with him. They did not plan to get a divorce and marry.’ The bon vivant Dr Gutmann was not shocked by his daughter’s adultery: ‘As long as they don’t have children, it’s no big deal,’ he said.
Two weeks later, without her husband’s knowledge, Assia returned to London. Equally secretly Ted had by then left Ireland and he, too, was in London, where he was waiting for her. Together they travelled to Spain, the very place where Ted had honeymooned with Sylvia. Hughes’s telegram to Sylvia was a ruse intended to lead her to believe that he was still in Ireland and to put her off his tracks. Before leaving for Spain, he had deposited a letter with a London friend, who in turn posted it to Sylvia a few days later. The envelope bore no return address and from the vague contents of the ‘numb, utterly dumb letter’ Plath could not figure out where he was, what he was doing, or when was he coming home. Deserted in the big house in North Tawton with two children and with her nerves increasingly on edge, Plath’s apprehensions intensified. One stormy night she panicked. Certain that someone had broken in, she had soon convinced herself that it was Assia’s husband, who had come down to Court Green to take revenge. She alerted the police. The only sign of any disturbance they found was a shattered window; the culprit was the storm.
For Ted and Assia, Spain was an oasis. At last they no longer had to make do with stolen hours; they could enjoy each other openly, comfortably, without fear of discovery, without restraints. They could, and they did. The trip delighted them both. It provided them, too, with a creative boost, and they began exchanging ideas for a film script they might write together. When they returned to London at the end of September, they took great care to remove every trace of their ten-day-long Spanish fiesta from their luggage. Indeed, it was three months before Plath found out about the trip and, when she did, she was outraged. David Wevill never suspected a thing; not until forty years later did he learn about it and even then he was incredulous ‘of Assia and Hughes going to Spain in 1962, or how, or when, that could have happened’.
The abundant intimacy that Ted and Assia savoured in Spain did not translate into any determination to pursue a joint future. A few days after unpacking her suitcase Assia was repacking it for another preplanned trip, this one to Germany, with David. Eight years had passed since Assia had hitchhiked through Germany with Dick Lipsey, her second husband. With her third husband, just in time for the autumn wine festivals, she visited Heidelberg, Düsseldorf, Boppard, Bingen and Mainz. Assia continued to feel ambivalent about the country, although David Wevill remembers that she enjoyed the language. They bought some books of modern German poetry, which she and David then tried to translate together. And she spoke the language with vigour and style. She was not always favourably mistaken for a native, though. ‘In a pub in Boppard we saw a sign for vacant rooms, and asked to stay the night,’ Wevill recalls. ‘The owner said, certainly, and called his wife. She came down, took one look as Assia, and said, no, we have no room, and disappeared. It cast a cloud over us, Assia felt her Jewishness had been detected. She was not frightened, but very disturbed.’
Before Hughes and Plath had taken the trip to Ireland, they had discussed vacating Court Green for the entire winter as one option by which they might resolve their marital crisis. For six months Sylvia would live in Ireland with the children, while Ted would take advantage of the notoriously cheap standard of living in Spain. The Wevills, on the other hand, had not broached the possibility of a trial separation. Even if they had, and subsequently had agreed to separate, it is doubtful that Assia would have then joined Ted in Spain, for she would have had to make too many significant changes in her life that she was not yet prepared to make. For one, she would have had to leave her well-paid job and thus, not only lose her hard-earned professional identity, but also find herself virtually totally dependent on Hughes and his meagre means. The situation would have been complicated even further, in fact, because David, who had won the Gregory Award – a literary prize that enabled writers to live abroad for a few months – was also planning an extended stay in Spain, so that he could pursue his interest in Spanish literature and indulge his fascination with the country’s earthy charms.
With Assia away in Germany, Hughes had decided not to hang around London but, instead, to await her return at Court Green. Had he and Sylvia been able to declare a truce, they might have been able to resolve their differences enough to be able to save their marriage. Instead, they declared war. Housebound together for the first ten days of October, they wore increasingly on each other’s nerves. The house became their battleground and their simplest interaction led them into an emotional minefield.
In a puzzling coincidence, the page for that first week of October, like that for the second week of September, is also missing from Plath’s calendar (which Hughes later sold to the Lilly Library at Indiana University, in the United States). Although any notations that Plath may have jotted down in frustration or anger on that page are lost, her letters to her family and friends speak frankly of a ‘ghastly week’. Hughes admitted to leading a secret love life in London and, adding insult to injury, said that he hated living with her as she bored and stifled him. For a long time, he told her, he had been looking for a chance to free himself from her. He said that he could get hordes of gorgeous women, and that she was ‘a hag’. Sylvia thought that he and Assia wished her dead, knowing that she had already attempted suicide before; her death would be convenient to Ted, who could sell Court Green and live with the children elsewhere. In the midst of the commotion Hughes managed to find enough solitude and calm to compose ‘Sunlight’, a sentimental nostalgic poem for Assia, atypically for him: ‘your absence is huge’.
In that ghastly week the tables had turned. For Plath, trial separation was now out of the question. Her union with Ted was not quite so indestructible after all. She wanted a clean break and evidently so did he: Sylvia stated that, like her, ‘Ted is glad for a divorce.’ The decision having been made, Hughes immediately phoned Assia to inform her that he was leaving home and that Sylvia intended to n
ame her as the ‘correspondent [sic] in a divorce suit’. On 11 October Plath drove Hughes along with all his belongings – clothes, books, papers – to the station. To judge by Plath’s calendar, he did not return to Court Green or see his children for the next two months. Although he denied to Sylvia that he was planning a future with Assia and asserted that he wanted to live only for himself, Plath was certain he would soon marry his mistress: both of them, are cut for each other, being ‘handsome and faithless’, and he would join the parade of husbands that preceded him. In all her letters, Plath never mentioned Assia by name, and referred to her, for example, as ‘the bitch’ or the ‘barren woman’. Sylvia’s suspicions of her husband’s former infidelities suddenly disappeared. She now averred that his affair with Assia was his first transgression; until he met her, he was a perfect husband, and Assia was the one who taught him that it is ‘sophisticated to lie and deceive’.
Plath was convinced that much of Assia’s appeal for Hughes was her childlessness – as a result of her many abortions. In Plath’s view, Ted was intimidated by her writing and motherhood. Hughes, she concluded, wanted a woman who could neither challenge nor compete with him, a woman who was not creative and would admire his writing and be utterly devoted to him. Plath consoled herself with her evident superiority over Assia in motherhood and artistic endeavour: infertile in body and soul, Assia’s only achievement – according to Sylvia – was her high salary. Plath welcomed and relished any gossip – the more vicious, the better – about her rival’s behaviour, and she gleefully recorded that Assia had attacked her former husand with a knife, causing damage to his car.