by Yehuda Koren
Although Ted agreed to pay Sylvia yearly maintenance of £1,000 for the house and children’s expenses, she feared that he would give in to his family’s pressure and renege on his responsibilities. Thoughout their marriage Sylvia had tried to be on good terms with her in-laws, but now she turned against them, calling them ‘inhuman Jewy working class bastards’. At the same time that she could declare ‘I think I may well be a Jew’ in her poem ‘Daddy’, in her letters she would use the word Jew derogatively. Her imagination ran riot with horrendous scenarios that her in-laws would force her to return to America as a ward of her family or that she would have to work as a waitress and put her children ‘in an orphanage’. In a less virulent moment, she could also hope that Hughes’s life with Assia might mellow him towards her and the children.
It was Dr Ruth Beuscher, Plath’s therapist, who urged her to get a copy of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving; ‘as I think it very important for you to read this book at this time.’ Plath kept this popular, now classic, psychological and philosophical work by her bedside and read it very carefully. She underlined and annotated passages that dealt with sex and love, symbiotic relationships, the nature of sadistic and masochistic personalities, and the fear of being alone, as well as the complex relationship between mother and child. On page 4, she marked a passage that may have described what had happened to her and Ted in the course of their own marriage: ‘The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement.’
Hughes, meanwhile, had abandoned his plan to move to Spain and had settled in a flat that Dido Merwin’s mother had bequeathed to her at 17 Montague Square. In the coming year, however, he would continue to use his parents’ address in Yorkshire for all official purposes. That autumn, after he had left Sylvia, Hughes confessed in a letter to his brother Gerald in Australia that he had finally found it impossible to stay married to Sylvia, especially because of her ‘particular death-ray quality’, and that he was pleased to have left her. Sylvia, who of course had her own version of the break-up, and did not hesitate to offer it, wrote to Gerald as well and in her letter described Ted as having a harem of women in London. Ted dismissed such tales as pure exaggeration prompted by Sylvia’s jealousy of Assia. Again independent, happy with the flat in Montague Square, and relatively carefree, Hughes enjoyed his newfound freedom, and he put no pressure on Assia to come and live with him.
In matters of the heart Assia always took her time. She was not an initiator; she was a responder. She left it to her husbands to pull the chestnuts out of the fire and deal with the mess that got made of marital bliss. When John Steele could no longer bear her infidelities, he made the decision to divorce; so did Dick Lipsey, once it became intolerably apparent that Assia herself would end neither her tepid marriage to him nor her affair with David Wevill. Certainly, in that emotionally turbulent October, Assia was not prepared to force the issue of divorce from David or remarriage to Ted, not when she more than suspected that Ted was not keen on the idea of remarriage. And if she separated from David in order to live with Ted, she feared that Ted might eventually desert her and that she would then be left alone, with neither man. Alone was Assia’s most dreaded scenario.
David was not forcing any issues, either. He continued to turn a blind eye to the affair as he strove ardently to please and appease Assia in his sincere attempt to save their marriage. ‘We didn’t want our marriage to end, and I didn’t feel it was ending,’ says Wevill. ‘Assia told me that she didn’t want the affair to happen, and regretted its happening. I was hoping it would die out.’ Nathaniel Tarn, though, had the impression, as he wrote in his diary, that David was largely: ‘in a pathetic state, doing some kind of manly acts: opening car doors for A; lighting her cigarettes, etc. She keeps looking dramatically at him, as if he were going to break. They are very lovey-dovey, arm in arm all the time.’ David, like Steele and Lipsey before him, acquiesced in his rival’s passion for Assia and to hers for him. Nor did Assia’s romantic entanglement with Ted destroy the mutual appreciation that the two poets had for each other’s work. David continued to admire Hughes’s poetry, and Hughes, who said he would not have minded if he himself had written Wevill’s ‘Our Lady of Kovno’, promised Assia that he would help David get his poems published in the New Yorker.
David’s submissiveness in the face of the affair frustrated and outraged Plath, who expected the cuckolded husband to step into and rectify an untenable situation by reclaiming his wife. Sylvia’s hope was that once he stood outside the influence of Assia’s bewitching aura, Ted would come to his senses and return to Devon, to her and their children. On 27 October Sylvia celebrated her thirtieth birthday on her own and two days later travelled to London to record an interview with Peter Orr for the BBC. She met Al Alvarez and attended a PEN party, an occasion for which she braced herself against the curiosity of gossips and the possibility of meeting Ted and Assia. There is no record that Ted, Assia or David attended the party and, for her part, Sylvia had the floor to herself. She moved from one guest to another, and took every effort to impress all with a cool, dignified stance, reconciled to the pending divorce and eager to move beyond it – for the divorce, she declared, would liberate her from the strain that marriage had become and would allow her to write in peace. Nonetheless, Sylvia was distressed to discover that many of the PEN members and guests in fact approved of Ted’s behaviour. At the same time that she feigned indifference to the affair, she fished for every titbit and scrap of information about it that she could. To that end she also asked Peter Porter to lunch. ‘She knew I was a friend of Assia’s,’ Porter said, ‘and she wanted to pump me about her rival. For the same reason, I prevaricated.’
At the beginning of November Plath went flat hunting in London with Hughes. They passed by their previous flat at 3 Chalcot Square, where Assia and David were now living and, on 23 Fitzroy Road, Plath found a flat. Indeed, she counted herself fortunate to have found the perfect place, not because it was barely a hundred yards away from Ted’s mistress’s window but because the house had once been occupied by the poet she idolised more than any other, William Butler Yeats. And there she would fantasise, just like Assia, of establishing a literary salon. Hughes always felt that Sylvia ‘witched herself into that building.’
‘Turn off gas’; ‘trash bins down’ – on her calendar Sylvia reminded herself of last-minute details to attend to before locking up Court Green on 10 December. When she arrived with the children at Fitzroy Road, she paid the rent for a year in advance. That same month the lease on the Chalcot Square flat expired, and Assia and David moved to a larger flat at 14 Highbury Place, in an old but completely modernised Georgian house owned by the author Sylvester Stein. In the nick of time, Hughes’s wife and mistress were thus spared the embarrassment of bumping into each other in the local shops and pubs of Primrose Hill.
Every Thursday morning at ten Hughes visited his children at Sylvia’s flat, though he would usually take them out to the zoo in nearby Regent’s Park. Finances caused Sylvia bitterness, too. She envied Assia’s high salary, which she believed to be £3,000 a year, a fortune from where Plath was sitting with two small children to feed and clothe.
Throughout their marriage Sylvia had resented Ted’s contention that any values vested in clothes were superficial and even more she had resented his insistence that she buy her clothes at cut-price stores. She had complained that she had constantly had to cut her personal and household expenses so that he could afford to devote himself exclusively to his writing and not have to waste his energy or time on a drudge job. Plath channelled her fierce emotions into Ariel. In one of its poems, ‘Amnesiac’, which she read in a BBC interview, a man living on the banks of Lethe, the river of oblivion, forgets his wife and children. That December, too, she was writing – and by New Year hoped to finish – a semi-autobiographical novel, Doubletake, about a woman whose hus
band turns out to be a deserter and philanderer.
Sometime before Christmas Olwyn Hughes came from Paris to spend a couple of days with her brother. On that visit she met Assia for the first time, in a café on North Audley Street, and found her ‘beautiful and very charming. Intelligent, humorous, likeable. She wore a very becoming black fur hat.’ It was clear to Olwyn that her brother was in love, but neither he nor Assia even hinted to her of any plans for a future they might share together. For Christmas, which Ted celebrated in Yorkshire with his family, he invited his estranged wife but she declined and preferred to spend Christmas with ‘someone else’, he later wrote to Sylvia’s mother.
Plath and her children in fact spent Christmas Day with her friends Suzette and Helder Macedo, who on the following day, Boxing Day, paid a visit to the Wevills. Assia and David had otherwise passed the holiday on their own. It was not generally Assia’s favourite day of the year. ‘Bloody Christmas, I do hate it, really,’ Assia wrote to her sister Celia, to whom she’d also sent a cheque to buy their father a recording of the complete Boris Godunov; ‘it’s all like a school prize giving, when you know in advance that you are not going to get the worthwhile prize anyway, it’s never really been Christmas since I left home.’
On 21 January and again on 9 February 1963, the BBC broadcast Difficulties of a Bridegroom. Hughes was familiar with the Cabbala, and the play owes much to the myth of Lilith, who seduces men in their sleep and then steals their semen; she also sometimes eats their flesh. Thus, in the broadcast version of Hughes’s play, the voluptuous mistress is a ‘man eater’, who sets out to make the bridegroom forget his bride and have complete possession over him. An irresistible party animal, the mistress greedily demands a penthouse in Charlotte Street, a red Cadillac and an unlimited expense account. When the groom pleads that he wants to fulfil his poetic vocation, she pays him no heed and insists that he will simply have to get a proper job and begin dressing stylishly. Assia, who could not fail to see herself in the Lilithine mistress, detested the play. It was no less painful for Plath, who identified herself not with the play’s bride but with the slaughtered hare.
On Thursday, 7 February Sylvia met Ted in his flat at 110 Cleveland Street and declared that she did not want a divorce at all: that ‘the whole crazy divorce business was a bluff’. In his poem ‘The Inscription’ (Birthday Letters), Hughes alludes to the visit: Plath was imploring him that, by summer, they would be together in Court Green. He said they would, whether to mollify or calm or console her – he was also misleading her, because, in fact, by that February his relationship with Assia was positively blossoming. To his sister he wrote, ‘the Assia saga is doing alright’, and to the Merwins he added Assia’s best wishes, an indication that she was the woman beside him. By then he and Assia were no longer making a secret of their affair. Heedless of what the gossips or anyone else thought, they went everywhere together, so much so that many people mistakenly thought that they were actually living together.
During the visit Sylvia made to Ted’s flat she spotted a familiar-looking edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Surprised at the apparent resurrection of the red Oxford volume she had slashed in jealous rage a year and a half earlier, she opened the book and read the inscription. Judging by her revulsion, it had been Assia’s consoling gift to Ted, to replace the volume he had lost. For Sylvia, it was a fatal blow, like a bullet striking a running animal.
By then Assia was carrying Ted Hughes’s child.
Twelve
The Shadow of Suicide
London, February–May 1963
It was close to eleven o’clock on Monday, 11 February, and Dr John Horder straightened up from the body that was lying in the middle of the sitting room. He estimated that his former patient had been dead for approximately six hours. Only when the ambulance doors had slammed shut behind the covered stretcher, did he turn to his car and drive the short distance to his clinic in Regent’s Park Road.
The only close friends of Sylvia Plath’s whose phone number he had were Gerry and Jillian Becker; he had already rung the Beckers three days earlier to check on Sylvia, who was their guest for the weekend, following his advice that she must not be left alone while taking anti-depressant medication. Dr Horder was now looking for Ted Hughes but Jillian Becker did not have his number. She called Suzette Macedo, who wavered between loyalty to Ted’s wife and her friendship with his lover. Macedo too had no idea of Ted’s whereabouts and phoned Assia. It was the mistress who had the grim task of notifying Hughes.
‘Something terrible has happened: Sylvia has killed herself,’ Assia announced, stepping into Art Director Julia Matcham’s office. Assuming that Assia must be overwhelmed with guilt, Julia sympathised, ‘Oh, you must feel awful.’ Assia’s eyes opened wide. ‘Why should I? It was nothing to do with me.’
Hughes immediately moved into the flat where his wife had lived and died, to tend to Frieda and Nicholas. He notified his friends of the tragedy, and one by one they gathered in 23 Fitzroy Road. Among the first to arrive was Susan Alliston, an aspiring poetess with a shoulder-length mane of dark bronze hair; she had always reminded Hughes of an ancient Egyptian figure, and, in Birthday Letters, he named her – and not Assia – as the woman who was keeping him away from the telephone on the nights when Sylvia repeatedly called him and needed him most. ‘I gave Susan a lift and as we entered the flat, Ted handed us the typed manuscript of what was to become Ariel. I read it and my hair stood on end,’ recalls his friend David Ross.
Two days later, Lucas Myers, Ted’s American friend, happened to pass through London and paid a condolence visit. Ted told him that he and Sylvia would probably have been ‘reunited in two weeks’ but Myers was not sure whether it was a real prospect, or the mind’s way of dealing with shock and grief. Al Alvarez was sitting on a sheepskin rug by the fire, talking to Olwyn Hughes, who had hurried home from Paris. Ted’s cousin Vicky and his aunt Hilda Farrar had come from Yorkshire to look after the children. Assia, feeling nausea, was resting in Sylvia’s room upstairs; apparently, the wife’s suicide did not make the illicit lovers dive underground. Myers went upstairs to keep Assia company and stayed in the flat for a few hours. ‘Not much was said. Someone asked Ted to sing “Waltzing Matilda”, and he did. It was like a wake without alcohol,’ he recalls.
Sylvia’s brother, Warren Plath, flew over from the United States with his newly wedded wife Margaret. They wished to take the children to be brought up in America and Ted asked for time to think it over. He let the young couple stay in Sylvia’s flat to see how they got along with the children and moved back into his own flat. It is not clear if Hughes was stalling for time, or whether he was so shaken by grief that for a flickering moment he was actually considering the option of leaving his children. But he soon made it clear that he intended to raise them himself and Warren and Margaret left England empty handed, though not giving up on the idea entirely.
Since his own flat was too small and the rent had been paid a year in advance, Ted decided to live in Plath’s flat. That same week David Wevill was called urgently to Ottawa, since his mother was terminally ill with cancer of the bowel. Being the eldest son and extremely attached to his mother, he planned to stay as long as it took. Assia continued to spend her nights in their Highbury flat, offering David long-distance support, while visiting Ted and his children after work. If there were any misgivings about her presence in Plath’s flat, she and Ted paid no notice. The children did not ask for their mother and clung to any feminine figure, and Frieda expressed her delight that ‘Daddy’s back’.
Free to pry around, Assia was mesmerised by Plath’s Ariel poems and, though they vilified and attacked her and Hughes, she admitted that they were ‘most incredible’. She flattered herself that she was the tragic muse. Opening the maroon-backed ledger, she read Plath’s last journal, ending three days before the suicide. Surprised to learn ‘that the marriage was much dryer’ than Ted had described it to her, she was shocked by the extent of Sylvia’s hostility and hatred tow
ards her. Reading the manuscript of Plath’s second novel, Assia easily identified David and herself as the Goof-Hoppers, and was disgusted not only by her portrayal as an ‘icy, barren woman’, but also by David’s character as ‘detestable and contemptible’. Apart from Plath ‘who is full of poems, kicks and kids, there are only saints and miserable sinners’, she told Nathaniel Tarn. She hoped that Ted would destroy it all; whether he followed her wishes or not, the fact remains that the novel was never found. As for the journal, Hughes admitted that he destroyed it because he did not want his children ever to read it. Assia’s account of Plath’s diary and her unfinished novel is the only surviving testimony as to their content.
Guilt is the ever-smouldering ember plucked from the suicide pyre and hastily passed from hand to hand, its scorch too agonising to bear. Hurling it away from himself, Hughes blamed it on Sylvia’s ‘murderous self’ and on her doctor’s unfortunate choice of an anti-depressant. It was evident that Plath’s friends would point the finger at the adulterer and his mistress. Assia’s friends pressed her to show remorse but she would have none of it. She blamed Sylvia for killing herself deliberately to destroy her and Ted’s happiness, complaining, ‘It was very bad luck that the love affair was besmirched by this unfortunate event.’
Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe invited Ted over to pay their respects, and were astonished when he arrived accompanied by a ‘strikingly beautiful woman – Assia Wevill’. Fainlight, loyal to Sylvia, hated Assia at first sight, but her rage was mixed with pity: