by Yehuda Koren
In addition to the film script she was working on with Hughes, Assia had her own project, developing Turgenev’s First Love into a film script. The mid-nineteen-century novelette was a study of the adolescent love-at-first-sight of sixteen-year-old Vladimir, overwhelmed by the beauty of the capricious, shallow Zinaida. Obsessed with naïve infatuation, lost in love for the exquisite, domineering, flirtatious 21-year-old, Vladimir is added to Zinaida’s herd of admirers, whom she keeps on strings at her feet. She amuses herself by raising their hopes one moment and their fears the next, twisting them round her little finger. Zinaida is looking for a man who can master and possess her and finds him in Vladimir’s father, who is married to a woman he does not love. The destructive love affair leads to an inevitable separation and the lovers’ early deaths. Scorned by his first love, Vladimir remains a bachelor.
The script has not survived but, on the opening page of Assia’s copy of Selected Tales of Ivan Turgenev, she has scribbled some stage directions for a scene between Vladimir and his mother:
Very blindingly lit dining table. It’s noon. Light behind seated woman. Move in on over-ringed, plump woman. She spoons soup into her mouth. Noise of starched napkin unfolding, of cutlery. Click. Clack. Move towards nested button of butter, and away. Now into tall portrait of sourly tempered woman and boy grinding their way through lunch.
Voice: my mother was ten years older than my father.
The camera remains on the boy’s back, and relentlessly follows the woman, watches her like an enemy. In profile, it cruelly discovers her mountainous belly, the seam of her wig, the line of food-moistures above her lip. She eats greedily, and self-centredly. Wisps of her own hair show under her wig. She wears long pearl earrings.
Voice: she scarcely paid any attention to me although she had no other children. Other worries occupied her completely.
David Wevill applauded Assia on her project (‘These scenes you imagined for First Love are beautiful – truly – and so clear and plain.’). He advised her to take writing seriously and write – paragraphs, tiny stories built around incidents. ‘Work slowly, Trynchin, let your pulse be at normal pressure when you write: you don’t have to lash yourself into energetic fury, like the cat on the stump.’ The two men nurtured her and, when there was an opening for a job at the prestigious advertising agency, J Walter Thompson and Assia was full of apprehensions as to whether she was right for the job, both encouraged her. Ted reassured her that she was the best in her profession and David remarked, ‘you are such a GOOD writer, and advertising wears good writers out.’
Assia was an integral part of her men’s artistic work; she collected and typed reviews and articles, which Hughes needed in order to get a grant from Vienna, and assisted David in his efforts to find a publisher for Birth of a Shark. He dedicated the book ‘for Assia’, and his photograph, which she took on their trip to her beloved Pisa, appears on the inner jacket: standing in a crowd, Wevill looks withdrawn, his head tilted down, eyes half closed. One of the poems, ‘Germinal’, carries suppressed violence and scars of the drama which was overtaking their life: ‘Wastes grow; you lean into the sun/As towards a good husband, hoping its fire/Will incinerate your trash and not you.’
On the publicity form that Wevill completed for the Macmillan publishing house, he remarked that his surname rhymed with ‘devil’. The collection consisted of poems from the previous five years – covering his life with Assia and the various places of his domicile: England, Canada, Burma, Spain and even the brief trip that they made to Ireland. The background was an anchor for his poems: ‘but events impose themselves: family relationships, love, breakages, hysteria, compromise, harmony and conflict, movement and fixity, cruelty and guilt … the poems are written around a contradiction: the desire to merge with things, and the need to break away.’ He said that man dreams of action but is helpless to act; he dreams of peace of mind but acts to destroy it. The book was selling rather well, and Peter Orr, who interviewed Sylvia Plath, added David Wevill to his anthology The Poet Speaks, based on the radio interview. To Orr’s question as to whether he had a specific audience in mind, Wevill replied, ‘I prefer to have one person in mind all the time, because I find that personal, direct communication turns to unleash a lot more, than if you are thinking in terms of a mass of people.’ When Hughes was asked by the Sunday Times to review some books, including Penguin Modern Poets 4, which included some of Wevill’s poems, his sister Olwyn, acting as his agent, replied that he must decline since he was ‘rather busy’.
In mid February, Assia was admitted to hospital. Returning home she was visited by Anne, then Alvarez’s girlfriend and later his wife. Assia was lying in bed, wearing all white and lace. ‘She was so beautiful, and kept on talking about Sylvia, and I thought that she has serious identity problems, and is breaking down.’ Anne Alvarez, who is a psychologist, thought that Assia was totally obsessed by her predecessor: ‘She had no chance, she was doomed from the start. Professionally I would say she had a counter-phobic reaction, and wanted to demonstrate that she was not afraid of Sylvia’s demon. For her own good, she would have been much better off not to sleep in Sylvia’s bed.’ Having met Assia’s two men, Anne Alvarez got the impression that Assia was more relaxed with David, and tense with Ted. When Ted and Assia visited the Alvarez home, there was a leaden silence between the lovers and, in their all-black clothes, they seemed like a pair of black panthers sitting across the fireplace, hissing at each other.
The past two years had been chaotic for David Wevill – he was plagued by his beloved wife’s continuous adultery and the fatal illness of his mother. At the beginning of March, he flew to Ottawa urgently, to sit by her bed. In his love letters from Canada he urged Assia to look for a new flat: ‘I’m weary of Fitzroy Road, the place’s malice.’ In April 1964, after his mother’s death, he returned to England. By early summer he and Assia had moved into 25 Belsize Park Gardens. Ted rented out Sylvia’s flat until the end of the year, and then took her furniture and curtains back to Court Green. He rented a room in London with his friend, psychiatrist Dr Nathaniel Minton and, in his tax statement for 1964, he declared that he made eighteen trips to London.
Fifty years earlier Belsize Park Gardens had been an affluent street: the writer Henry Brailsford had lived at number 37, the composer Frederick Delius at number 44. Its glory had faded by the time the Wevills moved into Flat b, on the ground floor facing the chestnut trees along the street. The living room had parquet floors and a large armoire and looked out into the garden. Assia decorated it tastefully with several framed miniatures of insects and flowers that she painted. At that time, David Wevill was making a poor living as a reader of uninspiring books and manuscripts for various publishers. Lucas Myers, who had meanwhile left Court Green, was offered a room with the Wevills. David was sleeping on the couch in the living room, while Assia slept in the bedroom. One day Myers noticed a book lying face down. He picked it up – it was The Colossus, Sylvia’s first volume of poetry, open on the nine-line poem, ‘Metaphors’. He stayed with the Wevills over two months and noted that, in the difficult and humiliating situation, David’s demeanour was dignified and admirable, and that Assia had the tenderest feelings for him. She had several heart-to-heart talks with Myers and time and again she pondered, ‘How is it possible to love two people at the same time?’ David and Lucas also spoke about Ted, separately, occasionally and obliquely.
It seemed that all three protagonists were refraining from making a move that would rock the boat. David still hoped that his devotion would win Assia over; she and Ted became less adventurous in their affair, resigned to the incompleteness of their relationship, with no escapades abroad or inland. Assia could not fail to notice the unmistakable similarities between her life and the film script she was working on. Turgenev’s heroine was surrounded by lovers: she had one who would readily have thrown himself into the fire for her, one who answered the poetic elements in her soul and one she could torment and into whose flesh she could stick a pin. Ass
ia too was dependent on Hughes for the exhilarating challenge and on David for the safe haven. Her favourite literary heroine, Anna Karenina, dreamt that her husband cried and kissed her hands, while her lover was standing by. In her dream Karenina was joyful that both men seemed happy and content, which made everything simpler. But when she woke up, she was horrified. For Assia the duality was far from a nightmare: she loved them both and had the best of all worlds. She was careful not to torment David with details of her affair; and he felt that by remaining in London, she had made her choice, to live with him. But had Ted found room for her in his intricate life, she would have followed him instantly.
Tucked into Assia’s copy of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a coupon for a free booklet about the most popular and advanced methods of birth control, ‘relieving anxiety about unwanted pregnancies and by ensuring that … children are wanted and welcome into a happy family’. Apparently, Assia did not fill in the form, or post it to the Family Planning. At the end of August 1964, she confided with Lucas Myers that she was pregnant. ‘I knew it was Ted’s child, but he did not know that with certainty.’
Fifteen
Birth
London, autumn 1964–winter 1966
When Assia had found herself pregnant in the winter of 1963, her relationship with Ted was not ripe for a baby and, before they could even weigh the possibility of parenthood, Sylvia’s suicide tipped the scales. Now, the storm had abated, and the pregnancy did not create a scandal. Assia, at the age of 37, was past her dread of becoming a mother. At the time of the previous pregnancy and abortion, David had no knowledge of it but now he was a full partner and had reason enough to believe that the child might be his.
Assia and Ted invented a secret code for their correspondence and Ted was dispatching his daily letters to her home, addressed to ‘F Wall, Esq.’ This act of deception could not have been used at 23 Fitzroy Road, since there were only two tenants, the Wevills and Dr Thomas, and David would have caught on to the deceit. But it was easy at 25 Belsize Park Gardens, which was divided into six flats of changing tenants. ‘F Wall, Esq.’ was a private joke between Ted and Assia; he was the fly on the wall in the Wevills’ home. Each morning, Assia would rush to pick up Ted’s letter from the pile of post that had been pushed through the crack in the entrance door and was lying on the black-tiled floor. Hughes made a point of sending his letters first class, so they would arrive first thing in the morning, and not later in the day, when Assia was at work and David could have still been at home. It is unclear why they went to all this trouble, when they could easily have used Assia’s office address, as they had before. Was it for the thrill, and the romantic intrigue?
Ted was careful not to sign his letters, although, if David had opened them, his rival’s distinctive, flamboyant handwriting would have easily betrayed him; especially since Ted was naïve enough to address Assia by his usual terms of endearment, like Asseeke. He also mentioned Frieda and Nick by name, as well as other members of his family and friends and gave details of his literary activities and the titles and transmission times of his BBC radio plays. The heading of his letters of that period lacked the sender’s address and even the date but the Royal Mail postmark from Devon would have exposed him outright. But David, although assuming that the affair was still going on, was not spying on Assia, preferring not to know. It worked all right until one day Assia found one of Ted’s letters torn open. It was a bulky envelope with a manuscript that someone must have mistaken for a letter containing banknotes. Nothing was missing, but Ted was in panic; he reprimanded her for disclosing their code to her friends and insisted that she find the Nosy Parker.
Hughes reported to Assia at length, filling her in on his daily routine, as a kind of introduction to the life awaiting her in Court Green. For her part, she acted as his emissary in the big city, doing all sorts of errands on his behalf, like buying The End of the Game as a birthday present for Gerald. When Hughes heard that a drawing of him had been published in The London Magazine, he asked Assia to look for it and send him a copy.
Their meetings were not as frequent as Assia would have wished them to be, and it soured their relationship. They continued their petty squabbling. Hughes first referred to the baby in his letters to her only a month before the expected birth. He advised her to find the right balance between reasonable caution and over-anxiety and, as a seasoned parent, he advised her not to buy many clothes, only nappies and waterproof pants.
The pregnancy was much easier than Assia had expected and in its last weeks she was immersed in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; she was enraptured with Tatiana, who had long been the Russian emblem of purity and fidelity and ideal womanhood. Tatiana was in love with Onegin but he refused to marry her, saying he would tire quickly of marriage. The most he could offer her was brotherly love. Three years later Onegin met the broken-hearted Tatiana again, now married to a prince she did not love. Onegin fell for her passionately but, although still loving him, Tatiana chose loyalty over love, and refused to betray her husband: long ago, she said, she and Onegin could have been happy but now he could bring her only sorrow. The analogies could not have escaped either Ted or Assia.
There was a snowstorm on 3 March 1965, when Assia was admitted to the delivery room of Charing Cross Hospital. She was in labour for nine hours, which were quite bearable except for the last 45 minutes. ‘I emerged whole, ecstatic (in which condition I have been for ten days) and so did my daughter Schura (to rhyme with Jura) whose full name is Alexandra Tatiana Elise,’ she joyfully informed Lucas Myers. ‘Miraculously unwrinkled, with black hair, very long, and North Sea blue eyes – skin fair as sweet friar, very equable, tactful, grave, very touching. Above all very touching.’ Influenced by Hughes’s fascination with astrology, she wrote down the hour of birth – 9.55 p.m. – and added that both moon and sun were in Pisces with Libra rising, though she had no idea what that meant.
Long aware of her mother’s terminal cancer, Assia added her name to the baby’s. Shortly after, on 18 March 1965, Elise Bertha Gutmann passed away in Canada, aged 76. On the birth certificate, Edward James Hughes, an author, from Court Green, North Tawton, Devon, is registered as the father of the newborn. However, it was David Wevill who gave the child his surname: thus, she was both men’s daughter, and neither’s. The given names, chosen by Assia and reflecting her sense of drama, pass on the mother’s dreams of grandeur to the daughter: Alexandra, after the last tsarina, the German-born wife of Nicholas II and Tatiana, after Pushkin’s romantic heroine. Doubly Russian, the name points up that Assia no longer wished to blur her foreign identity and asserts that, no matter which of the men, Ted or David, should rear the child, she belongs first and foremost to Assia.
That spring, the recently widowed Dr Leo Gutmann embarked on a three-month grand tour of Europe, and stopped in London to visit his new granddaughter. Assia did not reveal to him the identity of the father. Lonya brought with him the ancient family Bible and, on an inner page, Assia documented in German the birth and death dates of her mother and the birth date of her daughter. She also made an entry for herself (although not for her father or her sister), writing down her date of birth and enigmatically adding the word gestorben (passed away) – leaving a blank space for the date.
Gerald Hughes and his wife Joan knew of Assia, but Ted refrained from mentioning her in his letters. The first time he did was when asking Gerald not to inquire about Assia, because Olwyn was reading his post and he wanted to minimise friction with his family. The letter was written a day before Shura’s birth but still there was not a word about the impending event. Only on 4 May, when Shura was two months old, did Ted tell Gerald in passing that Assia had a little girl, still not coming clean about his paternity. ‘I suppose my parents accepted Shura. I suppose too they thought of her as Ted’s,’ recalls Olwyn. However, watching Shura asleep, Olwyn noticed her ‘long eyelids and lashes – like David’. Olwyn maintains that Ted was happy to take the child on, although Assia had told her t
hat she did not know who the father was. Friends who visited the Wevills were impressed with David’s loving paternal care of the baby and would not have suspected anything amiss had not Assia made a point of whispering that Ted was the father. ‘Assia was very interested and absorbed in Shura, she was not unmaternal in her nature, but she was not Mother-Earth,’ Wevill recalls.
Assia’s female friends observed that a woman who had never demonstrated the slightest interest in children had been transformed overnight into a doting mother. ‘She became soft, as if her whole hard edge had gone, she became vulnerable, and very protective of Shura,’ remembers Patricia Mendelson. Assia apologised for the years that she was ‘seriously flamed, bitch-woman’, ignominiously indifferent to Andrea, Patricia’s five-year-old daughter. She was grateful for the beautiful clothes that Patricia gave Shura, ‘ever since she was born I wanted to buy her some really pretty things to wear, but the money never stretched that far. So I gave up. Women are utterly irrational about these things. Indeed, it is a sort of awful conspicuous consumption – in my case, quite fraudulent – but the pleasure they gave me today was quite out of proportion with my whining Puritan conscience’s needle pricks,’ she wrote to Patricia in December 1965. With the birth of Shura, Hughes wrote more freely about his children. He filled Assia in on his preparations for Frieda’s party and the lunch of four trout that he made for him and Nick. Assia must have reported similarly about Shura, and Ted inquired, ‘How are the two little ladies’, asking Assia to give the baby two kisses for him.
Ben Sonnenberg recalls that Ted offered to cast the horoscope of his little daughter Susannah, trying to persuade him that ‘sometimes it’s a useful way of focusing one’s attention on a person’. Sonnenberg declined but Ted went ahead and ordered one for Shura. The astrologer foresaw delicate health in childhood, but predicted that Shura would grow to be handsome, pretty, fair skinned, with abundant artistic talent, but too much emotion, too much acting out, laziness and willingness to manipulate others for services rather than just getting on with the job herself. In many ways, it seemed as if Assia’s personality was imprinted in her daughter so deeply that they were inseparable. ‘There’d be a lot of fantasy life, pretending, unreality and self deception, as well as willingness to be deceived by others,’ the astrologer foretold Shura’s character. ‘It’s possible that with the control that comes with age, this person will begin to produce and be more creative, but I think this is a hell of a chart to come in with – a real crucifixion … I really don’t feel this chart is very promising.’ Hughes viewed astrology not as a science, but as an instrument for a vivid expression of intuitive insight, explains Lucas Myers. Hughes informed his friend of Shura’s horoscope, but did not comment on the ill omens in it, the astrologer having predicted: ‘There would also be severe loss in this person’s life – deaths, accidents, etc. in the family.’