by Yehuda Koren
In the spring of 1965, Ariel was launched and the sight of the daffodils bursting open in the yard of Court Green invoked memories of his last carefree spring with Sylvia.
His self-criticism was mercilessly harsh; he was over 34, but felt ‘like the naïvest beginner’, totally incompetent, distracted and wasted by humdrum jobs. He yearned for a steady income, since the struggle to make a living wore him out. Assia tried to ease his burden by typing the radio plays that he wrote for the BBC, The Tiger’s Bones and Beauty and the Beast. On a J Walter Thompson/Creative Department letterhead, she typed a number of poems, titled ‘Pear’, ‘Buttercup’, ‘Apple Blossom’, ‘Violet’ and ‘Primroses’. None of them was published.
Together they were working on another book that would illustrate his poems with Assia’s drawings. The theme was ‘A Full House’: a pack of cards, in which the kings, queens and knaves were biblical, mythological and historical figures. The King of Spades was Solomon, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Caesar was the King of Clubs, Charlemagne was the King of Hearts, and there were also rhymes for Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great, Victoria the Warrior, Cain and Don Juan. Hughes sent Assia the text to illustrate, suggesting the scenes, like three maidens dancing for Three of Hearts. Assia returned the drawings for Ted’s inspection. He confessed that he hoped to solve his financial difficulties through this book, but some time later he decided that the poems were not good enough for publication and stored them away. The poems survived, but none of Assia’s drawings has.
The poet and translator Michael Hamburger, Hughes’s good friend, remembers another project of Assia’s and Ted’s: ‘she showed me a book of her illustrations of poems by Ted, miniature paintings in brilliant colours with many animals and plants. This was never published, to my knowledge.’ Equally continuing to help her husband in his poetical career, Assia sent five of David’s poems to her former teacher and lover, Professor Earle Birney in Vancouver, to be published in his magazine Prism. She was ecstatic when David won the Arts Council TriAnnual Book Prize, together with Philip Larkin.
In late June 1965, it was time for the Festival dei Due Mondi – Festival of the Two Worlds – in Spoleto, Italy, and Hughes was invited along with poets including Ezra Pound, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Pablo Neruda. Assia would not have missed such a gathering of famous poets for the world and she left the three-and-a-half-month-old Shura in the care of David and the nanny. ‘We lived like Americans. And got fat and brown,’ she wrote to Lucas Myers.
Assia doted on her motherhood, rejoicing when the six-month-old Shura was ‘no longer just human sea-weed, her small feet dangling between the seat and the first step, and she ate real bread and butter and egg for the first time. And immaculately. Like a real child.’ To press on with her copywriting career at J Walter Thompson, she fired her nanny and hired a single mother from Barcelona named Mercedes, who moved in with her own child. Assia was bursting with ideas, and scribbled them everywhere; on the inside back page of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? she wrote slogans for Lux soap – ‘Cloud of gentleness’, ‘Lux the luxury detergent’, ‘rich, tight lather’. She was part of a team, headed by Jeremy Bullmore, that launched the campaign of Mr Kipling’s bakery, under the slogan ‘exceedingly good cakes’, still in use some forty years later.
But she made a name for herself in another campaign, a ninety-second film commercial which she wrote for Elida Gibbs’s Sea Witch hair colorants. Her script paid homage both to Greek mythology and to James Bond, who was becoming a cultural icon. Named Lost Island, the clip began with the brass fanfare from the last movement of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, showing seven men dressed in black standing on a speedboat, heading towards a tropical island. Thousands had tried before – the narrator dramatically said – but their scattered sculls, armoured visors and discarded military banners were a silent testimony to their defeat. Three women in white togas were sitting on the rocks with coiffed hair, black, auburn and fair. ‘The Sea Witches. The Greeks knew about them, the faces of mortal women, but their hair … their hair is legend. Was this the real location of Eden? The banished descendants of Eve?’ Assia wrote, invoking the legendary Lilith. While the three women were seductively letting their hair down, the soundtrack was taken over by Miles Davis’s jazz beat. Attacked, the Amazons fought back with drawn fingernails, killing six men. Escaping by the skin of his teeth, the sole survivor stole a briefcase containing the twelve hair colours. The commercial ended on a humorous note – a man’s hand emerging behind a chemist’s counter and nonchalantly placing the desired package.
‘It was an amazing mock-heroic epic, filmed at staggering expense in the Aegean, and made Bond films look a bit cheap,’ Tom Rayfield recounted in his memoir Fifty in 40, about fifty years of J Walter Thompson’s in 40 Berkeley Square. It was a breakthrough since, until then, most commercials of the sort were soft and romantic, with hardly any plot, usually showing women in exotic locations, waving their glossy hair. Assia’s was full with suspense, danger, violence and death. The Sea Witch commercial was a huge success, and was applauded in cinemas. A shorter version was made for television. Assia got a standing ovation from her colleagues, as well as a nice salary rise and became known in the business as The Sea Witch Lady. Her friends recall that she was also involved in another unconventional hit, the advertisement for Yardley’s cosmetics, portraying a leather bandolier holding a variety of lipsticks in place of bullets, playing on the visual similarity between the two, and the juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos, sex and death.
Twice, a dramatic event changed the course of the affair between Assia and Ted and saved it from exhausting itself and withering away. Plath’s suicide locked the two culprits together, and now, Shura’s birth broke the deadlock and pointed towards the next chapter in their lives: living together and raising all three children. In September, Olwyn Hughes, who had lived with her brother in Court Green for the past two years and helped with his children and the household, decided to return to London. It was an opportunity for Hughes to bring Assia back into his life. His mother’s arthritis was worsening and he planned to bring his parents down to Court Green for the winter and leave them with a housekeeper, while he, Assia and the children moved to Ireland.
Hughes wrote to Richard Murphy that he was looking for a house near the sea. Secretive about his plans, he did not mention that Assia and Shura were coming as well. Murphy found Doonreaghan House, a spacious house in the village of Cashel, on the west coast of Ireland, forty minutes’ drive from his cottage. It belonged to Lt-Col. Browne-Clayton, who lived in a magnificent country house nearby and who rented out his smaller house to holidaymakers. The date was set for 1 November and the house was available until the end of March. Three years into the affair, she realised that this was the one chance that she could not afford to miss. As sorry as she was to cut her rising career short, apprehensive about Ted’s full commitment, and still carrying unpleasant memories of their last attempt, Assia felt that their relationship was ripe for this long-overdue step.
They began preparing for the move; Hughes told Assia that he wished to start afresh with nothing whatsoever from their previous lives. Furnishing their nest, he allotted her a budget of £50 and she was instructed to purchase records of Bach, Handel and whatever else she liked, as well as art books – specifically pre-sixteenth-century art, anything that ‘might enrich their life together in the womb’.
Only then, after a long silence, did Ted write to Aurelia Plath about his next move. It was a typed letter, with no date, and Aurelia added at the top, in huge black marker pen: ‘Bomb number 1, December 1965’. He wrote to her that he was leaving for Ireland with the children and from there to Germany, at the invitation of the government that granted him three months’ scholarship. He planned to prolong the stay until the autumn of 1966, and return to Ireland for at least five years. Since he reckoned that Irish education was of an inferior standard, he wished to place his children in a private school, which catered for the large German community in Irel
and. As could be expected, he did not mention that Assia and Shura were coming with him. In his letters to his brother and friends as well, he only spoke of himself and his children, thereby not allowing his plans to be jeopardised.
But the deadline was constantly postponed: first Ted was waiting for his mother to leave hospital, then for his father to sell his newspaper and tobacco shop, and later for the end of his brother’s visit. Hughes was so keen to leave, that for the next three months he kept paying the rent, to secure the house. Ted was looking for someone who could watch over Court Green and help his parents settle in. Elizabeth Compton knew the place well, and took care of the house after Sylvia’s suicide, but now she was the last person on earth that he wanted there; he suspected that she was informing Aurelia Plath of his moves and did not want to give Compton access to his and Sylvia’s papers, which were left in the house. He preferred the Heddens, whom he had known since 1964. Brenda was a young, slim, blonde, attractive social worker, and her husband Trevor was a drama teacher who believed in open marriage. They lived nearby, often came for dinner and poker games, and helped Ted take care of Frieda and Nicholas, when Olwyn wanted some time off. Brenda Hedden did not know that Ted had a girlfriend in London and Assia’s name was never mentioned. ‘The first time I saw her was when she came down to Court Green just before they all left for Ireland. I was struck by her beauty and her fragility,’ Hedden recalls.
When the date was finally set for February, Assia broke the news to David. For the past three and a half years, David had been dreading that moment but was resigned to it, and when it arrived, he did not cling to Assia. ‘We knew this was it.’
Sixteen
Bliss
Connemara, February 1966–Devon, April 1967
The night before leaving for Ireland Ted had a dream: he was walking by a river and big salmon were splashing their milt and spawn over him. From that night on, salmon replaced the pike in his fish dreams. Water was life, and fish, energy, and Hughes was excited about the long stay ahead.
It took them about five hours to reach the village of Cashel, and Doonreaghan House from Dublin. Thomas Hazell, a trader in kelp, had built the two-storey house in the late 1790s. It was erected on a slope, just fifty yards from the rocky beach, in order to monitor the boats carrying the brown seaweed. With time, Hazell became fabulously rich and fathered twelve children, so he moved into the newly built palatial Cashel House. When his ‘whole tribe’ or ‘my herds’ as Hughes called his newly united family, moved in there, Doonreaghan was rather run-down. Poorly insulated and draughty, the walls were black, the floorboards were rotten and the furniture was bric-à-brac.
Cashel had only one grocery shop, its choice of goods next to nothing: mainly bread, tea and bacon. Everything had to be bought in the district town of Clifden but the bus travelled there only once a week. With no driving licence, Assia was a willing prisoner, totally dependent on Ted. Taken aback by the high cost of living, they grew their own vegetables to ease the financial burden and vary the menu. Hughes’s fishing skills proved useful, and he took the children with him as he drove to the lakes beyond the hill. There was no cinema in the area, and no other means of entertainment, and their only indulgence was to dine out in Clifden.
‘The end of Europe and the real beginning of the American Atlantic coast,’ was Assia’s impression of the Connemara region. Though she had unpleasant memories of Ireland from her previous visit with David, the old cottage, remote and desolate, was now a palace to her, and she did not look back on the excitements and indulgences of London. After almost four tempestuous years, Assia finally found rest and refuge, away from it all: his parents, her husband, nosy friends and Sylvia’s shadow. Walking on air, she practised a new signature: ‘Assia Wevill-Hughes’. Only when it was a fait accompli did Ted find the courage to inform his brother Gerald: ‘Assia is here with me, and a complete success.’ A huge weight was lifted off his shoulders and he was happy that he got away from Court Green’.
A local girl named Teresa Manaion (now Reilly) came every day to help with the household chores. ‘The house was known to be haunted, people said that there was a curse, and that no child had been born there for many decades,’ she recalls. Soon after moving in, they celebrated Shura’s birthday. Assia sent her family a photograph of the toddler in a white lace dress and a pink ribbon, sitting on a wooden bench at a table covered with a white tablecloth decorated with prints of Red Riding Hood. On the back of the photo it said, ‘Shura Hughes 1st birthday’. The four-year-old Nick was sitting next to Shura, Frieda facing them and, on the table, laden with wrapped presents, a chocolate cake decorated with two candles for the birthday girl to grow up to. Other photos of the time show Shura and Nick together in the bath before bedtime; Shura wearing just a white undershirt, laughing joyfully; standing in a round playpen on the lawn; crawling on a blanket on the grass, her hair shimmering in the sun. Ted was delighted and relieved that his children had greatly taken to their half-sister.
In the corpus of his published poetry, Hughes never mentioned Shura by name, referring to her as ‘your daughter’ or ‘her little girl’. But apparently, he did write a poem for his third and youngest child. It was ‘Lines for Shura’, and the title echoed, ‘Lines to a Newborn Baby’, an earlier poem that Hughes wrote for Frieda. The poem looks like a birthday benediction, full of good wishes for his daughter’s future and the marvellous triumphs awaiting her. Hughes probably read it out aloud at the party but never published it.
The rugged and untouched landscape of Connemara attracted foreigners who were on the lookout for spiritual inspiration. It felt like the end of the world, a chance to leave civilisation behind, with its treasures and seductions. After so many vicissitudes and distractions, Hughes was finally free to be immersed in his true vocation. He was exploding with ideas that he believed would last him the next 25 years. Surrounded by all his dear ones, his sweetheart attending to all their needs, he found the strength to probe into the suicide of his wife and began writing Crow, ‘which was, however improbably, the way he was finally able to write about his own experience of personal devastation,’ writes Diane Wood Middlebrook. ‘He is a scavenger poking his beak into a destroyed civilization. Wherever he finds a sign of life, Crow pounces on it with unselective appetite.’ While Hughes was locked in his study, Assia wrote and painted by the window of her study or in the garden, which, just like Court Green, was overflowing with daffodils.
The lease ran out at the end of March and they took Teresa with them as they moved to Cleggan Farm, a mile and a half from Richard Murphy. The estate was built in the mid-nineteenth century and, next to the master house, there were two holiday cottages to let. Ted and Assia knew the area well: it was in Murphy’s home in Cleggan that Ted dumped Sylvia in September 1962 and, seven months later, Assia and David visited the place. Their cottage was next to a stable and from the bedrooms on the first floor Ted and Assia could see Cleggan across the bay.
The small village of Cleggan had about ten houses in all, ‘virgin, swept with no pretensions aside from the presence of Murphy and the expensive sailing boats,’ was Assia’s impression. Their cottage was isolated and inconvenient as was Doonreaghan House; five hours’ drive from Dublin, and fifty years back in time, but Assia enjoyed every minute of it. They dined with Richard Murphy once a week, alternating between his place and theirs. They also enjoyed the occasional visits of painter Barrie Cooke and his wife Sonia. Cooke remembered his hosts ‘seemed very happy together. Assia was not easy to get on with, but I liked her very much.’
Living in seclusion was an ultimate challenge of conjugality and family life, since they had to be self-reliant and self-contained, with no buffers and getaways. And they rose to the challenge. At the end of May they were due to go to Germany until the autumn and return to Ireland for a few more years. But life in paradise was cut short. Olwyn was exhausted from looking after their elderly parents and Ted, an ever-devoted son, overlooked his own interests and decided that they would all return
to Court Green. He and Assia hoped it would be no more than an extended summer holiday: by October, they hoped with Edith recuperated, they would go back to Ireland.
Assia and Ted tried to recreate the Irish experience in Court Green: she put her green fingers to use and planted bulbs everywhere and made little gardens. She could not take her eyes off him toiling ‘in sweet sweat’ in the garden, which suddenly seemed to her like the primeval glossy jungle in the famous Rousseau painting. She melted at the sight of his ‘superb legs and thighs –the beautiful Anatomical Man’, as she wrote in her diary. From her study on the first floor she would gaze wistfully at the hut where Ted was working, expecting ‘the hut to smoke with the temperature of his presence in it’. She felt reverence in the company of ‘one of God’s best creations’ and wondered, ‘Is God squandering him on me?’