by Yehuda Koren
She gave Ted a biography of Goethe, and inscribed it, ‘The lady is speaking and/you can hear it yourself:/“Seamus!”’ She transcribed the Irish name four times, the letters getting smaller and smaller, and added at the side, ‘Darling, darling, darling.’ Shortly afterwards Hughes presented her with a copy of the 1811 publication, leather-bound, A General History of Quadrupeds, by Thomas Bewick. This famous and rare book documented hundreds of species of animals, with elaborate woodcuts. Hughes inscribed it endearingly and appropriately to the Halva Taur and signed ‘Cor Leonis Regulus’; it was the Lion’s Heart, the brightest star of Leo, the king of the zodiacal animals, who was ambitious to rule over others. Hughes was indeed a Leo, Assia was a Taurus.
They entertained Alan Sillitoe and his wife Ruth – Ted and Sylvia’s friends – who came from London for the weekend, as well as the Hungarian poet, Janos Csokits. They kept in touch with Teresa, their Irish help and, when she got pregnant, her boyfriend refusing to marry, Assia encouraged the girl to go on with the pregnancy, and invited her to come with the baby and work and live at Court Green. As Teresa approached childbirth, the pregnancy became so life-threatening that the priest summoned the reluctant father for the last rites. He married Teresa on her deathbed and she recovered miraculously. The young family remained in Cashel.
With her artistic flair, Assia went into business with one of Ted’s local friends, an antique collector. Hughes was very proud of her taste and keen eye, finding a Georgian set of drawers, a much-coveted fifteenth-century lead gargoyle taken off a church and several paintings, one of them, they hoped, a Titian.
Bringing up Ted’s children and living with his parents in Court Green were outward signs of domesticity and harmony. Winifred Davies aerogrammed Aurelia Plath: ‘Ted’s girlfriend, maybe wife I don’t know, a baby, are also at Court Green,’ and reported that Frieda and Nicholas adored the child. But the oppressive and demanding presence of Ted’s parents marred their intimacy. ‘We are here, in a nettle Emporium,’ Assia cynically informed Patricia and Michael Mendelson in Hampstead. ‘So are Mama and Papa. Also many “friends of the family”. It is difficult, almost impossible, but not quite.’ Edith Hughes was bedridden and needed extra care, and William Hughes was constantly bored, longing for his Yorkshire friends. Meanwhile, Assia’s father sold his house and property in Canada and sailed again to England, hoping to settle near his beloved daughter and granddaughter. He tried to fit into Court Green but, unable to stand the squabbles, moved to a hotel in the village. A few months later he returned to Canada, his hopes frustrated, and Assia lost a vital ally. In September, Edith’s health was declining rapidly and Ted and Assia were forced to postpone their return to Ireland. They were all waiting for Edith to improve enough to go back to Yorkshire with her husband. He and Assia kept separate accounts, with Ted paying for the household expenses. When she needed money for herself, he would give her a loan, noting it in his ledger, and marking her repayments.
In December 1966, Assia gave Ted The Muses’ Darling: The Life of Christopher Marlow, by Charles Norman. She bought the book twelve years earlier, while married to Lipsey. Now she added a new inscription, punning on the title of the book: muse, Hughes and darling: ‘for darling Mr Hughes, for whom feels full of sorrow’. William Blake was one of hers and Ted’s most revered poets and they had several books by him or about him. That month, Assia bought the 1880 collectors’ item Life of William Blake, by Alexander Gilchrist, as well as the impressive Oxford University Press edition of Vala, or the Four Zoas. In the long, epic poem, divided into nine nights, Blake attempted to write a history of the world. Assia’s inscription echoed Blake’s unique mythology, taken from Night the Third. The original line reads: ‘Into the Caverns of the Grave & places of Human Seed’. Assia’s inscription reads: ‘to the lovely place and brain of Human Seed’.
In response to David Wevill’s ‘copious, devoted, interested pleas’ Assia finally bought his second book of poetry, A Christ of the Ice-Floes. It included some poems that she had long thought highly of, like ‘Our Lady of Kovno’. In other poems, written after their parting, she could identify traces of their predicament. ‘Sense by sense we withdrew from each other,/Taste, first; then touch, smell, sound and sight/Now we need more than the rain to melt us together.’ (‘Infinity’.) There was no anger in the poems, only a poignant resignation; ‘… And the crime is single – no betrayal/only the mouths of each/for whom the same words have bone-different meanings.’ (‘Either/ Or’.) ‘The Panther desired peace,/but by the mind’s terms, peace was her killing.’ (‘Black Pantheress’.)
In Assia’s current state of mind, her husband’s poems left her cold and alienated: ‘It is a ghost of a book. Where is the glossy abundance I remembered, the sense of solid, wrought, tough poems? where is the ice rapier?, the framed, dense things – what a paltry, melancholy dishevelled book it is,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I hardly dare read the admired Surgeon’s tale, just in case it too had withered in my absence.’ It was not only the poetry; the man, over whose boyish good looks she was once ecstatic, now repulsed her. ‘His eyes grew narrower in sorrow. He sits, troubled, grievous, disowning it in the cold … the thick veins on his elderly hands – sitting on the lowest part of his spinal cord, the hands helplessly falling on the armrests of the chair.’ Her words echoed her reading of Anna Karenina, who, head over heels in love with Vronsky, suddenly saw her husband as repulsive and ludicrous, his ears sticking out.
Assia fell into self-loathing; the thoughts of her husband revived her guilt and the unpleasant memories of her clandestine affair with Hughes. She remembered the days without hope, the impatience for things to end, the touching faith that somehow, by sheer grace of time, things would fall into their right place. Her renewed cohesion with Ted had freed her of David’s allure, and he ‘has diminished to thinning symbols of my treachery, my selfishness … his anguish. His terrible bereaved anguish’. For the first time since she had fallen in love with Ted, she stopped acting like the biblical Lot’s wife, who looked back and froze, unable to go forward. Assia finally freed herself from dependence on her husband’s unwavering love and support, which had sustained her throughout the affair. At last she no longer regretted the step she had taken and stopped vacillating between her two loves. ‘Assia and I have separated. She’s well, living in the country,’ David Wevill wrote laconically to Earle Birney in Canada. ‘I’m trying to consolidate my coming life.’ However, though they had been living apart for more than a year, with no prospect of reconciliation, David and Assia did not begin divorce proceedings. There was no urgency on her side, since she and Ted had not reached the point of talking about marriage: with his mother’s fragile health, Ted was afraid that it might inflict a deadly blow on her.
For Valentine’s Day of 1967, Assia made a card for Ted and drew a wide-boughed, leafless tree, planted in the grass, with three birds hovering in the distance. Its roots were suckling on a blood-red heart and in needle-thin letters she wrote, ‘For the heart inside the heart of the dragon, for certain feathers in crow’s wing, on the left there, my best heart, my valentine.’ Overwhelmed by Hughes’s attractiveness and ‘so many perfections’, she felt so lowly and fortunate, that she decided, ‘I would in all truth not begrudge him an affair or two with other women – as long as [sic] remains loyal to me. I would suffer bitterly – but this in all truth is the only due thanks I could give him for all his grace.’
On the face of it, Assia had already resigned herself to the possibility of being betrayed and had decided to endure lovingly what her three husbands, Steele, Lipsey and Wevill, had gone through. But in reality, she was far from compliant. She was sensing some attraction between Ted and Brenda Hedden, who continued to be a frequent guest, often staying late with her husband for a loud game of poker with Ted’s father. Assia was worn out from running the household, with three unruly children, ill-tempered in-laws and a reclusive Ted absorbed in his writing, and she had no patience for bawdy company. In any case, she despised card games and,
in the Heddens’ presence, she felt disowned in her own kingdom. A ‘fiendish black secret battle’ developed between the two women. ‘The woman is my real enemy. An ex-social worker, ex-religious maniac, with the looks of an emaciated Marilyn Monroe. I beat her hollow in intelligence and experience, but she feels that I have usurped her place as the rightful soul of Court Green,’ Assia wrote to her sister Celia. ‘She hates me, has clearly hated me right away, but is either, or was, rather, too stupid or too cocksure to bother concealing it.’ She often quarrelled with Ted over his open-door relationship with the Heddens and finally won. Brenda and Trevor hardly set foot in Court Green.
Once again, Assia was sleeping in Plath’s bed, using her household utensils and linen. ‘A strong sensation of her repugnant live presence,’ she wrote in her diary. Plath’s manuscripts and notebooks were lying everywhere, and Assia was browsing again in the diaries, stopping at Sylvia’s pledge to ‘work at femininity’, followed by a list of resolutions and a shopping list which included a bathrobe, slippers and nightgown. Assia was engrossed in her predecessor’s life to such an extent that Sylvia acquired gigantic, mythical dimensions. Were Sylvia’s elbows ‘really sharp? The hands enormous and knuckled? Or is this my imaginary shape-giving to the muscular brain, my envy of her splendid brilliance?’ Assia pondered. The evocation of Sylvia stimulated her to do her own soul-searching: ‘how spoilt I am. I’m spoilt to numbness … my best world, my best past lies before puberty. Buried. The rest is an accretion of sensation by reading, by what I have heard told, and deemed desirable. In the past two years I have scraped the barnacles of my social education off, but gained nothing new for myself. Only a naked talcumed self-love.’
Court Green was full of news from the United States that Plath had become an icon among students and Hughes was surprised by Ariel’s success. He was warding off attempts of journalists and researchers to pry into his life with Plath and into the cause of her death. Her memory was very much alive, not least because of Ted’s parents who were still mourning her death; they had lived not far from Heptonstall cemetery and were the guardians of their dead daughter-in-law, putting a Christmas wreath on her grave and daffodils and lilies on Good Friday.
Winter incarcerated them and magnified the tension of opposites and Court Green turned into an inferno. Writing Ireland off proved a disaster; the four months in a paradisiacal cocoon were not enough to amalgamate Assia and Ted against the wedges that were being driven between them. His father could not bear the sight of Assia and never spoke to her. Hughes told Lucas Myers that Assia’s accent was the cause of his father’s enmity. Myers felt sorry that ‘these two survivors of world wars did not see that they trod common ground’, and the plainspoken Yorkshireman could not tolerate Assia’s ‘Versailles inflections and international elocution’. Engaged in a cold war, Ted’s father demonstratively ignored Assia’s presence and refused to sit with her at the same table. He averted his eyes when she put a plate of food in front of him. ‘We used to lunch with his father (strain) now I lunch with Shura and he eats with his father alone,’ Assia complained to her sister.
She lived practically like a pariah: after lunch, she would go alone to the bedroom upstairs, sleep and read for two hours, then come down for tea on her own, and then three hours of feeding the children, bathing them and putting them to sleep. She hardly saw Ted; he was locked for hours in his writing hut, struggling with Crow, which he thought was ‘turning into a real epic’, if he gave it three more years of hard labour. Leaving his desk, he would spend much time with his parents. ‘The rest we spent desultorily in the library,’ she wrote to her sister. The many portraits that she sketched of him disappeared, except one: Hughes looks withdrawn, grim, his shoulders sagging, his head bowed, his eyes deep set. Assia had difficulties in drawing his mouth, which she had once described as ‘a sand ditch’. She made a few attempts and erased them. Frieda Hughes has a vague memory of her father and Assia sketching each other: one of Hughes’s sketches portrayed Assia with accentuated eyebrows and introspective gaze, her hair parted down the middle, her lips voluptuous.
Ted often went fishing, twice a week he played snooker ‘with his father and two nits’, and some evenings he visited local friends, leaving Assia behind: in the small conformist, provincial village of North Tawton, her haughtiness and the trail of gossip worked against her. Elizabeth Compton saw Assia walking about in North Tawton, ‘looking lost and miserable. She had aged and put on weight, and Ted told everyone she was dying her hair, as she was going quite grey by then.’
The doctors had nearly given up on her but Edith Hughes pulled through and was looking forward to receiving visitors from Yorkshire. Assia and Ted moved into a hotel in the village to avoid tension and have some privacy but were immediately called back from their sanctuary when Edith suffered a severe heart attack. The doctors predicted that it would take a year before she could return to Yorkshire. Ted juggled between his endless tasks: taking care of his three calves, tending to his garden, doing some writing jobs to pay for it all and polishing Crow. He was weighed down with the emotional demands of so many people in his household, and had an urge to lock the door behind him and run from it all. He tried to pacify both parties, looking for stolen moments with Assia, sneaking off to the nearby village of Chagford, their island of sanity, to indulge in luxurious, gigantic afternoon cream teas. But the atmosphere remained contentious and, in any disagreement between Assia and the Hugheses, Ted invariably sided with his parents. They were drifting apart, and Assia was again oscillating between reproach and adoration. ‘I have these fits of huge love and admiration for him – but it is still two parts that, and one part memory of Ruthless. The Mouth.’
Assia found solace in her daughter and immersed herself in nurturing Shura. The child’s talents intrigued her: still in nappies, she was singing to herself at night, dancing, ‘her head tilted to one side in acute concentration. She dances most successfully to either Bach’s Cantatas or pop.’ A small card lists ‘Shurik’s’ second birthday presents: a set of tin cooking utilities, a chocolate cake, a cheque for £5 from Grandpa Gutmann, and a lovely mackintosh and hat with little green flowers. The toddler was especially ecstatic to get a petticoat from her Canadian aunt: ‘Frieda has one which was sent from America, which Shura has clearly secretly admired and coveted for months.’ Now that Shura had one too, the two sisters were frolicking around the house in their flimsy petticoats. ‘Shura is becoming a very beautiful precocious little girl – extremely intelligent,’ Ted proudly wrote to Lucas Myers. The three children used to play with the Compton children and Elizabeth remembers Shura as ‘a silent and sad child, and we never saw Ted give any indication that she was his daughter.’
Assia had no one to turn to and, although her relationship with her younger sister Celia had been strained from childhood, she sent her a very alarming letter on 11 March, a few days after Shura’s second birthday. ‘I’m clearly ill. The last four years have been a strain, simply too hard to bear.’ She begged Celia to rush from Canada, ‘I cannot tell you what pleasure and reassurance that would give me … please come, Cillik. Somehow arrange it, before either of us dies.’
Several times in the past, reaching impasses in her relationship with Ted, Assia channelled her frustration into telling him to vanish from her life. This time, she pointed her rage against herself. ‘This summer I’ve been literally suicidal,’ she wrote to Celia. She had made a few attempts on her life in the past but they seemed to be demonstrative, a plea for sympathy. It was done always within reach of help and she never took any risks or reached a point that required medical intervention. This time she felt a touch from death’s door. Though she could go back to London with her daughter, Assia dismissed the idea. Just a year had passed since her triumphant Sea Witch campaign but she already felt over the hill professionally: ‘I don’t have the self confidence for advertising any more, things are very difficult in advertising now.’ For her, it was living with Ted, or nothing.
She wrote a will and l
eft the sealed envelope in her desk drawer, appointing her sister as Shura’s legal guardian. ‘I also hereby bequeath to you, or to you to bequeath to Shura when you see fit, all my worldly goods, manuscripts etc,’ she wrote to Celia. She was well aware of the financial value of Hughes’s and Plath’s manuscripts – Ted boasted that he could sell every page of verse he wrote, even one with only ten lines all crossed out, for as much as £7 or £8. She selected about 25 to 30 pages of Plath’s manuscripts and sent them to her sister, to help secure Shura’s future. Celia Chaikin recalls that the manuscripts were not poetry but prose, part of a story or a novel, with Plath’s handwritten corrections. Assia packed two trunks to be shipped to Canada and made out a cheque for $1,200 to pay for Shura’s airfare and initial necessities when the time came. ‘I couldn’t bear some bloody woman looking after Shura. She is all I have. I adore her, as I only adored Mutti.’
Seventeen
Banished
Devon–London, spring 1967–winter 1967
Ted Hughes had not noticed the two packed trunks in Assia’s study; and with Sylvia’s papers chaotically scattered all over the place, he did not detect the disappearance of a few dozen sheets of manuscript. But first and foremost, he had no inkling of the emotional fluctuations that Assia was going through. On 27 April he wrote a six-page letter to his brother, sympathising with his mother’s suffering and his father’s depression; the letter lacks any mention of Assia’s despair. Celia was apprehensive when she received her sister’s letter but, being a housewife and mother of three small children, grounded in Montreal by her modest means and the needs of her family, she could not fly over to stand by her sister. She advised Assia to return to Canada. Assia declined: she refused to leave Ted even for a short while, fearing that in her absence another woman would soon take her place.