by Yehuda Koren
Apparently, writing a will and sending the SOS letter had a positive effect on Assia: having resolved to end her misery and attended to her daughter’s future, she seemed to find her sense of control over her life restored. It also gave her energy to plod on. She persuaded herself that it was only a passing fit of depression, not admitting that the immanent failings in her relationship with Ted were sweeping her down into a miry pit.
All those months, Hughes was busy organising an International Festival of Spoken Poetry with Patrick Garland and he involved Assia in it as well. Already in 1966, with his close friend Daniel Weissbort, Hughes had launched Modern Poetry in Translation, featuring Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, Czech Miroslav Holub, Yugoslav Vasco Popa and the Israeli Yehuda Amichai. Hughes called Amichai’s poetry ‘the under song of the people’, and envied his ability to read the Bible like a newspaper, weaving biblical threads and elements from ancient Jewish history into a modern, secular imagination. In Weissbort’s view, Amichai was ‘a sort of guide, a Virgil for Ted in this ancient world’. In a conversation around the table of his friend and neighbour, the children’s writer Michael Morpurgo, Hughes declared that ‘he would have preferred to be Jewish, rather than question mark Anglican’. Horatio Morpurgo, Michael’s son, sensed that Judaism fascinated Hughes and that he valued ‘the spiritual tenacity and the receptiveness, that had, over the centuries, kept the Jews culturally confident in spite of everything, making them so fertile in religious ideas.’ But Hughes’s instant affinity with the Israeli poet also stemmed from more personal reasons. ‘It came at a critical point in his own life, and helped him withstand the traumas of that period,’ explains Weissbort. Amichai was his favourite poet, and he never travelled without a copy of one of his books. Amichai was his oxygen mask when he felt that his own writing was blocked.
It was his close friendship with Yehuda Amichai and Hughes’s forthcoming journey to Israel, scheduled for March 1997, that made him give a rare personal interview to Eilat Negev. Hughes said, ‘Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist. When a person is hurt, his immune system comes into operation, and a self-healing process takes place, mental and physical.’ He called art ‘a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process.’ He said that the poems of Yehuda Amichai were full of evidence of pain and disruption but had a great ability to heal, unlike Plath, who ‘tended to focus on the pain and to scratch at the wound. If she had been able to free herself from that one wound that wracked her, she might have changed, led a normal life, even perhaps have felt healthy enough to stop writing.’
Wishing to publish more poems of Amichai, Hughes suggested that Assia be the translator. ‘Ted saw Yehuda as a life force that would do Assia good,’ Weissbort recalls. Assia was eager to comply. Hughes was thinking of a full volume, and informed Amichai of his plan. He assured him: ‘my wife grew up in Israel, and that they have already translated a number of Amichai’s poems together; he promised to be there for her if she needed to consult him. Assia allotted an hour every morning and an hour in the afternoon for translating the poems, which were due to be published by Cape Goliard, with Olwyn Hughes as the literary agent for the project. Assia’s selection of twenty poems from the large corpus of Amichai is intriguing. ‘Dates are already in view/In which you no longer exist,/Already a wind blows clouds/Which will not rain on us both.’ (‘Like our Bodies’ Imprint’.)
Since leaving Palestine in 1946, Assia had not read, written or spoken Hebrew and only in jest scattered a few words here and there in her correspondence with her sister or with Ted. She was out of touch with the changes in the resurrected language and its budding literature but, apparently, her childhood and adolescence in Tel Aviv, as well as her good ear for languages, furnished her with a firm enough base to produce very eloquent translations of poetry. Weissbort thinks that the fact that she was not a practising poet acted in her favour: ‘it meant she won’t try to do anything fancy with the poems.’
A few days before the gala opening of the International Festival of Spoken Poetry, Assia was delighted to get a postcard, addressed to ‘Mrs Assia Hughes’. Ruth Fainlight invited her and Ted to stay over for the whole duration of the festival: ‘it will be very convenient both for the Festival Hall and for Shura, (having children to amuse her, babysitter, etc).’ The five days between 12 July and 16 July at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room were beyond Assia’s wildest dreams; she was taking part in the greatest literary party of the time, rubbing shoulders with W H Auden, Robert Graves, Pablo Neruda, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsberg and Bella Akmadulina. She walked tall at Ted’s side, reigning together as ‘the royal couple’ of the festival. Heads turned whenever she and Ted took their seats in the auditorium or attended a reception. At last she was an acclaimed society lady, attaining her dream of a grand literary salon.
Film-maker Mira Hamermesh attended one of those parties, and was standing at the rear of the hall next to Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe:
… when the entrance door opened like a gate, and a couple emerged. I’ve never seen such beauty in my whole life. I asked Ruth, who are these gorgeous people, and she said, Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill. I thought to myself, could she be the Assia I lost contact with some twenty years ago? She and Ted walked towards us, and Alan introduced me. Assia reached out her hand majestically and muttered in her colonial voice, ‘how do you do?’ I teased her, ‘Where is my choker?’
Assia’s haughtiness melted away and the two women fell giggling into each other’s arms; they were inseparable throughout the evening. ‘What an insane week that was,’ Assia later wrote to Amichai. ‘I seem to remember us there in P Grady’s Seventh Salon, like the publicum in the Coliseum, watching ourselves being watched, the gladiators being our secret selves.’
Assia instantly fell for Yehuda Amichai and his Hannah who, like her and Ted, had experienced the joys and torments of an illicit affair; the 43-year-old poet had left his wife a few years earlier, after falling in love with Hannah, a young fellow teacher. They had been waiting impatiently for Amichai’s much-delayed divorce to come through. ‘You were the most agreeable guests we have ever had,’ Assia wrote to her new Israeli friends after their overnight stay at Court Green. She found common ground with Amichai, who had fled Nazi Germany as a child with his parents, just like her.
With the ball over, Court Green received them with Edith Hughes’s continuously failing health and her husband’s constant irritability. Ted was so exhausted after the festival that he lapsed into lethargy, and was bedridden with excruciating back pains. It was the summer holidays and the children were unruly, and Assia complained to the Amichais: ‘they blow soap bubbles in the yard, and Shura’s profanities grow daily more amazing.’ The deadline for the book approaching, she needed more time for herself and, together with Ted, compiled and introduced a set of rules for the children ‘to annoy [them] less’.
For Ted’s thirty-seventh birthday, Assia bought a green leather-bound edition of his first book, The Hawk in the Rain, which was republished after Plath’s suicide and dedicated ‘To Sylvia’: on the first page of this expensive collector’s item Assia wrote: ‘for my most darling Ted’ and added a card that she made herself. It was entitled, ‘for sweet Ted on his birthday some apples’, and she painted three stamp-sized scenes with apples: a tree with one red apple, a fruit bowl with a heart-shaped apple and Wilhelm Tell’s son, an arrow cutting the air towards the apple that was placed on his feathered hat. On lifting each drawing, like a paper scroll, a short rhyme was revealed: ‘Apple, apple/on the Tree,/I love Ted/Does he love/Me?’ Underneath the bowl of fruit, it read: ‘Apple, apple/ In the bowl,/Say I’m cold,/In my South/Pole!’ Under the Wilhelm Tell scene Assia wrote, ‘Apple, apple/On the hood/Tell how I’m,/Trying to be/good …’ She was just past forty, but her love for Ted remained as fresh and naïve as a schoolgirl’s.
The Amichai project was an opportunity for prolific collaboration, weighing words and seeking meanings toge
ther but it did not shield Assia and Ted from the sore points in their life. ‘Things have reached a pitch of mild disaster,’ Assia wrote to her friend Patricia Mendelson. ‘Ted is exhausted with the war between parents and me, and I seem to be the most expendable factor.’ Edith Hughes was moving from one bout of illness to another and it dawned on Ted that she would never get better as long as she and Assia lived under the same roof. To geth his and Assia’s life back on track, he first had to get his mother strong enough to return to her home, and then look for a new house for him and Assia, far from both devon and Yorkshire. Until he could pull it off, Hughes initiated a disengagement plan: Assia and Shura would have to return to London. She would work there for four days a week and come to Court Green at weekends. ‘All that remains are some photographs. Is this all there is to life? Just some photographs and passports?’ she wrote to Patricia with exasperation. Hellish as it was, Court Green was still the only permanent dwelling that they had together, and being banished to London was ‘terrible on the children, insufferable for Shura’.
The decision was taken in haste, culminating in Assia’s feverish rush to London, to try to find a job within three days. She was dashing from one interview to another: ‘at night I took a sleeping pill and just collapsed into bed.’ When she spoke to Ted over the phone, he told her that Shura was weeping incessantly. Assia mobilised her advertising colleagues to help her find a job, not stopping at her husband, who made some inquiries on her behalf. She met Royston Taylor, who had been David Wevill’s group head, and they discussed their love lives over lunch. ‘She told me that things were not going well with Ted Hughes,’ says Royston, whose marriage had broken up following an affair and whose wife was divorcing him. Royston secured her a job interview at Ogilvy & Mather, which she passed with flying colours and was offered a good contract. The following weekend, Royston took his two sons for a holiday in Cornwall and stayed the night at Court Green. ‘When I arrived, Ted Hughes was out at the pub with his father. Assia told me she felt that his parents were blaming her for Sylvia’s suicide. Ted hadn’t come back when I went to bed – his car coming out backwards at a hell of a lick, nearly crashed into mine in the coach entrance.’ Royston thought that Court Green was very gothic, rambling and badly lit. He shared a room with his sons, which Assia described as ‘smelling of a dead cat’; it overlooked the graveyard, which seemed spooky in the moonlight. When they left the next morning Ted was not about and Frieda and Nicholas ran after Royston’s car, begging his boys to stay.
Assia and Shura moved into flat Number 14 at 51 Marlborough Place, in affluent St John’s Wood. From his perspective, she was on dry land while he was still battling the waves and when they had a vile phone conversation, he put the blame on the domestic strain, the children, his ailing mother and bored father, which were fouling his mood and hindering him from writing.
Hughes’s friend, the Hungarian poet Janos Csokits, felt that the parting was meant to be kept a secret. Chatting with Assia at a bookshop in London, he was uncomfortable when the following day Olwyn Hughes happened to call him and inquired how Assia was. He answered laconically, ‘Sad.’ Olwyn asked whether Assia was still living in Devon, and he declined to answer. Csokits was quick to update Ted Hughes on the conversation and assured him: ‘as long as Assia belongs to you, I would respect your wishes concerning her,’ but declared that he would not criticise Assia ‘only because Olwyn wants me to do so’. The network of informants was quick to pick up the news and spread it around. Ted’s father phoned Hilda in Yorkshire, and she immediately wrote to Aurelia Plath to say how relieved and glad she was ‘that Assia had returned to London along with her furniture’. The grandmother was told that the children did not appear to miss Shura and ‘they were getting more attention now than they had had for some time’.
Assia feared that the separation might be irreversible and, when she met Richard Murphy, she asked him if he was sensing the same mood between her and Ted, as the one he had felt ‘between him and Sylvia three months before Sylvia’s suicide’. Murphy replied, to give her hope, that it was ‘altogether different’. But unlike their previous cooling-off period in the autumn of 1963, when Devon was out of bounds for Assia, this time Court Green was her second home. She and Ted resumed their correspondence and he let her in on every bit of the daily routine in Court Green.
Hughes now had a foothold in London and brought with him his flower poems and playing-card poems for Assia to illustrate. He celebrated Christmas in her flat with his sister and the three children and Olwyn Hughes recalled that the dinner was ‘a good feast’ and that she dropped the turkey at one point. These were days of grace after a dreadful year, and the holiday season allowed the anticipation of a better 1968. Assia harnessed her artistic talent to make a New Year card. She painted two winged angels, and typed her prayer on a narrow scroll, which was the angels’ gown:
Please God, send Ted a happy year – send him the Year he has waited for so long. And may he have more money than he absolutely needs, so that he won’t ever again worry about ending up without any. And please God, make him feel truly well and in full control of his body – and make his spirit fiery and splendid as ever and, if you can spare it, God, more so than ever. And please heal all his bruises and his many wounds. Please make him utterly whole again, because he’s one of your best creatures. And, please, make him forget our awful tribulations of the last year – and please restore him his heart wholly. And please ask him to forgive me my pride and its consequences. Look after him, God, because he’s rare and marvelous and you spent so much love in creating him. And if it’s the last thing I ever ask you, God, send him back to me loving and sweet as he was before our sorrows.
In those very days in Devon, Ted wrote a note of his own, pleading with Assia not to be so stubborn, to stop threatening to leave, to calm down and control her temper; if she endured just a little bit longer, by next year things would change for the better. Though different in style and intensity of emotion, both notes single Assia out as the guilty party, responsible for fouling up their relationship, while Ted remained irreproachable.
Eighteen
Love Me Back or Let Me Go
London, winter–spring 1968
But 1968 was ill-omened from the start. ‘A feeling of last-ditch panic seems to fill the whole of England, and advertising always feels it most immediately, most acutely,’ Assia wrote to Amichai on 11 January. She and her colleagues were made to work ‘like slaves’ until nine or ten o’clock at night: ‘all in order to grab some £1,000,000 account from another agency – but the sensation is that if you don’t do it, you’re out.’ In six weeks, 27 people were fired from Ogilvy: ‘the survivors are treated to little cocktail parties in the evenings, where our brains are then further picked.’ Assia counted herself lucky to be spared and harnessed all her skills for a TV commercial for Vesta Curry; Assia wrote the lyrics and Tom Boyd composed the music for one of the first ready-made TV-dinner commercials.
She apologised to Yehuda Amichai for the inevitable slowdown in her output; when she finally reached home each night she was totally exhausted and obviously she could no longer take her translation work to the office. Hughes helped her by reading her drafts and he ‘combed them a little’. She consulted him when undecided about the choice of words; he agreed with her, for example, that between ‘exercised’ and ‘trained’, the former is more ‘interesting, ambiguous in a desirable sense, whereas if one used “trained”, one would have to qualify it, i.e. “trained” to do what?’ Amichai had a good command of English and Assia relied on his taste and judgement, promising him: ‘if you are unhappy about it, I should change it to “trained”.’
Hughes was pleased with Assia’s work and assured Amichai that he could not have found a better translator for his poems. Assia also put her artistic talents to use and designed the cover of the book, transcribing one of the poems in elaborate ancient Hebrew calligraphy. She was still married to David Wevill but, touching upon another facet of her identity, she tho
ught it well to revert to her Jewish maiden name, which she had not used for the past twenty years. When Nathaniel Tarn edited a special poetry issue of Afrasian, the School of Oriental and African Studies student magazine, he selected four of Amichai’s poems and introduced the translator as Anastassia Gutmann. It seems that at one point or another, Assia toyed with the idea of using the flamboyant Russian name; however, it does not appear in any of her official documents, and she is not known ever to have used this name before. Daniel Weissbort believes it was Ted’s idea to put Assia’s name in bold letters on the cover, an unusual credit for a translator: ‘He really tried to promote her, to make her happy, though I don’t think she had any ambition to become a full-time translator.’ Weissbort did not get the impression that Amichai’s poems drew Assia any closer to her Jewish roots; of the two, Ted showed the deeper interest in Judaism. It always struck Weissbort that in choosing his spouses, Ted went out of his natural element and was drawn first to the New World – Sylvia – and then to the ancient world, symbolised by Assia.
However, the renewed contact with Hebrew and the warm exchange of letters with Amichai made Assia, for the first time, nostalgic for the country she had left behind. ‘Couldn’t the Israeli government need Ted’s presence in Israel next spring, say – it would be splendid to go there – and see you,’ she wrote to Amichai. Watching a BBC documentary on Jerusalem after the June 1967 war, she tried to conjure up the smell of the buses and the dust: ‘and nothing came, only the Indian food smell of the tenants below. How tantalisingly familiar and entirely out of reach Jerusalem looked.’
Assia’s moods became increasingly dependent on Ted’s temper and conduct. ‘Dearest love, sweet Ted. Those were two of the best days for what now feels like years. Thank you,’ she wrote to him on 2 February 1968. ‘We’ve allowed so much scum to come between us. So much irrelevance, they now look like irrelevances. Most miraculous of all is that we have somehow survived – this week was excellent proof to me – I don’t know what it looks like to you.’ Two intimate days with him were enough to keep her going for a while. In the middle of the month, she was again admitted to the Middlesex Hospital in London, with a bout of cystitis. Ted came up from Devon to visit her, phoned several times and sent her letters; to cheer her up, he copied a school essay in the form of a poem that his eight-year-old Frieda wrote.