by Yehuda Koren
His adaptation of Seneca’s Oedipus agonised him and invoked horrible dreams. It needed a lot of rewriting, and Assia’s skiing friend and lawyer, Martin Graham, who dealt with her divorce from Lipsey and later became a judge, recalls that she boasted that she assisted Ted. ‘She was well read and had a good ear for words, but more than that, he wished to give her self-esteem.’ Accompanying Ted to a rehearsal of the National Theatre at the Old Vic, Assia was far from enthusiastic; she thought that the production, directed by Peter Brook and featuring John Gielgud as Oedipus: ‘looks like an exhibit in the Greek Pavilion of Expo ’67. Golden cubes, revolving searchlights, the actors space-suited and a pink phallus 20 feet tall descends properly Deus ex Machina ready for an orgy in the last act. Ugh.’ It was Hughes’s first major work for the theatre and, capturing the excitement of the moment, he scribbled on Assia’s playbill on the gala night, 19 March 1968, that she was ‘the best sight’.
Assia felt trapped, enslaved by her devotion to him but she could endure living apart as long as Ted could promise her a joint future. At any moment she was prepared to follow him anywhere but there were no signs that Hughes was taking any concrete steps towards making her dream a reality. ‘Ted’s father is still there, Emperor of the Barn,’ she complained to Amichai. Hughes was fighting on several fronts simultaneously: his writing, Plath’s legacy and Assia’s pressure, but primarily, his parents’ health and presence.
Already while living together in Devon Assia had bought the book of manners Galateo by Giovanni della Casa. It was a Penguin edition of the famous Italian sixteenth-century book, which has been reprinted throughout the centuries. Based on the principle ‘that no man should do anything to offend or displease another’, it dealt with the foundations of good behaviour: the ills of scandalmongering, contradicting, giving advice, rebuking others and correcting their faults, and how perverseness can part friends: all of these were sources of annoyance. Only one page in the book was annotated and it is unclear by whom: that one should never boast, ‘of his brains, neither should he make a fine tale of his talents and the great things he has done’. A year later Ted composed his own version of house manners, which were meant to help him and Assia reunite in bearable cohabitation. The Draft Constitution of house rules reads like conditions of acceptance rather than suggestions for improvement.
The first item in the two typed pages concerned the children: Assia was expected to play with them at least one hour per day, mend their clothes meticulously and supervise their washing, teeth cleaning and going to bed. She was to teach the children German two or three hours a week. The second batch of rules, innocently headed Cooking, echoes Ted’s longings for Sylvia’s high norms of good housekeeping and disappointment with Assia’s. She’d have to vary her cooking and introduce a new recipe every week. The village bakery would be off-limits to her, and she would have to bake everything herself. She would have to prepare a cooked breakfast for the children, and teach Frieda some simple recipes. As for himself, he was to be totally exempt from doing any cooking and the daily help was to be reduced to one half-day. Every expense and bill was to be methodically registered in a logbook. Assia was ordered to be out of bed by 8 a.m., was forbidden to take a nap during the day, and had to be dressed up properly and not go around the house in a dressing gown. Hughes insisted that she improve her manners and tact, and would be always nice to his friends, including the ones that she despised.
Brenda Hedden, who was a frequent visitor to Court Green, remembers that Assia changed the furniture in the living room, put in exotic ornaments and hung heavy curtains to weigh the room down. Item seven on Hughes’s list reflects his and Assia’s endless arguments over her attempts to make Court Green more agreeable for herself: he thought that she was deliberately trying to erase any memory of Sylvia. She was required to stop pretending to be English, and stick to everything German and Israeli. She was not allowed to discuss him with anyone else. She’d have to promise to stay until the end of the year, and never threaten to leave.
Assia was invited to put forward comments and amendments. If she ever put her reservations in writing, or drafted her own version of the house rules, placing demands on Ted as well, these did not survive. Ted’s edicts were beyond endurance and only increased Assia’s anguish. She wrote to him at the end of March 1968:
This is the ancient steel nib with which I used to write you those broken nervous letters years ago. I wrote you a business letter this morning – through my throat. I’m writing this through my oesophagus, my throat a huge and growing wound. I’m writing to your big hands, to the lovely inside of your wrists, to your best-tempered eyes, to your brains not at all. And I’m not writing from my brain but from well bellow my oesophagus.
I want to know whether you want to mend us because you still love me, because you still feel the animal thing between us (the sight of me in that awful bed must have been pretty unappealing) or maybe you want me as your child keeper only.
I still have ABSOLUTE HOPES that we can build a happy, loving life together. I know that I can still love you fully with all my faculties and my body and my life – my darling Ted.
Open up – again – open out to me, as you used to – my love. And I could flourish under you, and care for you and give you everything I have …
So far, everybody but you and I have been dictating our lives – we need to be alone, to recover from our Intolerable. I feel so full of love to you at your sweet best, I admire you and I am frightened at the power you have over me. No man has ever had this power over me as a woman.
She ended her despondent loving appeal with an ultimatum: if by 8 April Ted did not reassure her of his intentions, she would leave for Canada within two months. ‘Love me back – and if you can’t, then say so, and let me go with whatever peace I can salvage.’ She did not sign the letter but, at the bottom of the page she drew a dying bird, with outspread wings, looking like a woman who had jumped from a roof and was flattened on the ground.
But leaving for Canada was not a real option: Assia hated the four years she had almost been forced to spend there and thought it was a cultural desert. All that was waiting for her there was an ailing father and a sister tied down to her own family. Leaving England would have been a humiliating defeat, a public admission that she had lost the battle.
Hughes was not alarmed enough – or not caring enough – to respond. For years Assia was alternately pressing and begging, bestowing love and ultimatums and he always managed to slip away. Their love was running on parallel rails, sometimes in opposite directions, only occasionally converging. They differed in their perceptions of conjugality and of each other’s attitude. Hughes deflected Assia’s arrows of criticism back at her: she was the source of their troubles; she was the one who was kicking her heels, messing everything up, she was the one who did not make clear what she was willing to do in order to repair their relationship. He reproached her that she only wanted a home for Shura. They had exhausted all words. Only action could change the course of things but Hughes was reluctant to act.
When ultimatums failed to get results, Assia channelled her abysmal despair into writing more wills and testaments. ‘In the event of my death, I wish all my furniture and furnishings to be sold by auction and the proceeds to go towards my estate, which I leave wholly to my only daughter, Alexandra Tatiana Elise Wevill. In the event of my daughter not surviving, I wish the proceeds as well as the rest of my savings at a deposit account at Lloyds Bank, Berkeley Square, W1, to go to my sister.’ She nominated Celia as the beneficiary of ‘any manuscripts of Ted Hughes in my possession, and inscribed books by him as well as all manuscripts and inscribed books by David Wevill.’ She left Celia three oriental rugs, two oil paintings in gilt frames, a nineteenth-century watercolour of an archway, also in a gilt frame, and their precious family heritage of silver cutlery and the plated silver samovar. To her husband, David Wevill, she left her photo albums if ‘he may care to have’ them.
The detailed will indicates that Assia
put a lot of thought into it, matching every item with its appropriate recipient, as if preparing birthday or holiday gifts. However, the short list of people proves how isolated and lonely she was: after fifteen years in England, she had no human safety net, no bosom friends, hardly anyone to turn to in her distress. She gave a Bulgarian rug embroidered with birds to Mira Hamermesh, with whom she had just resumed contact after twenty years of silence. The Mendelsons, whom she and David had befriended in Burma and kept in close contact with since, were invited to choose any ten objects or books from her apartment; to Peter Porter she left ‘any records or books he may care to possess’ and to his wife Jannice, who was the friend and nurse who supported her in her abortion in 1963, Assia left ‘any pieces of jewellery she may care to have’. Fay Weldon, her friend from advertising, was invited to pick any piece or pieces of china and lawyer Martin Graham was offered any ten objects he chose.
Assia remembered each last one of her friends but made one person conspicuous by his absence; she took great pains that Ted Hughes would not own anything that belonged to her and would have nothing to do with her estate. She did not skip his children though: to six-year-old Nicholas, who was ‘too young for possessions, I will all my most tender love’, and ‘to Frieda Rebecca Hughes I will also my love, and all the lace, ribbons and silks she can find, as well as a fine gold chain’.
To her father she left ‘my regret and love’.
To Ted Hughes, ‘I leave my no doubt welcome absence and my bitter contempt.’
She asked for her ‘cadaver to be buried in any rural cemetery in England’ and a tombstone to be erected with the epitaph, ‘Here lies a lover of unreason and an exile.’
Assia was so distraught when writing this will that she made a typing error: she put the date as ‘April 27th, 1967’, while, from the contents of the will, the St John’s Wood address and the reference to the royalties of her Amichai translations in the Cape Goliard edition which she bequeathed to her sister, it is clear that the year was in fact 1968. She left the will unfinished and unsigned. A year earlier, feeling at a dead end, she informed her sister that she had made out a will and nominated her as the executor. But this time, she did not update Celia about the new will. Celia was aware that her older sister was long inclined to depression and that ‘she was fragile and fell apart when life didn’t turn out the way she wanted it’. In her letter to Assia on 30 March 1968, Celia disclosed: ‘We both suffer from insecurity, it’s been ingrained in us.’
Assia and Ted seemed to have exhausted their relationship, drifting to extremes, creating a rift that could not be bridged. But in spite of the bitter strife, the threats, accusations and wills, their core of love was not crushed. That same month Assia bought a copy of Henri Troyat’s newly published Tolstoy and dedicated it to ‘My dear one, my dear one, to him.’ She and Ted planned to celebrate her forty-first birthday together in London and Assia sent Ted a telegram in North Tawton to say she had managed to take the day off. She signed ‘Esther’, reverting to secrecy and to the Jewish name that she never used. Was she obeying Ted’s command? Was he afraid of the village gossips, who knew that in her absence, other women had already entered his life?
Ted’s birthday present to Assia in May 1968 was the two very thick volumes of Philipp Spitta’s monumental biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, to which he added a laconic inscription. Two weeks later, when her translation of Yehuda Amichai was published, an immensely proud Assia handed Ted his copy, with the inscription, ‘My dearest, my lovely lost Ted’, and signed her own name in Hebrew. On the ochre-coloured opening page, in her calligraphic handwriting, she copied out a poem in both Hebrew and English: the first lines read, ‘Open the gate love, rise and open the gate/ Terrified was my soul with a great rage.’ Surprisingly, it was not one of Amichai’s but her translation of the medieval Hebrew poet, Ibn Gabirol; Assia was already thinking ahead and planning her next project, which was a much greater and challenging undertaking.
Poet and critic Pat Kavanagh welcomed Amichai’s book of poems with a rave review in the Guardian. ‘The translations of his Selected Poems by Assia Gutmann are so stunning, such good poems in English, it seems absurd to treat them as translations at all.’ In late June, Ted and Assia collaborated in a George MacBeth BBC Radio 3 programme, promoting the book. Just seven years earlier Hughes shared the same studio with Plath on the programme ‘Two of a Kind’, speaking of their poetry and symbiotic relationship. Now he read Assia’s translations in his deep thundering voice, while her tone was icy and aloof as she introduced the poems and spoke about Amichai’s poetic world. The choice of poems echoed dramatic chapters in Ted and Assia’s lives: Amichai’s ‘My Father Fought Their War for Four Years’, corresponded with Hughes’s own experience, since his father, like Amichai’s, was a First World War veteran. ‘My Parents’ Migration’ paralleled Assia’s own history, since her parents, just like Amichai’s, made the same voyage from Germany to Palestine. Most revealing of all is the selection of love poems: ‘Love appears as the most valuable element in life – but vulnerable, and doomed,’ Assia read her narration, and Ted followed with Amichai’s lines:
A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.
We even flew a little.
The image was a perfect reflection of Ted and Assia’s ill-fated affair but no less of Hughes’s marriage to Plath.
Assia was assembling more translations of Amichai for a Harper & Row edition but she still made time for her old passion, which at last was beginning to materialise: writing a television play. Hughes showed his support by furnishing her with two books on the subject by the legendary Sergei Eisenstein: The Battleship Potemkin and The Film Sense. She prepared an outline for Shelley Shelton, the creative director at Ogilvy, and managed to secure some £8,000 from the agency’s budget; Shelton allowed her the use of the agency’s Super 8 camera and lighting equipment. Assia rented the costumes from Berman’s, a long frilly white dress and men’s period suits. The actors were her office colleagues. ‘I agreed to take part because I was extremely fond of Assia,’ Chris Roos recalls. ‘She was a lady of great integrity, great honesty and extremely good company. We had been spending days on end in the office, playing silly games with quotations, using the Penguin Book of Literary Quotations that was standing on the shelf.’
Assia chose art director Martin Baker to be in charge of photography. ‘It wasn’t a happy film; the mood was subdued and nostalgic,’ Baker recalls. With the tradition of the romantic Russian novel in mind, Assia weaved the story of a love triangle that took place in 1914. Fay Maschler who, with her straight dark hair and oval face, bore a striking resemblance to Assia in her youth, played the heroine, who was wooed by her piano teacher (Jonny Gathorne-Hardy), but her heart belonged to her boyfriend (Chris Roos). When the boyfriend was killed in the First World War, the girl was devastated enough to marry the teacher that she did not love.
The shooting took place over two weekends and, though it was Assia’s first experience as a director, Martin Baker was impressed by her professional conduct and infectious enthusiasm. About twenty minutes of rushes remain of the film, which was shot without sound. The outdoor scenes were shot on Hampstead Heath: again and again, the heroine runs up the hill towards her lover, but when they meet, affection soon dissolves into bitter arguments. When the shooting was over they all went to lunch and Baker took out the camera and panned on the jubilant faces around the table. Assia is seen lifting a plate to hide her face, her hair tied in a striped kerchief. ‘She was very critical of her looks, edgy when people looked at her, and uptight when complimented on her beauty,’ Baker comments.
Her sister Celia recalls that Assia was afraid of getting old and losing her beauty and wished to remain young for ever, like Lorca, her adored poet, who was shot to death in the Spanish Civil War, aged 38. ‘She once said to me, “I’ll k
ill myself at 42.”’ In her letter, written a day before their mother’s birthday, Celia reminded Assia how Mutti, who was 76 at her death, disliked birthdays and how ‘she put cream on her face even on the last day, and was always proud of her legs and unwrinkled face.’ Assia equally abhorred a lined face and a baggy body and her concern for her for ever-young Aphrodite image was echoed in Hughes’s poem, ‘Fanaticism’: ‘“After forty I’ll end it”, you laughed.’ Assia’s friends took her threats lightly and put them down to her frivolity. But as ageing as Assia may have felt, young men in her office thought differently. She ‘was one of the most beautiful human beings I have ever encountered, she wore her beauty innocently, even clumsily, as though she herself were unsure what to do with it,’ in the 23-year-old Chris Wilkins’s words.
Months went by, Assia was due to vacate her St John’s Wood flat, and there was still no sign that Ted was any nearer to making room for her. ‘How I want us to live together, the 5 of us, to make a family again, instead of running our separate nut-houses. These long absences feel so dangerous – they show me that I could live without you, but once I make contact with you again, the total independence seems worthless. Is this the nature of women, or only my own?’ she asked Hughes on 9 July.