by Yehuda Koren
Teddy-sweet, go easy on the awful Truths – because knowing it only curdles oneself. I don’t want to know the last-ditch condition of things or persons, I wish I could somehow regain meaningfully that glazed innocence I once had. Ridiculous. But I do like my friends – I want them as I think they possibly are. Knowing any more is more than I can take. I think all the pus should come out in writing – but in real life, I want the people with my glaze. Oh Teddy – I see things very clearly at the moment. Clearer than ever before even For us to continue living separately feels fundamentally wrong, the reasons for it are abstractions. We’re meant to be together. And the children need both of us. And we need both of us, and it’s worth the effort. Yes, the whole effort. No man’s an island, which you’re pretending you are, and I’m persuading myself that I am. I don’t want to be. I want to be with you. Don’t leave it long, dear love, otherwise there will be no means of return to you. I shall have turned into a salt pillar.
Later that day, Assia was summoned to the office of her boss, Dan Ellerington. He had sacked scores of employees at Ogilvy that year – and now he told Assia that he was not satisfied with her output. The campaign that she was working on did not result in enough sales and she was fired. It could not have come at a worse moment. In a profession that had become more aggressive and flashy, with most copywriters in their twenties, her experience and age were working against her. She had the rent to pay, a daughter to bring up – and she was well aware that Ted was not going to support them. The most she could expect from him – judging from the past – was an occasional small loan that he would write down in his ledger, which she would have to pay back without delay. Her good friend Ann Semple, who had been fired two months earlier and went back to Canada, tried to restore Assia’s self-esteem: ‘You were the only REAL LIVE writer left in that hell-hole,’ Sample wrote from Montreal. She urged Assia to fight her terror and financial angst, and get another job quickly: ‘Be calm. Ted will feel your panic otherwise.’
Throughout the winter, Aurelia Plath negotiated with Hughes over her grandchildren’s summer visit. Ted was so reluctant to let them go that he used as an excuse the riots in Chicago following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Hughes had probably told Assia of his apprehension of the grandmother’s influence on his children, or else Assia had read the correspondence; in any case, she decided to write to Mrs Plath and fill her in on Frieda and Nicholas. Aurelia Plath was taken aback but decided to forgo her reservations and the two embarked on an unlikely correspondence. Mrs Plath appreciated Assia’s good will and concern and was willing to forgo her understandable hostility for the sake of having a channel of information about her grandchildren. Assia was the one who broke to Aurelia Plath the good news that Ted had finally booked the flight tickets for the children. Though grateful to Assia, Mrs Plath did not hide her resentment that she did not hear it from Ted. It was Olwyn Hughes who packed the kids off to America, with luggage so minimal that Mrs Plath had to purchase many items of clothing and personal hygiene.
In the mid 1980s, Richard Larschan, now a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, did a televised interview with Aurelia Plath and became her confidant until her death in 1994. As he helped her sort the thousand letters or so that she kept, Larschan noticed some from Assia. ‘I remember registering amazement, that Assia would write so familiarly to the mother of someone for whose death she, in some measure, could be considered at least partially responsible,’ he says. The tone in Assia’s letters was ‘very much that of a daughter seeking parental support’. Assia complained to Aurelia Plath that Ted was brutalising her, with ‘frequent mentions of emotional and physical abuse, some of it, I seem to recollect, sexual’. Larschan read in Sylvia’s letters similar complaints about Ted’s brutality and he was struck ‘by the tremendous resemblance between the two women’s anguished tone’. Aurelia Plath kept aside those of Assia’s letters, together with Sylvia’s, that had controversial contents; all of them were to be opened to the public after her death. Sylvia’s letters were eventually given to Lilly Library, at Indiana University, but Assia’s to Aurelia Plath are still kept back, and are possibly in Warren Plath’s possession.
Nineteen
Despair
London, summer–autumn 1968
When Ted Hughes sold his archives to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1997 it did not include any of his journals. The fact that he did keep a journal was hinted at in his ‘Notes on Letters Home, Revised’, written to Aurelia Plath on 12 January 1975; he said that the allegation that Plath willingly sacrificed herself to his ego will be refuted when ‘her journals of the time, and mine’ are presented to the public. But Plath’s journal disappeared, and Hughes’s were never made available. However, some journal-like entries are scattered in the notebooks that he was using to draft his poems and essays.
One of these rare entries was made on 6 August 1968. That day, Hughes escorted his children to Heathrow airport, seeing them off for the summer holiday with their grandmother. He pulled his notebook out and leafed through to find an empty space. He then jotted down some food-for-thought that eight-year-old Frieda had just left with him: that he ‘ought to marry Ca and B, and then there’ll be one mother each.’ ‘Ca’ was doubtless Carol, the twenty-year-old daughter of his good friend and neighbour Jack Orchard from North Tawton. Carol had finished her training as a nurse and tended to Ted’s mother. ‘B’ was Brenda Hedden, the attractive blonde social worker and mother of two small daughters whom he had known for a number of years.
If Hughes had worried about his children’s reaction towards remarriage, he could rest assured; their yearning for a mother was so intense that they wanted not one, but two. And curiously, although Frieda had known Assia closely for five years and had lived with her and with her half-sister Shura, she did not suggest Assia as her father’s future wife. Did the little girl dislike Assia, or did she grasp her father’s reluctance to tie the knot with his mistress? Frieda’s innovative notion, that he should marry both Carol and Brenda, indicated not only the two women’s prominent presence at Court Green, but also that the eight-year-old sensed the mutual attraction between her father and each of the women. Hughes kept his thoughts to himself and did not comment on his daughter’s idea in his notebook. After watching the plane to Boston take off he caught a bus to town and stopped to buy a few shirts; he was due to fly to Germany on a lecture tour with Assia and Shura. Exhausted, he fell asleep on the bus that drove him to Assia’s new address in Clapham Common.
Royston Taylor, Assia’s former colleague at Ogilvy who was getting divorced, suggested that she take over the lease of his flat in Okeover Manor. Built in 1935 on the north side of Clapham Common, the four-storey block of flats was made from dull brown brick, with a flat, projecting base linked by balconies, an art deco iron gate and a wooden entrance door. Two glass doors opened into a wide hall that led to an inner corridor serving two flats. Hughes accompanied Assia when she went to inspect flat Number 3 on the ground floor. The bare four-bedroom flat overlooked the back yard and a small garden. Number 5 was the London flat of MP Mr Goronwy Owen Roberts, who was Minister of State at the Foreign Office.
Hughes did not want Assia to rent Royston Taylor’s flat ‘because it was “tragic” – he spotted a child’s shoe in a cupboard in the hall,’ as Taylor recalls. Nevertheless, Assia decided to take up the lease, although she had to pay several hundred pounds extra for the new wall-to-wall carpet that Taylor had just put in. Shura occupied the first room on the right; the lounge was on the left side of that corridor, the German au pair Else Ludwig stayed in the next room, while Assia took the large bedroom at the end of the corridor. When Royston Taylor visited Assia some time later, he was struck by the stylish way in which she had furnished and decorated the flat – her utmost pride was the glass-fronted shelved cabinet, about shoulder-high, which displayed her cherished large collection of netsuke. Some dark green hessian in the living room transformed it into a nineteenth-century boudoir.
> The trip to Germany was Assia’s fourth, and she had made each one of them with a different male partner. On the first day, she and Ted visited Beethoven’s house in Bonn and stayed the night at the nearby ancient town of Boppard. She retained bad memories from her visit there with David Wevill six years earlier, when her Jewishness was detected. She now wrote in her diary, ‘In Boppard – evil, dangerous Boppard … The serious, unsmiling, unlovely people. I welcome being an outcast within them. I’m relieved that my only connection with them is historical. I’m about as German as I’m Israeli – in reality, neither. For once, I’m pleased to be unrooted here.’ This time, she decided not to visit her mother’s relatives.
On an impulse, she and Ted decided to spend the next day in Würzburg, Yehuda Amichai’s birthplace. It was a rainy day, and the round trip by train took them six hours. Glancing sideways to make sure that he was not being watched, Ted rapidly incised in the pink stucco façade of the thirteenth-century town hall, ‘Yehuda Amichai born here’. One of the clerks looked down from his office with a flicker of suspicion but was not alarmed enough to call the guards. Hughes was so proud of his audacity that he bought a postcard and reported his feat to Amichai, adding ‘many locals prospering on your absence. Although he signed the postcard ‘Love from Ted and Assia’, Assia felt the need to send her own account on another postcard. Twenty-three years after Germany’s defeat, she was still spotting Nazis everywhere and wrote to Amichai: ‘On the train here I spoke to a round robin of a man who was in the Waffen SS – yes, he knew Vilna backwards, my spine is still practically contracted.’ And in Hebrew, her code language with her compatriot, she added, ‘Me, half-German? No, no, no. Suddenly Germany disgusts me.’ She was very defensive and throughout the visit distorted her perfect German and spoke with a heavy accent and scrambled grammar, hoping to be taken for a foreigner: ‘to be taken for a German, would imply the whole treacherous structure of a German woman with an Englishman. The enemy,’ she wrote in her diary on 8 August 1968.
Neither of Assia’s homelands – Germany nor Israel – provided a safety net and she seemed to be letting go of them both. Hughes crystallised her state of mind perfectly in the poem ‘Descent’ that he wrote decades later: ‘You had to strip off Germany’ and to the list of abandoned identities he also added Russia and British Columbia. Assia was left with England, which in her eyes was epitomised by a life with Ted Hughes.
Hughes hardly spoke that day in Würzburg and Assia was gloomy as well, remembering the charge between them on their first holiday together, when they escaped to Spain in September 1962. Several times she tried to break the heavy silence in the train compartment, drawing Ted’s attention to the swelling on the tip of her nose. A book had fallen on her from the glass vitrine just before leaving home and she thought it most significant that she was hit by their cherished and priceless Book of Hours, a medieval illuminated prayer book. ‘T burst out in impatience – there was nothing remarkable in that book hitting my nose,’ she wrote in her diary later that evening. His blunt reaction filled her eyes with tears: ‘he uses the word sentimental frequently, whenever he refers to love between people. He condemns himself, us, whenever he says it. What he seems to say is that feelings, matters of the heart, matters of my heart, matters of his heart, that were, are unworthy of life. Unimportant.’ Ted’s cynicism distressed her and she fell back on her days with David, as she still did when she was left in the cold. She conjured up a bus trip that she and David had taken ten years earlier, when they were secret lovers. They were cuddling together on the seat, and a woman passenger remarked, to their excruciating embarrassment, ‘Ah, young lovers.’ It was not so much David that she missed, as the state of being wrapped in love.
During the entire German trip Ted’s mood fluctuated, sweeping Assia along with him; she recorded how one moment was ‘bleak with T’s chemistry gone amok, an ugly impatient mood setting in’, and the next, his good nature returned with magical abundance. He bought Shura two little wooden birds and played enchanting serious games with her. Shura called him Daddy and Assia noted that the three-and-a-half-year-old responded to him with complete, but slightly impertinent, adoration. It was a very rare opportunity for the three of them to be together on their own as a family. As the days went by, Ted became more relaxed, and Assia found him beguiling company. ‘This morning T rowed us round the black lake … Shura’s walking stick and the plastic whistle attached to it, her brave participation.’
That night, back in Court Green, Ted was overwhelmed by a dream; Sylvia had returned to life and met all her friends and spent a day and night with her children. Something could have been done to make her stay, but he didn’t know what. At the end of the day she fell asleep and never woke up. This time he sadly acknowledged her death was final.
It was Ted’s thirty-eighth birthday two days later, and Assia presented him with the recently published Selected Poems of Nelly Sachs. A year earlier, this Jewish poet, who had found refuge in Sweden, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature jointly with the Israeli novelist Agnon. Assia inscribed the book, ‘To the master-Netsuke-master, with loving amazement.’ Collecting netsuke was a long-standing passion of Assia’s, which Hughes had recently taken an interest in. He admired Assia’s exquisite taste and perception and complimented her when she returned from a sale of Japanese objets d’art with two extraordinary acquisitions, a mermaid and a couple. Netsuke was a booming market and Hughes instructed his brother Gerald in Australia to buy him some pieces for up to £300, which he hoped to sell for a high profit.
Since separating in the spring of 1959, and overcoming her post-divorce blues, Assia had been keeping in touch with Richard Lipsey, her second husband; by now he had become a distinguished world-renowned economist and immensely rich, due to his bestselling textbook An Introduction to Positive Economics. Three or four times a year, Assia would ring Lipsey and invite herself for lunch. Though increasingly reluctant to meet her, Lipsey found it hard to decline. ‘Her troubles were always the main topic of conversation, and I tried to give her some emotional support,’ he recalls. When they met in the summer of 1968, he still found her stunning; she never lost her fatal attraction and it seemed to him that her beauty would last many more years. She told him that she had broken up with Ted and was living in Clapham Common. ‘All her life she used to say that the greatest disaster that could ever befall anybody is to live in a bedsitter in South London,’ Lipsey says. ‘For her, a garret in Hampstead was immensely better than a house across the river in the south. She threw herself on me, saying she was desperately broke and living in poverty.’ By then, Assia was already working at Charles Hobson and Grey advertising agency, and there is no other evidence to the effect that she was hard pressed for money. Was she simply envious that she was not part of Lipsey’s fortune? And why did she say that she was no longer with Ted? Was it to elicit his pity? Dick finally gave in and, before departing, handed Assia a hundred pounds, telling her, ‘I don’t want to see you again and don’t want anything to do with you any more.’
She also kept in touch with David Wevill and, although it was two years since she had left him, she still remained possessive. Judge Martin Graham, Assia’s friend, was an acquaintance of a young woman who had become David’s girlfriend. ‘His new companion was a very beautiful, leading model from South Africa who came to London to pursue her career. Assia would come around, screaming and banging on the door, making a scene. She had a very volatile temper, and was slightly neurotic, and she couldn’t bear to see another woman living with David.’
But in the summer of 1968, Assia met David to discuss their divorce. ‘For a long time, we knew it was coming. Nothing prevented it, except laziness and inattention,’ Wevill recounts. ‘She admitted that things were difficult with Ted, did not elaborate, but seemed anxious that the decree be made all the same.’ As grounds for divorce Assia agreed to admit to the court that she had committed adultery with Ted Hughes. There was no property to divide, and it was clear that although Shura carried Dav
id’s surname he had no claim for custody over the child. When David came to her flat in Clapham Common to sign some papers, Assia seemed withdrawn and was smoking heavily. ‘I saw Shura – the little creature that I had raised as my own, and grown to like. She did not recognise me, and just accepted me as a visitor.’ David felt a prick in his heart when Assia did not come forward to refresh Shura’s memory. Before departing, she gave him a copy of Amichai’s poems in her translation and inscribed it, ‘If only it could have been different.’ He was troubled by Assia’s sombre mood, because ‘the choice for her in this affair was always between devil or deep sea’. Still, he hoped that she was getting somewhere with her plans. He thought it was best to remove himself from her life, in spite of their mutual affection, ‘so that she might plan more clearly in the direction of Ted, or just for herself and Shura alone … I hoped they could make some kind of life together,’ he wrote to their good friends Patricia and Michael Mendelson. He was afraid for Assia, yet knew that ‘she had this capacity to function and keep on living, she was a creature of life and not despair’.
By 9 October, when the marriage was dissolved by the Honourable Judge Dow, sitting at the Royal Court of Justice in the Strand, David Wevill was already in Austin, Texas. Assia hoped that by making herself legally free for Ted she would speed his decision to marry her.
But secretly, in Devon, Ted gave Brenda Hedden a golden bracelet with a pendant in the shape of a heart, inscribed ‘Ted and Brenda’. It was identical to one that he had already given Assia, so he warned Brenda not to wear it when Assia came down to Court Green. He also secretly gave Brenda a copy of the deeply intimate ‘Lovesong’, creating the impression that she was the inspiration for the poem, which celebrated symbiotic conjugality; the lovers became one, exchanged limbs in their sleep, ‘their brains took each other hostage’. Assia had her own copy of the poem, which was in fact intended for Sylvia.