by Yehuda Koren
It is clear that by January, Assia had made up her mind to take her own life and not to leave her child behind. If she had wished, she could have used one of the au pair’s days off or sent her away to town on some pretext. But the flicker of hope, the horror of taking Shura’s life, and her father’s grief, kept her going. Her mind was filled with the gas fumes and every friction with Ted could have ignited them. The deed was finally done on an impulse, using Else Ludwig’s unexpected visit to her friend. Assia knew that she had no more than three hours in which to execute it all: to prepare the letters, clear the kitchen, lay the blankets, close the windows, swallow a package of pills gulping whisky, carry Shura from her bed, and turn on the gas taps. The use of multiple methods indicates that she was past the point of no return, and did not wish to be saved.
Twenty-one
Agony
March–July 1969
A Canadian police officer knocked at midnight on Dr Lonya Gutmann’s door in Montreal, to notify him of the death of his daughter and granddaughter. He travelled to London on his own, Celia was anxious to attend her sister’s funeral but they could not afford the expensive ticket. ‘I knew she would one day, she has threatened for years, in her letters to me, but no one could stop her, it was just a matter of time,’ she wrote to Patricia Mendelson.
In the British papers that week, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s week-long, anti-war protest in bed made headlines, as well as the Reverend Ian Paisley’s imprisonment in Northern Ireland and the arrest of ten people following a nude play in New York about Che Guevara. The crime columns of the London newspapers ran items about the strangling of a wife in her home, a jail sentence for a man who killed a girl when he was thirteen, and the death of a girl who set fire to herself near the Arc de Triomphe. There was even an item about a dog that starved to death after being locked up in a flat for three weeks; the owner was fined £10 and was barred from keeping a dog for five years. But there was not a word about the ghastly deaths of Assia and Shura Wevill.
The local press in the Clapham Common area that week reported a baby girl’s cot death, as well as two incidents of children who died in house fires: the four Pollock siblings who were trapped in their home when fire broke out in the first-floor flat, and a two-year-old baby whose bedding caught fire. Two suicides made headlines; a company manager who gassed himself in his kitchen after returning from hospital following an operation for removal of stomach ulcers and a 56-year-old woman who took an overdose of anti-depressant capsules. However, the double death at 3 Okeover Manor was kept away from the public.
It was the second time that the press refrained – for some mysterious reason – from reporting the death of the spouse of Ted Hughes; in February 1963, there was no word of Sylvia Plath’s suicide and again in March 1969. Only one small, local newspaper, The South London Press violated what amounted to a total hush-up. But even there, the item was printed at the bottom of page 13 and squeezed under a much lengthier report entitled ‘Luxury flat tenants object to rent rises’. The laconic heading read, ‘Mother-girl inquiry opens’, and the body of the item stated that ‘poet and author Ted Hughes gave evidence of identification at Southwark on Tuesday, when the coroner opened the inquest’. It omitted any hint of an intimate connection between Hughes and the deceased or that he was the father of the child. The press continued to ignore the tragedy even when, in mid April, Hughes was summoned to the Coroner’s Court and, in front of eight jurors, was questioned about his relationship with Assia Wevill and about her mental health. Hughes, already a well-known poet, was presented as a friend of the Wevills, and the fact that the dead girl was his daughter was not disclosed at all. To save Hughes further discomfiture, HM Coroner, Mr A Gordon Davies told the jury that he did not feel it necessary for them to read the private letters that were discovered in the death flat. ‘I had been a friend of the family for about six years,’ The South London Press reported Ted Hughes as saying. Assia was described as an attractive divorcee. ‘As long as I have known her – about six years – she was subject to depressions,’ quoted the South London Advertiser and News, hinting at the cause of death.
In her will, Assia expressed a distinct wish for her ‘cadaver to be buried in any rural cemetery in England, the vicar of its parish not objecting to its burial’. She went into the smallest detail and asked that the parish church be paid £50 for the permission. In spite of her wish Hughes decided on cremation and instructed Ashton’s Funeral Directors to organise the funeral for Friday, 28 March, giving Assia’s father time to get to England for the service.
Leafing through Assia’s address book, Hughes telephoned her friends. Eda Zoritte-Megged, the wife of the Israeli cultural attaché in London, remembered Ted’s ‘hoarse, grave voice, as if his shadow was speaking from inside him’. His first words were, ‘“Assia is dead.” After a pause he added, “And Shura as well”.’ Hughes was very laconic in his calls and no questions were asked. Like all the others, Zoritte-Megged tried to remember her last encounter with Assia and wondered if she could have done anything to stop her. That winter, Assia was translating from Hebrew Zoritte-Megged’s play Last Game. The heroine, Bilha, was a lonely forty-year-old Israeli woman, deserted by her husband, and the play described her last day, a much-anticipated meeting with her estranged husband, in which her illusions were shattered one by one. In the last scene, the heroine is standing by the window, about to throw herself down. Assia complained that the play depressed her and Zoritte-Megged suggested that she put it aside for a while. Nevertheless, Assia staggered on and completed the translation just before going on her last house-hunting expedition with Ted. Keith Gems recalled that the week before, Assia had phoned his office and asked to see him but he told her that he was too busy. She wished to speak to his wife Pam but he forgot to pass on the message. Martin Baker remembered that he promised to phone Assia that very Sunday but failed to do so. And Patricia Mendelson could not forgive herself for not inviting Assia and Shura for the customary Sunday lunch.
Hughes notified some of his own friends as well. ‘I asked him if there was anything I could do. “Nothing that anyone can do. Send flowers”,’ Richard Murphy recalled the answer. Murphy was reading Sir Thomas Browne at the time and copied in his notebook the following quotation: ‘who can but pity the merciful intention of those hands that do destroy themselves?’ Soon afterwards Murphy wrote three couplets for the dead child:
Lullaby
Before you’d given death a name
Like Bear or Crocodile, death came
To take your mother out one night.
But when she’d said her last good night
You cried, ‘I don’t want you to go’,
So in her arms she took you too.
Finishing the round of calls, Hughes sat down and wrote a note to Brenda Hedden, letting her know that he would be detained in London until the funeral. ‘Ted told me that he was poisoned by his obsession with the words “black” and “death”, which affected not just him but everybody around him. He vowed that if he survived the ordeal and found strength to go on writing, he would break away from these topics. As distraught as he was, he sent his love, and asked me to be strong and take it easy’.
Assia’s unsigned will made it invalid so that the immediate beneficiary was her father. Her lawyer could have dealt with her estate, but he was not called upon to do so. Hughes, who had no legal standing, was the one who took over and decided what was to be done. When Dr Gutmann visited the flat, he read the will and collected as many personal items as he could push into his suitcase and set aside those that he wished Ted to ship to him later. Hughes phoned Chris Wilkins, who was named as the executor of the will. They met in Assia’s flat. ‘He was extremely distraught, his eyes red from weeping. He was bewildered by – and I think suspicious of – the fact that I had been named in the will,’ remembers Wilkins. ‘After he told me that the will was not signed, he had nothing further to do with me.’ Wilkins left the flat and never picked out the mementoes that Assia bequeathed
him.
Friday was a bleak and windy day and, wrapped in their coats, twenty people or so, most of them Assia’s colleagues from work, assembled at 9.30 in the funeral parlour, which was just across the road from the death flat. Mrs Jones, the neighbour from flat number 2, shook Ted’s hand and noticed that his sweater was worn-out at the elbows. She was remorseful for not being quick enough to smell the gas, and not insisting on having Assia’s door broken open sooner. In the undertaker’s car, which followed the flower-covered hearse, Ted looked completely crushed and disconsolate, remembers Peter Porter, who was there with his wife Jannice. It was Dr Gutmann, sitting next to Ted, who was whispering some words of comfort. The funeral procession stopped at Lambeth Cemetery, South London, and they all parked next to a red-brick one-storey building surrounded by wide, lush stretches of turf, a towering chimney at the back.
Inside the small, white-walled chapel, Hughes and Dr Gutmann sat in the front row, deadly silent. No one in the small gathering was able to stand up and eulogise Assia and Shura. It was left for the vicar to mutter a few words, which Edward Lucie-Smith found jarring and tactless. ‘Ted was like a pillar of stone, tears streaming down his cheeks and nose,’ he recalls. Nathaniel Tarn felt uneasy with the Christian ceremony, with no Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. Soon after, he wrote a ‘Requiem pro duabus filiis Israel’ (‘A Requiem for Two Daughters of Israel’), which he dedicated ‘to A & S’:
Daughter of daughter in the founding line
these daughters of the people gone confused
the alien language squatting on our tongues
while from the coffin her clear cry for help
participation and a place to sleep
in death’s white syllables went misunderstood
we gave her up now to the lapping fire
to Terezin Auschwitz and Buchenwald
for laziness for emptiness of spirit.
Silence prevailed, as all heads turned to the right. ‘The memory of the two white coffins waiting before the fire curtain, the one, an adult coffin, and the other, a diminutive shape, will always haunt me,’ says Peter Porter. Once the coffins disappeared behind the metal door, the participants were quick to disperse, not even stopping at the signpost outside the crematorium, which bore the note, ‘Flowers to the memory of Assia and Alexandra Wevill’. ‘It was terribly upsetting,’ remembers Patricia Mendelson. ‘Normally you wait outside for the ashes for an hour or so, shake hands and comfort one another, but we all left as quickly as we could.’ Edward Lucie-Smith stopped the hasty withdrawal by inviting all to lunch. ‘I felt that it mustn’t end like this, and I led them to San Frediano, a fancy Italian restaurant in Fulham Road. We were about ten people, including Ted, and I picked up the bill for the enormous lunch.’ After the meal, Ted went straight to Waterloo station and boarded the train to Devon. The following day, he took his car and drove to the nearby village of Bondleigh. There he met Brenda, who had come with her two daughters for a weekend with Trevor, her former husband. ‘Ted was in deep shock, and he was relieved that Assia’s death was not in the papers,’ she recalls.
Upon returning to Montreal, Lonya Gutmann turned his flat into a shrine for Assia, surrounding himself with her mementoes, which were lying everywhere. ‘I can’t understand it,’ he told Celia: ‘People were killed in Bergen Belsen, and here’s a woman who kills herself because of her love for a man.’ Celia was given Assia’s jewellery box and could not part with her sister’s bracelets, wearing them all the time. ‘I found two strands of her hair tangled in her necklace, it tore my heart.’
With his sister’s help, Hughes started disposing of Assia’s effects. Olwyn Hughes remembers that Assia’s furniture was taken to Harrod’s sales rooms. The proceeds from the sale were sent to her father. Assia and Shura’s clothes were given to the Oxfam shop opposite their flat to be sold for charity. It is not known what became of the valuable netsuke collection and Assia’s paintings, including the portrait that she did of Hughes. Ted phoned Martin Baker, Assia’s friend from Ogilvy, and told him that Assia had left him some of her records. ‘He invited me to come and pick whatever I wanted, after he and Olwyn sorted the flat out,’ remembers Baker. ‘I called three weeks later to set the time, but the tone was so frosty, that I decided that I didn’t want anything to do with the Hugheses any more.’ Patricia Mendelson had a better experience. She was asked to come to the flat and help Ted and Olwyn go over the things; she was the only one of Assia’s beneficiaries who actually got what Assia intended her to have: a white china candelabra with blue ornaments that Assia used at special dinner parties, a Victorian mirror and the still-life miniature painted by Assia, with a cockroach and a bee on either side of a bowl of fruit.
In a crate, Hughes packed Assia’s photo albums, Persian carpets, the mementoes she received as a baby from her grandparents, her white baby dresses and shoes, and her share in the family heritage: silver cutlery and embroidered and initialised damask tablecloths and napkins. All were sent to Montreal. The ship caught fire and the cargo took months to arrive but, luckily, Assia’s crate was among those that were not damaged. Hughes gathered Assia’s papers, her diaries, her correspondence with him and with others, and dozens of books from her library: some that he gave her as presents but many books that she bought for herself, or owned in her previous marriages. The last addition to her library was just days before she died: Selected Poems of Vasco Popa. Hughes wrote the introduction to the book but, since there was no presentation inscription, only Assia’s signature with the date, one can assume that she bought the book herself.
He loaded it all in his car and stopped at Ashton’s Funeral Directors to pick up the two urns. For some reason, he did not have them buried in Lambeth Cemetery but took them with him to Devon. He had not decided what to do with them: a furtive burial or scattering the ashes. For the time being, he kept the urns in his bedroom at Court Green and, when he later moved to Yorkshire, he took them with him. In a statement he later made to the US Immigration Department he summed up the years after Plath’s suicide, as ‘a permanent emergency at sea in a slowly sinking ship’.
All through the funeral, Fay Weldon kept rehashing her last conversation with Assia, just a few months earlier. Assia had asked Fay if she would take Shura, should something happen to her. ‘I thought she was afraid of some kind of terminal illness, and said, “Of course I would”. I loved Shura, she was a delightful child, and I could easily have brought her up with my own three children. Killing your own child is inconceivable, but when I came home, my Irish cleaning lady said, “Of course, if you decide to go you must take your child with you.”’
On 5 February 1963, just six days before her suicide, Plath had written the following disturbing lines in ‘Edge’. The protagonist has taken her children and ‘folded/Them back into her body …’ Professor Richard Larschan thinks, ‘Medea-like, Plath seriously contemplated destroying the life of her children.’ Plath is generally perceived as a responsible adult and a loving mother, who before turning on the gas taps, took care to protect her children. ‘In my mother’s view,’ writes Professor Anita Helle, Sylvia Plath’s second cousin, ‘the unpardonable crime Plath had committed in taking her life, was the refusal to mother, to uphold the maternal tradition, its sanctity and its essential righteousness. “What a selfish thing to do, leaving two children.”’
Researchers Brian Barraclough and E Clare Harris found an average of sixty murder-suicide incidents in England and Wales each year between 1988 and 1992, a large proportion of which involved a mother who killed her child and herself. Often it was a disturbed form of love, and these mothers were found to have been extremely caring parents up to the killing. Dr Philip Resnick, a renowned American forensic psychiatrist and leading expert on filicide, defined five types of filicide: altruistic, acute psychotic, killing an unwanted or illegitimate child, death as a result of a fatal maltreatment and, the rarest of all, killing children out of revenge, most often for infidelity, in order to make the other parent suffer.
The most common motive – 56 per cent – was ‘altruistic’. ‘Women have a much higher incidence of altruistic killing, because they view themselves as more inseparable from the child than the father. Through the depressed woman’s skewed vision, the world can look utterly treacherous, and to take the child with them is to do the child a favour,’ explains Dr Resnick, whose groundbreaking research on the subject was published in the year of Assia’s death. ‘The mother knows the nature and quality of her act, and that killing is legally wrong; however, the mother often believes she’s doing what is morally right for her child.’ These mothers see their children as an extension of themselves, do not want to leave them motherless in a cruel world and believe that the child will be better off in heaven with them. The mother sees ‘a hell on earth. It’s so miserable that she can no longer stand to live,’ believes Dr Resnick. ‘To leave that child in that world … and motherless, on top of it, will be more terrible than to murder.’
Shura was at the core of her mother’s existence but almost non-existent in her father’s life. In letters to family and friends, Hughes proudly detailed every accomplishment and witticism of Frieda and Nick but nothing of Shura. Only once in his extensive correspondence with his brother Gerald did he mention Shura, and even that was in passing, describing how much he needed a nanny for his children, like the one Assia has for ‘her little girl’. ‘Her’, not ‘our’. When describing their life in Ireland, Ted even bothered to mention the maid, Teresa, but no word about Shura. In the few posthumous poems that he wrote about Assia and mentioned Shura, he referred to her as Assia’s daughter only; never once ‘mine’, or ‘ours’, or by her name. ‘Her only daughter’s/ Otherwise non-existent smile’ (‘Chlorophyl’). ‘As your own hands, stronger than your choked outcry,/Took your daughter from you’ (‘Descent’).
Fay Weldon recalls a visit with her husband to Assia’s flat on Clapham Common; Ted gave Shura wine to drink and she danced and danced until she dropped into sleep. ‘It was very sadistic on his part, and I’m sure he would not have dared to do the same to Frieda. But after all, Shura was the illegitimate child, the daughter of the mistress,’ Weldon says. Assia complained to Martin Graham how upset she was that Ted was only interested in Plath’s children and not in Shura. The burden of caring for the little girl, emotionally, physically and financially, always rested on her alone. She was quite certain that with her gone, Shura would be a second-class child in the Hughes’s household. A few weeks after the suicide, Al Alvarez jotted down in his diary a conversation he had with Olwyn Hughes, who said, ‘she [Assia] could hardly leave Ted with yet another motherless child.’ Assia’s murderous act was the outcome of distorted over-responsibility, a manifestation of altruistic filicide. At the decisive moment, she declined to send Shura overseas to an aunt who had never seen her and was weighed down with her own three children. She also feared that Shura was too old to be adopted and did not wish her to grow up alone as a foster child, an orphan. In her letter of condolence, Patricia Mendelson wrote to Assia’s sister, ‘Thank God Assia took her with her. Shura loved her Mummy so much and already suffered so much by the instability of Ted’s relationship. She would be heartbroken each time he went away again. Assia’s loss would have dealt her a blow she could never have recovered from.’