A Lover of Unreason

  Al Alvarez believes that, from the outset, Assia wanted Ted because he was Sylvia’s husband; Sylvia was a woman to be reckoned with and Assia’s ‘only way of outdoing her dead rival was in the manner of her death’. ‘Outdo’, in Alvarez’s perception, meant not just to kill herself in the same way as Plath but to kill her child as well, and create not just one tragedy, but a double one. Indeed, there are cases of copycat suicides – an imitation of the suicide of family members, peers, friends or cultural icons such as film stars – but many experts believe they are rare. A study in the American Journal of Epidemiology (15 June 2001) revealed that people were less prone to suicide if they had known someone who had killed himself. The head researcher, Dr James Mercy, argued that exposure to suicide is actually a deterrent.

  Police records show that, in 1969, nearly two thousand women killed themselves in the UK, the largest group comprising the single, separated, divorced and widowed. The modal age was 42 years old: on all counts, Assia fell into the typical category. In 1963, when Plath killed herself, domestic gas was the main method of women’s suicide in England. It began to change due to the detoxification of domestic gas and, by the late 1960s, barbiturate poisoning became the prevailing method. Assia started her quest of dying not with gas, but with the exploration of other options, such as pills and bullets. At the moment of her plunge into death, she intoxicated herself with large quantities of whisky, a drink she was not accustomed to, and an overdose of barbiturates. She switched on the gas, wishing to end Shura’s life painlessly and decisively. ‘Execute yourself and your little self efficiently,’ she had written in her diary three days before the final deed.

  In the weeks that followed, Hughes was in a daze. He kept asking himself how did he not perceive the depth of Assia’s distress. Scores of times over the years they almost separated, but still he felt that they belonged together completely. ‘Assia was my true wife and the best friend I ever had,’ he wrote to Celia Chaikin. Meeting jeweller Pat Torney, he was enchanted by a ring that she had just made; if he had seen it a few weeks earlier, he would have bought it for Assia, ‘because it is more like her than anything I ever bought her.’ Now he felt that he must bury it with her ashes.

  He told Aurelia Plath that he and Assia tried to atone for Sylvia’s death but living in her house drew him and Assia ‘into the utmost nightmare’. He was certain that Sylvia’s suicide brought out all the demons inside him and had a destructive effect on others as well. He asked Aurelia to keep Assia and Shura’s deaths a secret for a while, until he could find the right time to tell Frieda and Nicholas. He also kept it from his parents, fearing that his mother was too ill to withstand the shock.

  With two suicides on his back, Hughes felt as though he was cursed. There was something in him, which was fatal for every woman who got involved with him. He infected them with his black moods, but they did not have the immunity that he had, and could not cope. ‘I think this was very true of Assia’, he wrote to his brother Gerald. In a letter to his close friend Lucas Myers, Hughes took full responsibility for the deaths of his two loved ones, confessing that with Sylvia, it was his ‘insane decisions’, while in Assia’s case, it was his ‘insane indecisions’. He was certain that on that doomed Sunday it was in his power to stop Assia from killing herself, had he ‘only given her hope in slightly more emphastic words’, as he wrote to her sister Celia. He and Assia had experienced similar clashes before, and always one of them sobered up before more damage was done, but their last conversation got out of control. He believed that if Assia had stuck to her plan to go to her friends in Dorset, she would not only have saved herself, but would have dragged him out of his exhaustion and passivity. But she was swept by one of her dark moods and was unstoppable. When interviewed in London in October 1996, Hughes compared the two tragedies in his life. ‘My first wife’s death was complicated and inevitable, she had been on that track most of her life. But Assia’s was avoidable’.

  His first impulse was to escape from the scene of his miseries and, once again, Ireland seemed an island of refuge. He went over to check the Newtown Quaker School in Waterford for his children, and then headed northwest to his friend Barrie Cooke, now living in Thomastown, County Kilkenny. Cooke was rushing around in his studio, packing the eight huge, heavy murals he had been painting for the past eighteen months, when suddenly, Ted appeared in the doorway. They did not exchange a word, and for the next two hours both men were sweating together, loading the panels on the lorry. When it drove away to Trinity College, Dublin, Cooke took out a bottle of whiskey and filled two glasses. ‘I knew Ted as a man always in control, but now he looked choked, on the verge of tears. He said, “There’s been a disaster, Assia killed herself.” There was a long silence. Only later did he mention Shura. I have never seen him so shattered before or since.’ Hughes stayed the night but was too numb to speak. He was envious of the simplicity and harmony that he saw in his friend’s life, the way Cooke combined work and conjugality and seemed to find time for everything.

  Hughes then drove to the town of Cashel, in Tipperary, and went to the Cashel Palace, built in 1730 and home to archbishops, earls and lords. This Palladian mansion had recently been converted into a luxurious hotel. He went two floors down to the sumptuous restaurant but found the meal distasteful. He crossed the corridor and stepped into the Derby Kitchen Bar, and ordered half a glass of brandy. From the windows he could see the illuminated Rock of Cashel, the cornerstone of Christianity in Ireland. It was the first day in many years that he was on his own. He took out his spiral notebook, which he had started in March 1968; it contained drafts of poems, alongside his monthly expenses, written in red ink: postage, phone calls, taxis, hotels, restaurants, cinemas and also a loan of £42 that he gave Assia.

  On page 16 he wrote: ‘Effect of A’s [illegible word] – Disastrous, yes,’ underlining the last words. He felt the pain spreading inside and overpowering him. Awake and asleep, he was seeing Assia’s and Shura’s faces everywhere. A few pages further, in an untitled poem, he lamented his women, ‘with his long face/On their dead souls’. In another poem, on a loose blue sheet of paper, probably from the same period, he tormented himself why was he so destructive towards his nearest and dearest, ‘who were my life’? He never published the poems. Was it because they contrasted the account that he wished to leave for posterity? In 1990 he published the twenty Capriccio poems, revolving around Assia. There is no mention of his own destructive forces and Assia is blamed for consciously burning herself on Sylvia’s funeral pyre.

  Meanwhile in Yorkshire, Edith Hughes appeared to be getting on well since the operation on her knee: her leg healed and she was due to leave hospital. It was nearly two months since she last saw her son, because following Assia and Shura’s deaths, he had avoided his parents and did not visit, phone or write. When his father asked Olwyn what was going on with Ted, she told him of the tragedy but made him vow that he would keep it a secret. But Mr Hughes could not keep silent and broke the news to his wife. Edith was stricken with thrombosis and lapsed into a coma that lasted three days. She died on 13 May and was buried not far from Sylvia Plath. On the day of the funeral, Hughes finally made up his mind to buy Lumb Bank. Already in 1963, he had planned to buy the house and move there with Assia, ‘the sort of place she would have made beautiful’.

  Returning from his daughter and granddaughter’s funeral, Dr Gutmann’s blood pressure had soared up, and he too was stricken with thrombosis. He was hospitalised, to be operated on for the blockage of the veins in his legs, but his only kidney was severely damaged in the operation. He died in Montreal on 29 July. ‘With all the medical terms they give it, I call it a broken heart,’ Celia wrote to Assia’s friend Patricia. Hughes shared the same sentiment and in his condolences to Celia, he admitted that it was Assia’s suicide that gave the ‘final blow’ to both Dr Gutmann and his mother.

  His wife’s and mistress’s suicides were ‘giant steel doors shutting down over great parts’ of himself, he wrote to Lucas Mye
rs in 1984. At that time, while fencing away biographers and journalists who hounded him for details of his life, Hughes began to compose a new verse-version for posterity. He started with Capriccio and then Birthday Letters. In those later writings, he disassociated himself from the two suicides and used the same reasons for both women’s decision to end their lives: a troubled background, a death wish and emotional instability. He linked the two suicides together, making each woman the cause of her rival’s death. Poetically, he described Assia’s suicide as a fait accompli from the outset; she was doomed already when they met. He argued that although Assia fled Nazi Germany, she could not escape the fate of her fellow Jews, and doomed herself to a terrible and untimely death: ‘a long-cold oven/Locked with a swastika’. She was constantly challenging death, and her obsession with Sylvia, he argued in his poetry, and the guilt she felt after her rival’s death, dealt the final blow: ‘Why did you kneel down at the grave’s edge/To be identified/Accused and convicted?’

  Indeed, Assia lived in Plath’s houses, slept in her beds, used her linen and cutlery, but she saw these places as Ted’s homes, and used the household objects for practical reasons and not out of any obsession with her rival. She bowed to Plath’s great talent, but knew better than to make her a role model by writing poetry, or become a domestic goddess like her. Sylvia was ambitious and fastidious but Assia remained shiftless and blasé, a bon vivant, and a rather sloppy housewife. For a life with Ted, she was willing to endure anything: gossip and accusations, Plath’s radiant presence in Ted’s life, and his absorption with her literary estate. But his wife’s suicide while he was having an affair was an obstacle too large for Hughes to overcome. In those circumstances, he could never marry the mistress.

  ‘The times were against Assia, as against Sylvia,’ Fay Weldon analyses the situation. ‘Both talented women died of love, not depression, let alone suicidal tendencies. In those pre-Feminist days, women saw their lives in terms of being loved or not loved by a man. It was terrible to be abandoned, death was better than rejection.’

  Twenty-two

  Aftermath

  In the summer of 1969 Hughes took Frieda and Nicholas with him to Brenda’s house in Welcombe. The children enjoyed the company of Harriet and Judith, Brenda’s two small daughters, and were thrilled when they took a holiday by the sea and Brenda taught them to surf. Now, with Assia no more at his side, Brenda Hedden climbed up the ladder: in September, all six of them moved to Lumb Bank. It was Hilda Farrar who disclosed the news of a new woman in Ted’s life to Aurelia Plath, and added that the northern winter and the necessity of keeping house and taking care of four children was too heavy a burden on Brenda; she herself told Brenda to expect nothing from Ted and that she would do better to return to her husband, ‘but some women will do anything to be close to a writer, and especially a poet’.

  In no time Hughes understood that the hoped-for peace of mind and safe haven were not to be found in Yorkshire and that it was a mistake to live so close to his family: he felt that he should have followed his instincts and stopped being so considerate of others, at the risk of being labelled an egotist and ‘a selfish bastard’. He became restless again and one morning Brenda woke up in an empty bed. There was no letter or note. He came back after several days. ‘I’ve no idea where he was, and didn’t want to know.’ Hedden suspected that he was having romantic escapades in North Tawton with the twenty-year-old Carol Orchard. ‘It happened again, many times. He did it not just to me, but to Assia as well, and to the others.’

  One day Ted sat Brenda on his knee and declared that he had one final duty; to scatter Assia and Shura’s ashes over a churchyard in Kent. He then asked her if she had happened to see the urns:

  I had no idea what he was talking about. Our bedroom was full of his things, and he said that the urns were in a casket by our bed, but now he couldn’t find it. I’m sure he did it on purpose, to scare me and leave me vulnerable. He had a way of undermining the women he loved. He could write love letters, and in the same breath, had a way of eroding your self-esteem, your self-assurance, and your confidence in the relationship. At that time, I was already disillusioned about him, in a way that poor Assia never was.

  A few days later, Hughes disappeared again and the next that Brenda heard from him was via a postcard from Ashford, Kent: apparently, he had found the missing urns and completed the mission. In her will Assia clearly indicated that she wished to be buried. Did Hughes choose cremation in order to obliterate any trace of his daughter and of Assia? Was he apprehensive of the revealing epitaph, ‘Lover of Unreason’? The fact remains that Assia, who was an unwilling wanderer on earth, and throughout her life yearned to strike roots, found no repose even in death.

  Once again, the Hughes clan disapproved of Ted’s living with a married woman and, after a turbulent Christmas with his relatives in Yorkshire, he took Brenda and the four children back to Devon. Now, he could save himself the journeys and be closer to his other love, Carol Orchard. In February 1970, he signed a contract with Faber and Faber, for the publication of Crow. It was a book that Assia was very much involved in writing and he used to send her draft after draft to read and comment on. His poetic attempt to confront death following Plath’s suicide came to a halt when his life was plagued by another suicide; he did not write any more Crow poems after Assia’s death. Hughes dedicated the book ‘In Memory of Assia and Shura’, and his initial plan was to have the dedication in Hebrew as well. When published, no public curiosity was aroused as to the identity of the deceased.

  Once again, Hughes was vacillating between women, but Celia knew nothing of this. He presented himself as the ever-grieving lover of her dead sister, and told her that the memory of Assia was haunting him: ‘the whole of England seems red-hot’. He was relieved when Celia sent back Sylvia’s manuscripts, smuggled by Assia three years earlier, when she sought to finance Shura’s future. When the time came to give Celia the proceedings of Assia’s estate, he informed her that at Assia’s death he had sublet the flat to a group of students, who painted the walls black and purple and ruined the flat. When he gave it back to Freshwater Flats, he had to pay £350 for redecorating, and subtracted it from the £2,156 of Assia’s estate.

  Court Green kept haunting Hughes and he and Brenda tried to get away from it, but their house-hunting was futile and they stayed on. In July, they entertained Seamus and Marie Heaney, who came for a weekend. ‘Heaney was so impressed by our conjugality, that he wrote a poem, celebrating our harmonious relationship,’ Brenda Hedden recalls. With Frieda and Nicky in the United States, Ted and Brenda planned to go to Ireland, to check the possibility of settling there, but in mid August, just after they celebrated Ted’s fortieth birthday, he disappeared again. Brenda Hedden: ‘A few days later, I received a postcard from London. Ted wrote that something terrible had happened, and that he needed my help. He arrived the following day. We were very passionate with each other, and after we made love, he told me that he had married Carol. He sent her to her family and spent his honeymoon with me.’ In spite of his marriage, Ted and Brenda did not cancel their trip to Ireland but instead of house-hunting, they went camping in the mountains. Aurelia Plath learned of the marriage two months after the event and, even then, not from Ted but from the ever-faithful aunt Hilda. It took Hughes six months to tell even his close friend, Lucas Myers.

  He continued to shuttle between the two women until Brenda broke off with him a few months later. She moved to Brighton and resumed her career as a social worker:

  He was a real hunter. The moment I drew away from him and became independent, I was more attractive in his eyes, and he chased me and pleaded that I would come back. It was the same with Assia: when she tried to break away and was out of his reach, he became motivated. But when they were together, he did terrible things. I feared I would end up like her, and resisted his temptations. Her terrible suicide saved my life.

  To a later lover, Emma Tennant, Hughes described the mating habits of the greylag goose, which
remains faithful to its first mate: ‘I may after all be a greylag goose,’ he said.

  For several years, Ted and Assia had been thinking of visiting Israel; ‘I could have gone there, happily,’ he wrote to Celia. In February 1971, he finally travelled to Israel as a guest of the British Council along with Peter Porter, Dannie Abse, D J Enright and Jeremy Robson. Before boarding the plane, Hughes had to spend several loud minutes persuading the police that the five-inch tiger’s tooth he carried in his pocket was indeed a tiger’s tooth, a present for his friend Yehuda Amichai. He was the only one who brought his wife along and they behaved as a honeymooning couple. In the basilica of Nazareth, a priest, noticing that Ted had put an arm round Carole’s waist, reprimanded him: ‘This is no no place for love!’