by Yehuda Koren
The group appeared throughout Israel, in Poets Reading Their Work. The playbill included the text of ‘A Childish Prank’ from Crow, which opens with ‘Man’s and woman’s bodies lay without souls.’ On stage, he read ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’, and ‘The Thought Fox’. Once again, he and Assia shared the same platform, since Yehuda Amichai was reading Assia’s translation of two of his poems: ‘God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children’, (‘But perhaps/He will have pity on those who love truly/And take care of them’). The second poem began with ‘The end was quick and bitter’. One can only guess what was going inside Ted’s head two years after the quick and bitter end and the death of the kindergarten child Shura.
On one of their free evenings, Peter Porter suggested that they attend the Israeli Philharmonic performance of Fauré’s Requiem, while Ted proposed seeing Euripides’ Bacchai in Hebrew at the Kameri Theatre. ‘He had guaranteed that real blood (animal) would grace the staging,’ commented Porter. Hughes was elated in Bethlehem and Massada, where he was awed by the collective suicide of almost a thousand Jews, besieged by the Romans. But Jerusalem was the most overwhelming place he had ever seen. He was mesmerised when the tour guide showed them the rock where Abraham went to sacrifice his only son Isaac: it ‘must be the most electrical place on earth,’ Hughes wrote to Peter Redgrove. He was taken by the Israelis’ energy, vitality and cheerfulness, and expressed his wish to live there for a while. His Israeli hosts showed him a number of houses around Jerusalem. One of them in particular enchanted him: an Arab stone house on a mountain, overlooking the Judea Desert. The visit stayed with Hughes and, when interviewed in London in 1996, he spoke enthusiastically about it. Remembering the Dome of the Rock, he said, ‘It’s the most sacred and important place, where rites were probably performed, a place of shamans, of visionaries. In any culture, mountaintops are very sacred, and a cave on a mountaintop is more sacred than anything.’
Throughout his life, Hughes tried to ward off biographers and journalists from probing into his privacy. But already on 17 February 1963, Al Alvarez had hinted at the circumstances of Plath’s death, publishing four poems in the Observer. A line in ‘Edge’ hints that the speaker took her own life – ‘Her dead/ Body wears the smile of accomplishment’. Another poem, ‘The Fearful’, portrays a woman so frantic about her beauty that she abhors motherhood. Reading further into the poem, Plath’s close friends remembered how she intercepted Assia’s phone call, in which she disguised herself as a man, to Court Green. Plath left the poems in a black spring binder on her desk, and Alvarez collected it in one of his condolence visits to the flat.
Hughes asked his friends to refrain from mentioning him in interviews or in their memoirs. In March 1965, when Richard Murphy sent an elegy that he wrote about Sylvia for his approval, Hughes asked him to delete a reference to the circumstances of her death. His concern was that if the suicide was made public, his children may learn about it from their friends before he told them. But his arm could not cross the Atlantic and, in June 1966, Time magazine reviewed Ariel, stating that Plath ‘was found in a London flat with her head in the oven and the gas jets wide open’. In 1970, Faber and Faber published The Art of Sylvia Plath edited by Charles Newman, which included an essay by Lois Ames, Plath’s first appointed biographer. In her ‘Notes Towards a Biography’, Ames did not mention Hughes’s adultery and, of course, gave no hint of Assia.
But like a Russian doll, the truth was revealed layer after layer. In his study of suicide, The Savage God, Al Alvarez described Plath’s new drive to write as ‘demonic possession’, which could have been the reason why she and Ted ‘temporarily parted’. However, he made no mention of the adultery, although he was a close witness to Ted’s affair with Assia.
The full facts were whispered in literary circles and, in 1972, the American poet and feminist activist Robin Morgan published a book of poetry named Monster. In her poem ‘Arraignment’, she accused Hughes of the murder of Sylvia Plath. She also referred to the suicide of ‘Assia Gutmann Wevill’, the woman Hughes never formally married, who took her daughter Shura with her ‘rather than letting Hughes raise the child’. The book was published only in the United States and although pirated editions were passed around in Canada, England and Australia, the information did not make any headlines.
In 1973, Yehuda Amichai’s book of verse Songs of Jerusalem and Myself appeared in English. It included his eulogy of Assia, published in Hebrew two years earlier:
I can’t understand your death in London
In the mist
As I can’t understand
My life, here, in the bright light.
It was a lamentation for a dear friend who was untimely and inexplicably plucked away. The Hebrew title was ‘The Death of Assia G.’ while the English was the more obscure ‘The Death of A.G.’: Amichai’s friendship with Ted Hughes made the change of title hardly coincidental. Over twenty years would pass before the full title was restored.
In 1975, Aurelia Plath published her daughter’s Letters Home, with Hughes’s reluctant consent. Though heavily edited, the letters made it clear that the separation was far from temporary and that Sylvia was seeking divorce on grounds of adultery. Plath did not call Assia by name, and referred to her as ‘Ted’s girl friend’, or ‘Ted’s girl’. A year later, Professor Judith Kroll named Plath’s rival, in her book Chapters in a Mythology. No biographical information was given and Kroll preferred to use Assia’s maiden name, Gutmann, maybe out of consideration for the privacy of David Wevill, her colleague at the University of Texas in Austin. In May 1976, Elizabeth Compton published her memoir of Sylvia in the New Review monthly, published in London. She named Assia as the wife of a Canadian poet David Wevill and gave some biographical details, including her death with Shura. The information went unnoticed and when that year Edward Butscher published this same memoir in his Sylvia Plath – Method and Madness, it was censored. Assia was disguised as Olga – no surname, hinting at her Russian origins. Butscher gave an abundance of details – not always accurate – disclosing that she killed herself with her child, but did not say that she was Hughes’s daughter. A year later, in a collection of essays and memoirs about Plath, The Woman and the Work, Butscher was still using ‘Olga’ and, only in 1979, in the British edition of the book, was Olga changed to Assia, but the surname was still withheld.
In 1984, Assia’s friend Eda Zoritte-Megged published a detailed memoir in Mosnayim, the periodical of the Israeli Writers’ Association. The revelations of Hughes’s neglect of Assia, his apathy towards Shura and the details of the suicide and funeral did not get much publicity, since it appeared only in Hebrew. In January 1987, Ted Hughes flew to the USA to attend a trial for libel in Court 11 at the Federal District Courthouse in Boston, brought by Dr Jane Anderson, an old friend of Sylvia Plath’s, who accused him and a Hollywood film company of defaming her in the movie The Bell Jar, based on Plath’s novel by that name. ‘No one for instance – outside the immediate circle – knew who the other woman was,’ wrote journalist Iain Walker in an Australian newspaper, The Advertiser. ‘Today her identity can be disclosed. Her name was Assia Wevill. Hughes was asked about her at the Boston courtroom. He looked stunned and stared at the marble floor. “No comment,” he said.’ Walker interviewed friends of Assia and Sylvia and, in St Catherine’s House in London, in the registry of births and deaths, found Shura’s birth certificate, with Hughes’s name recorded as the father. Walker brought it all out – the full name of the mistress, Ted’s fatherhood and the horrible death. Later that year, Linda Wagner-Martin mentioned Assia Wevill in her Sylvia Plath: A Biography. In 1989 some more biographical information was published in Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame, though nothing was said about Assia’s suicide. It was Ronald Hayman, in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath and Paul Alexander in Rough Magic who, in 1991, elaborated on Assia’s suicide and on the fact that she had a daughter by Hughes, who died with her.
Hughes kept disregarding the publications about his relationship wit
h Assia and was writing her out of his life story. In the few instances where he agreed to give some biographical details about himself, Assia was not mentioned. On 28 July 1989, in a letter to Leonard Scigaj, who was compiling a biographical essay, Hughes wrote that after Sylvia died, he lived for a while in her flat with their children, assisted only by his aunt. He was looking for a permanent feminine figure, but ‘The right woman failed to materialise’. He then moved to Devon and his sister helped him look after the children. He tried to settle down in Ireland but had to return to Court Green and there he only had a local woman to help with with the daily chores. To Janet Malcolm, the author of The Silent Woman, Hughes wrote in 1992 that apart from the two years in which Olwyn lived with him and the children, he was constantly seeking a new home and ‘a woman to replace their mother’. Assia was not mentioned, as the woman who was with him all that while in London, Ireland and Devon, and who mothered his children after their mother’s death.
But throughout those years, Hughes was deeply occupied with Assia’s life and death. Already in 1986, he was working with painter Leonard Baskin on Capriccio, which was published in 1990 in a limited edition of fifty extremely expensive copies. The cycle of twenty poems and paintings presents chunks of Assia’s life and unmistakable details about her: Germany, Israel, Russia, British Columbia; ‘After forty I’ll end it’, ‘baby daughter’, ‘German au pair’, ‘Six full calendar years’, ‘Her grave’. Assia’s features – her straight dark hair and green eyes – inspired some of Baskin’s paintings. In his poetic version of the events, Hughes scattered all the clues for anyone to find, getting as close to the fire as playing on her name: ‘he wanted the seven treasures of Asia.’ Five years later Hughes published the more accessible edition of New Selected Poems, 1957–1994, with eight of the Assia poems from Capriccio and eight poems about Sylvia, which later appeared in Birthday Letters. He was relieved that readers and reviewers overlooked all sixteen autobiographical poems. ‘I feel that my poems are obscure, I give the secret away without giving it. People are so dumb they do not know I’ve given the secret away,’ he told Eilat Negev.
Hughes agreed to be interviewed then, because a bilingual edition of The Thought Fox had just been published in Israel and he was due to take part in an International Poets Festival in Jerusalem, scheduled for spring 1997. He hardly ever gave interviews, and avoided talking about his personal tragedies, but this time he did; maybe because the journalist came from Assia’s country, maybe because he thought that an interview in Hebrew would remain obscure and be no risk to his privacy. He may also have wished to send up a trial-balloon: in those very days, he was going through his private archives, preparing them for shipment to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and was completing Birthday Letters. He must have known that eventually the press would have a field day and may have wished to test the waters. ‘I wrote many poems in which I referred to Sylvia, but there are many that I won’t publish. I must think of my wife Carol, and how it would affect her,’ he said. ‘If I write love poems to my former love, showing how close we were, it’s a kind of adultery. Sylvia has lived for two years in our Devon house, and Carol has been living in it for 25 years. I don’t want her to feel as if she’s living in a mausoleum, haunted by the spirit of her predecessor, like Rebecca.’
Hughes confirmed that he also wrote many poems about Assia but said that he was not sure that he ‘wrote the ones [he] should have written’. When tragedy strikes, he said, people struggle with it and incorporate it into their lives.
But being a writer, these things are chewed all the time, because you write about them and they disturb you, and they keep appearing and disappearing. They keep hanging on your neck and you deal with the emotions again and again, as if it’s a broken record, stuck in the same monumental groove. And instead of letting go of the past and living for the future, you find your past in front of you. A monument, sitting on your head.
When Birthday Letters was published in January 1998, Hughes had already been diagnosed with cancer. The book became an unprecedented poetry bestseller, all the attention naturally revolving around his relationship with Sylvia Plath. On 28 October 1998, Hughes died in London Bridge Hospital, a private clinic close to Guy’s Hospital, where Assia and Shura’s bodies were autopsied. He had requested cremation and his ashes were scattered over a forest in Dartmoor.
At his death Assia resurfaced, with Shura, regaining their rightful place beside him.
Notes
Frequently mentioned names, books and archive collections are abbreviated as follows: AP: Aurelia Plath; AW: Assia Wevill; CC: Celia Chaikin; DW: David Wevill; GH: Gerald Hughes; LM: Lucas Myers; RL: Richard Lipsey; SP: Sylvia Plath; TH: Ted Hughes. Emory: Ted Hughes Papers, Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Lilly: Sylvia Plath Collection, the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Smith: Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. The Tarn Papers: archive of Nathaniel Tarn, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California. Yale: Yehuda Amichai Archives, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Prologue
‘Assia was reciting’: TH–CC, in a letter, 14 April 1969. Emory.
Else had asked permission: statement of Else Ludwig to Det. Sgt J Loakman, Clapham Police Station, 23 March 1969.
Seven times: LM, Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared, Sewanee, USA, Proctor’s Hall Press, 2001, p. 133.
One: Childhood
Information about the Gutmann and the Gaedeke families: interview with CC in Canada, May–June 2002, and subsequent emails, letters and telephone calls, July 2002–April 2006.
Documents and family photos, courtesy of Celia and Arnold Chaikin.
General background about Jewish life in Kagarlyk, Lutsk, Riga, Berlin, and life under the Nazis: Beth Hatefutsoth, Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, Tel Aviv; Yad Vashem, Holocaust Museum and Archives, Jerusalem.
‘physician to the Bolshoi Ballet’: LM, Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared, p. 127.
‘Her father/Doctor to the Bolshoi Ballet’: TH, ‘Dreamers’ in Birthday Letters, Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, 2003, p. 1145.
Lucas Myers recounts her stories: LM, email exchange, November 2001–December 2003.
displaced persons’ camps: Philip Hobsbaum, email exchange, October 2001–May 2003.
‘death-camp’, ‘ex-Nazi Youth Sabra’, ‘Hitler’s mutilations’: TH, ‘Dreamers’, in Birthday Letters, Collected Poems, p. 1145.
‘swastika’: TH, ‘The Locket’, in Capriccio, Collected Poems, p. 784.
‘hanged women choke’: TH, ‘Dreamers’, in Birthday Letters, Collected Poems, p. 1145.
Two: A New Life
Information about the Gutmanns in Tel Aviv: interview with CC in Canada, May–June 2002, and subsequent emails, letters and telephone calls, July 2002–April 2006.
Documents and family photos, courtesy of Celia and Arnold Chaikin.
General background about the German Jews’ emigration to Palestine is based on Tel Aviv Municipality archives; Gelber, Yoav, A New Homeland – The Immigration from Central Europe and its Absorption in Eretz Israel 1933–1948, Jerusalem Leo Baeck Institute and Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1990 (in Hebrew); Niederlander, Doron, ‘The Influence of Immigrant Physicians from Germany on the Development of Medicine in Palestine, 1933–1948’, Jerusalem, Hebrew University, 1982 (MA thesis, in Hebrew); Segev, Tom, The Seventh Million, New York, Henry Holt, 2000.
‘her parents made her go to the butcher’s’: RL, interview in Canada, June 2002, and email exchange, July 2002–June 2003.
‘last night, in the half dark’: AW diary, 19 May 1963, in private hands.
Three: A Tabeetha Girl
Information about the Gutmanns in Tel Aviv: interview with CC in Canada, May–June 2002, and subsequent emails, letters and telephone calls, July 2002–April 2006.
Documents and family photos, courtesy of Celia
and Arnold Chaikin.
General background about Palestine during the Second World War, is based on the following sources: The Hagana Book, Maarachot, 1955–1972 (in Hebrew); Reich, Daniella, ‘National Mission and Social Ostracism’: the Liaisons between Jewish Women and British Servicemen, 1940–1948’, Haifa University, 2003 (MA thesis in Hebrew); Segev, Tom, The Seventh Million, New York, Henry Holt, 2000; Tel Aviv Municipality archives.
‘Me, half-German?’: AW, postcard to Yehuda Amicai, August 1968, Yale.
Jane Walker-Arnott, who had left Glasgow: Isobel, Goodwin, May You Live to Be 120! The Story of Tabeetha School, Jaffa, 1863–1983. Saint Andrew Press, 2000, p. 18.
A column of smart chauffeured cars: Wedad and Leila Andreas, interview in Israel, November 2001.
Assia gave the credit: RL, interview in Canada, June 2002, and email exchange, July 2002–June 2003.
a stunning girl: Mira Hamermesh, interview in London, October 2001.
The son of a banker: John H Steele, letter exchange, July 2002–January 2004.
Four: A Teenager in Love
General information about British soldiers in Palestine: Hospitality Committee, 1940–7, Tel Aviv Municipality Archives; Hebrew newspapers in the 1940s: Ha-aretz, Davar, Hazman, Iton Meyuhad, Laisha; Reich, Daniella, ‘National Mission and Social Ostracism: the Liaisons between Jewish Women and British Servicemen, 1940–1948’, Haifa University, 2003 (MA thesis, in Hebrew); ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’. BBC Radio 4, produced by Linda Pressly and Tanya Datta, July 2003.