Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Since you are confined in the orbit of me

  do you not loathe the confinement?

  Is not even the beauty and peace of an orbit

  an intolerable prison to you,

  as it is to everybody?7

  The idea of constriction would surface in Plath’s poem “The Rabbit Catcher” that May: the “tight wires” trapping the prey was an apt metaphor for the forces binding the unhappy couple. The poem has often been interpreted as a diatribe against Hughes, yet the last line of the poem is “The constriction killing me also.” The arrival of their second child had dashed the couple’s freewheeling ambitions; they had given up the Maugham Award and scrapped their plans to live in Italy. They both found themselves locked into traditional gendered roles that had once terrified them. “I’m aghast when I see how incredibly I’ve confined & stunted my existence, when I compare my feeling of what I could be with what I am,” Ted wrote Olwyn in late summer 1962.8 In some respects, Sylvia settled more comfortably into her role as wife and mother. For her, living with her beloved children and husband among the daffodils at Court Green was, as she later told Elizabeth, like living in Eden. But as Sylvia found her place in the world, Ted became gripped by anxiety that he had succumbed to the sedate, genteel life (living in a manor house, no less) that he had tried so hard to avoid. Later he told Anne Stevenson that after they left London, he and Sylvia became “well aware of the possible mistake of our move—isolating ourselves too far and finally, narrowing the children’s options of good schools, losing easy access to libraries & lively friends. But we did want the isolation. We wanted to block off all other ways out except by writing.” The error “made itself felt in bizarre and alarming ways, in both of us. But at least we had life on our own terms in our own place.”9

  In his poem “The Lodger,” Hughes writes of what he called “heart trouble,” but which sounds very much like panic: “The pangs. The poundings.”10 (It was not unlike the attack he’d had at the BBC in March 1960.) He thought he “was going to die.” At night he went to bed “with fingers that throbbed so hard / They jerked the book I clung to and stared at.” He had been experiencing such attacks for almost three years, he wrote in the poem, yet had never told Sylvia. In Devon, they grew worse.

  I was already a discard,

  My momentum merely the inertias

  Of what I had been, while I disintegrated.

  I was already posthumous….

  My new study

  Was all the ways a heart can kill its owner

  And how mine had killed me….11

  Sylvia told Winifred Davies that Ted “wanted out” that summer because he was upset that “he could no longer write in the afternoon when he had to assume domestic chores.”12 His resentment probably angered Sylvia, who assumed far more domestic duties than he did and had even less time for writing. Winifred thought his frustrations with the marriage were creative rather than sexual: “Ted was jealous of Sylvia’s work.” Hughes had not written much since Lupercal. He was busy with BBC work and editing an American poetry anthology, which he never completed.13 Plath, meanwhile, had written a novel, a radio play, and poems that seemed stronger by the week. His wife was again the breadwinner, as she had been in America; her Saxton grant provided their main source of income. His poetry was no longer flowing; Sylvia was no longer his “luck”; marriage was no longer his “medium.”

  Hughes’s later writings hint at the isolation he felt in Devon, away from the distractions of London he claimed to disdain. In 1986 he wrote to his son, Nicholas, that in America, he and Sylvia had “made hardly any friends, no close ones, and neither of us did anything the other didn’t want wholeheartedly to do….Since the only thing we wanted to do was write, our lives disappeared into the blank page.” Years later he speculated that he and Sylvia should have realized that “one person cannot live within another’s magic circle, as an enchanted prisoner.”14 He believed, as he told Owen Leeming in 1961, that he and Sylvia had telepathic access to each other’s thoughts. He thought his wife possessed “clairvoyant divination,” and he later claimed that she had stolen an image of the goddess Nehamah, based on Assia Wevill, from his brain for her poem “The Munich Mannequins.”15 The once fulfilling symbiosis now seemed claustrophobic: “Our telepathy was intrusive.”16

  After Sylvia’s death, Ted told his brother Gerald that she had become intensely concerned, “even paranoid,” about The Bell Jar in the fall of 1961 and winter of 1962. She worried that it would not be successful and would hurt her friends and family in America. “Again and again Ted had tried to reassure her, but her anxieties grew, and the emotional tension between them and the increasing marital strains reached an unbearable pitch,” Gerald wrote in his memoir.17 Sylvia was indeed under much stress during this period. She was trying to write new work and reassuring Heinemann that she would not be sued for libel, all while caring for a toddler, a new baby, and a large home. But the end of the marriage, when it came, was also bound up with Hughes’s writing block and his hope for imaginative regeneration with a new muse many called “the most beautiful woman in London”: Assia Wevill.18 As Ted’s later lover Susan Alliston would write in her diary in 1963, “He says he’s never in his life found someone so physically attractive. Also she releases his imagination….She is a rare person. He might be able to save her and she him.”19 Hughes’s images of panic in “The Lodger” suggest that he experienced a private breakdown in the spring and summer of 1962—one that would have very public consequences.

  * * *

  WITH HER “RAVEN” HAIR and kohl-lined gray eyes, Assia Wevill struck many as “Babylonian”; admirers compared her to Scheherazade and Aphrodite.20 Luke Myers thought she bore a “strong likeness to Elizabeth Taylor.”21 Suzette Macedo remembered, “Everybody was in love with her; she was magnetic; she told stories, she was beautiful. And, also, death to men….She needed to be loved, she wanted to be loved.” The Macedos met the Wevills around Christmas 1961 at a party thrown by a South African literary friend. By then the Wevills had taken over Sylvia and Ted’s Chalcot Square lease. Suzette had already heard about Assia from Sylvia, who had told her that Assia was “wonderful.”22 Assia’s history of exile and her command of German, Hebrew, and Russian intrigued Sylvia. Jillian Becker, another of Sylvia’s London friends, was less charitable. She thought Assia “capable of immense malice, of idiotic and cruel intrigue for the fun of it but a kid playing what she thought to be a femme fatale.”23

  When Assia walked into the party, Suzette thought, “That must be the beautiful girl. She was stunning.” Suzette sat down next to Assia and told her she was friendly with the Hugheses. “Oh,” Assia said suggestively, in her deep, alluring “cut-crystal English” voice. “You know them, do you? What do you think of him?” Suzette answered that Ted was “a very good poet.” “But, him,” Assia pressed. Assia and David were “much more available socially” as a couple than Sylvia and Ted, who were more “ambitious” and moved in more “prizewinning” literary circles. Suzette would become close to both women, though she remained closer to Assia.

  Assia Gutmann was born in Berlin in 1927, the child of an atheist Russian Jewish father and a devout German Lutheran mother. She and her sister Celia were brought up in a Berlin teeming with cabarets and cafés. Assia’s father, a doctor, had treated members of the Bolshoi Ballet, a romantic detail Hughes would later include in poems about her. Until the Aryanization of the German health services, the Gutmanns enjoyed an affluent lifestyle, complete with white damask tablecloths and fine silver cutlery. But by the early 1930s, with the Nazis in power, Assia’s father could no longer practice medicine. Jewish and married to a Christian, he began to fear for his family. When Assia turned six, the Gutmanns fled to Pisa, Italy, among the first group of Jewish refugees to leave Germany. After six months, the family fled again, to Palestine, where in 1933 they settled in Tel Aviv. “We were driftwood, post-war driftwood,” one of
Assia’s Israeli friends later remarked.24

  In Palestine, there were no damask tablecloths. Dr. Gutmann found himself among a surplus of doctors in a land of mostly healthy young people. Assia’s mother became a dressmaker and cooked lunch for paying customers; Assia once allowed the local butcher to “fondle her” to get meat at a discount.25 There were other indignities. Assia’s father was indulgent, but her mother could be cruel. She would hit the girls with a violin bow, tie them to windows for minor infractions, and break their toys. The hardships of exile made her moods even blacker, and the sisters reacted with wild, dark moods of their own. Assia’s father often calmed them with tranquilizers. Assia’s family, however, was luckier than others in their extended family; the Nazis killed her paternal uncle, his wife, and their young daughter. (Her maternal cousins, meanwhile, joined the Hitler Youth.) She knew that her own escape from the horror had been close. On a 1954 trip to Germany with her second husband, she stood before the gates of Dachau but could not bring herself to enter.

  The half-German Assia experienced a sense of persecution in Tel Aviv that was similar to what Sylvia had experienced in 1940s Winthrop. Just as Sylvia had feared that her father might be sent to a detention camp for Germans, Assia feared that her mother might be detained as an “enemy sympathizer.”26 A native German speaker, Assia was told to hide her German background. She picked up Hebrew at her first school, but she was no Zionist; while Assia’s teenage friends were eager to work on a kibbutz over their holidays, she was happiest—like Sylvia—lying on a beach.

  The Gutmanns wanted a European education for their daughter and took on extra work to pay her tuition at a local British school. There, Assia learned the Queen’s English and immersed herself in British literature. She dreamed of moving to England and establishing her own literary salon. She later told her closest female friend in England, Pam Gems, that she wanted to marry an English poet who looked like Rupert Brooke. Pam told her that she would have been better off in the nineteenth century, a muse to “Shelley and Browning and Keats.” She thought Assia had “an artistic temperament but no specific talent to express it.”27 The Irish writer William Trevor, who worked with Assia in London, remembered her constructing elaborate plots for novels “someone else might care to write.”28

  In 1946, Assia left Tel Aviv for London, where she had secured a spot in the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art, and married John Steele, a British soldier she had dated in Tel Aviv. (Assia’s parents had practically demanded the match, desperate for British passports.) She quit art school to play the part of a suburban wife but grew lonely and isolated. Hoping to improve his prospects, John decided to emigrate to Canada—a decision that appalled Assia, who could not face another upheaval. Canada, a friend recalled, “meant intellectual death for her.”29 She followed him but tried to commit suicide in 1948 by taking fifty aspirins; she was saved at the hospital. The couple divorced.

  In Vancouver, Assia met the future economist Richard Lipsey. They married and moved to London, where Assia stood out amid the gray postwar drab in her fashionable bright reds and purples. “We were stopped in the streets—one man clutched at her sleeve, and stared and stared before apologizing,” a friend remembered.30 The couple lived on tinned sardines and potatoes while Richard studied for a PhD at the London School of Economics. Assia’s visions of a glamorous literary life receded. She tried to kill herself twice, again with pills. Both times her husband saved her.

  On a voyage back to England from Canada, where the couple had been visiting Richard’s relatives, Assia met the Canadian poet David Wevill. A shipboard romance ensued, with her husband’s full knowledge. The affair continued in England, where David was studying at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Assia finally left Richard for David and found satisfying work with Reuters, translating Hebrew broadcasts about the Suez Crisis from the Middle East. The assignment eventually led to a copywriting position at Notley’s advertising agency, where she worked with the writers Peter Porter, William Trevor, and Edward Lucie-Smith. Suzette remembered that Assia was a talented copywriter and “very happy in her advertising world.”31

  Through Edward Lucie-Smith, Assia and David fell in with the Group and began attending their weekly meetings in mid-1957. She was thrilled to join a salon, even if it was not her own. It was here that Assia encountered Ted Hughes’s poems for the first time.32 She herself wrote poems but did not submit them to the Group. One that survives, “Magnificat,” has the ring of Dylan Thomas’s “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” one of Plath’s favorite poems: “And I do praise the force that falls / With loosened stones and plunging force / Of clear ghost-rivers in dried beds.”33 Philip Hobsbaum would write that he found, in Assia’s work, “a community of vision linking Hughes, Plath, and Wevill.” Assia’s later translations of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai would earn her praise.34

  In London, Assia developed a reputation as both a tragic muse and a femme fatale. When she and David arrived in Hobsbaum’s Stockwell flat for a Group session, Peter Redgrove whispered to Hobsbaum, “I know who she is. She has killed two men already, and will be the death of David.”35 Hobsbaum remembered her posh accent, her wit, and her skill with language. Together, she and David cut slightly tragic, glamorous figures. The novelist Fay Weldon remembered that when they entered a room, heads turned. William Trevor thought Assia looked like Sophia Loren, and David, Gary Cooper. They were beautiful and damned, he thought, like “Scott Fitzgerald people, sixties-style.”36 Assia played the part especially well; she once tried to stab her second husband, Richard Lipsey, with a Burmese dagger near the entrance to the South Kensington tube station.37

  In 1958, Assia followed David to the University of Burma, where he had accepted a two-year teaching contract. She was still married to Richard, but they had agreed to divorce shortly before she left. Richard was now on the brink of a professorship at the London School of Economics, but Assia, like Sylvia, followed the drifting poet. The divorce took nearly two years.

  In Burma, Assia and David met Michael Mendelson and his wife, Pat. Michael belonged to a prominent, wealthy Jewish family who had fled Belgium for England at the start of the Second World War. Educated at Cambridge and the University of Chicago, he was an anthropologist who studied the Maya in Guatemala and, later, Buddhist culture in Burma. He would adopt the pen name Nathaniel Tarn when he began writing poetry. Patricia Mendelson remembered that in Burma, Assia “presented herself as very glamorous, and was quick to adopt the colonial etiquette, wearing wide-rimmed hats, puffing on her cigarette.”38 Assia once shocked a group of expatriates at a dinner party with her impersonation of Eva Braun. On a memorable 1962 Boxing Day, she donned full Burmese costume and danced for the Macedos, Doris Lessing and her son Peter, and David. Suzette remembered that Doris was “fascinated” by Assia, while the men were left speechless. “I thought, My God, she’s just, what is she?” Suzette said.39

  After her divorce from Richard finally came through in 1960, Assia and David married in Rangoon and then headed back to London. (The British Council had refused to extend David’s teaching contract in Burma when they learned that he was living with a married woman.)40 Assia was pregnant and had decided to keep the baby—she had had several abortions over the years—but she miscarried. David worked as a porter at Harrods, then as a copywriter at the Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather advertising agency. Assia returned to Notley’s, where she grew more successful as a copywriter. A famous 1961 Notley’s ad featured Assia, William Trevor, and another well-heeled couple punting on the Serpentine, drinking champagne and typing on a typewriter. Notley’s did not need a professional model when they had Assia, who looked glamorous and sophisticated holding a champagne flute in one hand, a pencil in the other. She soon moved to a higher-paying position at another agency, where she impressed her superiors with her “unconventional, often wild and stimulating ideas.” She headed up several successful ad campaigns, including a now iconic television commerci
al for Sea Witch hair dye, part James Bond, part Homer. She was so talented that she was able to keep her job despite frequent tardiness and absences, and what one supervisor remembered as a “wild temper”: “it always puzzled me why she was in advertising, when she could have been a diva; our world was too limited for her.”41

  The Wevills were looking for a less expensive flat when they saw Plath and Hughes’s sublet ad in the London Evening Standard. “I didn’t meet or know Hughes or Plath while at Cambridge, though I did read some of their work,” David recalled.42 All three had contributed to delta and Chequer around the same time, and were all published in Christopher Levenson’s Poetry from Cambridge in 1958.43 Poems by Plath and David Wevill had even appeared in the same issue of delta in the summer of 1956.

  The Cambridge poetry connection helped Assia and David beat out the other interested party for the Chalcot Square flat. After meeting Sylvia and Ted, Assia remarked to William Trevor, “Heavens, the coincidence of it! All three of them being poets!” Trevor thought he heard a more plaintive cry, that of “the outsider”: “she had no lines to offer in that charmed poetic circle. One day she might have the right to be there, but for the moment she possessed little more than beauty and an imagination she could not properly make work for her.”44

  The two couples socialized “a few times” over the next three weeks, before the move to Devon, David remembered. “We got on with them like a house on fire.” According to Ted, Assia even gave Sylvia a handmade wooden snake from Burma. David ascribed “no subtle reasons behind it.” (“Assia was indifferent to the occult, and for her, it was just a decorative object.”)45 The two couples kept in touch by mail and phone after the Hugheses moved to Court Green; they invited the Wevills to stay in the spring of 1962. In a May 14 letter to Aurelia, Sylvia described them as “a nice young Canadian poet & his very attractive, intelligent wife coming down for this weekend.”46 Sylvia simply wrote “The Wevills” in her calendar that weekend, along with a menu of beef stew, corn chowder, and gingerbread. She left no star, as she often did on happy occasions.