After Ted left, Sylvia told her mother the phone call had been from Assia Wevill, “with whom Ted had been having an affair for some time, whenever he went to London, ostensibly only on BBC engagements.” Sylvia had felt “a growing change in Ted, and with this telephone call all disturbing indications, evasions, and events fell into one indisputable, shattering revelation.”38 The hurt, when it came, was a blow comparable to her father’s death. “She felt that she had been thrown out of Eden,” Elizabeth said.39
Before Assia’s phone call, Sylvia’s letters had been mostly pleasant and witty. Now there was anger. To the Kanes, she blamed her distress on her mother, a convenient shield. “We have been up in a heaval with my mother here (she stays way into August) as with no matter what good will & fortitude mater’s [sic] turn to witches after a certain amount of days if left in the sun.”40 In her six-page letter to Dr. Beuscher on July 11, she mocked her “happy” letter of March 27, in which she had extolled her husband and their joy at Court Green. She had learned of Ted’s affair, she wrote, and was now “at sea.” “I suppose all this sounds very naive to you. It is, after all, what seems to happen to everybody. Only I am not, as Ted says, blasé enough, I care to a frenzy.” She could never revenge herself by having affairs with other men, for none possessed Ted’s genius and beauty.
Ted is so fantastically unique—beautiful, physically wonderful, brilliant, loving, eager for me to do my own work, without (as I thought) a lie or deceit in his body. It is the lying that kills me….I am sure a possessive wife would have driven most men mad before this. But I just don’t have the ability to care nothing about other women chasing Ted….He seemed to want to flee all big publicity—TV & so on, & was furious when I let any cameramen into the house. But now it is different: I have been a jinx, a chain.
The thought of his being with another woman, especially one who “is dying to stop my creative work,” made her “retch.” “I cannot sleep. I cannot eat….I keep having to run off to cry and be dry-sick as each image of that girl assaults me, and her pleasure at hearing me nonplussed on the phone, of taking my life and joy. I can’t imagine a life without Ted. But I am not like other wives who tolerate all—marriage to me is a kind of sanctity, faithfulness in every part, and I will not ever be able to love or make love again in happiness, with this looming in front of me. It is his wanting to deceive me that is so like this girl & unlike him.” She asked Beuscher, “What can I do?”
She refused to get a divorce. “I honestly do believe I am wedded to Ted till death. Other men seem ants compared to him. I am physically attracted to no-one else. All the complexities of my soul & mind are involved inextricably with him.” She was
simply not cool & sophisticated. My marriage is the center of my being, I have given everything to it without reserve. Worst, my writing is killed by this mess. I write, not in compensation, out of sorrow, but from an overflow, a surplus of joy, & my ability to criticize my work & do it well is my objectivity, which stems from happiness, not sorrow.
She felt such joy upon receiving the first proofs of The Bell Jar the day after Ted left. “It saved the day for me: I roared and roared, it was so funny and good.” But she could not face the empty bed at night. She imagined Assia and Ted together, and fantasized about “breaking her nose & knocking her teeth out.” Assia was “sophisticated, so mocking”—unlike her: “I break up in pieces, cry, rave. I am proud.” She would not play the “part of the wronged wife,” and she would be damned if Ted thought he could come home from his London trysts “refreshed” to a “wife-secretary-mother-dishwasher-housekeeper….I can’t be any sort of sweet homebase for stuff that makes me gag. I feel ugly and a fool, when I have so long felt beautiful & capable of being a wonderful happy mother and wife and writing novels for fun & money. I am just sick.”
She knew that others would tell her to let the affair run its course, let Ted get Assia out of his system—David Compton remarked that “wife-swapping” had by then entered the consciousness of the bourgeoisie—but she couldn’t.41 “Well, what about my system? How do I get this other It out? The jealous retch, this body that comes, laughing, between my body & his body.”
“To make things worse,” Sylvia continued, her mother had witnessed it all. Aurelia was “a real help & I make her feel this. But you can imagine how images repeat themselves—here I am, alone with my mother & the children! I am so numb I am only glad she looks after Frieda, because I am hollow as a zombie inside & without motion.” At least Aurelia was “good, doesn’t pry, makes herself scarce.” Sylvia implored Dr. Beuscher to write back to her. “I can talk to no-one about this—mother, of course, least of all.”42
After Ted left, Sylvia fled to Elizabeth’s house with baby Nick for a night. Elizabeth was “shocked” by her state. “She wept and gripped my hands, saying, ‘Ted lies to me. He lies. He is having an affair and he has become a little man.’ She said that she couldn’t feed Nick: ‘My milk has dried up.’ ” Elizabeth insisted that she sleep upstairs, but Sylvia slept on their sofa. She told Elizabeth, “I gave my heart to Ted. If he doesn’t want it, I can’t take it back. It’s just gone.” She said, “I cannot live without him.”43 David remembered that the two women spent most of the night in the kitchen and that he heard Sylvia weeping, “a wrung-out, reluctant, dry, ashamed sort of convulsive thing….She was absolutely shattered and remained so. But it wasn’t a disproportionate reaction considering what she’d put into the relationship….This drive toward integrity, this drive to love, this drive to the occult, this drive to art….to become bigger in every way.”44 He stayed in the background, “wary of emotionality,” as Elizabeth consoled Sylvia, who kept gripping her hands and saying, “Help me!”45
The next morning she was somewhat calmer. “She was bending over this basket of kittens we had. ‘Look at them, they’re so new, they can’t even see.’ You’d think that nothing had happened, really, but she was very distressed.”46 She began weeping again as she left. Elizabeth begged her to stay but she would not. David was surprised that Sylvia had come to Elizabeth instead of seeking support from her own mother back at Court Green and felt that the gesture spoke to the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between Sylvia and Aurelia. Winifred, too, remembered Sylvia’s distress during this time. “Frieda was in her bed and Sylvia didn’t just cry quietly. She used to open her mouth and howl as a child would howl. Poor Frieda was terrified.”47 The week of July 9 is uncharacteristically bare in Plath’s 1962 calendar.
Sylvia wrote to Clarissa Roche on July 11 asking her to come to Court Green, saying that Aurelia had arrived “out of the blue,” which was false, and that “things are hectic.” “I get homesick for you just writing to you.”48 Plath also wrote a poem on this day: “Words heard, by accident, over the phone.” (“Speak, speak! Who is it?”) Meanwhile, Suzette had gotten wind of the developments. When Assia learned that Ted had left Court Green, she called Suzette, who remembered her saying, “ ‘Disaster…she has thrown him out…and it’s terrible…and he is pushing me to leave David and I don’t want to. I’m not going to leave David.’ ”49 Assia asked Suzette and Helder to come meet her, her husband David, Ted, and Al Alvarez at a local London pub one night that July. When Suzette arrived, she found Ted “looking absolutely black,” standing at the counter with Al. The Wevills, Ted, and the Macedos then went to a party at Nathaniel Tarn’s “palatial” house in Hampstead. On the way to the party, Ted sang a mournful Irish ballad, “The Brown and Yellow Ale,” about a husband who lies down and dies because of his wife’s unfaithfulness. Helder noticed the “current” between Ted and Assia that night.50 Indeed, Assia seemed to enjoy playing Ted and David off against each other. “These people were in an extreme state of tension with each other,” Edward Lucie-Smith said, speaking of the larger “network” that included the Wevills, the Hugheses, the Macedos, Al Alvarez, and the Merwins.51 Helder Macedo agreed, adding that “Ted was himself in crisis….they all behaved very extr
emely—in destructive ways, self-destructive and otherwise.”52
Suzette phoned Sylvia in late October or early November, when the phone had been reinstalled at Court Green. Sylvia was angry, and hung up on her. Suzette called again, and this time Sylvia stayed on the line. “And she said, ‘What are you phoning for? You’re her friend.’ ” Suzette said, “Sylvia, just stop. I can’t help it if I’m a friend of Assia’s.” She told Sylvia she was concerned about her. “She was in a terrible state.” Suzette asked her to come stay, which she did, in early November. Sylvia spoke of how she had come to realize that Ted was having an affair: “She’d known it from the beginning, when she saw them in the kitchen when they were supposed to have been peeling potatoes….She knew it was rubbish that he was going for the BBC,” she said. When he returned to Court Green from London, Sylvia told Suzette, he “smelled different.” Sylvia said she ransacked Ted’s study and burned his papers, and that the name “Assia” came out of the flames—and that was how she knew. It was the sort of story she liked to tell, Suzette said. She could be dramatic, like Assia, that way.53 Sylvia had also found love poems written to Assia in Ted’s study.
Aurelia claimed that Sylvia also burned the new version of her unpublished Bell Jar sequel (likely based on drafts of Falcon Yard), parts of which Sylvia had read to her out loud that June. Aurelia had come into the living room during her first night at Court Green to find her daughter sitting in “her favorite chair, by the fireplace.” She was editing some pages in her hand.
As I sat down opposite her, she announced excitedly, “I have written two novels, mother; one is complete [The Bell Jar] and one almost done in first draft, and a third planned in my head.” She scowled for a moment, quickly made a note on the page she apparently had been reading, then looked at me and continued with a note of triumph in her voice. “This second one I’ll show to Ted as a birthday surprise; he’s the ‘hero’ and it’s dedicated to him.” Smilingly she held up a page with just the words “To Ponter” neatly centered on it. “It’s autobiographically based, more or less—facts serve Art, you know.”
From her answers to my questions, I learned that this novel was woven about her student life at the University of Cambridge, her romance and marriage, the combination of married life and teaching at Smith, the Beacon Hill year following, the return to England—all ending with the birth of Frieda. “I feel I have been living a series of novels, really, and this is, so far, the most exciting part.” She paused, then added, slowly and thoughtfully, “It is Life seen through the eyes of health,”—a statement I did not fully understand until after her death and after my reading of The Bell Jar.54
Sylvia began reading Aurelia “parts at random” until Nick began to cry. Sylvia went upstairs to tend to him and never mentioned the novel again to Aurelia until the day, shortly after Assia’s phone call, when she stood “helplessly in the doorway” of Court Green and watched her daughter “furiously” tear apart the thick manuscript: “piece by piece she burned this sequel to The Bell Jar in a blazing bonfire she had built at the end of the cobbled courtyard….Later that night I brought up the subject of the destruction. All Sylvia would say was that the manuscript had symbolized a period of joy that now proved to have been built on false trust—the character of the hero was dead to her—this had been his funeral pyre.”55
* * *
THAT SUMMER, Ted wrote to Olwyn, his fiercest protector, with the “Grave news” of the separation. Since April, the marriage and Court Green had seemed a “dead-end”:
So I blew up—very mildly—and went on the spree, but that was no substitute for the real thing, which is to go & live where I like alone, working uninterruptedly, choosing my friends as I please & seeing them as often as I like, & generally changing myself without the terrible censorship of somebody like Sylvia confining my every impulse & inclination….I came awake, & find myself in the old folks’ home. And I have come awake. I know in rough outline what I want, I feel it’s in my power, & the 10,000 desires which in a gentlemanly considerate way I’ve repressed for 6 years have suddenly appeared in full bloom, absolutely insatiable. So, I’ll give Sylvia the house, the car, & and send her cash. The less I own, the better. I shall live in London till December, because I have numerous engagements to read etc, then I shall go to Germany, live there till I speak fluent German, then Italy, till I speak fluent Italian, & so on. My centre of gravity has suddenly become internal, so I need no outer guidance or stabiliser. Besides, I’ve suddenly acquired, along with the rest—a great power to work along purposeful lines. I don’t know what will happen. Sylvia has more or less helped—refusing to have me near the place, since I became so sinful. She made some terrible mistakes, and I let her make them.
But it seems insane to me that I shouldn’t try to make something of myself & my life. And the only things that change me are situations & relationships & a fairly emotional carry-on—not this tepid routine of reading & sinking back into the family circle. I would like to be at least one English person of my generation that will have broken the shell—I’m so sick of the sight & sound of them.56
He felt as if he were suffocating with Sylvia under her bell jar. His only alternative was “suicide by wishy-washiness.” He would work to fulfill his promise; he would not become a drifter. He was writing more than ever: “I seem to thrive on upset.” Nicholas, only about six months old, was still “quite strange” to him, but he worried about living without Frieda—“a problem,” he wrote. As for his wife: “Sylvia’s tough, she’ll be O. K.”57
On July 10, the day after Assia’s phone call, Ted “dropped in” on the Wevills at his old Chalcot Square flat carrying four bottles of champagne.58 He said it was his birthday, though it was not. When David left to buy cigarettes, Ted told Assia he was leaving Sylvia and that he wanted to spend the next day with her. Assia agreed, and the two spent the afternoon of July 11 at Al Alvarez’s flat.59 After that first night, Assia told Nathaniel Tarn that Ted was “very virile, ‘does things a man does,’ decides etc. everything D. has stopped doing.”60
Assia returned to Chalcot Square later that afternoon, where she met David. The two of them joined Alvarez for drinks in the pub. Tarn noted that Alvarez had by this time “guessed about” Hughes, who had told him “he has left S[ylvia] & is in love.” Ted spent the night at Al’s flat, oblivious of his friend’s feelings for Assia. Two days later, on Friday the 13th, Ted took Assia to the Ritz, where, Assia told Suzette, she ordered champagne and peaches to mark the beginning of the love affair. Assia told Nathaniel he made “violent & animal” love to her: “he ruptures her. A. turns against him, goes quite cold.” Assia phoned Suzette on the Sunday after their “tryst” and asked to meet at the Cosmo Restaurant. “She had expected peaches and champagne but Ted had ripped the nightgown off her…she had been really frightened by his physicality,” Suzette remembered. Sylvia, she noted, “could handle it.” Assia told Suzette she never wanted to see Ted again and spoke of her husband’s gentleness. Suzette remembered that though Assia sounded “horrified” as she told the story, “it was as if there was something there she needed and wanted.”61 Sylvia would hear about all of it. Her London friend Jillian Becker said, “she lamented to me that his need to sin in such luxurious settings—The Ritz, the shores of the Mediterranean—so depleted their joint bank account.”62
David Wevill could no longer contain his rage. Tarn recorded that when Assia told David, that night, that she was seeing Ted off at the station, he grabbed a knife and walked toward Waterloo. But he turned back and returned to the Chalcot Square flat, where, in despair, he swallowed eighteen sleeping pills. When Assia arrived back at the flat at twelve thirty, she found him half conscious. She was terrified, and, at the same time, struck by how young and sweet he looked in contrast to “fierce H.” She woke him and told him Hughes had raped her. An ambulance brought them to the hospital, where his stomach was pumped. “She walks him around all night,” Tarn wrote.
“They leave. She sees him again in afternoon. He still wants to kill H. Doctors quiet him down. D. writes to H. ‘if you come near my wife again I will kill you. D. W.’ ” (Assia also told her colleague Julia Matcham about David’s suicide attempt, and Sylvia spoke of these events in letters to her mother.) When Assia told Ted that David had tried to kill himself, Ted let out a groan, “says he [David] was straightest man in the world,” Tarn wrote.
According to Tarn’s July 19 journal entry, Ted told Assia that Sylvia had “been having hysterics, child also.”63 Ted also told her Sylvia had crashed her car and ordered him to send back the Wevills’ dining room table. Tarn’s journal suggests that Plath drove her Morris Traveller off the road into a nearby clearing in mid-July. Hughes later told Alvarez that Plath had “blacked out” while driving and that the accident was minor. But he was troubled by the event, Alvarez recalled. “His dark presence, as he spoke, darkened an even deeper shade of gloom.”64 Alvarez said Plath told him in autumn 1962 that the accident had been a suicide attempt.
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