Elizabeth, too, encountered a sad scene at 23 Fitzroy Road not long after Sylvia’s death. “I went up to see the children after she died, and Ted came in and he was talking to me in the kitchen, and he gave me The Bell Jar. He said, ‘This is yours.’ I hadn’t known [Plath had dedicated the novel to her and David]. He said, ‘I feel like a murderer.’ And I said, ‘You’re not a murderer, you didn’t murder anybody.’ The children were being looked after by a nanny, and my daughter came with me, my oldest daughter, Meg, she had long brown hair, and when Nick saw her he climbed on her and held her hair…awful, awful. Ted said, ‘I hear the wolves howling and it seems appropriate.’ ”59
After this visit, Elizabeth wrote to Aurelia, “He loves those children, & is taking great care of them. He looks so sad & bent down….And yet I can’t blame Ted. He is such a kind & gentle man.”60 Elizabeth continued to see Ted often in North Tawton in the years that followed. “Never was Sylvia mentioned. Never, by anyone.” One night while they were sitting and drinking by her fire, Ted told her, “You’ve got to be aware that if you’re creative, you have a demon, and that that demon can destroy people who come close to you.”61
Ruth Fainlight remembered that when Ted and Assia came around to her flat a few days after she returned from Morocco that February, “they both had this shocked look—like north Italian fifteenth-century Adam and Eve expelled….And of course she was the demon woman, the murderer, everything. That was my preconception. She was extraordinary looking, really beautiful, but she always had this pained, vulnerable quality about her—already.”62
Ted continued to change his mind about whether he would stay in London, go back to Court Green, or raise the children in Yorkshire. Before Sylvia’s death, he had been planning long trips abroad—Germany, Italy, “North Africa, then East, to Egypt & Arabia, up through Syria to Turkey, then East through India & to Japan, then to South America.”63 Now his life was in chaos. To Olwyn he wrote that spring, “But simply to work, as everybody else does, for a few hours a day, I seem to have to push my head like a ship’s prow through a sea of yellings, cries, anxious letters,…& the incessant querying voices of the unsolved Nanny, the unsolved Home, the unsolved Plaths et al.”64 He had inherited a mother’s responsibilities, and a mother’s lack of freedom, at exactly the moment he had been plotting his escape. But he loved his children too much to abandon them, and he fretted over their future. When he and Frieda were alone together, they entered, he said, into a “conspiracy of mourning.”65 The nannies he hired were too harsh, Hilda was too puritanical, Assia not maternal enough. At one point he wrote to his old teacher in Mexborough, Pauline Mayne, asking her to leave her family to help him raise his children. She declined.66 Elizabeth offered to raise Nick in Devon, but he said things would have to “be a great deal more difficult” before he gave up his son—though he later tried to convince the Comptons to move to Yorkshire to help him raise Frieda and Nicholas, an offer they declined.67 David recalled, “He wanted to go up to Yorkshire and take us and start up a new life there. And I took a train journey up to Mytholmroyd, and came back again very quickly. Yorkshire! This black man came from this black county! There’s black rock under the soil and all the houses are built out of the black dust. Oh God, I could not see myself raising Ted and Sylvia’s children in Mytholmroyd, sending my children to the school.”68
Aurelia visited both her daughter’s grave and her grandchildren in Yorkshire (they were staying with Hilda) in June 1963. Ted had written to her in May urging her not to smother the children with her misplaced love for Sylvia, nor to “make a battlefield of their loyalties.” He told her he had heard rumors that her visit was “an investigation,” and he expressed anger about questions Warren had put to him when he was in England for Sylvia’s funeral. He dreaded, he wrote, “the effects of that tense, watchful anxiety” that had made his wife’s life “so much more difficult than it need have been…a more or less constant state of terror that something might go wrong, then panic when it does, even if it’s only missing a train.” But the letter was an apology, too.
Please, Aurelia, do not make the mistake of thinking that the way I caused Sylvia to suffer was any indication of my real feelings for her, which are simply unaltered….my love for her simply underwent temporary imprisonment by something which can only be described as madness, as much an attempt to free myself from the strangling quality of our closeness as by an outer cause. My love for her simply continues, I look on her as my wife and the only one I shall ever marry, and these two children are ours.69
That June, Aurelia did not reproach him, and she doted on the children. But Ted found the visit “a strain.”70 She asked him, again, to allow Warren and Maggie to raise the children in their large home in an affluent suburb of New York City. Again, he refused.71 They kept in close touch over the next few years, tied together by loss and the children. They were wary of each other, yet also mutually protective. They had both loved Sylvia, both imperfectly.
When Aurelia next came to England, she was distraught about The Bell Jar. Hughes re-created the scene in an unpublished poem.
In a restaurant in Hammersmith,
…“How could she?
The only good thing in the whole business
Is that Mrs Prouty is dead & beyond
Reading about Philomena Guinea.
I cannot understand. I cannot. I cannot
Understand.” A lunch of stricken tears.
Faceless, nameless hardly knowable
Horror emerged, behind both our faces,
…“Why? Why? Why?
What did I do wrong?”
And then
The only drug, the only mouthful that eased:
“That psychiatrist reinvented her.
She was shattered & that woman took
All the bits and glued them back together
Into a girl
That simply wasn’t my daughter.
The person who wrote that book was not my daughter.”
Bitterness, pure. Helplessness. Bitterness.
…from that day
Sealed my resolve never to let The Bell Jar
Be published in America.
She begged “never.”
And I swore: “Never.” I saw
It was enough for her, more than enough
To deal with in secret…
………………..
All her pains & years of the winner’s prizes
Converted to blazing shame, by her daughter.
As Herself sentenced for her daughter’s death
By her daughter’s voice, crying from the grave.72
Mindful of the financial cushion the novel would provide for Frieda and Nicholas, Ted published The Bell Jar in America in 1971 when he realized that, because of a copyright loophole, it would come out there anyway.73 Aurelia never forgave him.
* * *
AFTER SYLVIA’S DEATH, Assia had a row with Suzette, who, Assia claimed, had been “dining out on the story.”74 They would soon make up, and they pondered creating an authors’ agency together—Hughes’s idea—“Macedo, Hughes, & Gutmann.”75 Meanwhile, Nathaniel Tarn continued taking notes. “Hosts of women appear to have tried to work out their guilt by offering help with the children,” he wrote. “A.[ssia] says she put her foot down and brought in a nanny. Things are coming back to normal.” Hughes wanted to get away—“lunatic plans as usual including China”—but felt he should stay for the sake of the children. Assia told Nathaniel that Ted “wants to get her [Plath’s] poems out as quickly as possible.” As for Alvarez, Tarn noted his “hangdog adoration of T. H.” and that “S. P. appears to have made passes at him.”76
In early March, Assia again wavered to Nathaniel about whether to leave David. “She has taken no decision, has no one to talk to & is lost in a maze of reasons for not deciding.” The
re were reasons, she told Tarn, not to stay with Hughes: “1) voracious sexual appetite, 2) superstitious about remarriage 3) black moods 4) lack of contact & sharing his work 5) Puritanism.” She and David were no longer sleeping together, and she was pregnant with Ted’s child. She probably told Hughes about the pregnancy. Yet, Tarn wrote, “the question of her pregnancy is as far as possible from an over-riding consideration. The woman for all her scheming is really fantastically naive.”77 Assia had become, he wrote, “the tragic muse!”78 He felt that if David did not leave her, “it will cost him his life.”79 As for Assia, “she will lose herself in the Hughes mystery.”80
In the weeks after Sylvia’s suicide, Assia accompanied Ted to Heptonstall and the Beacon, where she had a massive row with his family. Billy Hughes—a Great War survivor—could not stomach Assia’s German heritage and upper-class accent. Edith was scandalized by Assia’s three marriages. “A [Assia] loses her temper, touchy,” Hughes wrote in his notebook.
Then a dog-fight, coming and going. Hilda high & weeping, calling A a hor [sic] and that kind of woman….Pa & his reason: A being with me after S’s death, the root of the scandal, quite correct. Hilda’s irrational suspicion and antagonism against Assia…moral defendent of the family name, etc….But how loyal she’s [Assia] been and still seems to be—even against that lot. But it’s easy for her to take [an] absolute stand against Hilda—for me not so.81
The tension between Assia and Ted’s family later reached a breaking point when all were living under the same roof at Court Green in 1966.
In April 1963, Assia and David Wevill, like Sylvia and Ted before them, traveled to Ireland and stayed with Richard Murphy in Cleggan. They hoped that the trip would ease some of the tension in their marriage, but it had the opposite effect, just as it had for Plath and Hughes. The Wevills agreed to a six-month trial separation, and David left for Spain in early May. Assia moved out of the Highbury flat she had shared with her husband and into 23 Fitzroy Road. She and Ted would live there together until early fall, when he took the children to live at Court Green. When Assia and Ted stayed with Nathaniel Tarn and his wife, Pat, on August 5–6, 1963, Assia confessed to Pat, to whom she had grown close, that she missed David terribly and that he was the only man she would ever love. “Ted is very kind but she can’t stand the children,” Tarn recorded. “The little girl.”82 Yet Assia’s coolness may have been a pose, for in her diary she wrote of the immense pleasure she took in Nick and Frieda.83
In early October, Ted returned to Devon with the children. He wrote Assia from Court Green, “It’s completely different down here—so strange to be here without the electrical cloud. The peace is bewildering—I spend a lot of time just standing about.”84 “The electrical cloud” was clearly tied to Plath and the tense atmosphere both had endured in the second half of 1962. Ted told Assia he was going to “try to write myself out of it.” Frieda, now three and a half, had started packing her things a few days ahead of time, making sure everything she brought “would be right for Court Green.” After a long car ride (both children were “angels”), they stepped out into the dark yard. Ted wrote in his notebook,
She asked if this was it—then went into the house, quite mystified, looking about. I was wondering what she would remember. She obviously knew her way about, but still didn’t seem to remember anything in particular. I can’t decide whether she just took everything for granted as the same, or in fact simply didn’t remember. But she obviously does remember—since she knows all the people straight off. What strange things must have been going on in her head though, those first few days. That world was so utterly different than this.85
* * *
WHEN DAVID WEVILL RETURNED from Spain in late October 1963, he moved into 23 Fitzroy Road with Assia, who was still seeing Ted. David and Assia would move to Belsize Park Gardens in April 1964, hoping to rekindle the marriage, to little avail.
Literary London treated Assia as a pariah after Sylvia’s death; David wrote to Nathaniel Tarn in 1969 that Assia was “blamed and never forgiven.”86 Fay Weldon remembered that at literary parties, “people would turn their backs when she came into the room because they blamed her so much.” Assia told Fay that Ted called her “ ‘the dark force. You are the dark destructive force that destroyed Sylvia.’ To think that she was unmoved by this, or unhaunted by this is impossible.”87 Assia was haunted, too, by Sylvia’s ghost, and the knowledge that Ted still loved his dead wife. “Maybe I’ll end up writing the biography of Plath,” Assia told Nathaniel. She read Sylvia’s journal and was surprised that the marriage was “much closer than Ted ever made out.” She told Nathaniel, “Ted often misses her [Sylvia] terribly. Also caught in every sort of guilt. ‘Of course there are some good days.’ ”88
Linda Gates, Alvarez’s American girlfriend, remembered Assia and Ted coming round to Al’s flat for dinner in 1964. Ted and Al would talk, leaving Linda with Assia. Assia never mentioned Sylvia, but Linda knew many in Al’s circle blamed her for Sylvia’s suicide. Linda had attended dinner parties with Al that winter at the homes of Kingsley Amis, Edna O’Brien, and John Mortimer, where everybody drank neat whiskey. The literary scene was cliquey, and she had no real friends of her own. Assia thought that this lone American might be a sympathetic ally. “Assia wanted to be my best friend,” Linda remembered. She thought Assia dramatic and passionate—“She lived for love.” Assia taught Linda Israeli folk songs on the guitar and spoke of her interest in literature and art. Linda found Assia “very beautiful, very troubled.” Assia once told her that she should put belladonna in her eyes, like a Renaissance woman, to make her pupils dilate “orgasmically.” Linda found Ted, who didn’t speak much to the women, “dark, Celtic, brooding and intense.” “He never smiled,” she said, but recited poetry and ballads beautifully. “What a man. You could drink his blood.” Assia “smoldered a lot. So did Ted.”89
In autumn 1964, Hughes returned to Yorkshire and hiked the path to Wuthering Heights.90 It brought him peace at a time of “wasted weeks; steady hell…utter emptiness.”91 He dreamed of seeing and loving Sylvia again: “ecstatic joy of her & me. Love, complete reality.”92 But there were nightmares, too. Around the second anniversary of her suicide, he had a “terrible grief dream about Sylvia, long and unending. In a house, large stone, on the moor’s edge—the garden was also a cemetary [sic].”93
Assia was all too aware of how small she stood in Sylvia’s shadow. In her 1963 journal she wrote,
she had a million times the talent, 1,000 times the will, 100 times the greed and passion that I have. I should never have looked into Pandora’s box, and now that I have I am forced to wear her love-widow’s sacking, without any of her compensations. What, in 5 years’ time, will he reproach me for? What sort of woman am I? How much time have I been given? How much time has run out?94
When she read Plath’s new novel and 1962–63 journals, she told Suzette she was “so distressed by the cruelties and malice” that Plath had “written about her.” Suzette said that Assia told Ted to destroy the journals and that Ted had “reassured” her that he would.95 (He later claimed that he destroyed only the last journal, which covered the weeks preceding her suicide.) According to Assia’s close friend Mira Hamermesh, Assia came to believe that Sylvia’s suicide had been her fault: “She never, never thought otherwise.”96 Assia would feel Sylvia’s “repugnant live presence” at Court Green, but she also admired her “splendid brilliance.”97
Assia continued to miss David terribly. “What insanity, what methodically crazy compulsion drove me to sentence him to being alone, and myself to this nightmare maze of miserable, censorious, middle-aged furies, and Sylvia, my predecessor, between our heads at night,” she wrote in her diary.98 “Only David can claim me morally….Reality is David, my own income. T[ed] is a long night of nightmares.” She dreaded the thought of moving to Yorkshire with Ted (“the North terrifies me”) and raising his children. She seemed to understand
that a bleak future awaited if she stayed with Ted, yet she could not summon the will to leave him. After a row at the Beacon in spring 1963, Ted kissed her as she leaned over the table to feed Frieda. “I then flared up with enormous love,” she wrote in her diary.99
Elizabeth Compton, who was looking after Court Green in Ted’s absence, remembered Assia’s first visit to the house. She came with Hughes, who was there to collect some rugs. After lunch, Assia said to Ted, “Ask her to show me around.” According to Elizabeth, “Ted looked down at his place and said, ‘Would you mind?’ He knew damn well I’d mind. So I went with her to the sitting room and the playroom, then we went up the stairs past the door of her writing room, and she said, ‘Don’t you feel a traitor?’ and I said, ‘I certainly do, and I’m not going a step further.’ And I went downstairs to where Ted was crying, actually. He was rolling up a rug and tying a string round it, and Assia came into the room and she said, ‘Do you think Ted and I can be happy?’ And I said, ‘Never, never. Look at him, look at the state he’s in.’ And she had hysterics, she cried, and then he just bundled everything into the car and drove off. It was awful business.”100
David Compton’s memory of the day is similar. Ted, he recalled, was “in a state….I don’t know if they’d been snipping at each other all the way down in the car. Anyway, they were basket cases. He had come to pick up something, and he ended up going around that house tearing the curtains off the walls and stuffing them in the car while Assia had Elizabeth in the garden, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ and ‘What would you do?’ And poor Ted. It must have been so dreadful, there was Sylvia’s life there, and he just set about breaking it. He knew what those curtains were….It was a very, very sad and too deeply felt occasion, and the only view of them we ever had—of Assia—and it wasn’t a happy one. She was a very dramatic-looking woman. At that time she was tortured, feeling bad. She came down with him I suppose hoping to help, maybe, but it didn’t work.”101 Elizabeth remembered Ted weeping in the garden like Heathcliff as he dug up Sylvia’s strawberry plants to take back to London.102
Red Comet Page 132