More London visitors arrived on the third weekend in May, in the form of the couple to whom Ted and Sylvia had sub-let the flat in Chalcot Square. The lease was for three years and sub-letting was allowed; retaining the flat kept open the possibility of a return to London.
David Wevill was a rising poet, having considerable success in getting his work published. His wife Assia, three years older than Ted and eight years older than her husband, born Assia Gutmann, had a staggeringly beautiful face, but always complained that she did not have the body to match. In contrast to slender-limbed Sylvia, she was self-conscious of her broad hips and the thickness of her waist. She was nervous, of German-Jewish refugee origin, on her third marriage and now working in an advertising agency. On the Saturday, Ted and David drove out on to Dartmoor, taking little Frieda. They ran out of petrol, but managed to get home, thanks to the assistance of a passing army truck. While the men were out, Assia helped Sylvia weed onions in the vegetable garden. In the evening they all listened to a recording of Robert Lowell reading his great early poem, ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’. They talked about each other’s poems. Sylvia left abruptly and went to bed. Despite calls for him to come up, Ted carried on talking to his guests until late.
The next day, Assia was helping to prepare Sunday lunch by peeling the potatoes in the kitchen, with Ted assisting. Sylvia and David were chatting outside. They could hear muffled voices. Sylvia touched David on the knee, said ‘I’ll be back’ and headed for the kitchen. She did not return and was very quiet over lunch. The Wevills left as planned, in time to catch a slow Sunday train back to London. In the carriage, David asked Assia why Sylvia had changed from being so friendly to so silent and edgy. Assia said, ‘Ted kissed me in the kitchen, and Sylvia saw it.’21 David was shocked – he was not yet aware of any cracks in their marriage – but he did not press further, assuming (or hoping) that it was just a flirtation. Back at work in London, Assia said nothing of a kiss, but told her friend Suzette Macedo that she sensed that Sylvia had picked up a ‘current of attraction’ between her and Ted.22 She told another friend that in the course of the weekend Ted had said that he hated Sylvia, that because of her he had not been able to write for four years, and that his only decent work in all that time, the poems in Lupercal, were written during the ten days she was in hospital for her appendectomy.23 Since the last of these assertions is patently untrue (the Lupercal poems were written over a long period during Ted and Sylvia’s residence in New England), the other claims are not necessarily to be trusted.
Assia’s boss at the advertising agency claimed many years later that before leaving work on the Friday Assia had been showing off about the invitation to Devon and had said ‘I’m going to seduce Ted!’ The boss allegedly took the boast with a pinch of salt and muttered, ‘I don’t care what you do, as long as you come back on Monday in a better mood.’24 At such a distance of time, it is impossible to know whether such an exchange ever took place and, if it did, whether Assia was joking or semi-serious. She did, after all, have a complicated marital history and something of a reputation as a seductress.
Ted’s retrospective narrative in Birthday Letters offers little biographical help. It makes Assia into more of a mythical figure than a real woman. He creates an image of Sylvia being fascinated by the dark Germanic undercurrent in Assia’s ‘Kensington jeweller’s elocution’. Then he turned her into a ‘Black Forest wolf’, a ‘witch’s daughter’ out of the Brothers Grimm, a ‘Lilith of abortions’, a tissue of contradictions: one part Harrods, one part Hitler, as she helps Sylvia to weed the onions. The poem ‘Dreamers’ lays on such imagery to grotesque excess: ‘An ex-Nazi Youth Sabra. Her father / Doctor to the Bolshoi Ballet’ (which he indeed was), ‘A German / Russian Israeli with the gaze of a demon / Between curtains of black Mongolian hair’. All this, the poem alleges in one of Hughes’s most tasteless lines, makes Assia ‘Slightly filthy with erotic mystery’. The poem also claims that while at Court Green Assia told of a dream about a giant pike, which made Sylvia ‘astonished, maybe envious’.25 David Wevill has no recollection of this. It is possible that Assia made up the dream, knowing that it would intrigue Ted – she had read his poems, and when she and David went round to the Chalcot Square flat to discuss the possibility of a sub-let, she would have seen the Gehenna Press Hughes Pike on the wall. But to suggest that she was putting out a line in order to catch a bigger poetic fish than her husband is to buy into the image of her as a ruthless seductress.
The day after the Wevills left, Sylvia wrote two poems. ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, according to Ted’s Birthday Letters reply-poem with the same title, was inspired by a rabbit snare discovered by Ted on a recent clifftop walk. ‘Without a word’, Sylvia tore the snare out of the ground ‘and threw it into the trees’.26 Where Ted saw the countryman’s heritage of living off the land, Sylvia saw only the cruel hands of the imagined trapper, a Lawrentian figure with hands closing round his mug of tea as they would close round the neck of the poor rabbit. There may also be a memory of Ted’s hands on the hillside above Benidorm. The poem closes with a jump-cut to the idea of marriage as a trap, a form of suffocation:
And we, too, had a relationship –
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also.27
The past tense and the images of closure suggest that something in the marriage had died at the sight of Ted and Assia in the kitchen the previous day.
The other poem written on 21 May 1962 was originally entitled ‘Quarrel’, then revised to ‘Event’. It tells of a couple lying in bed by cold moonlight, back to back, as their baby cries for food. A rift has opened between them; they cannot meet each other’s eyes (which is what Ruth Fainlight had noticed earlier in the month). ‘Love cannot come here,’ Sylvia wrote bleakly.28
There was no sense of guilt or embarrassment in Assia’s thank-you letter to Sylvia for the weekend, which thoughtfully included a tapestry pattern in response to a passing remark from her hostess that needlework was something she was thinking of taking up. Shortly afterwards, Ted’s family arrived at Court Green, complete with Uncle Walt. A visit from Aurelia, fresh from Warren’s wedding in America (which Ted and Sylvia were not able to attend), then began in the third week of June and lasted for six weeks.
On 26 June, Ted and Sylvia, leaving the children with Aurelia, took the train to London to do some recordings for the BBC. During a break, Ted made an excursion from Broadcasting House to Assia’s advertising agency in Mayfair. Unable to meet her, he left a note, which allegedly read, ‘I have come to see you, despite all marriages.’29 Assia seems to have wanted her husband to know that she was on the brink of an affair: she showed Ted’s ‘short declaration’ to David, trying to get him to react.30 He did not rise to it. It may be that she was trying to drop a hint because there was something else she really ought to have told him.
According to the novelist William Trevor, who also worked at the advertising agency, when Assia received Ted’s note she looked out of the window of her office and saw a gardener mowing the lawn in the square below.31 She went down and picked up a blade of freshly cut grass, which she posted to Ted at Court Green without any message. Presumably this was a clever joke. Since grass was Green, Court meant courtship. One might think that this story in William Trevor’s memoir of Assia was a novelist’s concoction, save that Ted corroborates it in a poem in his scarce and extremely expensive cycle of poems to Assia, Capriccio, which Trevor is most unlikely to have known: ‘She sent him a blade of grass, but no word.’32
Sylvia found out about the affair before it had really started. On Monday 9 July, she returned to Court Green from a shopping trip in Exeter with her mother to hear the phone ringing. Sylvia got to it before Ted and realised from the embarrassed moment of silence at the other end that the call was not meant for her. Accounts vary as to whether it was Assia putting on a deep voice, or a m
ale friend phoning on her behalf. Either way, it was clear that she and Ted were in, or at least on the brink of, a relationship. After the call, Sylvia ripped the telephone cord from its socket and there was an explosive row, Aurelia shielding the children. Ted left for London and Sylvia told her mother that he was having an affair.
Two days later, Sylvia wrote an anguished, angry poem called ‘Words heard, by accident, over the phone’.33 Ted’s later poem ‘Do not pick up the telephone’ was, more obliquely, another answer to the call. ‘A dead body will fall out of the telephone,’ he writes: might everything have been different if neither of them had picked up the telephone that day? A line towards the end of the poem, ‘You screech at the root of the house,’ is a clear allusion to Sylvia’s other poetic remaking of the fateful call, in ‘Daddy’: ‘The black telephone’s off at the root.’34
‘Daddy’ is a poem that yokes father and husband, under the influence of Sylvia’s psychoanalytic journey. In Ted’s case, a Freudian might well see a connection between the woman-trouble that began with the phone call and some lines in the original limited-circulation version of ‘Do not pick up the telephone’, which were cut from the mass-market reprint: ‘Panties are hotting up their circle for somebody to burn in / Nipples are evangelising bringing a sword or at least a razor / Cunt is proclaiming heaven on earth.’35
The version of the poem that included these lines was in a group of four, published in a little literary magazine called Ploughshares in 1980. The others were the honeymoon remembrance ‘You Hated Spain’, which was later included in Birthday Letters; ‘Lily’, which, in Lawrentian mode, compares the look and feel of the inside of a lily to female genitalia; and ‘A Dove’, a poem of benediction that Hughes reprinted as the closing poem in both his volume of family elegies, Wolfwatching, and his summative 1995 New Selected Poems. Its two doves, ‘Nearly uncontrollable love-weights’, are simultaneously ‘violently gone’ and still present, ‘coiled’, ‘bubbling molten’, ‘wobbling top-heavy / Into one and many’.36 They are manifestations of the Hughesian Goddess, partly metamorphosed into the Holy Spirit, but perhaps also the spirits of Sylvia and Assia. In the contents list of New Selected Poems, the title ‘A Dove’ is placed on the page in such a way as to suggest that it is a coda to the sequence of ‘Uncollected’ Sylvia and Assia poems that are this volume’s most remarkable feature.
The mini-cycle of four poems in Ploughshares was an epitome of both Hughes’s myth and his life. In terms of his myth: initiation, infernal descent and rebirth. In terms of his life: the beginning of his marriage in Spain, the lily-imaged ‘craving / Of cunt-flesh’ which ‘Hurt cannot open deep enough / To quench’,37 the end of his marriage with the telephone call, and the dove-imaged hope of redemption through cathartic poetry.
Shortly after the ill-fated phone call, Sylvia burnt a pile of Ted’s manuscripts on a bonfire in the garden. In ‘Burning the Letters’, the incantatory poem that was companion to the act, she referred to the distinctive loops and jags of Ted’s handwriting as ‘spry hooks that bend and cringe’, and proclaimed that the attic would be ‘a good place’ now that Ted was gone from Court Green.38
In London on 10 July, Ted went round to the Wevills’ with four bottles of champagne. He said that it was his birthday, which it wasn’t. Presumably he meant that it was the first day of his new life without Sylvia. When David went out to buy cigarettes, Ted told Assia that he was leaving Sylvia and that he wanted to see her, alone, the next day.39
She took the day off work, and Ted borrowed Al Alvarez’s tiny flat. His memory of the occasion remained vivid for years: ‘The first meeting at Al’s flat: the Joan Baez records on – the strange bliss. The spicey suspicions: that she knew the place too well, that she had visited Al there.’40 Reflecting on what he was doing, he recognised that what had really driven him into the affair was the quest for freedom and independence, the need to free himself from the ‘bondage and tyranny’ of marriage to Sylvia. Assia called herself the catalyst.
Their lovemaking was vigorous. Assia told her friend Nathaniel Tarn that Ted was ‘very virile, “did things man does”, decides etc. Everything D[avid] has stopped doing’. Ted stayed with Alvarez that night. Two days later, on Friday the 13th, he booked a hotel. (He was haunted by the significance of that date in relation to both Sylvia and Assia, making it the starting point of ‘Capriccios’, the opening poem of his elegy sequence for Assia.)41 This time his lovemaking was ‘so violent and animal’ that he ruptured her. This turned Assia against him. She phoned her husband and told him that she was going to see Ted off at the station. David Wevill headed for Waterloo with a knife, turned back, went home and took eighteen sleeping pills. Assia returned home after midnight to find him ‘lying so sweetly, so young (such contrast to fierce H. in bed)’. She woke him up, told him that Ted had raped her and called an ambulance so that he could have his stomach pumped in hospital. In the morning, David wrote a note to Ted: ‘If you come near my wife again I will kill you. D.W.’42
Nathaniel Tarn, to whom Assia reported all this, described the next twist in telegraphic form: ‘H. back in Devon. Wife has been having hysterics, child also. Wife had car crash. When A. tells H. over phone about D., he groans; says he was straightest man in the world etc. H. sends back table they had given him on S.’s orders. D. very tender and loving to Assia.’ By the end of the month, Assia had told Ted that she did not want ‘a slinky affair in London’. Her instinct was that Ted would probably stay with his wife.43 He was indeed with Sylvia at this time: they fulfilled a commitment to give a joint poetry reading in North Wales, stopping on the way with Daniel Huws and his wife Helga, to whom Sylvia confided her marital woes. In early August, they said goodbye to Aurelia at Exeter station, with tension in the air. She would not see her daughter again.
Towards the end of August, Sylvia wrote to tell her mother that she was thinking of getting a legal separation. Ted was still seeing Assia in London during the week and only coming to Court Green at weekends. She felt degraded and she hated his lies. She was also concerned about financial support for the children.
In September, though, she decided to give the marriage another chance. To have any hope of rebuilding their relationship, they would need some space away from Devon and indeed the children. As so often when imagining an alternative life, Ted’s thoughts turned to rural Ireland. They recalled an encounter of the previous summer. The Poetry Book Society, under the directorship of poet, novelist, biographer and Oxford don John Wain, was running a festival in London called Poetry at the Mermaid. Guinness the brewer had sponsored a dozen rising poets to write a piece on a subject of their own choice, for a modest fee. The best poem would then be awarded a Guinness Prize. For the brewer, it was a low-cost opportunity to run an advertising campaign under the slogan ‘Thirst Prize’. Ted, along with Geoffrey Hill and Clifford Dyment, had read at one o’clock. He and Sylvia had then joined another of the poets, Richard Murphy, for a late lunch.
Murphy was in awe of The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal. Sylvia did most of the talking. Ted was strong and silent, but came alive when the conversation turned to country life, fishing and the sea. Three years older than Ted, Murphy was a native of the west of Ireland. In 1959, a marriage just ended (following his wife’s affair with the writer and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien), he had arrived at Inishbofin aboard a leaky sixty-year-old lugsail-rigged fishing and cargo boat with nothing but a box of books, a case of wine and a carton of orange juice. Determined to learn more about the sea, he bought and restored the Ave Maria, a fishing boat of the ancient kind known as a Galway hooker. The following year, based in the impoverished fishing village of Cleggan, he set himself up in a small business that involved taking tourists out into the Bay of Galway for a combination of sea angling and day trips to Inishbofin.
By the time of the Mermaid event, he had put together a volume of poems, many of them inspired by his adventures on the Ave Maria, called Sailing to an Island. The publisher Macmillan was looking at it. A few months l
ater, Charles Monteith showed the manuscript to T. S. Eliot, who said ‘yes’, leading Murphy to withdraw it from Macmillan and become a Faber poet. Around this time, Murphy met Sylvia, but not Ted, for a second time: he was at a reception in the Goldsmiths’ Hall in London, where she received a Guinness Prize for her poem ‘Insomniac’. The following year, she was a judge for the same prize, and on Saturday 21 July 1962 she sent Murphy a letter tipping him off that he would soon be getting an official letter telling him that he was the next prizewinner. The letter went on to say that she and Ted desperately needed ‘a boat and the sea and no squalling babies’.44 Murphy invited them to stay in September, after the tourist season.
They arrived in Connemara on Thursday 13 September 1962, having taken a train to Galway and been driven the 60 miles to remote Cleggan. They planned to stay for a week of sailing and sea air. When Murphy asked them to sign the visitors’ book of the Ave Maria, he could not help noticing that Ted put his address as ‘Halifax, Yorkshire’ and Sylvia hers as ‘Court Green, North Tawton, Devon’. They slept in twin beds.
Murphy took them to Coole Park, home of W. B. Yeats’s friend Lady Gregory, and then to Yeats’s tumbledown tower at Ballylee. Ted and Sylvia said that they should steal apples from a moss-coated apple tree that had been planted in Yeats’s time, perhaps by Yeats himself. They shook the branches. Murphy asked why they were doing this. ‘When you come to a place like this you have to violate it,’ said Ted in a ‘voice of quiet intensity’.45
They did not criticise each other in front of Murphy. He never heard them quarrel. They spoke separately of their troubles. Sylvia was upset by Ted’s lies; she wanted a legal separation. Ted never mentioned any fault in Sylvia, but he said that ‘after six or seven years that had been marvellously creative for him, the marriage had become destructive, and he thought the best thing to do was to give it a rest by going to Spain for six months’.46 He did indeed have Spanish plans, though not for a long stay.
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