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Assia Wevill with Shura in 1968 |
The passionate story of Ted’s ‘other woman’
For poet Ted Hughes’s mistress Assia Wevill death was preferable to rejection, writes Ruth Gorb
A Lover of Unreason: The life and the Tragic Death of Assia Wevill
by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev.
Robson Books, £20.
THIS is a love story that has it all. Passion, poetry, adultery, suicide and a woman of heart-stopping beauty. Yet that woman has only ever been a footnote in the telling of the story. Until now.
So much has been written of the love-hate marriage of two poets, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
The Other Woman, Assia Wevill, remained in the background. Was she, as some have said, an evil woman, a Jezebel who enchanted Hughes, who destroyed Plath, and ultimately caused her suicide? Or was she, like Plath, a victim of Ted Hughes’s cruelty and colossal ego? After all, she too committed suicide for love of him.
It has taken two Israeli writers Eliat Negev and Yehuda Koren, to bring her into the foreground, and who in doing so have to try to make sense of an appalling truth – that when Assia Wevill killed herself, she killed her four-year-old daughter with her. “We never pass judgement,” say the biographers. “We just found the material and put it on the page.”
Their involvement with the story began 20 years ago, with a chance reading of a poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, a close friend of Ted Hughes. The poem, he told them, was an attempt to understand the death of the woman his friend had loved.
Koren and Negev, mystified, saw it as a challenge. They spent 15 years researching letters and documents and diaries, they interviewed 70 people, among them the poet Al Alvarez, the writers William Trevor and Elaine Feinstein, Assia’s friends playwright Pam Gems and Fay Weldon, even a world exclusive with Ted Hughes himself. A picture emerged of a complex, difficult woman, restless and fundamentally unstable (there had been earlier suicide attempts before her final death in 1969), but whose charm and beauty captivated everyone – especially men.
She married three times, but despite her tendency to move on to the next man, and her ultimate obsessive love for Ted Hughes, continued to care, and be cared for, by all of them.
Assia Gutmann was born in 1927 in Berlin, the daughter of a Russian-Jewish doctor and a Lutheran German mother. She was adored by her father, cushioned by an affluent life-style, and brought up with no notion of her Jewishness.
In 1933 her father was forced to recognize his roots and together with hundred of other Jews left Germany and took his family to Palestine.
Reduced circumstances in Tel Aviv did not suit the Gutmann family, least of all the tantrum-prone Assia.
The belief that she was a little princess was exacerbated when her mother sent her to a school run by an Englishwoman where Assia learnt to speak English with the cut glass vowels that characterised her speech for the rest of her life.
She had began to re-invent herself, a new upper-class self whose aim in life was to find an English officer who would get her and her family out of Palestine.
She got what she wanted. She married John Steele at the register office in Hampstead when she was just 20. She had already managed to enrol at the Regent Street Polytechnic as an art student and had been living in a room overlooking Primrose Hill. It was an area she loved and would return in the 1960s, the turbulent, happy time of her years with Ted Hughes.
The account of her life and loves is detailed and disturbing. She was not happy with John Steele, and when he suggested they emigrate to Canada, she swallowed 50 aspirin.
By the time she was married to her third husband, the blond handsome poet David Wevill, her ideal Englishman, she had had several affairs and had landed a job as copywriter in an advertising agency. Her colleagues there describe her in alarming terms: mendacious, manipulative, wild, untrustworthy, “all that beauty could turn ugly in an instant”.
The extraordinary beauty went unnoticed at first by Ted Hughes. He and Sylvia Plath and Assia and David Wevill belonged to the same poetry group, but rather than instant chemistry there was a business-like arrangement in 1960 whereby the Wevills rented the Hughes’ tiny flat in Chalcot Square.
What the biographers call “a fateful meeting” took place two years later when Ted Hughes invited the Wevills, together with Alan Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight, to stay in their house in Devon. Assia’s response was exited and to the point: “I’m going to seduce Ted!”
It took her a little time, but once again she got her own way. Their affair became public, and in February 1963, in her flat in Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill, Sylvia Plath committed suicide. When a colleague said to Assia Wevill that she must feel awful about it, Assia opened her eyes wide and said, “Why should I? It was nothing to do with me”.
It is hard to feel sympathy for the woman, even though her biographers write kindly about the way she looked after Ted Hughes’s children, about her domination by Hughes, and about the pain of living under the shadow of Sylvia Plath’s suicide.
When Al Alvarez’s wife, Anne, a psychologist, was interviewed, she said Assia was doomed, totally obsessed by her predecessor. “She had no chance,” she said.
This was proved tragically right. The affair between two beautiful, charismatic people began to sour as Assia begged and pleaded for Hughes’ love, and as she endured his cooling ardour and infidelities.
She moved with her little daughter, Shura, to Clapham, and it was there in March 1969, after a telephone quarrel with Ted Hughes, that Assia Wevill took a handful of sleeping pills and a tot of whisky, picked up her sleeping child and laid her on an eiderdown in the kitchen, lay down beside her and turned the gas.
It was six years since Sylvia Plath had killed herself. Al Alvarez felt that Assia’s only way of outdoing her dead rival was in the manner of her death. But the virtual murder of her child is impossible to excuse, although biographer Eilat Negev has this to say: “The child was the core of her existence, Ted showed no interest in her. The child would be motherless, with no father. She did it for the child’s own protection.”
The story, she says, reads like fiction, but it was all based on interviews. The research that she and her co-writer undertook is impressive, as is their total involvement with their subject. They write elegantly, and with such a passion that one is almost convinced that Assia Wevill was what they call “a singular 20th-century woman”, more sinned against than sinning. Almost.
In the end her only claim to fame is that she was for six years the mistress of a great poet, six years which crystallized the basic flaws in her character. In her will, written when the affair was crumbling she wrote: “To Ted Hughes. I leave my no doubt welcome absence and my bitter contempt.”
Perhaps Fay Weldon’s charitable assessment must be the epilogue to this sad story. “The times were against Assia, as against Sylvia,” she said. “Both talented women died in love, not depression. In those pre-feminist days, women saw their lives in terms of being loved or not loved by a man. It was terrible to be abandoned, death was better than rejection.”
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