Juxtabook

As my Typead blog has dispppeared I will be republishing a few of my favourite blogs. This, from 2008, is one of my earliest reviews.

The poetic and romantic relationship of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has fascinated fans of both their work since the 1970s. The story of the smart girl from Boston, piercingly intelligent and rabidly passionate, and the granite like Yorkshireman with his disconcerting poetry of dissection, power and mythology, ending with her tragic death by suicide, is literary biography at its most sensational. Like the Brownings a century earlier, the story of their relationship seems bigger than their literary legacy.

The causes of Plath’s death are many and complicated, and it is certainly true that she had previously attempted suicide and suffered from depression before she had met Hughes. It is also the case at the time of her death that the Hugheses’ marriage was in trouble and Ted was having an affair with Assia Wevill, the beautiful wife of a fellow poet.

The biographers in A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Death of Assia Wevill make the point that Wevill has always been seen as a bit part, a walk on player, in the traditionally more important tale of Plath, Hughes and poetry. Yet of course Assia was a person not a sub-plot. She has been portrayed as the other-woman, which she was, and the second of Hughes tragedies, as she (stepping-up the tempo set by Sylvia) kills not only herself but her and Hughes’ daughter Shura. As such she has been either portrayed as the wicked femme fatal or, in the feminist assessments of Hughes biography, the final victim. Of course the truth is both more interesting and more complicated.

Assia was born Assia Gutmann in Germany to a Russian Jewish father and a German Christian mother in 1927. Her ethnicity and place of birth combining to make her always, as she said, an exile. Her story is immediately interesting as it follows her family fleeing the anti-Jewish laws, including laws against inter-marriage, to move across Europe to the pre-state of Israel, then still under British control. Books on Germany in the ’30s and ’40s tend to concentrate on the awful tragedy of those who did not leave. This is the first, fairly full account I have found of what it was like to be such an exile: lucky on one hand because you survive, but nonetheless a victim. The problems for the Gutmanns, and those like them, were many: now in Israel they feared for the safety of the German mother in a state at war with Germany, and they also feared invasion by Germany. Socially the parents felt (as wealthy, middle-class, middle-aged Germans) they did not fit in with a country founded by East European immigrants with their communist ideals. The Gutmanns’ fellow Israelis tended to be young men, involved in the physical labour of building a new country and speaking Hebrew, not the educated, literary German speakers that populated their earlier world.

The trauma of Assia’s early years, the spoiling favouritism of her adoring father, combined with her intense beauty making her an exotic flower in post-war England, formed an unsettled, butterfly personality, attention seeking and prone to rages and depression: “Assia thought she deserved everything”. She was not just beautiful but talented, speaking four languages by the age of 7 or 8, aiding her poetic lovers as an insightful commentator, writing the poetic translations of the work of fellow Israeli Yehuda Amichai, and holding down a succession of successful posts as a copy-writer in London. But none of this was enough. Her life as a copy-writer is a small version of her personal tribulations; her talents and weaknesses just the same:

Assia’s free spirit and ability to imply elegance even in the most ordinary ads impressed Angela Landels, who was Assia’s group head. ‘She was innovative, everything she wrote had charm, and she brought a touch of poetry to mundane subjects like bread.’ But Assia was also difficult to work with, brazenly lying to excuse her regular lateness or complete absences. Landels found her unpredicatable, untrustworthy, manipulative, devious, argumentative and petty, but still was charmed by her unconventional , often wild and stimulating ideas, a priceless advantage in the profession. To her fellow workers, Assia’s bubbling vitality seemed feverish; her radiant glare was at times menacing, slightly insane; ‘all that beauty could turn ugly in an instant’.

By the time she met Hughes and Plath Assia was on her third husband, Canadian poet David Wevill. Normally she was in control of her relationships, she left all of her previous husbands not the other way round, but Hughes was the one man she could not secure. Though Assia was with Hughes as long as Plath was they never married, living together for sporadic tempestuous periods. The ghost of Sylvia never left them. Living in Plath’s houses, sleeping in her beds (from the very day she died), jealous as Plath’s poetry grew in posthumous stature, resented by both Plath’s family and Hughes’ as one of the causes of Sylvia’s death, meant that despite having Hughes’ child they never came together in a stable family home. Assia Wevill gassed herself and her daughter in March 1969.

The tale of all Assia’s relationships is psychologically interesting. Her ex-husbands all contributed positive but realistic memories of the unfaithful beauty. The portrait of literary London, the fellow poets, the young novelists working in the copy-agencies (including Fay Weldon and William Trevor) is lively. And though, if you have read the Anne Stevenson biography of Plath or the Elaine Feinstein biography of Hughes you might feel you know the story, the thorough examination of it from Assia’s point of view brings new insights into all three people, and into the work of Hughes particularly. Readable, well researched, balanced and fascinating, it does however leave a bit of bad taste behind it when you think of Hughes; it is not overtly Hughes-bashing (I think their assessment is very moderate) but you can’t help despairing of his behaviour. If you want to admire Hughes’ work untrammelled by the complicated personalities of his women, this biography is best left alone; for everyone else I can heartily recommend it.