Red Comet

by Heather Clark

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  WHEN ASSIA RECEIVED the invitation, she told her supervisor that she planned to “seduce Ted” in Devon.47 Suzette also recalled her rhapsodizing about Ted’s good looks and asking, “Shall I wear my war paint?” “I said, ‘What for?’ Because it was a bit of a joke. She was naughty, and she adored making an impact. But it didn’t cross my mind that she meant it when she was invited to Court Green.”48 Such declarations seemed out of character to some who knew her. Edward Lucie-Smith felt that she was unaware of her beauty and “often panic-stricken when men misinterpreted her warmth and friendliness.” He suspected that it was her naivete that “created so many explosive situations around her.”49 David Wevill himself thought her “Brave, resourceful, warm” but with “many shadows” from her displaced past.50 Neither thought her manipulative. Ruth Fainlight, who hated Assia after Sylvia’s death, eventually became very close to her.

  Yet many who knew Assia agreed that she could be dramatic. An old boyfriend from Canada remembered that she “thought that ordinary life was contemptible” and tried to live the values of the modernist poets she admired.51 Assia’s ad agency colleague Julia Matcham recalled that she “had an original, entertaining mind…coloured by an exaggerated romanticism, which in its rather tenuous relationship to reality allowed her free rein to be quite ruthless in the pursuit of anything she wanted, without the burden of a bad conscience.” When Assia had told her about making a play for Ted, she had been “perfectly unashamed.”52 Ted Hughes was Britain’s most famous young poet in 1962, and his celebrity impressed Assia. Lucie-Smith said that Assia was “an intellectual snob. She was very influenced throughout the Hughes business by the fact that this was Hughes.”53 One of Assia’s colleagues remembered overhearing Assia, after the Hugheses separated, tell her hairdresser that she was carrying the child “of a very famous poet.”54 Ted came to believe that Assia arrived at Court Green with a plan. “We didn’t find her—she found us. She sniffed us out,” he wrote in his poem “Dreamers,” eliding his own role in the affair.

  Ted picked David and Assia up at the train station on the evening of Friday, May 18. They dined together on the Wevills’ round wooden table and “talked a lot,” David remembered, “satirizing people we knew. It was a lively conversation.”55 Assia told stories from Burma, Sylvia “anecdotes of her life in the States.” In “Dreamers,” Hughes wrote that in the morning, at breakfast, Assia told him that she had dreamed of “A giant fish, a pike.” Plath, in the poem, was “astonished, maybe envious.” This was the moment, he suggested, that he fell in love with Assia:

  I saw

  The dreamer in her

  Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.

  That moment the dreamer in me

  Fell in love with her, and I knew it.56

  Ted did not realize that Assia would have seen the Gehenna Press broadside of “Pike” that hung on the wall at Chalcot Square; he viewed the dream as a sign.57 The conversation put Sylvia on guard. As early as 1957 she had contemplated writing a story about a “poet husband” who writes about his “Dream Woman Muse” rather than his wife.58 And as Suzette, who was privy to both Sylvia’s and Assia’s confidences, noted, Sylvia was at the time breastfeeding, sleeping little, and looked like—in her word—a “shlumper.”59 It was a term, Yiddish in origin, that Suzette had learned from her Jewish friends to describe women who let themselves go after having children. Sex that had once been, according to Suzette, “wild and demanding” was now on the wane after the birth of their second child. “Assia had no pity for that at all. Her attitude was she [Sylvia] had no right to let herself go like that. Assia was always perfumed and manicured.”60 Indeed, Sylvia would tell Dr. Beuscher that fall that sex had become so infrequent after Nicholas was born that she thought Ted was ill.

  The next day, Saturday, David and Ted drove to Dartmoor with Frieda while Sylvia and Assia weeded together in the vegetable garden and prepared the day’s meal. Plath would later include images from this afternoon—variations of “black boots among the cabbages”—in her July 1962 poems. Ted thought that Sylvia, half German herself, found a doppelgänger in Assia. “She fascinated you,” he wrote in “Dreamers.” “Her German the dark undercurrent / In her Kensington jeweller’s elocution / Was your ancestral Black Forest whisper—” “Warily you cultivated her, / Her Jewishness, her many-blooded beauty, / As if your dream of your dream-self stood there.”61 Ted, too, was fascinated by this Jewish-German-Russian refugee. Both reduced Assia to a cipher, and a cliché: she would become a Germanic black goddess in Plath’s work, a “slightly filthy” seductress in Hughes’s. “Her black-ringed grey iris, slightly unnatural, / Was Black Forest wolf, a witch’s daughter / Out of Grimm,” Hughes wrote in “Dreamers.” There, he called her, notoriously, a “Lilith of abortions.”62 The real woman, according to those who knew her best, was generous and talented, but troubled.

  After dinner that Saturday night at Court Green, the four spoke of Roethke, Sexton, and Lowell and listened to a recording of Lowell reading “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” Sylvia went up to bed first and called for Ted to join her, but he stayed downstairs.63 The Sillitoes had felt tension between the couple during their spring visit, but David noticed nothing amiss. “She and Ted gave the impression of a very close and devoted couple that had worked out a life for themselves,” he told Assia’s biographers.64 Sometimes Sylvia’s face would betray an odd expression, “as though she were looking inward,” but for the most part she was a “gracious” conversationalist.65 Assia, though, silently judged her surroundings. In her diary she later mocked the hearts and flowers Sylvia had painted on furniture. The rooms, she thought, were too red, “childishly furnished. Naively furnished. The whole look of it improvised, amateurish.”66

  David recalled that he was “chatting” with Sylvia outside on Sunday afternoon while Assia and Ted made potato salad in the kitchen. “We could hear Assia and Ted’s muffled voices, and suddenly Sylvia went very still. She touched me on the knee and said, ‘I’ll be back.’ She jumped from her chair and ran into the kitchen as if she remembered that she had left some fire burning.” She did not return, and at lunch he noticed that she was withdrawn, “as if a door had slammed down on her.”67 He sensed that she was tired of hostessing or had fought with Ted. Assia told Suzette that Sylvia had asked her to peel the potatoes—“now, Assia was not a potato peeler, ever,” Suzette said—and that Ted had gone in to help her while Sylvia was somewhere else in the house. When Ted stood behind her, Assia “could feel his eyes” boring into her.68 Ted said, “ ‘You’re a Taurus, aren’t you?’ At this moment she turned round, their eyes met and…le grande passion!”69 Assia told Suzette there was an “enormous current between them” in that moment.70 Sylvia had then “walked in, slammed something down on the table and said ‘What are you talking about?’ ” Ted answered, “Just our signs.” Sylvia turned to Assia and said, “I think you should leave after lunch.”71 Assia told Suzette, “She’d sent them off unceremoniously….They were marched off to the train, practically….Poor darling David said, ‘What have we done?’ ”72 Sylvia told her own slightly different version of the story in a July 11, 1962, letter to Dr. Beuscher as the marriage was falling apart. “I’d walked in on them (Ted & she) Tête-à-tête in the kitchen & Ted had shot me a look of pure hate. She smiled & stared at me curiously the rest of the weekend.”73

  David remembered that Sylvia drove them to the train station after lunch. She had not kicked them out, exactly, but “she was very nervous, clashed the gears, and was on edge.” On the train, he asked Assia whether she had noticed the change in Sylvia’s behavior—she had been so friendly but had “changed completely” after lunch. Assia then told him, “Ted kissed me in the kitchen, and Sylvia saw it.”74 Assia offered no further details, and David tried to push the event from his mind. He hoped that it was just a harmless flirtation.

  Back in London, Assia and David both confide
d in Michael Mendelson, who now went by his pen name, Nathaniel Tarn. Nathaniel was also a Jewish refugee whose childhood had been interrupted by war, and Assia trusted him. He and his wife had been Assia and David’s closest friends in Burma, and they remained close in London, where Nathaniel now taught at the London School of Economics. Suzette recalled that he was Assia’s “confidant,” and throughout the spring and summer of 1962, Nathaniel kept notes on his conversations with both Wevills, whom he often met (separately) for lunch.75 These notes, archived at Stanford University, offer a contemporary account of Assia’s and David’s perspectives about Sylvia and Ted as they unfolded in real time.

  Assia told Nathaniel that the stay at Court Green had been “full of difficulties.” “Sylvia, a witch, hated her, wanted her out early. Sylvia’s clairvoyance. Hughes hates her. Has been unable to write for 4 years. Wrote Lupercal in 10 days she was away (?),” Nathaniel wrote in his notes. Assia did not mention a kiss to him; she may have lied about it to make David jealous. Nathaniel noted that Assia was frustrated by David’s passivity. “D. doesn’t react. She wants to make him react.”76 Assia’s word “clairvoyance” to describe Sylvia may have come from Ted, who likely mentioned his belief that Sylvia had such powers.

  Sylvia had indeed sensed the attraction, as she told Dr. Beuscher. She did not write to her mother between May 14 and June 7—an unusually long stretch of silence. While the flirtation between Ted and Nicola Tyrer had angered her, Nicola was a teenager. This was different. The two poems Plath wrote the day after the Wevills left suggest a change in marital weather. “The Rabbit Catcher” reads, “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.” In “Event” (originally titled “Quarrel”), Plath wrote, “Love cannot come here.” “Who has dismembered us? // The dark is melting. We touch like cripples.” The same day she wrote these two poems, she sent them, along with “Elm” and Three Women, to Howard Moss at The New Yorker. She would later send “Event,” “The Rabbit Catcher,” and “Elm” to Al Alvarez at The Observer. Plath was writing about a marriage in trouble, and these angry poems were not meant to be private. They upset Hughes: in a draft of “The Minotaur, 2,” he wrote about “Event”: “ ‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘Hey wait a minute / This is breaking the rules. / Do we blab about each other, about our secret life / To amuse poetry fanciers?’ ”77

  Assia’s visit reawakened Ted. Two days after meeting her, he suggested to the Merwins that he felt close to breaking through his writing block. “I’d got to the point of writing purely out of nerves—so now I’m quite content to let that tension relax & smooth itself out. Then maybe I’ll be able to hear myself speak.”78 He wrote to Olwyn later that summer that “just as the climax was arriving,” he had been doing “quite a burst of writing.”79 On May 24, he told the Merwins that he was “writing a morality play ‘Difficulties of a Bridegroom’—moral, ‘What you are afraid of overtakes you,’ something of a joke.”80 The play was about a young man, Sullivan, who runs over a hare with his car on his way to London to see a girlfriend. Hughes had told Plath the hare was her totem, a fact that she had exploited in her poem “The Rabbit Catcher.”

  On May 22, Assia sent Sylvia a letter that included a small tapestry kit Sylvia had mentioned she liked. Assia had sought out the “Rose Bouquet” pattern at Harrods and told Sylvia that she would change the wool thread colors for her if she didn’t like them. Assia did not mention the weekend in the letter, which concerned the technical aspects of tapestry. She told Sylvia she might become “seriously addicted” to the needlepoint work. (“Please, please don’t let it possess you.”) She signed her letter, “Much love, Assia.”81 Sylvia wrote “tapestry” in her calendar one or two days a week up to July 1, which suggests that she worked steadily on it for about five weeks. “I’m learning to do gros point tapestry for cushion & seat covers. Wonderfully calming,” she told Aurelia.82 Assia’s polite note and generous gift seem to have mitigated Sylvia’s suspicions.

  Alvarez stopped by briefly on June 8 on his way to Cornwall. To him, Sylvia seemed confident and secure in her marriage, “her own woman again.”83 But Alvarez had his own reasons to steer clear of the unfolding drama. Assia told Nathaniel Tarn that she and Alvarez were lovers, but that by February 1962 she had tired of him. She said Al had begged her to accompany him to America, but she declined. Undeterred, he would, according to Assia, propose marriage to her in late July 1962. In 2016, Alvarez denied the affair, dismissing Tarn’s notes and calling Assia “a nightmare, a very unpleasant woman,” among other things. Anne Alvarez, whom Al married in 1966, disliked Assia intensely. She remembered that when she and Al used to go out together with Assia and Ted, Assia tried to erode her trust in Al. Anne called Tarn “Assia’s drunken friend” and also dismissed his notes.84

  David Wevill was less surprised by the revelations in Nathaniel Tarn’s notes. “Tarn was a good friend in those years, and ‘drunken’ doesn’t fit him at all….Al was drawn to Assia as were many.”85 Assia told Nathaniel that Ted was “terribly jealous” of Al in 1963, four months after Sylvia’s death.86 Nathaniel considered himself Assia’s main male confidant and wrote with some satisfaction of the “many gaps” in other friends’ knowledge of her dramas, particularly “Alvarez being attracted to A. [Assia] at the same time as Hughes.”87 Ted wrote about a London assignation with Assia in his diary: “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.”88

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  THAT JUNE, Sylvia enjoyed showing off Court Green to Ted’s parents, who, she told Aurelia, were “immensely impressed & proud.”89 Six laburnum trees—her “favorite tree”—bloomed right outside her study window, dripping “gold everywhere,” she told Joan and Gerald Hughes.90 The weather was “halcyon clear.” She apologized to Aurelia for her three-week silence, claiming, “This is the richest & happiest time of my life.”91

  It wasn’t all hyperbole. The BBC had accepted Three Women and had asked her to do a talk on “The World of Books.” She was excited that Douglas Cleverdon, the same producer who had worked with Ted, was now producing her work.92 (When Three Women aired on August 19, Eric Walter White, secretary of the Poetry Book Society, called it “absolutely first class,” and he invited the Hugheses to dinner in London.)93 Ted had just finished recording a program about the war poet Keith Douglas, and his play The Wound would be rebroadcast a third time on July 14, netting them “another blessed $300 out of the blue.”94 Sylvia hoped that with Aurelia about to arrive she could get back to work on her new novel. She wrote Alfred Fisher, her old Smith professor, to ask whether she could buy some pads of pink Smith memorandum paper. “My muse is mad for them!” she wrote. She also sent him a copy of The Colossus, writing, “I got to remembering those fine afternoons in my senior year at Smith under your office gable. The book is your due.” She told him how wonderful it was to live in the country on their “ancient smallholding” amid the apple trees and laburnum, writing “in shifts, balancing babies in between.” She had started a second book of poems “much freer than this” and had a first novel accepted: “It is wonderful to discover one’s destiny.”95

  Sylvia put Assia out of her mind and set about fulfilling her dream of raising bees and harvesting her “own daffodil-apple blossom honey.”96 In early June, she and Ted met with the local beekeeper, Charlie Pollard, who demonstrated his techniques. Neither Sylvia nor Ted had brought any protective clothing, and Sylvia half-jokingly prayed to the spirit of her dead father to shield her. The other beekeepers, who included the rector and Sylvia’s midwife, lent them hats. Plath would draw deeply on this day in her bee poems, especially “The Bee Meeting,” in which she transformed this enthusiast club into something more sinister. In her June 7 journal passage about the event, she sounds excited about a new adventure with her husband: “We were interested in star
ting a hive, so dumped the babies in bed and jumped in the car and dashed down the hill past the old factory to Mill Lane.”97 Pollard gave them a hive, which they painted white and green and filled with Italian hybrid bees. Ted got stung many times, Sylvia noted, but she did not.

  The fine weather and the outdoor work in the garden improved Sylvia’s spirits. She told the Kanes she was in the garden “from morning till night digging & hacking the huge weeds from square after square of vegetables.” By evening, she was “stupid-cow-tired,” but the work calmed her. (Ted, she wrote, was “a wonderful planter but does not see weeds. I see weeds.”)98 When she was not in the garden, she was painting furniture white or black with hearts and flowers “to make ‘sets’ for this room or that.”99 David Compton remembered that she used to joke excitedly to Frieda that the bees had landed on the Germanic folk-art flowers she had painted around the front door at Court Green.100 The furniture painting, the gardening, and the honeybees were a reflection of a personal and artistic philosophy that Sylvia described to Olwyn as “this William Morris making & designing of things, babies & incipient books.”101 But so much making added to the many domestic burdens she already carried.

  Sylvia and Ted celebrated their sixth wedding anniversary on June 16. “*ANNIV*,” Sylvia wrote in her calendar. She made a celebratory dinner of roast beef, mushrooms, peas, potatoes, and her pièce de résistance, lemon meringue pie. The anniversary seems to have given her a new burst of energy. That week, her calendar was much fuller than it had been since the Wevills’ visit; there are long lists of tasks again, nearly all of them checked off. Two days later, she wrote Olwyn, “I just feel to be lifting a nose & a finger from the last 3 years cow-push of carrying, bearing, nursing & nappy-squeezing. My study is my poultice, my balm, my absinthe.”102 Yet she wrote just one poem in June, “Berck-Plage,” completed on the 30th. “When you come I really must sit in my study in the mornings!” she told Aurelia.103 Sylvia told no one about her marriage’s difficulties that spring. Yet there was a telling aside in her June letter to Olwyn: she praised Thom Gunn’s recent collection, writing that she was also “very sympathetic to Alvarez’s poems, some of them, because I like him & know something about how his wife’s knocked him about & gone off.”104