Lover of Unreason

The story of the marriage between the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath is the very definition of private-made-public; in the popular imagination its tragic details have largely eclipsed their work. But until now little has been known of Assia Wevill, the woman Hughes was having an affair with at the time Plath committed suicide. Wevill helped in the care of the two children Plath left behind and had her own daughter with Hughes, continuing her tumultuous relationship with him for six more years. But ultimately she met the same fate as Plath, ending her life by breathing in the fumes of a gas oven—the major distinction being that she took her four-year-old daughter into death with her.

In their new biography of Wevill, Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev write that when Hughes' archive at Emory University was made open to the public in 2000, nothing of his life with Assia was there. It wasn't until 2003, when his widow sold thousands of volumes from his library, that "Assia surfaced" in many books they had exchanged as gifts and inscribed with messages. With their exhaustive yet riveting work, Israeli writers Koren and Negev give us a full picture of the woman Hughes once called his "true wife and the best friend I ever had."

The Assia Wevill of their biography is dramatic, quick-witted, Old World-sensuous, imperious, and uneager to settle down with one man. Born in Germany to a Jewish father and a German Lutheran mother, Assia was raised in Tel Aviv, where the family fled in 1934. But Wevill left Palestine for England as a very young woman and never returned, years of top-notch schooling having prepared her for a life of culture and sophistication there. She was a successful copy writer at a London advertising firm and was on her third marriage--to the writer David Wevill--when she met Hughes.

And she was beautiful. The writer William Trevor thought her looks were "reminiscent of Sophia Loren in a tranquil moment," and the Irish poet Richard Murphy was stunned by her "Babylonian beauty." The bristlingly masculine Hughes began their affair by leaving a note at her London office, saying he had come to see her "despite all marriages."

Using newly unearthed personal diaries and letters, as well as household ledgers and interviews, the authors reveal that Wevill first became pregnant with Hughes' baby while he was still married to Plath, and terminated that pregnancy while she was living with Hughes in the flat where Plath had died. The many quotes from Wevill's diaries also reveal a caustic wit she eventually turned on herself, as well as a poet's knack for description. "His mouth is grim--it's a sand ditch," she wrote about Hughes, who proved to be moody and difficult in the domestic sphere. When she wanted her thoughts kept secret she wrote them in Hebrew, as in this one-word inscription about life with Hughes: tohu va'vohu: chaos.

They never married, and Plath's presence loomed large in their relationship; early on Wevill seemed to know that it, and perhaps even she, was doomed. The summer after Plath's death she implored of her diary, "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?" Later, when things had gotten very bad, Hughes drew up a list of house rules for her, including the amount of time she was to spend with his children each day.

The authors also plumb the creative work of everyone involved, meticulously and thoughtfully considering many of the works and their chronology. They find meaning, for instance, in Wevill's choice of Yehuda Amichai's poems, which she translated from the Hebrew for a book project with Hughes. They quote her doing a reading from the book on a BBC radio program: "Love appears as the most valuable element in life—but vulnerable, and doomed."

This is powerful stuff, and Koren and Negev expertly refrain from injecting opinion into the already intense narrative. In fact, you're never entirely sure whether or not they like their subjects (a very good thing in a biography), all of whom spend much of the book throwing themselves around in hysterics. Even poor David Wevill, who comes off like a long-suffering saint, swallowed thirty sleeping pills when he found out about his wife's affair. (He survived, and was interviewed for the book.) Reading this impressive and engaging biography, you may find you have sympathy for Dr. Trevor Thomas, who shared the London building Hughes lived in with Plath and later with Wevill, and who always found it hard to get along with the inconsiderate people upstairs.