She Would Quite Like to Kill Me

The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill (Louisiana State University Press, 2021), the assorted works of a woman better remembered for who she knew than for what she published, is striking for all that it omits. None of the dozens of letters included here record 1947, 1948, 1950, 1951, or 1961. Her diaries, with significant interruptions, span only six years. There is a self-portrait in pencil, three illustrated cards, and five original poems. And there is a collection by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, now out of print, that Wevill translated from the Hebrew in 1967. To mention the gaps isn’t to impugn the research by the book’s editors, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and Peter K. Steinberg, whose efforts appear assiduous. Nor is it to chastise the friends and relatives unwittingly tasked with saving Wevill’s miscellanea. No doubt all that was findable is here; in all likelihood, little more exists. A screenplay didn’t survive, for example, and surely many letters didn’t either. The slenderness of this volume is the inevitable consequence of a life not aimed at documenting itself. Under ordinary circumstances, the book’s incompleteness and relative brevity would not seem sad—or no sadder than the random, meager ephemera most people leave behind.

Wevill, a secretary-turned-copywriter, was deprived, or perhaps deprived herself, of the liberty of being nobody by colliding, in 1961, with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, two of poetry’s eternal somebodies. Within months of that meeting, Hughes left Plath, apparently for Wevill, though family and biographers still debate his reasons. Inside of a year, Plath killed herself. Six years later, Wevill also killed herself—and her four-year-old daughter with Hughes, Shura. In the public memory, these unspeakable events have affixed Wevill in permanent relation to one of modern literature’s most infamous marriages. The contrasts between Plath and Wevill—between their minds, their works, their looks, their deaths—were henceforth inescapable. 

Nowhere are those contrasts more apparent than in sheer page count. Plath’s collected letters alone exceed 2,000 pages; her unabridged diaries add another 700-odd. Hughes’s selected correspondence—300 letters chosen from several thousand—clocks in at almost 800 pages. In this volume, Wevill’s letters run to 142 pages; her journals amount to a mere 62. But who’s counting? Well, in a manner of speaking, the women. “What has this Weavy Asshole … got that I haven’t?” Plath raged in a letter to her psychotherapist, Ruth Beuscher. “[She] can’t make a book or poem. Just ads about bakery bread.” The “girl who works in an ad agency” pursued Hughes because she was “bored, bored, bored." She couldn’t “make a baby”; grotesquely, she meant to “die before she gets old & loses her beauty.” “She is so outwardly sophisticated, so mocking. I have never learned the art & never will.” Perhaps, Plath mused, Hughes was attracted to Wevill because she stood in for his sister, Olwyn; Wevill was the “barren & frigid symbol of sex.” In any case, it was clear to Plath that Wevill was involved with Hughes because she was “dying to stop” Plath’s creative work. In fact, Plath submitted, “she would quite like to kill me.” 

Plath’s abuses of Wevill, however cathartic, could not stave off her grief or the stifling suspicion, touched off by the woman's calamitous arrival in her life, that she was “ugly and a fool." “It was cruelly unfortunate that the one woman Sylvia envied for her appearance should happen to get tangled up in my departure,” Hughes wrote to his brother, Gerald, soon after Hughes and Plath separated. “That hurt her more than any other thing.” Wevill’s beauty was indeed incontestable. In a contact sheet reproduced in the Collected Writings, she wears a sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows, a slight, knowing smile on her lips. Her high forehead is framed by the black wings of her bangs; her hair is slightly disordered. Her eyes seem unusually light, her lashes unusually dark. “What a seductive animal,” recalled Ben Sonnenberg, a friend of Hughes and the publisher of the literary journal Grand Street. “There was a feral purr in her voice and something feral in the arrangement of her hair.” Wevill’s first husband remembered her “exceedingly pretty face”; in his poem “Dreamers,” Hughes memorializes her “many-blooded beauty,” “slightly filthy with erotic mystery.” “To be with Assia was like being admitted into the presence of Aphrodite,” said her friend Pam Gems. David Ross, one of the contributors to St. Botolph’s Review, the literary magazine Hughes started as a student at Oxford, described walking in with Wevill to pubs “packed with men,” who, when they saw her, “all moved aside.” 

The unavoidable comparisons between Wevill and Plath make it difficult to get a sense of the woman behind the myth. And for many decades, Wevill’s role in Hughes’s life was suppressed, not least by Hughes himself, who removed signs of Wevill from his archive before releasing it to Emory University and avoided discussing her with biographers. (In 2007, Emory acquired more than 60 letters between the couple, including one in which Hughes entreats Wevill to “burn all my letters.”) Most of the writing about Plath and Hughes examined her perspective or his; Wevill’s experience was largely ignored. This state of affairs made welcome the publication of a biography, Lover of Unreason (2006), by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, which remains the only comprehensive study of Wevill’s life. Though marred by overwriting and rather free interpretations of its subjects’ interior lives, the book is nonetheless a thorough, well-researched account. The Collected Writings, however marked by lacunae, commendably fills out the story, offering material previously unseen and numerous letters and journal entries hitherto available elsewhere only in brief quotation.

***

Wevill was born in 1927, in Berlin, to a Latvian Jewish doctor and a German Lutheran nurse. When she was six years old, her parents fled the Nazis with her and her four-year-old sister, Celia, and settled in Tel Aviv, where she grew up. In her teens, she attended Tabeetha High, an expensive Protestant school for girls taught in English. The young Wevill was confident, witty, and wild—if she wanted to stay out all night, she told her parents she was at a friend’s—and she dated widely. At 19, she immigrated to London to study art at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Spurred by her mother’s encouragement, she married John Steele, a British soldier she’d met some years before. Her mother hoped Steele could get the entire family to England, although, as it turned out, they were able to leave without his help. The pair was very young and not particularly close when they married; they soon discovered they were not well-matched. Shortly after Wevill’s family arrived in London, Steele took his wife to Vancouver, Canada, where they hired a photographer and another woman to act as Steele’s lover and staged a scene of betrayal to document the grounds for a divorce.

Wevill’s romantic life went through several dramatic transformations before its final detonation. Her marriage to her second husband, Richard Lipsey, who later became a noted economist, fell apart when she met David Wevill, a poet seven years her junior, on a ship to England. For a while, Lipsey tolerated the affair, not without torment. In an autobiographical essay on his website, Lipsey, who is still alive, describes his relationship with his first wife as “tumultuous,” then elaborates in a footnote: “I will not say more about my first marriage except to note that the name of my first wife will convey to many that the word 'tumultuous’ is not an over dramatization.” Ultimately, the pair separated. Wevill and David lived for a while in Burma, where David was teaching, then married and moved to London. There, after renting an apartment from Plath and Hughes, the two couples became friends. The rest, as the cliche goes, is history: Hughes and Wevill took up with each other “despite all marriages” (as Hughes’s first note to Wevill read) and, after Plath’s suicide, remained deeply entangled until Wevill’s death, in 1969.

The journals in Collected Writings document the last six years of Wevill’s life. They begin in April 1963, when Wevill took an ill-fated road trip to Ireland with David (whom she never mentions by name) in an apparent attempt to give their marriage a chance. If her impressions of Galway are any indication, there was little hope for her relationship: the town was “dour—smug, catholic-clean and bereft, utterly bereft of joy.” Nor did she spare the Irish people: “Their villages are ugly; there are no gardens, their clothes are ugly, their food is unspeakable.” After the Ireland trip, the diary jumps to a date in May that Wevill commemorated as “4 days after my 100th birthday and 14 days after the end of my 3rd and sweetest marriage.” Not even a year had passed since the beginning of Wevill’s relationship with Hughes, and she was already in pain. Unnervingly, the intensity of her despair and poisonous self-doubt resembles Plath’s earlier anguish over Hughes. “What, in 5 years time will he reproach me for?” Wevill wrote. “What sort of woman am I? how much time have I been given? how much time has run out? What have I done with it? have I used myself to the hilt, already? am I enough for him? AM I ENOUGH FOR HIM?”

Apparently, she was not, in exactly the sense she feared. While with Wevill, Hughes involved himself with at least three other women—the poet Susan Alliston, a married woman named Brenda Hedden, and, eventually, Carol Orchard, whom he later married. Even outside of his infidelity, the pressures on his relationship with Wevill were great. His family resented her, the two children he’d had with Plath needed caring for, and always there was Plath herself between their “heads at night.” A couple of years before she died, Wevill wrote a will that demonstrates how acrimonious her relationship with Hughes sometimes was. To Hughes’s son with Plath, Nicholas, “too young for possessions,” she gave all “her most tender love.” To Frieda, Hughes’s and Plath’s daughter, her love and “all the lace, ribbons and silks she can find, as well as a fine gold chain.” But to Hughes: “I leave my no doubt welcome absence and my bitter contempt.” Conspicuously, she did not rewrite a will drafted in obvious anger, as if she reckoned that the sentiments would last or be accurate enough for perpetuity. 

***

Scholarship about Wevill is important, her biographers have argued, because it reveals the “interrelationship” of the three protagonists of the fatal drama. But just what status Wevill’s work should be afforded in that interrelationship remains unclear. Was she an unrealized talent in her own right, or is she of interest simply because of her association with Hughes and Plath? Those who study her seem to be impressed enough by her intelligence and passion to imply that it’s the former. Goodspeed-Chadwick and Steinberg refer to her “literary contributions” without elaborating on their nature; her biographers lament “how much more she could have achieved.” Certainly her appetite, her intensity, and her contempt for convention were formidable. She was fantastically cosmopolitan. She lived in five countries (Germany, Israel, England, Canada, and Burma) and spoke five languages. She read widely, drew with genuine skill and sensitivity, and, by her own description, dressed with “brio.” She had numerous lovers and underwent multiple abortions. She swore she would die before she was 42; that she made good on her promise suggests a kind of horrifying, inverted strength of character. She was unsatisfied with what she was able to make of her life, and in her 30s appeared to be grasping toward art, at once encouraged by her husbands and lovers and helplessly quashed by them—or, more, by the stunning dramas she herself helped orchestrate. 

And there is some evidence, if slight, of the nature of Wevill’s ambitions. In 1964, she worked on a film script with Hughes and, separately, began developing Turgenev’s novella First Love into a screenplay, now lost. She drew a series of illustrations for a book of Hughes’s—“miniature paintings in brilliant colours with many animals and plants,” according to a friend of his, that were never published. She was, in the accounts of her poet lovers, an excellent reader who did not spare them her criticism. “Where is the glossy abundance I remembered, the sense of solid, wrought, tough poems?” she wrote of one of David’s books. “The framed, dense things—what a paltry, melancholy, disheveled book it is.” She didn’t restrict her reviews to poetry. Of Hughes, she wrote:

When he’s angry, or suspicious, his face actually turns black, or a dark brown/grey and the cloud colour and amorous impact of his eyes disappear, and become camouflaged and as significant as his nostrils. The weight of his chin must account for 1/8 of his total weight, and bears heavily on his neck—he has 2 of them. Basically, he’s a prim, rational (self-admittedly) highly-charged puritan, with whole Versailles of virtues beautifully landscaped through his brain.

Both Hughes and David urged her to take writing more seriously. “Work slowly,” David cautioned her. “Let your pulse be at normal pressure when you write: you don’t have to lash yourself into energetic fury, like the cat on the stump.” He admired her skill and told her to watch out because she was such a good writer, “and advertising wears good writers out.” 

Whether because she was worn out, distracted, or undisciplined, she did not write a great deal or very seriously. Of the five poems in Collected Writings, one was a valentine for Hughes, another is light verse, and a third is a bit of doggerel sending up her second husband, Richard Lipsey (“Why Mr. L. is not a swine / And why anyone suggesting that / He might be / Is a homosexual American Scene Setting / Anti Vietnam, Thomas-loving liberal-cultural Fendango Gimmick master of the moment”). The most interesting of the batch elegizes a long-dead, apparently undistinguished Englishman, Thomas Head—“Unhollied, unmarked, spring less Thomas”—whom Wevill likely encountered at a cemetery in Hertfordshire, next to “his child and bitter wife / Stalled in their mass eroded cattle grave.” Head, she writes, “has eaten his fifty / Year old death and had no time, / No sun, no annotation.” The poem seems to mourn something stalled or finished in the speaker’s own life, which she likens, somewhat portentously, to a “black northern pond”:

Its autumn spent
Its eye burning with crippled cedar wings
And four black feet deep with
Summer’s rotting rooks

Though the poems show some facility, it feels unfair in a way to consider them too deeply; there is little evidence that Wevill meant to be a poet. Her friend Pam Gems said she had “an artistic temperament but no specific talent to express it.” Her most sustained artistic efforts and her most successful were her translations of Amichai. A good third of the Collected Writings is devoted to those translations, which were published in two editions, both of which are now out of print. The translations are confident and plain, with a deliberate, cadenced simplicity:

Like our bodies’ imprint
Not a sign will remain that we were in this place
The world closes behind us,
The sand straightens itself.

In a letter to Amichai, she praised the poems’ “fine steel backbones.” They were “open, innocent, good-humoured,” she wrote for a BBC program about the poet, “often funny, always sad, always fundamentally elegiac—lamenting something lost or foredoomed.” Amichai made Hebrew poetry “colloquial and supple enough to deal with the complexities of modern life in Israel,” and Wevill’s translations highlight the attributes she lauded. She may have begun working with him at Hughes’s suggestion, but she was exceptionally well-suited to the project, not just as a speaker of Hebrew and a fellow Israeli but also because the poems moved her. Amichai was, she thought, mainly a “love-poet”—and the love he knew was “homeless, nationless, striving to live in the niches and shadows of a world as terrible and abstract and unconcerned as Jehovah.” For Wevill, who saw herself as an exile and who never settled long enough in any romance to find comfort, never let any lover relax into complacency beside her, the imagery of love itself as an exile was surely familiar. She admired Amichai’s warmth and sincerity, the “unspoilt self” that was “always there.” 

Did Wevill influence Hughes’s art? His affair with her was among the fundamental relationships of his life. Yet there are signs that her work, however little there was, also made an imprint on him. Hughes’s “Lovesong,” for instance, with its grim, folky rhythms and imagery of lovers as a conjoined body, trading limbs, unmistakably recalls Amichai’s “A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention,” which Wevill translated in 1968, two years before the appearance of Hughes’s Crow, the volume that includes “Lovesong.” Here’s the end of “Lovesong”:

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop
 
In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage
 
In the morning they wore each other’s face

And the beginning of “A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention”:

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

The accomplished translations offer a poignant taste of what Wevill might have done had she lived. But she was harassed by comparisons to Plath—just as Plath was harassed by comparisons to Wevill. At some point after Plath’s suicide, she read the novel Plath wrote about the end of her marriage with Hughes, a manuscript that doubtless portrayed Wevill in an unflattering light. The manuscript disappeared, perhaps lost, perhaps destroyed by Hughes. The poet Nathaniel Tarn, a friend of Wevill, said she was unsettled by its characterization of her as an “icy, barren woman” and of David as “contemptible.” “Sylvia had a million times the talent, 1000 times the will, 100 times the Greed and passion that I have,” Wevill wrote just months after Plath’s death. In her journals, she derided herself with abandon: She had “no talent”; she was “the weak mistress, forever in the burning shadow of their mysterious seven years.” That she had never wanted or worked to be a poet was incidental in the grand scheme of her suffering. While Plath was “growing” in Hughes, “enormous, magnificent,” Wevill was “shrinking daily”: “Both nibble at me,” she wrote. “They eat me.”

Wevill’s and Plath’s agonies testify to the corrosive effects of contrast, the difficulty of maintaining any sense of one’s merits when measured, by happenstance or misfortune, against someone else. There are a million opportunities for such measurement every day; mysteriously, that’s not what undoes a person. Rather, it’s the indignity of being pitted against a particular individual with her particular virtues—one’s blissfully murky reaches suddenly lit by a single light, gauged by a single, punishing yardstick. The injuries that may follow, the crimes committed against the self, are deep and legion. In May 1963, sick in bed with cystitis, Wevill insulted her “slight, decorative intelligence”—the kind of observation that, in its implicit ambition and pithy cruelty, can be made only by a mind of substance.