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  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  One: Childhood

  Two: A New Life

  Three: A Tabeetha Girl

  Four: A Teenager in Love

  Five: First Marriage

  Six: A Second Husband

  Seven: Falling in Love

  Eight: Third Marriage

  Nine: A Fateful Meeting

  Ten: An Illicit Affair

  Eleven: Leaving Plath

  Twelve: The Shadow of Suicide

  Thirteen: Domesticity

  Fourteen: Torn Between Two Lovers

  Fifteen: Birth

  Sixteen: Bliss

  Seventeen: Banished

  Eighteen: Love Me Back or Let Me Go

  Nineteen: Despair

  Twenty: The Die Is Cast

  Twenty-one: Agony

  Twenty-two: Aftermath

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Preface

  Twenty years ago we were leafing through a book by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, when we chanced upon a poem entitled ‘The Death of Assia G’. ‘I can’t understand your death in London,’ Amichai wrote, and we were curious to know who this woman was and what she was to him that he vowed ‘to publicise’ her death.

  We called him the next day.

  Amichai’s answer was laconic and mystifying: Assia was the beloved of his best friend Ted Hughes and an ex-Israeli who died tragically in 1969. The G stood for her maiden name, Gutmann. This set us on our quest.

  Ever since, we have been tracing the many facets of Assia Wevill’s story, and have published a number of features about her in major British, German and Israeli newspapers. In October 1996, we had a world-exclusive interview with Ted Hughes – the only personal one he ever granted. For once, he spoke about Assia.

  Like Sylvia Plath, Assia shared her life with Hughes for six years, and she, too, bore him a daughter. Still, she has been effectively written out of his story. Any influence she may have exerted on him or his work has been diminished or dismissed. The story of the ultimately tragic failure of his marriage to Sylvia Plath has been related in numerous books and articles from one of two conflicting points of view: his or hers. Either way, Assia was reduced to the role of a she-devil, enchantress, Lilith, Jezebel, the woman alleged to have severed the union of twentieth-century poetry’s most celebrated couple.

  Assia Wevill was a complex person, born to dichotomies. Her remarkable life evinces both the limitations and the possibilities of a gifted, independent-spirited, ambitious woman in the mid-twentieth century. To gain a variety of perspectives on her character and to amass as much detail and as many dimensions as possible we have interviewed seventy people, including her sister and brother-in-law. Her schoolfriends in Tel Aviv and the British soldiers who dated her there have contributed substantially to our sense of the beautiful, rebellious teenage Assia. Her three husbands have provided insights into the captivating woman she was. Intimate friends of Assia and her colleagues from advertising, as well as friends of Hughes and Plath, have shared with us their memories of Assia in London in the sixties.

  Our intensive search for new primary source material has not gone unrewarded and in its course we have uncovered a wealth of documents and private papers, many of which were not known to exist. We worked in numerous archives around the world, and gathered new findings from the Hughes and Plath archives and from those of prominent poets who corresponded with them. Some of the material was censored until recently.

  The examination of this material in conjunction with Assia’s diaries, letters and poems is of great importance in the understanding of the writing of the protagonists of the book and of the events that surrounded the two suicides. It reveals the inter-relationship of their work and is all the more important for the fact that some of Assia and Plath’s writing was destroyed.

  A Lover of Unreason charts the emergence of a singular twentieth-century woman. Exotic, cosmopolitan, cultured, she mesmerised men and women alike. Yet she was also a divorcee (thrice), a career woman, the other woman, and a single mother: she openly defied the conventions of a censorious pre-feminist society.

  Assia was on a quest to moor herself emotionally and express herself creatively. Yet security would continually elude her, for all her apparent self-assurance, charm and sophistication. At the same time as she strove to free her creative spirit and declare her independence, so she defined herself by, and bound herself to, the men in her life, ultimately to catastrophic effect. In her increasingly obsessional relationship with Hughes, doubt, fear, distrust and humiliation would dog her, and dislodge her. She and Hughes would not marry, they would not find the house that they would make their own. Instead, Assia – unmoored, again the nomad, always the mistress or muse – would end the journey.

  The exquisitely beautiful Assia inspired, or provoked, many epithets in the pursuit of a destiny that took her, via several continents, from dark pre-war Berlin via Tel Aviv, Vancouver and Mandalay, to London in the swinging sixties. In the end, none would prove to be more fitting than the epithet (and epitaph) she chose for herself in her last will and testament: ‘Here lies a lover of unreason and an exile’.

  Jerusalem, May 2006

  Prologue

  At noon on Sunday, 23 March 1969, Assia Wevill telephoned Ted Hughes at his home, Court Green. They had spent the past five days house-hunting in Yorkshire. On Saturday Assia had returned to her young daughter in London, and he to his children in Devon. For six years they had been trying to set up a home together but every failed attempt drove another wedge between them. They had a vicious quarrel over the phone that culminated with Assia insisting that they should separate for good: the relationship between them was no more than hobbling on and she simply did not believe any longer that he really wanted to be with her. Still, Assia did not slam the door on their future together completely. She remarked that she had spotted an ad for a house to rent in Devon, in the old market town of Barnstaple. Ted asked for the address and promised that he would take a look at it. Assia was not pacified, however, and they resumed arguing until, finally, she told him that her bags were packed and she was going to visit some friends in Dorset for a week. He was not to phone her back, she said, and without waiting for his response, she put down the phone.

  Ten minutes later, Ted did phone back, and they continued their squabble. The two of them had endured scores of similar dead-end arguments over the past years and he felt that Assia was reciting her old grievances towards him. In apathy and exhaustion he had repeated his worn-out reassurances. After hanging up, Assia returned to the lounge, but Else Ludwig, her German au pair, sensed nothing unusual.

  It was a cloudy, dry, cold day, just four degrees Celsius and they all three – Assia, her daughter Shura, and Else – stayed indoors. Else had asked for permission to visit her friend Olga, who lived a short walking distance away and, at 7.30 p.m., before leaving, she went into the four-year-old Shura’s room, ‘and saw that she was in her bed, and asleep. Mr Wevill was in her bedroom. She was still dressed.’

  Assia then acted quickly. She made sure that the sash-type window in the kitchen was fully shut and pushed the small dining table and chairs over to the wall. From her bedroom she fetched some sheets, pillows and an eiderdown, and laid them on the kitchen floor, next to the gas oven. She poured herself a tot of whisky that she kept for occasional guests – she had abstained from alcohol throughout her life – and gulped it down. With another to
t she then swallowed some sleeping pills. Seven times she gulped the whisky and swallowed the pills. Wobbling, she went into Shura’s bedroom and lifted the sleeping child tenderly in her arms. In the dimly lit corridor she carefully negotiated the two steps that led back down into the kitchen. She laid Shura on the makeshift bed, closed the kitchen door tightly, turned all the gas taps fully on and opened the door of the Mayflower gas cooker. She switched off the kitchen light. Then she lay down quietly beside her daughter, so as not to wake her up. Their heads were lying close to the gas cooker. Assia’s feet almost touched the door.

  One

  Childhood

  Russia, 1896–Germany, 1933

  Times were changing and Ephraim Gutmann turned a blind eye when his son found all sorts of excuses not to accompany him to the synagogue on Friday evenings. Lonya had stopped wearing his yarmulke, smoked on the Shabbat and ignored the dietary laws of Kashruth but Gutmann trusted patriarchal authority – and his son’s financial dependence – to prevent him from breaking the ultimate taboo.

  Nevertheless, when Lonya announced his marriage plans, his father’s world fell apart. Ephraim Gutmann could barely tolerate the age gap – the prospective bride was already 37 years of age, seven years older than his son – and the discrepancy in status – his favourite son was a doctor from a well-to-do bourgeois family, while his lover was a farmer’s daughter, who earned her living as a nurse. But he could never consent to the difference in faith: since they reached adolescence, Gutmann had constantly warned his three sons that, come what may, they were not to marry outside the Jewish religion. Elizabetha Bertha Margarete Gaedeke was a Lutheran and Ephraim Gutmann threatened to disinherit his son. The Gaedekes were much more tolerant, eager to see their daughter saved at long last from becoming an old maid. The groom’s Jewishness proved no obstacle and, being proud German nationals, they only had to overcome the embarrassment of their daughter marrying a non-German, a man from Latvia. When the marriage did take place, obviously without Gutmann’s blessing or presence, he announced that the newly weds were never to set foot in his home.

  The roots of the Gutmann clan were in the Ukraine and Ephraim, son of Nachman Gutmann, was born in 1866 in Kagarlyk, a village southeast of Kiev. At a young age he took the 250-mile journey northwards, settled in the city of Lutsk and married Menja Lipowa Pintchuk. Lew (Lonya), born on 9 December 1896, was their third son. Ephraim Gutmann made his fortune by supplying rubber boots and uniforms to the tsar’s army, at the peak of his success employing 200 workers in his factory. With a view to expanding his business activities, Gutmann sent his sons to London with a stock of caviar. Lonya and Vanya, bedazzled by the temptations of the city, gave away or ate most of the samples, squandered the money and returned home shamefully empty-handed.

  Gutmann’s wealth allowed him to send his eldest son Vanya to law school and to finance Lonya’s medical course in far-away Moscow. Russian law limited the quota of Jewish students in universities (one Jew for every nine students). Gutmann was obliged to pay a heavy fee to lift the numerus clausus and subsidise several non-Jewish students, for his own sons to be enrolled. Before departing for Moscow, Lonya was given a silver cigarette box with an engraving of a Teutonic warrior: a puzzling gift for a pious Jewish father.

  In his fantasies, Lonya Gutmann saw himself not in the operating theatre with a surgeon’s mask and gown, but in a tuxedo. Basking in the limelight of the concert hall, his fingers would dance on the black and ivory keys of the grand piano and he would take his bow to a cheering audience. Arriving in Moscow, he defied his father and enrolled in the music conservatory. But despite the distance, hundreds of miles away, his father soon discovered the deceit and forced Lonya to attend the medical school of the First Moscow State University as planned. It was the oldest university in Russia and boasted of having Anton Chekhov among its medical students.

  Lonya Gutmann’s surviving report card shows him to have been a mediocre student. ‘Father never wanted to be a doctor,’ explains his younger daughter Celia Chaikin. ‘He enjoyed the student parties and took part in vodka-drinking competitions. He was a practical joker and had a great sense of humour. One day, at the opera, some Greek Orthodox priests were sitting in front of him, their long hair tied at the back of their heads. Father caressed it, his friends choking with laughter, the priests unaware of the reason for the commotion.’ The American writer Lucas Myers, who met Dr Gutmann decades later in his daughter Assia’s flat in London, remembers his ‘marvellous tales of dancing and drinking in the gypsy camps on the outskirts of Moscow, when he was a medical student.’ A born storyteller, Lonya Gutmann often mixed fact with fiction to amaze his audience and create an aura of intrigue around himself. He thus told Myers that he ‘had once been physician to the Bolshoi Ballet’. Hearing this same story, her future lover, Ted Hughes, incorporated it into his poem about Assia, ‘Dreamers’: ‘Her father/Doctor to the Bolshoi Ballet’. No documents were found to prove that Gutmann ever worked for the Bolshoi, and his daughter Celia never knew whether it was true or not. There were more tales, impossible to verify or disprove: that Tolstoy used to visit the Gutmanns’ home and that they were neighbours of the violinist, Yasha Hefetz: Lonya remembered Yasha’s mother, urging her son to stop playing outside and to practise the violin.

  While Lonya was frolicking in Moscow, his parents back in Lutsk were caught in the turmoil of the First World War. Their town fell first into the hands of the Austrians and then was recaptured by the Russians, passing back and forth between the sides, until finally, in June 1916, it was Russian again. Instability increased with the Bolshevik Revolution of February 1917. Having lost much of their property, Lonya’s mother Menja was compelled to sell her jewellery and they migrated to Riga. Ephraim Gutmann soon regained his wealth, enjoying a spacious house, four servants and a coachman.

  In 1921 Lonya Gutmann returned home after graduation, choosing not to specialise in any specific medical field. This hedonistic pampered young man, who indulged in the luxuries of life, had a taste for choice cuisine, flowing conversation, a good laugh and being a tourist. A man of culture, who loved music, frequented concerts and was an avid reader, he was delighted when his father sent him to Germany to attend to the family business and estates. Just before leaving, he fell in love with the German nurse Elizabetha (Lisa) Gaedeke. The tall, stately and striking Lisa specialised in nutrition and was accompanying a private patient to a convalescent home in Riga. Her parents were devout churchgoers, farmers from Kladen, halfway between Hamburg and Berlin.

  Lisa followed Dr Gutmann to Berlin and they lived in the affluent quarter of Charlottenburg. For five years they conducted a passionate affair that he kept secret from his father. They married on 5 May 1926, and for some reason, the marriage certificate gives Lonya Gutmann’s profession as ‘merchant’, though he made his livelihood from the then popular physiotherapy and electrotherapy; treating rheumatic pains was less demanding than other medical professions. Assia Esther was born on 15 May 1927. The birth of his first grandchild softened Ephraim Gutmann’s heart and he broke the year-long ostracism. When Assia was six months old she was taken to Riga, and the Gutmanns showed some goodwill towards their daughter-in-law, presenting her with a silver goblet with the initials EG (Elizabetha Gutmann) engraved on it. However, Lisa was never accepted into the family and was a thorn in the flesh of her mother-in-law.

  A photograph in the Gutmann family album portrays the unsmiling, reserved two-year-old Assia, standing tall in a studio setting. Her straight dark hair is cut short and stiff like a helmet, her small hands folded obediently on her chest. She is flanked by a king-size picture book portraying two kittens, and by a large doll sitting on the floor, raising her hands in vain for the child to pick her up. It would be tempting, in hindsight, to interpret this as Assia’s innate detachment and flawed maternal instinct; but the doll could well have been a fragile prop in the photographer’s studio, which the well-behaved little girl was forbidden to touch. On 22 September 1929, her sister Celia wa
s born.

  Accustomed to princely life since childhood, Lonya Gutmann now enjoyed the bourgeois pleasures of Berlin: concerts, cafés, strolling along Kurfurstendamm in his elegant clothes. The three daily meals were not complete without a gorgeous white, embroidered damask tablecloth, stiffly ironed napkins folded in silver rings and silver cutlery. But Berlin did not dull his longings for his native land and temperamentally he remained a buoyant Russian. Lonya and Lisa had polar personalities to accommodate – he was jubilant and buoyant, she was stiff and controlled; he was an extrovert, she a brooding introvert; he was an atheist and she, a devout Christian. But the core of discord was over their daughters’ education, and especially Assia’s. Lonya doted on his elder daughter, the apple of his eye. He never criticised her and defended her from the wrath of her mother. She was his little princess and was treated like one. He adored Assia’s every witty remark, every childlike observation and made her believe that, like him, she was born for grandeur.

  ‘Don’t sing in the morning, or you’re bound to cry at night,’ was a constant motto of Lisa Gutmann’s. Her character strict, her methods of education and punishment harsh, she had firm ideas about Good and Evil. Short-tempered, she blew up quickly at any of her daughters’ misbehaviour. ‘Mutti was very Germanic. She often hit me with Assia’s violin bow, which was very painful,’ Celia still nurses the insult. ‘Once she picked up Assia’s favourite china doll, broke it and hurled it out of the window. Vati made no secret of his disapproval of Mutti’s methods, and she accused him of being too indulgent with Assia.’ Lisa Gutmann read to her daughters from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but her favourite and often-repeated story was Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter, about Slovenly Peter, who never combed his hair and whose filthy nails grew so long that his mother had to cut them off with a saw. ‘We were brought up like any German girl, without a trace of Jewishness. The house rules and manners were German, but the backbone was Russian,’ Celia Chaikin recounts.