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Those tragic poets
She Wanted To Be Sylvia Plath, But Instead Killed Herself And Her Daughter
Assia Wevill’s Story Intertwines Complex Fragility With Crime
For those who saw her for the first time, she was dazzling with beauty.
For the loyal fans of Sylvia Plath, she was her husband’s stealer and her (inadvertent) killer.
For those obsessed with crime, she was the perfect study subject.
Will we find anything different, if we peep beyond the veil of the adulteress,
the child-murderer,
the suicide?
Her lover, the English poet Ted Hughes — tall, rough-looking, Yorkshire-gorgeous in his lion-bulkiness (Daniel Craig in the 2003 film does not do him any justice) — puts it perfectly in blank verse:
We didn’t find her — she found us
[ … ]
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
[ … ]
Who was this Lilith of abortions
Touching the hair of your children
With tiger-painted nails?
[…]
She sat there in her soot-wet mascara,
In flame-orange silks, in gold bracelets,
Slightly filthy with erotic mystery -
A German
Russian Israeli with the gaze of a demon
Between curtains of black Mongolian hair.[…]
The dreamer in me
Fell in love with her, and I knew it.
1998, “Birthday Letters” collection
When Assia Wevill entered their lives, the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had moved to the idyllic Devon countryside, to escape the lure of the London literary circles and try their hand at gardening, bee-keeping, child-rearing, and poetry-making — perhaps also…
