Quote of The Day: Want Everything And Nothing (Part 4)

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This is the 4th part of the story. The previous parts are here: 1, 2, 3.

When Assia Wevill and David Wevill became their neighbor, Assia and Ted started an affair quickly and openly, much to Sylvia Plath’s anguish and dismay. Ted had up to that point tried to be very respectful and discreet about his relationship with other women. Probably he had no other women, or probably he had. Whatever he had done or not done, he had always made sure that Plath didn’t know about it or didn’t felt its presence. However the affair with Assia was very different. Ted no longer wanted to hide it from his wife, and didn’t feel the need to placate his wife. Somehow Ted managed to let Plath know that he needed this affair and it would blown over.

The Wevills moved away, but the affair continued. Often Ted didn’t come home. Plath tried to persuade him to stop seeing Assia, but to no avail. For months, Ted and Assia would meet in their London flat regularly–now that Ted had a little more money, he splashed it all on Assia. So Plath decided to kick Ted out.

Kicking Ted out had plunged Plath into a psychological darkness, which paradoxically ignited her poetic genius. She wrote her best poems during this period of turmoil–the several months before her suicide. The despair pushed her to break free from her usual style–her words were more biting, her tone more acerbic, her style more bold. She felt that she had come to a brick wall in her life, which she could not scale over. Not knowing what to do, she just turned on the gas and killed herself. Spending all her life to look for opportunities for her poems and her publication, she didn’t realize that her separation from Ted was the biggest opportunity she had ever encountered, and the best break free moment her poetry had ever experienced. If she had known this, if she had understood this, her life would be so different. Her education had ill-prepared her for such knowledge; her conventional upbringing had blinded her to life’s whims and intrigues. She died of not knowing what she was capable of.

Plath’s death sent Ted Hughes into an emotional turmoil and public relation disaster. One moment he was on cloud nine with his new love, and the next moment he was called back home, facing two young children, explaining to bewildered neighbors, answering questions from the police. At one point, when he couldn’t stand the nosy inquiries, he defended himself by saying something to the effect that it could have been him, meaning he could have killed himself since he and Plath had been on each other’s throat.

Plath’s mother and brother came to the U.K. for her funeral. Observing Ted being so dispirited, they offered to take the two young children with them and raise them in America. However Ted couldn’t allow that. He could just imagine his embittered mother-in-law instill messages like “your dad is a devil” into the two innocent brains. Ted was a poet and he wrote successful children’s poems too. He was a good guy and he wanted to remain that way.

Ted and Assia became a couple, although not married. Assia divorced her husband and moved in with Ted, but she was not very good at child rearing. Eventually Ted had to ask his sister Olwyn to come to help take care of the children.

Plath had been a diligent chronicler of her own life since she was little. Her diary was extensive, recording what book she read, what gathering she had, what conversation she had, who she met, and what mood she had, what she was writing at the time, and what poems or manuscript she had submitted to where. Almost every one of her poem can be matched mood for mood with her diary entries. One can almost see how she came up with the idea of the poem, what she felt at the time, what difficulty she faced in the construction of the poem.

Ted gathered Plath’s latest poems and published Ariel, which was an immediate success. Actually before her death, Plath had already showed many poems in Ariel to an editor friend. Her domestic despair prompted her to write more, to be unafraid of her own hidden emotions. When Ted found the poems she wrote, he was astonished at their quality. So the poems were published, but Ted made sure that the corresponding diary entries were no where to be found.

Little did Ted know at the time that his wife would have a fascinating after-life, which was going to be everlasting and enchanting to her fans as well as nerve wracking and devastating to him.

(To Be Continued Here)