New book unravels poet’s two deadly relationships
TED HUGHES was in bed with another woman on the night his wife, Sylvia Plath, killed herself a short distance away, according to a new biography.
On that evening in 1963, the poet took Susan Alliston to the London flat where he and Plath had first made love seven years earlier. It was also where they had spent their wedding night.
The revelation, as well as new information about Hughes’s relationship with Assia Wevill, who killed herself in 1969, is in a book by Sir Jonathan Bate, provost of Worcester College, Oxford, who has had ‘‘full access, unlike earlier biographers’’ to Hughes’s archives in the United States and papers placed more recently in the British Library.
Bate has also been shown the previously unseen diary of Alliston and spoke to several women with whom Hughes had relationships, including his first serious girlfriend, Shirley, from his university days at Cambridge.
The academic has used new evidence to piece together the February weekend of Plath’s death. On the Friday morning, she sent a letter to Hughes, described by Bate as ‘‘an enigmatic parting letter’’, saying she planned to leave Britain and never see him again.
She had assumed it would not reach him until the Saturday, but an efficient second post meant it arrived that Friday afternoon. A concerned Hughes rushed to Plath’s home in Primrose Hill with the letter, which she snatched away and burnt.
‘‘This was their final face-toface which Ted turned into Last Letter, which was only published in 2010,’’ said Bate. ‘‘This explains that poem.’’
Next day Plath rang Hughes, but Alliston answered before handing the phone to her lover. He told her to ‘‘take it easy, Sylvie’’, according to Alliston’s diary.
On the Sunday evening, Hughes took Alliston to the flat of a friend in Bloomsbury to avoid more phone calls from his estranged wife. This is where he had first made love to Plath in 1956. On the Monday, he learnt of Plath’s death.
Five years later, writes Bate, Hughes was caught in the midst of a love triangle, unable to make up his mind about the women in his life – Wevill, Brenda Hedden, whom he had met in Devon where he had a house, and the trainee nurse Carol Orchard, also from Devon and then only 20.
Hughes, according to a hitherto unseen journal, called them A, B and C. He wrote: ‘‘3 beautiful women – all in love, and a separate life of joy visible with each, all possessed but own soul lost.’’
He then wrote a poem about his dilemma, which began: ‘‘Which bed? Which bride? Which breast’s comfort.’’
Bate said: ‘‘In other words, Ted could not decide.’’
By March 1969, Hughes had still not sorted out his love life. Bate tells how a distraught Wevill rang Hughes in Devon. But a woman answered, who Wevill assumed was a new lover. So she hung up. But it was simply a friend of his sister Olwyn. The next day, Wevill gassed herself, leaving a note that they could not live together ‘‘because of the memory of Sylvia’’.
A few months later Hughes called his children and Olwyn together to seek advice on marrying either Brenda or Carol. The children, aged 9 and 7, went for Carol, whom they saw as a potential mother figure, but Olwyn scolded her brother that he should marry neither if he could not make up his mind. In the end, in 1970 Hughes wed Carol, to whom he was married until his death.
But there were other girlfriends, such as Jill Barber, with whom he had a four-year affair, and a south London resident with whom he had a relationship for the final three years of his life.
Bate, who also writes about Hughes’s poetry and the legal battle in the US over Plath’s The Bell Jar, concludes that her death and his subsequent guilt were ‘‘central’’ to the rest of his life. ‘‘However hard he attempted to get away from it, he never could.’’