Auction of papers leaves Canadian poet ‘troubled’

An acclaimed Canadian poet says he’s “very troubled” and has been taken by “total surprise” that hundreds of pages of his own manuscripts, letters and other material from a critical period in his career and personal life are set to be auctioned in a landmark sale of literary artifacts in Britain.

“Something here feels very wrong,” said David Wevill, a nominee for Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award for poetry in the 1960s and now, at age 78, retired from a 40-year career as an English professor at the University of Texas.

The David Wevill “archive,” as it’s described by Bonhams, is expected to sell for about $10,000 US at a May 8 auction in London, in part because of the Canadian’s close association with 20th-century literature’s most tragic marital meltdown: the split that consumed American poet Sylvia Plath and scarred her adulterous husband, Ted Hughes, later Britain’s poet laureate.

A Bonhams spokesman declined to comment to Postmedia News on Tuesday about Wevill’s concerns, but invited the poet to contact the auction house directly.

The Ottawa-raised Wevill was a top young Canadian poet in the late 1950s and 1960s; his collection A Christ of the Ice-Floes was a finalist for the 1966 Governor General’s Award that was won by another up-and-coming poet at the time: Margaret Atwood, who took the prize — the first major award of her career — for The Circle Game.

After studying at Cambridge in the late 1950s, Wevill moved in elite literary circles in Britain — Hughes and Plath were among his friends — and enjoyed a string of publishing successes before and after returning to North America in 1968 to begin teaching at the University of Texas at Austin.

But during Wevill’s time in Britain, his wife, Assia, became the notorious “other woman” who triggered the Hughes-Plath breakup that is widely seen to have led to the latter’s 1963 suicide, one of modern poetry’s darkest and most debated episodes.

Plath, whose final and best-known works seethed with great rage and grief, was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize and hailed as a feminist literary icon; Hughes, while destined for tremendous success as an artist before his death in 1998, was vilified by some critics as a callous man for whom creativity and cruelty were inextricable.

Assia, after separating from her husband in 1962, joined Hughes in an ultimately turbulent and unhappy relationship. Depressed over Hughes’s continued philandering, she committed suicide in 1969, also taking the life of the four-year-old daughter she’d had with Hughes.

Reflecting on the early 1960s, Wevill told Postmedia News that those years were “creative and tense and intense, all of that.”

He added: “When I left London, I was very happy to leave.”

Next month’s auction includes a mountain of Wevill’s papers from the late 1950s and early ’60s — once in Assia’s possession, then kept by Hughes, and finally added to the vast Roy Davids Collection of Poetical Manuscripts. The Wevill archive is just one of hundreds of items being sold in a multi-sale dispersal of Davids’ one-of-a-kind collection.