Canadian poet ‘gifted’ with own manuscripts
Work was about to be auctioned
Call it poetic justice.
The distinguished Canadian poet David Wevill, who recently expressed dismay over the scheduled sale of hundreds of pages of his own early manuscripts by Bonhams next month, has prompted the British auction house to pull the vast collection off the block and arrange for it to be given to the man who created it.
The decision follows a Postmedia News story highlighting Wevill’s concerns that the rediscovered “archive” of his work from the 1950s and ’60s — amounting to nearly 1,000 handwritten or typed pages of poetry and prose, as well as letters, photographs, a travel journal and other items — might be sold to a collector and thus lost to literary scholars and Wevill himself.
The collection includes 280 pages of handwritten poems, 500 pages of typed poems, 140 pages of prose, 50 drawings and sketches, nearly 200 photographs, newspaper clippings, a journal Wevill kept while travelling in Spain in 1963 and copies of his earliest books.
“I fear that they might not be owned by me, the way these things go,” Wevill said last week. “But they’re my stuff.”
The 78-year-old Wevill, a widely published poet for more than 50 years and emeritus English professor at the University of Texas, was a 1966 finalist for the Governor General’s Award for his acclaimed collection, A Christ of the Ice-Floes.
The mountain of material from the dawn of his writing career was expected to sell for about $10,000 at a May 8 auction in London, in part because of the Canadian artist’s close connection to controversial British poet Ted Hughes and his American wife, Sylvia Plath, who took her own life in 1963 after the couple’s tumultuous marriage finally ended over Hughes’s affair with Wevill’s wife, Assia.
Wevill, born to Canadian parents in Japan in 1935 but raised in Ottawa, had moved with Assia into a London home in 1962 that was being rented out by their friends, Hughes and Plath.
The ruined marriages and suicides that followed — Plath’s in 1963 and Assia Wevill’s in 1969 — branded Hughes a destroyer of women, but he went on to a brilliant career.
The Wevill archive had apparently been among Assia’s belongings when she died and was later held for decades by Hughes, until his death in 1998. It eventually wound up — along with the bulk of Hughes’s private papers — in the Roy Davids Collection of Poetical Manuscripts, a vast, multimillion-dollar library of literary artifacts now being sold by Bonhams in a series of auctions that began in 2011.
But after learning that Wevill was upset about the potential sale of his handwritten poems and other writings, Bonhams contacted Davids and it was agreed that the material would be withdrawn from the May 8 sale and simply given to the Canadian poet.