BOOKS: LOVER OF UNREASON

"You will not be able to put this one down..."

LOVER OF UNREASON:
Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival
and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love
by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev
(Da Capo Press, 2006)

For a biography about someone most of us have never heard about, this book has haunted me since I finished reading it.

LOVER OF UNREASON is the shocking and tragic biography of The Other Woman between the novelist and poet, Sylvia Plath, and her husband, the poet Ted Hughes in 1963, when Plath infamously committed suicide. [From Wikipedia: "Plath took her own life on the morning of February 11, 1963. Leaving out bread and milk, she completely sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with 'wet towels and cloths.' Plath then placed her head in the oven while the gas was turned on."]

The public focus on Sylvia Plath's suicide has always been on mental illness and instability. In fact, her husband tried to keep Plath's suicide hushed for years, until it was brought out publicly in a Time Magazine review of her book of poetry, Ariel, in June 1966, more than three years after her death. This book, Lover of Unreason, explains why he wanted to keep it quiet (because he was having a very flagrant affair, at least one, that quite possibly drove Plath to her suicide) -- and then some.

Lover of Unreason is never wholly sympathetic to Assia Wevill as the mistress: She was a strong, smart, manipulative woman, ahead of her time in literary London of the sixties, ultimately undone by her own obsession. Even more, though, it is a revealing expose of Ted Hughes as a world-class womanizer and seriously flawed misogynist.

The authors write in Lover of Unreason: "Like Sylvia Plath, Assia [Wevill] shared her life with Hughes for six years, and she, too, bore him a daughter."

On March 23, 1969, Assia Wevill lifted their sleeping four-year-old child, Shura, out of her bed and carried her to the kitchen of their apartment. "She laid Shura on the makeshift bed, closed the kitchen door tightly, turned all the gas taps fully on, and opened the door of the Mayflower gas oven. She switched off the kitchen light. Then she lay down quietly beside her daughter, so as not to wake her up..."

How many secrets are out there, waiting for someone's death to be revealed?
Although the circumstances of Assia Wevill's life and death, and that of her daughter with Ted Hughes, were well-known in literary circles, this second suicide, and the very existence of the child, would be covered up for decades. Against her expressed wishes, Ted Hughes had Assia and their daughter cremated, as if to obliterate any trace of their existence. Almost 30 years would pass before Ted Hughes' death in October 1998, at age 68, in London.

In October 1996, he granted a world-exclusive interview with the authors of this book, the only personal interview he ever granted. In that interview, he talked about Assia Wevill and his work: "I feel that my poems are obscure, I give the secret away without giving it. People are so dumb they do not know I've given the secret away." (page 226)

"His wife's and mistress's suicides were 'giant steel doors shutting down over great parts' of himself, he wrote in 1984. At that time, while fencing away biographers and journalists who hounded him for details of his life, Hughes began to compose a new verse-version for posterity. He started with Capriccio and the Birthday Letters. In those later writings, he disassociated himself from the two suicides and used the same reasons for both women's decision to end their lives: a troubled background, a death wish, and emotional instability. He linked the two suicides together, making each woman the cause of her rival's death. Poetically, he described Assia's suicide as a fait accompli from the outset; she was doomed already when they met. He argued that although Assia fled Nazi Germany [as a child], she could not escape the fate of her fellow Jews, and doomed herself to a terrible and untimely death: 'a long-cold oven/Locked with a swastika.'" (page 217)

Lover of Unreason is a remarkable re-creation of a fascinating, ultimately doomed woman and her life, through interviews with 70 of her contemporaries, friends and family. The authors also relied on the one interview with Ted Hughes and exhaustive research and analysis of personal documents and correspondence available, both public and private. There are dozens of pictures in the book which bring Assia and Shura to life. This story, on so many levels, is better than fiction and reads like a novel -- you will not be able to put it down.

See more about LOVER OF UNREASON on Amazon.com.