ASSIA GUTMAN : "SHE DEVIL" SEDUCTRESS BLAMED FOR SYLVIA PLATH'S SUICIDE - AND POET TED HUGHES

ASSIA ESTHER GUTMAN
(May 15, 1927 – March 23, 1969)

Mistress of the Month

The review that follows is my take on Assia after reading the book:

"She devil?"  Well, it's not my original idea of Assia Wevill and maybe after you learn the facts of her life, you'll agree or not to label this talented, charming, and effervescent woman this way. The talk about her "feral" beauty and seductiveness began just as she was blossoming.  No doubt about it, there are people who believe if it were not for poet Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill's involvement, poet Sylvia Plath might have not commit suicide shortly before Valentine's Day in 1963. Maybe Ted Hughes used Assia to break his marriage with Sylvia?

In 1933, when Assia was in kindergarten, her parents, a German-Lutheran mother and an atheist Jewish father, were among the 25,000 Jewish and mixed marriage couples in a first wave to leave Nazi Germany in three months.  One step ahead of the Nazi's, Doctor Gutman was one of 3500 Jewish physicians out of work when Hitler Aryanized public heath care.  He chose to go to Palestine, where he could still practice medicine. This was the beginning of the years in which Assia's family struggled and lived low. Eventually they sold the furniture and the silverware, everything, after a decade of deprivation in Palestine. But their exit to Canada was based on her probably arranged marriage to a Canadian.  Eventually, she went to Great Britain where the drama unfolded. Assia's family may have survived but they never regained the status they had in pre-Nazi Germany. She was always dealing with cultural change. To her credit she excelled in languages speaking German, Russian, Italian, Hebrew, English, and French!

As a young woman Assia was called a femme fatal and was said to have beauty like Elizabeth Taylor. She was judged to have power over men and it was assumed she could ride through life based on her beauty. She was actually an intellectual and a "Creative" born too soon to enjoy the progress of feminism. If she didn't want marriage and motherhood, it was frankly her best option in those times, the late 1940's through the 1950's.  In better circumstances, she might have become a professor of literature.  Instead she'd become the wife of professional and literary men.

Assia's nonconformity was misunderstood, casting her as an adventuress out for a good time and with an easy sexuality, as evidenced by her use of abortion as contraception.  Maybe she was just trying to survive. These were the days before the Pill and the IUD.  Certainly she was no Sylvia Plath, the poet who claimed motherhood as necessary for women, but who left her children motherless when she killed herself with her head in a gas oven.

Assia's was married to a service man and boarder of the family named John Steele.  Her father opposed the marriage but she went forward at age 20, having already had a pregnancy scare, and very likely continued to date and have affairs after that marriage, even before they left for Canada. Yet, this is confusing, supposedly Steele didn't even tell her the plan was to immigrate to Canada.  Her reaction to being so disrespected and used was to attempt suicide with pills. So, like Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill had a history of depression and suicidal behavior before she ever met Ted Hughes, a poet who had published and attracted literary fame.

She needed a divorce and the only reason legally was adultery.  Someone had to admit to it or document it and there was a lively business  going on, including actresses and photographers for hire.  Assia did the admitting and got out of her marriage of inconvenience. Assia tried to cancel the marriage by saying it was a sexless, annulled marriage.

She did enroll in college at the University of British Columbia, and renamed herself Pamela A.E. Steele.  She was active in social activities and clubs and not perceived as much of an academic.  Probably for good reason, she feared suffering from anti-Semitism.  She started speaking in a more cultivated English accept, but shoplifted cosmetics and stole her sisters clothes, all in an effort to remake herself.

Her second husband was Richard Lipsey, who met her and proposed to her a week into their affair. He decided six months later that she was only good for an affair but he didn't bail out on the marriage proposal. He'd known her reputation before he started with her.  Lipsey was headed for a PhD at the London School of Economics.  Maybe his later testimonials are a Lipsey gone conservative.  More accurately, the young couple were part of a mid 1950's hip group of students who were liberal about sex and even communal about it.  Strangely, as if she'd been passed on, Lipsey became life long friends with first husband, Steele.  Four years into this second marriage, Lipsey was ready for children, and she wasn't.  It's said that before the drama was over for him, he attempted suicide.

David Wevill, husband number three, was met on board a ship.  Wevill was a Canadian History and English professor and poet.  In a pattern of behavior, Assia and David had an instant shipboard affair and declared their love. This time Assia got a job out of the affair as an interpreter.  She translated broadcasts from the Middle East, moving between English, Hebrew, and Arabic.  From there she got a job as a secretary for an advertising agency in London. 

Wevill proved to be the best husband so far.  He was a published poet in in the same "Poetry from Cambridge" anthology as Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.  That, and a poetry group, was the connection.  (Assia also writes poetry but hers is secret work, unpublished and not shared.)By 1958, David Wevill accepted two years of teaching in Burma while Assia stayed in London working.  Their living apart resulted in another divorce which he decided.  Before the drama was over for him, he attempted suicide too.

Assia did not live as most women did in her time.  She was not faithful, she was not interested in motherhood, she was married and divorced four times. She had so many abortions in her lifetime that Ted Hughes called her "The Lilith of Abortion." Thus the "She Devil" label.  She kept everyone on their toes being unpredictable.  She wasn't stable.

Let me switch now to a focus on poet Sylvia Plath, who feminist women have taken up as a cause.  Driven and talented, and mentally ill, Ted Hughes said she was "draining" him. He was unable to do his writing around her and the children. Was she draining or is it that he couldn't cope with being a father and husband?  Was it that he tried having an artist for a wife and did not like it?  Sylvia attacked Assia as not being what she was - a mother.

He had a family who did not approve of his lifestyle and he seemed unable to separate from them. Then again, he needed someone to care for the children.  Was not Assia a bad choice for that task after Sylvia died?

Sylvia had been shattered by his betrayal, and threw Ted's letters and manuscripts into a bonfire. Sure Ted was conflicted and maybe torn up about leaving the children with Sylvia or his family, but he used his friends to cover for him when he disappeared for a break away from his wife and for time alone with Assia - a holiday in Spain - freedom. A hot affair, they were mutually convinced the other was the love of their life.  Can we hold that against either of them?  Yet at this point all spouses involved wanted them to just come to their senses and come home!  Ted and Sylvia had been married six years when they had their second child.  Was Ted just having "the seven year itch?"

The couples met in the summer of 1961, struggling with conservative values not ready to join the Swinging 60's.  They were a generation too old to be part of that.  In 1962  Assia was 34, not a mini skirted mod, not into drugs or hippie culture or a beehive hair do.  She had her issues but drinking wasn't one of them.  She didn't. She had a sophisticated and classic look and she worked in advertising and was successful.  Yet her own mental instability lead to her creating scenes for attention.  She even claimed to her husband, David, that she had been raped by Ted Hughes.

In this horrible story, there are a lot of desperate, extremely emotional people prone to suicide attempts.  Sylvia dead, Ted was not up to raising his two children he'd had with her on his own. Assia moved in with Ted Hughes, into the home that he had shared with Sylvia.  She was haunted by Sylvia. The woman who had so many abortions finally allowed a child to be born. At the age of 37, in 1965, while London was Swinging, she had a daughter she  nicknamed "Shura." She was still married to David Wevill but the child is implied to be fathered by Ted. In 1969, the over 40 Assia followed Sylvia's example of using gas in a kitchen to kill herself and her four year old. She gave her daughter sleeping pills first.  And so she became not only a suicide but a murderer. 

Did the authors do everyone involved justice?  I believe the two Jewish male authors of this book were fascinated with Assia, and in a subtle way this is a story born in Naziism and the diaspora of Jews from Germany, and what happened to them, how it effected them to have to flee for survival.  Assia's Gutman's life had its wonderful moments but ended in tragedy.

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