Book Review: Lover of Unreason by Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev - Page 2

At any rate, Wevill has been mainly described as a temptress, a veritable serpent in the Garden of Eden that was the Plath-Hughes marriage. I had little idea of Assia’s background until I read the comprehensive study of her in Lover of Unreason. Wevill was the daughter of a Jewish father of Russian extraction and a Lutheran mother of German ancestry.

In 1933, when she was a young child, Assia, her sister Celia, and her parents fled Berlin during the Nazis' rise to power. They settled in Tel Aviv, where Assia bloomed into young womanhood. Assia seemed to become a restless soul, and traveled to England, straight into a disastrous first marriage — and, though married, Assia continued to need and attract as much male attention as she could, and she eventually divorced and remarried three times before she met up with Ted Hughes.

Koren and Negev spare no details of how alluring Assia was. Indeed, her pictures show that she resembled the young Elizabeth Taylor, and her fashion sense was quite strong. I was impressed with the fact that Assia had a lucrative career in advertising and made her way in the world up until the very day of her death. Her third husband, David Wevill, was devoted to her. She had money of her own, good looks, a generosity of spirit that nudged her to lavish friends with gifts, even an artistic bent — she seemed to be a fairly competent poet and was proud enough of her own watercolors that she framed and displayed them throughout her house. Why, then, did her life ultimately come tumbling down around her like a fragile house of cards? Plath at least left her stunning writing, a legacy that outlived her; Wevill seemed reduced to a mere ghost after years of systematic erasure from Ted Hughes’ life.

Negev and Koren fail to fully answer the question of Assia's self-destructiveness comprehensively in Lover of Unreason, or make some sense of the discordant notes in her personality. They state that marriage suited Assia — if so, then how does one explain her many divorces, her apparent need for infidelities and sexual intrigue, her statement to a work colleague that she was off to “seduce Ted Hughes” when Plath and Hughes invited the Wevills for a weekend at Court Green? Negev and Koren do manage to shed some light on why Hughes and Assia continued their relationship beyond the fling it likely was meant to be, for Plath killed herself a few months after she and Hughes separated. The authors point out that Hughes’ need for someone to help him shoulder the responsibilities of parenting the children Plath left behind probably tethered him prematurely to Assia. Indeed, and I think admirably, she did take to Plath and Hughes’ two children, and eventually bore a child of her own with Hughes, a daughter named Shura.

Article Author: Ms. Strega

Author of the (still being birthed) book on my Italian-American family, The Strega's Story. Numerous poems published in such magazines as Poetry, ONTHEBUS, Saranac Review, Chattahoochee Review, Oyez Review, and Quarry West. …

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