Book Review: Lover of Unreason by Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev - Page 4

Finally, there came a time when Assia, ordered out of Court Green by Hughes, suddenly found herself on her own, caring for Shura in a London flat during a dreary and cold English springtime, reminiscent of Plath’s desperate London winter years before. There is no question in my mind that Assia loved her daughter Shura, but she also seemed entangled with her daughter, unable to see her as separate - she made no distinction between what she called her "self" and "her little self."  Assia continued to be tormented by her on-again, off-again relationship with Hughes (he rejected her emotionally and physically at this time, yet occasionally went house-hunting with her for a place they could potentially live in together). She fell into an intractable depression and began to make a will, even to hint not-so-broadly that she felt suicidal. Absolutely no one heard her very obvious cries for help.

Lover of Unreason gives haunting descriptions of the bitter cold and lingering ice on the ground around Assia's house as winter refused to release its grip, a metaphor for the fragmented, seared landscape of Assia’s emotional state. After a bitter argument with Hughes over the phone, her hopes crushed, Assia took advantage of her live-in nanny’s absence, picked up the sleeping Shura (it is not clear whether she drugged the child), and lay down with her on a pallet she had prepared in the kitchen, made from an eiderdown quilt and pillows. In a horrifying echo of Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Assia sealed the room, took a handful of sleeping pills with gulps of whiskey, then turned the oven's gas taps wide open. Shura was only five years old when she and her mother died together.

Lover of Unreason elucidates the many painful missteps taken both before and after the tragic death of this mother and daughter. Assia wanted to be buried, like Plath, in a rural English churchyard, her tombstone carved with the epitaph, “Here lies a lover of unreason, and an exile.” Instead, Assia and Shura remained unburied for years, their ashes stored at Court Green (and even misplaced for a short time) until Hughes eventually scattered them to the four winds. The authors do an excellent job of describing Hughes’ devastation after their deaths, his terrible sense that he was toxic to anyone he loved, and his soul-searing guilt over not preventing both Assia and Sylvia’s suicides. One wonders, for all his flaws, how he summoned the strength to pick up his life afterwards. The Assia Wevill-Ted Hughes equation seems an incomprehensible snarl of passions, depressions, betrayals, and warring demons which left, at the end, three senseless deaths.

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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