up and about

I was basically glued to my bed from Thursday, January 11, to Thursday, January 18th with a badly sprained muscle (probably from overdoing Pilates or some such thing). I watched old X-files reruns (if anyone wants any late clarification on some element of the mytharc, just let me know), I knitted a "smitten" (sort of like an old-fashioned muff....and, no, for those naughty folks, not that kind of muff), a single mitten with two cuffs. This is to use when Mr. Strega and I take the canine for a stroll, and is easier for me to deal with than gloves, which get lost. When I wear it, it kind of looks like I have paddles for hands, or no hands at all, but it keeps me warm, and in this weather, that is getting increasingly important. The pattern is from one of my favorite knitting books of all time, One-Skein Wonders by Judith Durant. This book is great for all the single skeins of yarn I have sitting around, left over from other projects (I always buy one more skein than necessary, as the knitting books exhort me that This Is The Thing To Do, lest I run out of yarn in the same dye lot).

Anyway, I never got to my book review for Blogcritics, though I intend to finish it. The book I am reviewing is called Lover of Unreason by Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev. It is the biography of Assia Wevill, the "other woman" in the Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath relationship. I kept questioning why I was reading this biography, when my reading last year of Her Husband by Diane Wood Middlebrook didn't strike the same guilty spark. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two talented writers living and working together, how their life processes and creative processes meshed and influenced each other--that's the premise of Middlebrook's book, a study on how Hughes and Plath influenced each other as writers. Lover of Unreason is far more shadowy, terribly sad in a way that is nearly unspeakable, for Assia Wevill killed herself in March of 1968, using the same method as Plath.

Wevill had been living on the margins of Hughes' life for years, sometimes in the same house, but always as the "outsider," always treated as the mistress not only by Hughes' family, but by Hughes himself at times, as if he found it impossible to break out of the role--this is not to cast him as a demon, but as someone whose moorings were profoundly torn apart after the death of his wife.

Wevill's suicide had a twist to it, though, one so heartrending it is nearly impossible to describe: in the course of her suicide, Wevill also killed her five-year-old daughter Shura, whose father was Ted Hughes, by placing the sleeping girl on the floor next to her in the kitchen (the gas from the oven killed them both). Fay Weldon described Hughes as being a loving father to Shura at times, but always treating her "like the daughter of the mistress"--at times giving her wine to drink and laughing as Shura clowned and danced drunkenly (something Weldon says he would never have done with his children by Plath), or refusing to set up any real home or support up for the little girl and Wevill. Elsewhere on the Internet, I've seen Wevill condemned as nothing more than a "serial adulteress"--yet she was an intelligent, creative person, certainly flawed, but nonetheless not deserving in any way of her lonely death with her child by her side. She also left many warnings of deep and fatal depression, including making multiple wills (which she told people about emphatically), and told her sister Celia that she was suicidal. I couldn't help but think as I read about her life that she was like a person screaming for help, with no one to hear. The times were different then--many people interviewed by the authors said that the idea at the time was that if someone threatened suicide, they were not serious about it.
I felt a sense of sadness for this woman who lived at the margins of someone's life, always waiting for a way in, but never getting any lasing sense of being cherished. It's as if her entire adult life was a dance between disrupting and disruption.

Even in death, Assia Wevill had no real resting place. She wanted to be buried, with a tombstone and the epitaph, "Here lies a lover of unreason, and an exile," but Hughes had the two bodies cremated and eventually had the ashes scattered. Her identity was so shrouded in mystery that a wider audience became aware of Assia's life only after Hughes' death, when more of his private archive was opened.

So, I will likely get this review done (notice I've already started it--a great thing about a blog), but I wouldn't recommend Lover of Unreason if you're feeling at all depressed--it might be a better book to read in summer,
when at least there's the sun and warmth to compensate for the cold sorrows of this book.

So, those are my thoughts for today.