Cabala the Ghetto Demon

Speaking of the Cabala brought to mind the Ted Hughes poem ‘Folktale’, which deals with his relation to Assia Wevill:

She wanted the silent heraldry
Of the purple beach by the noble wall.
He wanted Cabala the ghetto demon
With its polythene bag full of ashes.

[…]

So they ransacked each other for everything
That could not be found.

. The way I read it, what he desires in Wevill is (to use a Lacanian formulation) that which was ‘in her more than herself’, her agalma, her secret treasure. She is the object of his desire, yes, but the cause of his desire is this secret thing, which, of course she does not in fact possess; conversely, he embodies for her a certain kind of English reserve and decorum. And each ‘ransacks’ the other for this secret, like the child opening the kinderegg. But what, specifically, is ‘Cabala the ghetto demon’?

One first needs to know a little about the ‘alluring but fragile’ Wevill, originally a war-time Jewish refugee


the bizarre fate of Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he had left Plath. An aspiring poet and strikingly beautiful Russian-German-Jewish woman, Wevill continued a tempestuous relationship with Hughes after Plath’s suicide, bearing his child, a girl called Shura, in 1967. Two years later, depressed by Hughes’ inability to make a commitment to her, Wevill gassed herself and her daughter in her own kitchen, in a grotesque re-enactment of her rival’s death

Hughes is brutally candid about the reasons for his desire – the dark allure of Jewish suffering, the sex-appeal of Otherness, even the horror of the fate of the Jews from which Wevill figures as a miraculous escapee, and the shadow of which lends to her unusual beauty a deliciously intolerable pathos. Needless to say, as Hughes recognizes, she does not actually possess these things. She serves as their support, their sign. And in trying to access these fantasy objects, the actual empirical person is destroyed.