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Title: Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s son commits suicide (Scientist/Professor in Alaska).
Source:
Times Online
URL Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5956380.ece
Published: Mar 23, 2009
Author: Ben Hoyle
Post Date: 2009-03-23 08:16:08 by noone222
Keywords: None
Views: 91
Comments: 2
Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept. Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at his home in Alaska after battling against depression for some time, his sister Frieda said yesterday. He was 47, unmarried with no children of his own and had until recently been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Dr Hughes’s death adds a further tragic chapter to a family history that has been raked over with morbid fascination for two generations. Obsession set limits on Sylvia Plath's poetry Charity shop finds rare Plath poetry edition He was only a baby when his mother died but she had already sketched out what he meant to her in one of her late poems. In Nick and the Candlestick, published in her posthumous collection Ariel, she wrote: “You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn.” Later his father wrote of how, after Plath’s death, their son’s eyes “Became wet jewels,/ The hardest substance of the purest pain/ As I fed him in his high white chair”. Neither he, nor his sister nor their Poet Laureate father could ever fully escape the shadow cast by Plath’s suicide in 1963 and the personality cult that then sprang up around her memory. Ted Hughes was hounded for the rest of his life by feminists and Plath devotees who accused him of driving her to her death by his infidelity. In 1969 he suffered another terrible loss when his mistress gassed herself and their daughter in an apparent copycat suicide. Plath’s friend, the poet and critic Al Alvarez, once said: “I would love to think that the culture’s fascination is because Plath is a great and major poet, which she is. But it wouldn’t be true. It is because people are wildly interested in scandal and gossip.” Her turbulent marriage to Hughes became a modern myth, from their first meeting at Cambridge where he kissed the young American Fulbright scholar “bang smash on the mouth” and she bit his cheek so hard that it bled, through the whirlwind secret wedding all the way to its catastrophic ending. Plath’s suicide in effect froze her children in time so that in the public memory they remained a one-year-old and a two-year-old lying in their cots, carefully sealed off from the gas leaking over their mother in the room next door. Hughes did everything that he could to shield them from the increasingly lurid interest in their mother and did not tell them that she had killed herself until they were teenagers. Frieda Hughes reemerged into the public gaze in her twenties when her first children’s book was published. She has also been a successful artist, poet and newspaper columnist and has spoken and written about her parents and her own own struggles with depression, ME and anorexia. Her brother never resurfaced in the same way, but his life had also moved on. A family friend said last night: “Nick wasn’t just the baby son of Plath and Hughes and it would be wrong to think of him as some kind of inevitably tragic figure. He was a man who reached his mid-forties, an adventurous marine biologist with a distinguished academic career behind him and a host of friends and achievements in his own right. That is the man who is mourned by those who knew him.” Frieda Hughes was travelling to Alaska yesterday but said in a statement: “It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16th March 2009 at his home in Alaska. He had been battling depression for some time.” He was an evolutionary ecologist who specialised in the study of stream fish and travelled thousands of miles across Alaska on research trips. “His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan.” Shortly before his death, he left his post at the university to set up a pottery at home and “advance his not inconsiderable talent at making pots and creatures in clay”. Although there is acceptance that depression can be inherited, there is no known suicide gene that could connect Dr Hughes's death to his mother’s. Paul Farmer, the chief executive of Mind, the mental health charity, said: “Suicide is a much more complicated event than simply being a question of genetics, but there is some evidence that if a member of your family has taken their life there can be a higher risk of people doing the same. However, it is often absolutely to do with what’s happening in the here and now rather than any urge that is more deeply rooted.” Dr Hughes’s parents split up before he was 1, his father leaving Plath for Assia Wevill, the exotic wife of another poet. The winter that followed was unrelentingly harsh. Struggling to get by on very little money as a single parent with two young children, Plath’s fragile mental state collapsed. She wrote many of her finest poems in a final burst of creativity and killed herself early one February morning. Six years later Wevill, who had lived with Hughes and the children for much of the intervening period, also gassed herself. It was March 23, 1969 – 40 years ago today – and her death differed from Plath’s in one appalling respect: she had murdered four-year-old Shura in the process. To the frustration of biographers, Hughes stayed silent about his own response to these events until almost the end of his life. Then, in 1995, he published half a dozen poems that he had written for Wevill, hidden among the 240 poems in his New Selected Poems. In 1998 he finally unveiled in Birthday Lettersa series of 88 poems examining his life with Plath and his reaction to her death. Serialised in The Times,the poems recast his reputation from a man who had shown no apparent contrition for his wife’s fate into something far more complex. In a letter to the poet Kathleen Raine he said he wished that he had published them earlier. “I might have had a more fruitful career – certainly a freer psychological life.” Hughes dedicated Birthday Letters to his children. Unusually for a book of poetry, it became a runaway best-seller, shifting more than 150,000 hard-back copies in Britain alone. He did not live to see it awarded the 1999 Whitbread Book of the Year award, as he died of cancer the previous October. It was Frieda, not Nicholas, who accepted the prize on his behalf
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#1. To: noone222 (#0)
Am I the only one that looked up photos of this woman,expecting to see something really special? When I found them,I was looking at photos of a very ordinary-looking woman. I guess these poetic-types have to be dramatic.
It's unlikely Wevill would warrant a biography if it weren't for her fateful relationship with Hughes and the tragedies that followed. Israeli authors Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev did an admirable job researching her life in "Lover of Unreason," but the portrait they assembled of Wevill is more a patchwork of information than a satisfying psychological portrayal. From her childhood as a Jewish refugee in Palestine to her later life in the glitzy advertising world of London, Wevill is painted as a capricious and exotic beauty, a calculating narcissist who conquers men and keeps them enthralled even as she moves on to the next. By the end of the book, her image has grown hazier. Assia was married to her third husband, David Wevill, when they answered an advertisement to sublet Hughes and Plath's London flat. The two attractive and intelligent young couples hit it off and began socializing on occasion. When the two acclaimed poets invited their tenants to come spend a weekend with them in Devon, Assia reportedly told a friend, "I'm going to seduce Ted." Through interviews with family members, former husbands and acquaintances, Wevill comes across as a charismatic but not very likable person. She's portrayed as someone who took what she wanted from life with little thought for how her actions might harm others. Regarding Plath's suicide, she reportedly complained that it "was very bad luck that the love affair was besmirched by this unfortunate event." Wevill read Plath's final journal and the manuscript of her second novel and told a friend she wanted Hughes to destroy it all. He eventually did get rid of the journal, which he said he did not want his children to read. The novel has never been found. Like Plath, Wevill had a history of emotional instability and had attempted suicide before she met Hughes, albeit in a way that was meant to ensure that the attempt was unsuccessful. So it is a bit jarring that toward the end of the book, the authors seem to portray her more sympathetically, as something of a victim. Assia had already had a number of abortions, one of a pregnancy by Hughes, before she bore Hughes' child. At the time, she was still married to and living with David and gave baby Shura his last name, although Hughes was listed as father on the birth certificate. In a suicide letter, Assia declared she simply couldn't leave little Shura behind, explaining: "She's too old to be adopted." Perhaps that is how Assia rationalized the murder. But to outside eyes, it comes across as a way of one-upping Plath and striking a double blow at Hughes. Altogether, "Lover of Unreason" is a gloomy tale of a woman who borrowed her fulfillment from others and left behind a legacy of pain.
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Dr Hughes’s parents split up before he was 1, his father leaving Plath for Assia Wevill, the exotic wife of another poet.
#2. To: noone222 (#0)
Is "poet" code?
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