Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s Son Commits Suicide

The Times (London) ^ | March 23, 2009 | Ben Hoyle,

[nickcarraway]

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 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.

[Ciexyz]

If the son was predisposed toward depression by genetic factors, then his biology was against him. So sad. As for his parents, both were flawed individuals. Ted Hughes carried the weight of world condemnation because of Plath’s suicide till his death. BTW his poetry was of a much higher caliber than hers.

[Harrius Magnus]

(Liberal) ideology consists of: the denial of God, transcendent truth, and objective morality, which in turn leads to the denial of hierarchy and particularity, which in turn leads to the belief in equality and non-discrimination as the ruling principles in a bureaucratically and scientifically managed, unfree society.

(Unfree, except, of course, in the sexual, disruptively expressive, and criminal sense, which is what Samuel Francis meant by anarcho-tyranny.)

Untethered, we can weep for those who were not called.