NICHOLAS HUGHES, the son of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has taken his own life at the age of 47. The former fisheries scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks had carved out a successful scientific career in one of the remotest parts of the western world, but ultimately he could not escape the legacy of being the offspring of one of the most famous and tragic literary relationships of the 20th century.
Those who know little else about his mother know that she was the American-born poet who killed herself in the kitchen of her north London home in February 1963 while her one-year-old son and his two-year-old sister, Frieda, slept in their cots in a nearby room. Plath had been distraught at the break-up of her relationship with Hughes, following her discovery of his infidelity. Six years after their mother’s death, in 1969, their father’s then partner, Assia Wevill, also took her own life, killing her four-year-old daughter, Shura, in the process.
Plath’s relationship with the future poet laureate has been the subject of numerous literary and personal memoirs and biographies, and even a film, as well as long-running attacks on her husband’s reputation and behaviour by some feminists.
She addressed one of her last poems, Nick and the Candlestick, to her baby son: "O love, how did you get here? O embryo . . . In you, ruby/ The pain you wake to is not yours . . . You are the one."
Although Hughes maintained an anguished public silence about the tragedy, poems written at the time, published in the last year of his life, also spoke of his relationship with his son.
In a statement issued late on Sunday evening, Frieda Hughes reported: “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. 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 for the next project or plan.”
A report in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner yesterday by its columnist Dermot Cole understandably celebrates Hughes's academic and personal qualities rather than his literary associations. Noting that he had gone to Oxford, Cole says he earned a doctorate at the University of Alaska in 1991: "He made lasting friendships in Fairbanks with those who shared his inventive interests in such varied pursuits as stream ecology, pottery, woodworking, boating, bicycling, gardening and cooking the perfect pecan pie ... He spent countless summer hours in his research of grayling and salmon ... exhibiting all the patience and wonder that defines a great fisherman."
That interest may seem to pop psychologists a more positive inherited legacy, of Ted Hughes's passionate interest in fishing, and indeed his father made several visits to Alaska before his death in 1998. – ( Guardianservice)