FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) — Nicholas Hughes, the son of poet Sylvia Plath, has killed himself, 46 years after his mother committed suicide and almost 40 years to the day after his stepmother, Assia Wevill, did the same. He was 47.
Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself at his home March 16, Alaska State Troopers said. An evolutionary biologist, he spent more than a decade on the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Marmian Grimes, the university's senior public information officer, said he left about a year ago.
Sylvia PlathHughes' older sister, poet Frieda Hughes, issued a statement through the Times of London, expressing her "profound sorrow" and saying that he "had been battling depression for some time."
Nicholas Hughes was only 9 months old when his parents, Plath and poet Ted Hughes, separated, and still an infant when his mother died in February 1963. A few months earlier, she had written of Nicholas: "You are the one/Solid the spaces lean on, envious/You are the baby in the barn."
Not widely known when she died, Plath became a cult figure and feminist martyr through the novel "The Bell Jar," which told of a suicidal young woman, and through the "Ariel" poems she had been working on near the end of her life.
The immediate cause of their breakup was Hughes' affair with Wevill, and Plath's fame would long haunt her husband, hounded for years by women who believed he was responsible for her suicide and by a procession of scholars and fans obsessed with the brief, impassioned and tragic marriage between the two poets.
Ted Hughes would relive the tragedy not only through the constant reminders of Plath, but also through the suicide of Wevill, his second wife, who in March 1969 killed herself and their 4-year-old daughter.
Hughes, England's poet laureate, was reluctant to discuss Plath until near the end of his life when he published the best-selling "Birthday Letters," a collection of deeply personal poems that came out in 1998. He died of cancer the same year.
Sylvia Plath:
Ted Hughes:
Nicholas Hughes (right) at the thanksgiving service for his father, Ted Hughes, in 1999. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features
- posted on 03/25/2009
自杀是最好的结束.... Erica Jong's comments:
Star-crossed lovers always fascinate, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were surely star-crossed. Their attraction was fierce and they both chronicled it with brilliance. Sylvia Plath wrote powerfully of her attraction to suicide, then killed herself. Ted Hughes was also no slouch when it came to the pull of mortality (witness his book, “Crow”).
We are often drawn to characters who seem to be exemplars of the inexorability of fate, of destiny. And they were such. In their lives, in their work, they seemed to express the darkest workings of the unconscious.
People born to do that are not often steady parents. And we know that suicidal parents often produce suicidal children. I knew Ted a little, did not know Sylvia, but was very sad to hear of their son’s death.
The legend of tragic, fated lovers seldom includes happy children.
- Re: Poet Sylvia Plath's son, Nicholas Hughes, commits suicide in Alaskaposted on 03/25/2009
我不同意好死不如烂活的说法。自杀不能随便。但深谋远虑的自杀胜于烂活。 ;)
我的敬意给与勇敢活着的人们,也给与深谋远虑后勇敢自杀的人们。
见闻一次深谋远虑的自杀,其效果就跟读一篇史诗一样,不是吗?
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