There’s something desperately sad about the news of the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
He is understood to have hung himself aged 47, following in the footsteps of his poet mother who gassed herself when Nicholas was a one year old baby. This raises the obvious debate about whether or not there is a suicidal or depressive gene which encourages this final resolution. There are previous examples of people having suicide in their families continuing the legacy – Kurt Cobain for example suffered the suicides of two of his uncles over his traumatic childhood.
No doubt there are several far better scientific studies of this phenomena than I can muster – not least in today’s Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/mar/24/nicholas-hughes-suicide) so I’m going to instead focus on the thing that this story has reminded me of – the fantastic poetry of Sylvia Plath.
There’s a common put down of Plath’s work that it is a somewhat one dimensional version of adolescent despair. Woody Allen perhaps puts it more eloquently than most in his film Annie Hall when his character picks up a copy of Ariel and riffs at Diane Keaton: “Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality”.
While that may be true of her audience, her poetry was certainly not one dimensional. She had a way with words that blew me away when I first read them and that still have the same impact now. It is the lilting, rhythmic feel that her words drop into, with a constant sense of longing colouring each word. My favourite Plath line - the opening salvo from The Munich Mannequins - seems to sum the two clear motivations that she had in life: the quest for perfection and the love for her children. It was also a sad indictment of the fact that she couldn’t combine both.
“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children”
Away from that point, I particularly like the way in which she combines Nazi and Jewish imagery together in a way which is still slightly shocking now. She was writing these poems in the aftermath of the Holocaust at the end of 1950s, with the full terror of what had happened in Germany being felt by a world that would never be the same again. In her collection Ariel, there are German references in an overwhelming number of her poems, almost as a cut and dry way of describing the paradox of good and bad in all things.
Much is made of the poem “Daddy” in which amongst other things she describes the father figure of the work as “A man in black with a Meinkampf look” and how she “thought every German was you. And the language obscene”. This was a very specific attack on the two men in her life, designed for maximum effect and hurt. What interests me more is the way in which the German analogies continued into the less violent poems of her Ariel period. Using phrases such as “Bright as a Nazi lampshade” she made ordinary out of the extraordinary.
This gorgeous, bouncing lyrical style of writing was not just limited to her poetry. If anything, it was enhanced in her prose. This is obviously evident in her famous novel The Bell Jar, a painful study of the way that mental health was treated with in that era. What fascinates me more is to read extracts from her diaries that were published in the aftermath of her death, from which it is plain to see that this unique style was there from a very early age. Reading diary entries from her as a college girl, describing going on dates on a Saturday night somewhat forces home what a talent she actually was. The subject matter was largely dull but yet the writing sublime; anyone with the patience and perseverance to get through the 1000 pages of her collected diaries are rewarded not especially with a great insight into her life but more with the beauty of her sentence construction.
Part of me thinks that if Plath was born into the modern day, she might not have met the same end – with better health treatment and more support she could have gone on to be one of the most prolific female poets in history. More likely she would have been some kind of troubled pop star; such is the way that interest in poetry has submerged.
The sad truth is that had she been born into the modern day, Sylvia Plath would probably have ended up in the same situation. The unfortunate death of her son is a poignant reminder of the fact that we will never know.
He is understood to have hung himself aged 47, following in the footsteps of his poet mother who gassed herself when Nicholas was a one year old baby. This raises the obvious debate about whether or not there is a suicidal or depressive gene which encourages this final resolution. There are previous examples of people having suicide in their families continuing the legacy – Kurt Cobain for example suffered the suicides of two of his uncles over his traumatic childhood.
No doubt there are several far better scientific studies of this phenomena than I can muster – not least in today’s Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/mar/24/nicholas-hughes-suicide) so I’m going to instead focus on the thing that this story has reminded me of – the fantastic poetry of Sylvia Plath.
There’s a common put down of Plath’s work that it is a somewhat one dimensional version of adolescent despair. Woody Allen perhaps puts it more eloquently than most in his film Annie Hall when his character picks up a copy of Ariel and riffs at Diane Keaton: “Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality”.
While that may be true of her audience, her poetry was certainly not one dimensional. She had a way with words that blew me away when I first read them and that still have the same impact now. It is the lilting, rhythmic feel that her words drop into, with a constant sense of longing colouring each word. My favourite Plath line - the opening salvo from The Munich Mannequins - seems to sum the two clear motivations that she had in life: the quest for perfection and the love for her children. It was also a sad indictment of the fact that she couldn’t combine both.
“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children”
Away from that point, I particularly like the way in which she combines Nazi and Jewish imagery together in a way which is still slightly shocking now. She was writing these poems in the aftermath of the Holocaust at the end of 1950s, with the full terror of what had happened in Germany being felt by a world that would never be the same again. In her collection Ariel, there are German references in an overwhelming number of her poems, almost as a cut and dry way of describing the paradox of good and bad in all things.
Much is made of the poem “Daddy” in which amongst other things she describes the father figure of the work as “A man in black with a Meinkampf look” and how she “thought every German was you. And the language obscene”. This was a very specific attack on the two men in her life, designed for maximum effect and hurt. What interests me more is the way in which the German analogies continued into the less violent poems of her Ariel period. Using phrases such as “Bright as a Nazi lampshade” she made ordinary out of the extraordinary.
This gorgeous, bouncing lyrical style of writing was not just limited to her poetry. If anything, it was enhanced in her prose. This is obviously evident in her famous novel The Bell Jar, a painful study of the way that mental health was treated with in that era. What fascinates me more is to read extracts from her diaries that were published in the aftermath of her death, from which it is plain to see that this unique style was there from a very early age. Reading diary entries from her as a college girl, describing going on dates on a Saturday night somewhat forces home what a talent she actually was. The subject matter was largely dull but yet the writing sublime; anyone with the patience and perseverance to get through the 1000 pages of her collected diaries are rewarded not especially with a great insight into her life but more with the beauty of her sentence construction.
Part of me thinks that if Plath was born into the modern day, she might not have met the same end – with better health treatment and more support she could have gone on to be one of the most prolific female poets in history. More likely she would have been some kind of troubled pop star; such is the way that interest in poetry has submerged.
The sad truth is that had she been born into the modern day, Sylvia Plath would probably have ended up in the same situation. The unfortunate death of her son is a poignant reminder of the fact that we will never know.
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