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Meghan, thank you for writing something about the death of Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes who killed himself earlier this week at the age of 47. I've been unsettled by this news all week but unable to think of anything to say besides: how horribly and irredeemably sad. To readers who grew up on the myth of Sylvia and Ted (and if readers have a tendency to mythologize Sylvia Plath, it's also because she mythologized herself, with maddening narcissism and consummate literary skill, in her poems and journals), Nicholas will always be the baby of Plath's brilliant final poems, the one whose "clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing." "I want to fill it with color and ducks/ The zoo of the new," she wrote in the poem "Child." Instead, her legacy to him was a lifelong struggle with depression, what the last lines of that poem call "this dark/ Ceiling without a star." "The pain you wake to is not your own," she assured her then-9-month-old in "Nick and the Candlestick." But, of course, it was: Our mother's pain is always our own. While there's no way of knowing whether Nicholas' depression was the result of nature, nurture, or both, it's difficult to imagine a more painful early childhood: Assia Wevill, the woman Ted Hughes left Plath for and who would raise Nicholas and his sister for six years after their mother died, killed herself and her 4-year-old daughter in a grotesque copycat suicide/murder six years after Plath's death.
Like you, I found the New York Times' roundup of tributes to Plath surprisingly anodyne and platitudinous (including, for me, Elaine Showalter's, which argues for Plath's inclusion in the "they-died-too-young" literary pantheon alongside Keats without giving a sense of what her contribution to 20th-century poetry actually was). I've always thought that, had Plath lived, she might have become one of the great poets of motherhood. Her poems about pregnancy are delightful (and unexpectedly playful for a poet we associate with suicide and despair), and her description of the experience of childbirth in her journals, which you mentioned in a post some time back, is the least sentimentalized and most gripping I've ever read. The awful news of her son's death seals the deal: The poet who could have been the bard of maternity (among the most under-represented of all human experiences in literature) will now be remembered as a cautionary tale about the dangers of maternal depression.