Sylvia Plath’s Son Is Dead
THE Times leads with news that “Sylvia Plath’s son commits suicide”.
Jade Goody is dead. Natasha Richardson is dead. And David Prowse is looking in pretty good shape. Anorak’s CCN (Celebrity Cancer News) alert hasn‘t beeped for a full three hours. What to do..?
The Times scurries though the news wires, pass the war in Iraq, pass the war in Afghanistan, pass the research on how to tell your “brain sex” and comes up trumps:
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.
Front-page news. Son of dead star poet dies. Read all about it.
Dr Hughes’s death adds a further tragic chapter to a family history that has been raked over with morbid fascination for two generations.
We plough the fields and scatter, the troubled seeds of the land…
It’s what Plath wanted, so too Hughes. If OK! had a poetry special, they’d be on the cover, with Nick picking a daffodil and a quote from Jordan – Game Warden, Jordan’s new book of poems, featuring pictures of her dressed as rampant rabbit:
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”.
And then with no hint of irony, the Times writes:
Plath’s friend, the poet and critic Al Alvarez, once said: “I would love to think that the culture’s fascination is because Plath is a great and major poet, which she is. But it wouldn’t be true. It is because people are wildly interested in scandal and gossip.”
Beep! Beep!
It’s a CCN suicide special…
Posted: 23rd, March 2009 | In: Reviews Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
