When Nicholas Hughes was in his early 20s, his father, poet Ted Hughes, advised him on the importance of living bravely.
“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated,” Hughes wrote to his son.
Nicholas Hughes committed suicide at 47 last week at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, 46 years after his mother, poet Sylvia Plath, killed herself.
From the time that Plath died, in 1963, Ted Hughes had tried to protect and strengthen their children, Frieda and Nicholas, from their mother’s fate and fame. He burned the last volume of his wife’s journals, a decision criticized by scholars and fans, and waited years to tell his children the full details of Plath’s suicide.
Nicholas Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself March 16, state troopers said. He was the only member of his immediate family not to become a poet.
A fisheries biologist, he spent more than a decade on the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks as a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences. Marmian Grimes, the university’s senior public information officer, said he left about a year ago.
Hughes’ 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.”
“His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father,” Frieda Hughes wrote. “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 and enthusiasm for the next project or plan.”
Hughes was only 9 months old when his parents separated and was still an infant when his mother died in February 1963, gassing herself in a London flat as her children slept.
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.”
