One for the books: Literary creativity and suicide

One of the most wrenching news items this week was the death of 47-year-old Nicholas Hughes, the son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Hughes took his own life on March 16, and the Times of London reported his death on March 23.

The literary world has seen perhaps more than its fair share of this heartrending phenomenon. In 1994, when the 92nd Street Y hosted a conference on the confluence of creativity and suicide—which, coincidentally, focused on Hughes’ mother Plath—the New York Times mused that writers, “perhaps more than other artists... can be seduced by the attractiveness of suicide as a means of controlling their life story.”

The Times also noted that many books hinge on depressive, self-abusive characters. One participant in the conference, novelist William Styron of Sophie’s Choice fame, said that he could, in hindsight, identify many warning signs of his mental illness in his early work.

Tempting as it is, this explanation seems rather too neat. Certainly writers draw on their own experiences, but it would be absurd to pin all of a character’s qualities on his creator. (The biggest scandal of the month—the American publication of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, which is written from the perspective of an unrepentant Nazi SS officer—should prove that much. Debate may rage, but few have accused Littel of Nazism. It goes without saying that depression has little in common with Nazism, but the point that an author’s character is independent of his work stands.)

That said, it’s difficult to ignore the ties between creativity and suicidal tendencies—particularly in a year that saw the loss of David Foster Wallace. Perhaps this helps to explain the interest in Hughes’ story, whose death would be a private tragedy if not for his family, with its literary gifts and history of self-destruction.
Plath, along with Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and Anne Sexton, may be among the most famous literary suicides, but the most profoundly disturbing suicide patterns are found not within her profession, but within her own family. Six years after Plath’s death in 1963, her husband’s mistress, Assia Wevill, gassed herself and her four-year-old daughter.

The suicides undoubtedly had an impact on Hughes’ life, but the specifics of that impact—psychological distress? a genetic link? both?—remain unclear. On March 24, in response to interest in Hughes’ death and personal history, Scientific American published an article on the question of whether suicidal tendencies run in families. The answer, unsurprisingly, was murky. Studies have shown that suicide is much more likely among families of suicide victims than among others, but studies can’t prove a causal connection, and the genetic details have yet to be specified—particularly as other studies suggest that suicide is connected to the number of certain receptors in the brain, which are reduced not by genetic mutation but by life experience.

Hughes’ death is intriguing because it links these two popular theories of suicidal frequency: that creative people are more prone to suicide and that it is an inheritable tendency. The extent to which Plath’s children relate to these questions is notable. Hughes’ sister Frieda is herself an author and has publicly addressed her family, her artistic work, and her own mental and emotional issues. Hughes, on the other hand, was a more private figure whose career was not in the arts, but in marine biology. He did not choose to call attention to his family history—students and colleagues at the University of Alaska, where Hughes taught, said that he was all but silent on the subject. Those wishes, expressed in life, are to be respected in death.

It is nothing more than sensationalism to use Hughes’ death as an excuse for wild speculation and invasive gossip, and it’s a shame that so many have done so. But it is not illegitimate to explore the issues related to this unusually public tragedy. This is particularly true if exploring those issues could enhance our understanding of factors that can increase the risk of suicide, including emotional trauma, genetic predisposition, and, yes, even the urge to write.

Rebecca Evans is a Columbia College junior majoring in English and creative writing. One For the Books runs alternate Fridays.