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Nicholas Hughes, Individual
We finally have a fairly lengthy portrait of Nicholas Hughes from his good friend, Joe Saxton. It’s a welcome resurrection of Nick Hughes the man from the mausoleum of his role, so fanatically designed by the literary Death Eaters, as the Tragic Victim of his parents’ marriage, his mother’s depression, his father’s infidelity, his genetic heritage, or some combination of all or some of these elements. The Tragic Victim makes a perfect figure for the Death Eaters’ favorite narrative; but Hughes’s real life story is more significant than these cannibal fantasies.Read More
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Adios, Nicholas Hughes … Hello, Death Eaters
I’ve felt mysteriously shaken by the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. In part it’s because I remember with such affection the tenderness in Ted Hughes’s letters to and about Nicholas, whose deep knowledge of the natural world Hughes loved and admired. But part of my feeling involves the dread of Death Eaters; not those demonic Harry Potter wizards and witches, but their literati equivalents: critics, biographers, opinion page hacks and the like.Read More