“America’s Literary Giant.” On the Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe in Vietnam

By 1964, Vietnam had been bisected for a decade. Fierce fights between the US-backed South and the communist North had marred the country, and with US forces officially entering the war that August, it seemed things were only getting worse. From the West Lake in Hanoi, the poet Chế Lan Viên wrote to decry American war crimes and made sure to specify their perpetrators:

No! It is not Edgar Poe who herded us into strategic fences,
Not Lincoln who dropped thousand-kilogram bombs on the faces of men,
Not Whitman who fired three thousand nights of cannons.

At first glance, the mention of Poe sticks out like a sore thumb. It would make sense to name Lincoln and Whitman, who embody the ideals of America and contrast with its brutal crimes in Vietnam, but why Poe? The answer lies in his surprisingly major role in the early twentieth century, right at the dawn of Vietnam’s modern literature. For a period in Vietnamese history, Poe was “America’s literary giant,” inspiring a generation of authors who would go on to take up arms and raise their voices in support of the struggle against imperialism.

*

Vietnam was first introduced to Poe in the early twentieth century, when it was under French colonial rule. To cultivate indigenous servants to the empire, the colonists had implemented a new education system where youths would study and read only in French. In class, they would pore over the upstanding classics of La Fontaine and Molière, while at the library, they could read a wider variety of material, including translations of non-French authors who were making the rounds in the metropole. In 1917, in a journal article on Baudelaire, Phạm Quỳnh mentioned that Baudelaire had translated the works of “America’s literary giant Edgar Poe.” This was the first known mention of Poe in Vietnam, and even then, the writer who died poor and lonely in Baltimore was being heralded by an epithet that he couldn’t have foreseen being ascribed to himself.

In a book published in 1941, Nguyễn Tuân recounted an opium den patronized by writers, who would get high, chill out to music on the radio and say to one another: “This is so Edgar Poe!” Indeed, Poe’s name evoked liberation of the mind, and he was praised as someone who had ascended from the mundane by the power of imagination. This perception of Poe came from French writers like Baudelaire, who had remarked that “for [Poe], imagination is the queen of faculties.” Coincidentally, Vietnamese people already had a penchant for stories that blurred the lines between the real and the unreal.

For most of its history, Vietnam was dominated by the Chinese-originated genre of chuanqi—short stories of strange encounters with gods, spirits and demons, often laden with social commentary. Thus, when Poe came to Vietnam, escorted by Baudelaire’s praises for being an imaginative writer, he quickly found an audience engrossed in his tales of sentient houses and premature burials. Soon enough, Poe became the singular American author to cast a broad shadow over the dawn of modern Vietnamese literature.

The most prominent of the writers influenced by Poe was Thế Lữ. An ardent member of the Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Youth League, Thế Lữ wanted to pursue painting, but was dissatisfied with the faculty at the French-led College of Fine Arts. In 1929, after dropping out, he opened a literary salon and began writing.

In 1934, Thế Lữ published his debut short story collection, Vàng và máu (Gold and Blood). A foray into mystery and horror, it contains tales of mountain-travelers tricked by a mysterious woman, and of crossdressing actors in a haunted house. The collection’s titular story draws from “The Gold-Bug,” which centers on a treasure hunt on a South Carolina island. Thế Lữ’s version is set on the foggy peaks of northern Vietnam, and the treasure there is traced back to the Ming Chinese occupation in the fifteenth century.

Much like Poe’s Legrand, Thế Lữ’s protagonist held a piece of paper over a fire and noticed secret instructions on how to locate the treasure. In another striking similarity, that treasure turned out to be inside a cave, guarded by the skeletons of Chinese servants killed to ensure secrecy. While Thế Lữ’s story lacks the vivid cryptography of “The Gold-Bug”, his lucid prose and thrilling depiction of the treasure hunt were enough to earn him the acclaim of writer Khái Hưng, who said that he had “the scientific mind of Edgar Poe.”

In 1937, Thế Lữ switched to detective fiction, then still a new genre in Vietnam. He set his novels in Hanoi and followed the journalist Lê Phong, who solved cases using methods from Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. In the story “Những nét chữ” (Letter Strokes), Lê Phong told the Watson-like narrator: “The stuff about reading people’s thoughts from their faces like Edgar Poe and Conan Doyle said… I’m only more convinced that they’re true. Because I just did so.” More than most writers of the time, more than the airy smokers described by Nguyễn Tuân, Thế Lữ was appreciating and finding inspirations from Poe’s oeuvre in its totality.

But 1937 also marked the rise of another Poe admirer: seventeen-year-old Chế Lan Viên. Chế Lan Viên grew up in Bình Định Province, a former domain of the Cham people who had been ethnically cleansed by medieval Vietnamese conquerors. Living amid the red-bricked Cham ruins, he was fascinated by the fallen kingdom and adopted the faux-Cham pen name Chế Lan Viên, which he attached to his first poetry collection Điêu tàn (Ruins). In Điêu tàn, Chế Lan Viên used octosyllable quatrains to speak of parched skulls, splashed blood and ruined towers, grieving the glorious Cham reign and weeping the lonely souls left behind—a morbid kind of settler appropriation. For example, in “Những sợi tơ lòng” (Silk-Threads of the Heart), he took on the voice of a restless Cham spirit and lamented:

Give me a frigid stellar sphere,
A lonely star at the sky’s far end!
There, I shall spend my time in hiding
From sorrow, anguish and dismay!

The echoes of “Alone” or “Spirits of the Dead” are palpable here. And in a 1942 book, Chế Lan Viên even recounted his melancholy at graduating high school by asking: “So how come when a student’s car carries his stuff out of the school gates, no Edgar Poe’s raven is there to cry the dark lament of ‘Nevermore’?”

In smaller ways, Poe’s specter could be felt throughout the Vietnamese literary community. Hàn Mặc Tử and Bích Khê were two of Chế Lan Viên’s peers in the self-claimed School of Mad Poetry; both filled their verse with Gothic images of blood, bones and dead maidens, and both died of illness at a young age. One could also look at Xuân Diệu, the “King of Love Poetry”; he was more indebted to the French Symbolists, but did have vague vestiges of Poe in poems like “Vội vàng” (In Haste), where a translated version of the phrase “Nevermore” bookends a stanza as a lament for the passage of youth. Last but not least, there was Nguyễn Tuân, who dabbled in Poean weird tales in the early 1940s.

But as much of a revolutionary Poe was for Vietnam’s literature, he soon lost his footing amid the upheavals of real revolution. On August 19, 1945, the Việt Minh coalition, led by Hồ Chí Minh, revolted against the newly-defeated Empire of Japan, which had seized Vietnam from France in 1942. On September 2, Vietnam declared independence, and soon after, it fell into a fierce war with France. Thế Lữ, who had dabbled in theatre since the 20s, now committed to it full-time, staging pro-resistance plays for civilians and soldiers. Chế Lan Viên also gave his pen to the cause, becoming editor of propaganda journals and writing poems to praise the Communist Party or the deeds of Hồ Chí Minh. Of the Poe admirers, a majority joined the Việt Minh by choice and took on drastically different artistic careers. A gut-wrenching exception was Phạm Quỳnh: due to suspicions of colluding with the French, he was arrested by a local Việt Minh cadre and executed in the woods, his body thrown into a ditch.

The death of Phạm Quỳnh, the first Vietnamese writer to praise Poe, served as a fitting time-marker for the end of Poe’s dominance in Vietnam. Out was the age of angst where writers looked to macabre fantasies; in was the age of warfare where gore stared you right in the face, and the spirits of the dead weren’t coming back to change the brutal reality of the living. After France was defeated and Vietnam was split, the South received an influx of newer Western literature, while the North favored socialist realism. When writers fought for more creative freedom in North Vietnam in the late 1950s, those who cracked down on them would even include the Poe admirers themselves.

*

So why did Chế Lan Viên defend Poe in his 1964 indictment of America’s war crimes? Maybe he was evoking Poe’s ancient sway, reminding the readers of a time when America’s impact was actually useful and liberating for the mind. Maybe he was paying homage to an author who meant a lot to him as an aspiring poet. Either way, it was a personal acknowledgement of history, one that was refreshing to see in a time when art was single-minded towards nation-building and the state.

Entering the twenty-first century, many of the early works of Thế Lữ, Chế Lan Viên and others have become classics, discussed and analyzed in school as defining texts of a transitional era in Vietnamese literature. In such discussions, Poe’s name rarely appears, for his impact, albeit strong, is still less pervasive than those of Frenchmen like Baudelaire and Verlaine. Still, it is a fact worth acknowledging that for a time in history, Poe was the single most admired American author in Vietnam, and with that admiration, a whole generation of radical artists had crafted novel things, forever changing their country’s literary landscape.