Letters

Tom Crewe’s vivisection of the works of Ocean Vuong is surely one of the best things of its kind since Macaulay’s demolition of Robert Montgomery’s poetry in the Edinburgh Review of April 1830 (LRB, 26 June).

Tom Crewe’s review of Ocean Vuong’s latest novel reveals his ignorance of the multiple literary traditions in which Vuong participates. Vuong has discussed the influence on his work of the late Korean American author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose best-known work, Dictee (1982), is an experimental text combining illusory poetry and prose. Vietnamese American literature is in general characterised by a profound obscurity that to some extent results from the linguistic dislocations caused by transnational migration. The poet Hoa Nguyen has talked about losing the Vietnamese language when assimilating to mainstream American culture as a child, and the poet and novelist Vi Khi Nao has described using Latin as an intermediary language when learning English as a native Vietnamese speaker. Vuong, who is dyslexic, immigrated to the United States at the age of two and struggled to learn to read. His style bears the linguistic traces of the typical immigrant experiences of originary fracture and eventual reconstitution. I would also note that Crewe has accidentally gestured towards something genuine in his characterisation of Vuong’s utterances as ‘vatic’. Vuong’s rich engagement with the tradition of Greco-Roman literature, best exemplified in his poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), places him in the vatic tradition of poets such as Pindar and Horace. Following Horace, we might refer to Vuong as a biformis vates, ‘two-formed poet’, for his collocation of Vietnamese and American identities in one literary voice.

I will also respond to a couple of loose observations in Crewe’s review. First, I fail to see how the representations of racist and homophobic bullies in Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) are cartoonish or crude. As a Korean American adoptee born in 1988, like Vuong, and who grew up near him in Vermont, I too was accosted by racist children in the playground, who would squint as a way of mocking me. I was astounded by the fidelity with which Vuong rendered these experiences. Second, Crewe claims not to understand Vuong’s characterisation of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous as ‘a private document (a letter from a son to his mother) “performing” as a novel’. Vuong describes his books as ‘reincarnations, in the Buddhist sense, of one another’. Authors have retold the same stories in different genres since antiquity. Ovid’s presentations of the myth of Ariadne and Theseus offer a salient example. This story appears in Metamorphoses and in Heroides, a collection of epistolary poems, whose form mirrors that of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

I am ultimately grateful to Crewe for quoting so much of Vuong’s text. Readers of his review have been given the opportunity to evaluate the quality of Vuong’s prose for themselves. My belief is that many of them will be mesmerised by its singular beauty.

Like Gundars Rudzitis, I am ‘a lucky Balt’, who spent a very happy year, aged four, in a Latvian refugee camp in Flensburg (Letters, 10 July). I was an only child very glad to have so many friends and enjoyed the relative freedom of the camp – never mind that I nearly died three times from illness and accident. What I found much more difficult to understand was the ‘normality’ of Edinburgh, where my mother and I arrived in 1948, having been invited by my aunt. My story would have been very different had my mother’s older sister not married an artist born in Moscow, but of English extraction, with a British passport.

Adam Mars-Jones praises a sentence from Alan Garner’s Red Shift – ‘Each hill had a hood, a huge hackle of mist, and the cold clear rain that shed from the clouds was ice when it hit’ – as ‘a brilliantly cadenced description’ (LRB, 10 July). The first (and most striking) half of this description is lifted straight from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (line 2081): ‘Vch hille hade a hatte, a myst-hakel huge.’

Francesca Wade notes Bella da Costa Greene’s ‘efforts to identify a series of illuminated manuscripts as the work of a single modern painter she called the Spanish Forger’ (LRB, 26 June). This doesn’t quite encapsulate the scale of the research that went into identifying these manuscripts as the work of a single individual (probably not ‘Spanish’, and ‘forger’ has never seemed sufficient). Without Greene these works – something like two hundred have been attributed to the Forger – would have remained in the archives of various institutions. Instead, we are able to see them as a reflection of the art market’s taste for medieval manuscripts at the turn of the 20th century: the existence of these works tells us how keen buyers were to own illuminated miniatures so long as they looked the part.

Bee Wilson refers to a scene in Dog Day Afternoon in which Al Pacino, playing Sonny Wortzik, gets ‘the crowd to cheer for him by shouting “Attica!” (a reference to a New York prison riot a few years earlier)’ (LRB, 26 June). The reference wasn’t just to the ‘riot’ (more correctly an uprising, in the course of which the prisoners issued a long list of demands for better treatment), but also to the violent police response ordered by the New York state governor, Nelson Rockefeller, in which 33 prisoners and ten guards were killed – a higher number of deaths than in any prison uprising or riot in the US before or since. Afterwards prisoners were beaten and tortured. It was all of this – the prison revolt with its strong political overtones and the violent government response and aftermath – that would have been on the minds of viewers, especially in New York, when the film appeared four years later. In the context of the film, Pacino’s Wortzik is daring the police to make a similar deadly response.

Jonathan Meades refers to ‘the fatuous CIA-promoted disparagement of representational painting because it was contaminated by’ the Nazi terror (LRB, 26 June). But in promoting Abstract Expressionism over figurative art, the CIA wasn’t continuing a war already won but instead fighting the Cold War’s cultural contest between the West and the Soviet bloc. Unlike the collective self-sacrifice celebrated in the latter’s officially sanctioned Socialist Realism, Abstract Expressionism screamed individualism and personal freedom, the self unsacrificed and unbound. That it too was officially sanctioned, albeit covertly, is one of history’s ironies.

Drug consumption rooms, or Safer Drug Consumption Facilities, are, as Dani Garavelli says, controversial (LRB, 26 June). She also notes that ‘there are some two hundred SDCFs in other countries, including Canada, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands and Australia’. As a result, much is known about their impact and effectiveness, above all for people who inject drugs. Published studies on individual sites and meta-analysis by, among others, the EU, confirm that SDCFs prevent deaths, reduce the transmission of HIV and other blood-borne viruses, reduce ambulance call-outs and A&E visits, and reduce the discarding of drug-related paraphernalia in public places. They also restore some dignity to drug users who inject.

Opponents say that SDCFs condone drug use. Less consideration is given to the way that opposition to SDCFs and other harm-reduction practices ‘condones’ drug-related deaths. The complaint that SDCFs act as ‘state-sponsored pushers’ is illogical: those who attend the facilities bring their own supplies so that they can use them in safe and hygienic spaces, with professionals on hand in case of overdose. Opponents often talk of the need to ‘protect’ children from drug use and drug users; in practice, this attitude exacerbates the marginalisation and othering of drug users, and as Garavelli points out, alcohol and opiate dependency often originates in abuse in early life.

Drug use should be seen as a public-health issue, not – as in England (though not Scotland or Northern Ireland) – a criminal justice issue. The prohibition on the provision of tourniquets at SDCFs stems from the same impulse as Theresa May’s reluctance, when she was home secretary, to allow drug clinics to provide foil to heroin users. Politicians and much of the media see the adoption of harm-reduction methods as condoning drug use, when they should be recognising it as a reality and seeking to mitigate its effects. The UK government claims that its drug policy follows the recommendations of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. In a major reversal of its previous stance, the UNODC this year joined other UN agencies in endorsing harm reduction. It isn’t yet clear what influence this will have on UK policy, which for now continues to treat drug use as a law enforcement issue.

Steven Shapin’s review of Patchen Barss’s biography of Roger Penrose is 5258 words long (LRB, 26 June). Yet not one of them is ‘twistor’.