DAVID HOCKNEY

N IS FOR. . . by

William Boyd

Nguyen N, Laotian belle-lettrist and amateur philosopher. Born in Vientiane, Laos, 17 April 1885; died Paris, France, 22 February 1942. N’s family was of bourgeois stock, comparatively wealthy, francophone and Francophile. Nguyen, a precocious but somewhat unhealthy youth, yearned for Paris, but World War I delayed his arrival there until he was twenty-four.

But after humid Vientiane Paris proved noisome and frustrating. The severe winter of 1920 caused his health to fail (something cardiovascular) and he went south to recuperate, to the Côte d'Azur. Strengthened, he decided to settle there. He earned his living as a maths tutor and semi-professional table-tennis player, participating in the short-lived ping-pong leagues that briefly flourished on that sunny littoral in the 1920s.

And it was there that he wrote his little masterpiece, Les Analectes de Nguyen N (Monnier, Toulon, 1928), a copy of which I found last year in Hyères, its cerise wrapper dusty and sunbleached, its pages uncut. A sequence of epiphanic images and apophthegms, its tone is fragile and nervy, balancing perilously between the profound and the banal. ‘Somewhere snow is gently falling,’ Nguyen writes amidst the mimosa and umbrella pines, ‘and I still feel pain.’ English cannot do their tender sincerity full justice.

After the book’s success Nguyen N was taken up by the cultural salons of Paris, where he returned permanently in 1931. He is a tenant of the footnotes of literary history; the unidentified face as the café table; a shadowy figure on the perimeter of many a memoir and biography.

He wrote once to André Gide, who had taxed him on his unusual surname, which is not common in Laos. ‘ … It is properly pronounced unnnnhhhh, effectively three syllables, the final ‘hs’ being as plosive as possible, if you can imagine that. Ideally, after introducing me, you should be very slightly out of breath.’

The war brought penury. Nguyen went to work in the kitchen of Paris’s largest Vietnamese restaurant, where he discovered a talent for the decorative garnish. His lacy carrot carnations, scallion lilies and translucent turnip roses were miniature works of art. In between shifts he wrote his short autobiography, Comment Ciseler Les Legumes (Plon et Noël, Paris, 1943 – very rare), which was published posthumously.

Nguyen N was run over in the blackout one gloomy February night by a gendarme on a bicycle. He died instantly.