Association and the Journalists' Association, and his writings after the First Indochina War showed a commitment to Marxism-Leninism. Personal life Despite his bold literary persona, Xuân Diệu was a secretive individual, with most of the tales regarding his private life being told by his acquaintances before and after his death. His companionship with Huy Cận, with whom he shared a house between 1938 and 1940, has been depicted by Vietnamese and Western sources alike as both an intimate friendship and a romantic relationship. Huy Cận himself spoke of the time he lived with Xuân Diệu in the poem "Ngủ chung" ("Sleeping Together") from his debut collection Lửa thiêng (Sacred Fire, 1940). Another alleged muse of his was the poet Hoàng Cát, to whom he referred by the kinship term "em" (the common second-person pronoun for women in a heterosexual relationship) in a farewell poem that he penned when Hoàng Cát left for the front line in 1965. Hoàng Cát was much younger than Xuân Diệu, and in a 2013 interview, he said that he was aware of Xuân Diệu's affections towards him but did not reciprocate them, for he "did not love Xuân Diệu in the way that men and women love one another." In his memoir Cát bụi chân ai (Dusty Sand on Somebody's Footsteps, 1992), the writer Tô Hoài recalled one of the nights in Việt Bắc in which Xuân Diệu was reprimanded by the military commanders: "Xuân Diệu just sat and cried. Who knows whether Nam Cao, Nguyễn Huy Tưởng, Trọng Hứa, Nguyễn Văn Mãi, and even lão Hiến, Nghiêm Bình, as well as Đại, Đắc, Tô Sang, and a bunch of other guys had slept with Xuân Diệu or not; naturally, nobody admitted it. I was also silent as a clam. During those wild moments in the seductive darkness of night, I also went a bit crazy— Xuân Diệu was not by any stretch of the imagination alone in this regard. Nobody specifically mentioned these episodes [of homosexual love], but everybody raised their voices, raised their voices severely, harsely criticizing his "bourgeois thinking, his evil bourgeois thinking, which needed to be fixed." Xuân Diệu sobbed and said, "it's my homosexuality [tình trai]... my homosexuality," choking on his words with tears flowing, but not promising to fix anything at all." Legacy and recognition In their monumental book of literary criticism, Thi nhân Việt Nam (1932–1941), Hoài Thanh