Obituary: Pierre Gascar

In one of his last works, Portraits et Souvenirs (1991), the novelist Pierre Gascar, loaded with honours, writes about his many and varied friendships with fellow writers. We find him with the philosopher Michel Foucault investigating the "gay quarters" of Sankt-Pauli and the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. Jean Cocteau is stunned by the beauty of "Les Chevaux" (later published in 1953), a work smuggled into France during the war when Gascar was a prisoner of the Nazis, and Louis Aragon alerts the French Communist Party to the significance of Le Temps des Morts (1953), about the extermination of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

The variety of Pierre Gascar's friendships was equalled by the variety of his life and work, and friendship - so rare among literary people, especially the French - remained one of the most important elements in his memories of the past. He wrote: "We form a sort of secret family, often stranger to one another, apparently, but all stamped with the same invisible sign, and from time to time we rediscover this fraternity of the obscure which, for us, gives our world an irreplaceable dimension." One of those friends, Jean Rostand, son of the famous poet and dramatist Edmond Rostand, a biologist, was instrumental in developing what was to be a very important part of Gascar's work, the linking of science and literature.

Pierre Gascar's mother died when he was very young, and as a small boy he was sent to live with relatives in a small village in Lot-et-Garonne. His education began in Agen, and continued at the College de Versailles. Conscripted into the army in 1937, he was taken prisoner in 1940 on the Somme and deported to Germany. He made two escapes, but was re-captured and incarcerated in the concentration camp at Rawa-Ruska in Ukraine, from which he was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. His first novels were Les Meubles (1949) and Le Visage clos (1951), both published by Gallimard, who was to be his regular publisher.

It was a time when men returning from the war were writing remarkable novels about their experiences: Robert Merle's Weekend a Zuydcoote (1949) and Jean Dutourd's essay-novel-autobiography Les Taxis de la Marne (1956) are immortal documents of the period. Gascar wrote Les Betes (1953) and Les Temps des Morts (also 1953), which won the Prix des Critiques and then the Prix Goncourt. Les Betes treated a theme that was to become a regular feature of Gascar's work: man's inhumanity to the animal kingdom.

Gascar became a great traveller in those golden days when not everybody travelled. He went to China and wrote a dazzling series of reportages about it for Le Monde collected in a book, Chine ouverte (1956). He travelled all over Europe and most of the five continents, producing a steady flow of superbly well-written books - novels, biographies, short stories, plays, scenarios for films. Among them are Les Femmes (1955) and La Graine (1956). Le Fugitif (1961) is a novel about Germany in the post-war period, shrewdly perceptive, subtly ironic. Les Moutons du feu (1963) was a thriller about the OAS (Organisation Ar- mee Secrete), the clandestine movement opposing Algiers' independence from France.

In the mid-Eighties, the themes of nature and the animals began to assume greater importance in Gascar's work. He was to become one of the first contemporary writers to discuss the ethics of man's relationship with the animals, and with nature and the environments in which he lived. Charmes (1965) is a meditation on human nature and a hymn to "the profound relationship between human beings and things". He loved the poetry of "illumined" poets like Gerard de Nerval and Arthur Rimbaud, of both of whom he wrote biographies.

Les Chimeres (1969) reflects this visionary lyrical mode: it is a factual fantasy, an exploration of mineral and vegetable life, of lichens and rocks, of "the archaic mud whose turmoil is the stuff of dreams". These environmental visions were continued in Les Sources (1975), Dans la foret humaine (1976), L'Homme et l'animal (1974), followed by biographies of Buffo, Pasteur and the great humanist of the Enlightenment, Montesquieu.

Gascar's Montesquieu (1989) is an informal biography that shows the author, protector of the things of nature, on easy terms with the philosopher of the nature of things, including the great Bordeaux wines his estate produced. It is a lovely portrait, though not in the same class as the fine scholarly studies of Montesquieu by Professors Robert Shackleton and Louis Desgraves.

One of Gascar's most fascinating works is Les Secrets de Maitre Bernard (1980), a tribute to a fellow spirit from his home town of Agen, the remarkable 16th-century potter and enameller Bernard Palissy, whose works were decorated with some of Gascar's favourite subjects, animals, plants and fruits taken from life, from nature, rustiques figulines, some of which can be seen in the grotto of the Chateau d'Ecouen and in the gardens of the Tuileries.

There is a serene melancholy in Pierre Gascar's later work, like the ecological essay "Pour le dire avec des fleurs" ("Say it with Flowers") on the flora and fauna of the Jura, where he made his home, and his last novel, La Friche ("The Fallow Field", 1993). He will be remembered for his pure style, strong opinions on the conservation of nature and the respect of all animal life, and for the quality of his friendship, that embraced all humanity, and all the natural world.

James Kirkup

Pierre Fournier (Pierre Gascar), writer, journalist, dramatist: born Paris 13 March 1916; twice married (two sons); died Baume-les-Messieurs, Jura 20 February 1997.