By Robert Fraser
I am often asked to name my favourite poem by the British writer David Gascoyne (1916-2001), my biography of whom appears with OUP this month. Bearing in mind Gascoyne was in his time an interpreter of Surrealism, an existentialist of a religious variety and a proponent of ecology, you might expect me to go for a poem along these lines. Instead, I usually choose a poem of the early 1940s entitled “Odeur de Pensée.” The title is intriguing for a start, since it translates as either “The Smell of Thought” or”‘The Scent of a Pansy.” A pansy, you will properly reply, is almost odourless; its appearance suggests fragrance without it shedding much. If it possesses a scent at all, it is so elusive as almost to be undetectable. It is thus with thought:
Thought’s odour is so pale that in the air
Nostrils inhale, it disappears like fire
Put out by water. Drifting through the coils
Of the involved and sponge-like brain it frets
The fine-veined walls of secret mental cells,
Brushing their fragile fibre as with light
Nostalgic breezes…
Hard to locate in time or place, fitting uneasily into a biographical sequence, these lines nonetheless convey so much about a writer every stage of whose existence was marked by elusiveness. To me his life seemed a patchwork of lost years, lost works, lost people. There was, for example, the saga of his pre-war diaries, compiled in Paris and London between 1936 and 1940. Gascoyne had lent them to a theatrical colleague, who had forgotten to return them. For decades he assumed them to be lost then, one morning in the early 1970s, they re-appeared on his doorstep wrapped in brown paper, having surfaced among the effects of a recently deceased acquaintance. Unpacked and eventually published, they abounded in descriptions of contemporaries well — or else scarcely — known: W.H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky, André Breton, Henry Miller.
It was the obscurer names that preoccupied me. Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, for example — where was she? As a puppy-like teenager she had been a neighbour of the poet’s in the mid-nineteen thirties. She had a walk-on part in his Paris diaries, since she had gone on to study drawing with Fernand Léger and sculpture with Ossip Zadkine. I had seen a portrait of Bettina as a voluptuous twenty-something year old painted by David Kentish who, along with Lucian Freud and Johnny Craxton, formed the nucleus of the so-called East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing haphazardly run by Cedric Morris in the early war years. If she had known Kentish, there was a fair chance she knew the rest of that ramshackle bunch. Portraiture was very much part of the scene. In 1943 Freud sketched Gascoyne several times, his four wildly differing likenesses bearing witness to the poet’s changeable personality. Had Bettina drawn Gascoyne as well?
I contacted the Bridgeman Art Library who could tell me little, though they thought she might be in Italy. A circuitous trail of contacts led to her daughter, who told me she and her mother lived north of Rome in the picturesque lake-side town of Trevignano Romano. Bettina too had lost Gascoyne’s diaries, her printed copy had been borrowed and not returned. Could I acquire a replacement? I agreed on the condition we met. Thus I lured her to Richmond in Surrey where, one crowded bank holiday, we sat in a crowded pub where I endeavoured to hear her murmured reminiscences above the din of the drinkers. It was futile, so last autumn my wife Catherine and I followed her out to Italy, where she occupies a modest flat hun