John Walsh: Knicker Man

Sexy John Walsh, journalist and Padel squeeze, has tried to impress us by writing in French (Indy, 23 June). Sarkozy has taken to reading books, apparently, Zola and Céline among them.

Walsh tries to imagine what Sarko would have said to novelist Michel Houellebecq when he invited him to dinner. Walsh’s French goes like this: “Oh, Michel. J’ai lit tout de ton oeuvre”

This is hopeless. Lire (to read) doesn’t go to past tense lit. Un lit is a bed, and the person round here most interested in beds is sexy John himself.

It should be: j’ai lu toute ton œuvre. That’s only three mistakes, John.

But no French person would use this construction in the first place. Sarko would have said: J’ai lu tous vos livres.

Walsh then goes on to mention that Sarko has been reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline, author of Voyage au bout de la nuit, which he says is “savage”. Why doesn’t he also mention Céline’s notorious anti-Semitic tract Bagatelles pour un massacre, published in 1937, just in time for the war?

Walsh does a lot of superficial and tricksy stuff about the Goncourts and Proust and Flaubert. Why doesn’t he say how significant it might be that a very right-wing president is reading a very right-wing author? Why doesn’t he notice that Sarkozy is also reading Zola, a radical of his time, who in 1898 denounced the judgement in the Dreyfus affair in his famous “J’Accuse…!” newspaper article. It was a magnificent statement against state anti-Semitism.

Isn’t this contradiction interesting enough? Walsh doesn’t pick up any of it. Instead he burbles on about the alleged sincerity of Sarko’s new interests (so it’s not Carla), and Alan Bennett – always safe territory.

Instead of trying to make a serious point or two, Walsh is more interested in suggesting some people read Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland because Obama is reading it. I bet he’s met a whole lot of people doing that.

Walsh mentions no less than twenty-two writers in his 750-word piece. He has nothing significant to say about any of them. A kind of literary jeering takes place instead.

On 9 June he made what looked like a similar point, about F.T. Marinetti, the Futurist agitator (tied to the current Tate Modern show). He wrote: Marinetti was a barking mad Fascist sympathiser. Very true of the 1920s. But not when he founded and propagated Futurism before the First World War. There was no Fascism then, and Mussolini was still a socialist. Hopeless, again.

A friend who has read John Walsh with more attention than he deserves says that a year ago he wrote about Edith Sitwell’s underwear, and the chances of her contemporaries making an entry therein. Kitchen-table bonking, le lit, knickers – these are John Walsh’s real interests.

Come on, John: if you’ve read so many books, try and say something thoughtful about them.