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.

Ruth Padel and John Walsh: was it him?

Big scandal around the election of Ruth Padel as Oxford poetry professor. The rival to “Paddle” – as Kirsty Young called her on Desert Island Discs – was the great poet Derek Walcott. Somebody circulated 100 potential voters with photocopies from a 1984 book describing the advances that Walcott made to two women students when he was at Harvard in 1982.

As a result, Walcott withdrew from the election, and Paddle got the job.

In the Sunday Telegraph (17 May) Padel is quoted denying as “ridiculous” claims by a former ~Professor of Poetry (not named) that she had colluded with John Walsh, “a friend and newspaper columnist” to do this. She said: “I used to know John 10 years ago and I see him once a year at parties”.

Walsh is a columnist for the Independent. On 28 April he wrote a deplorably partisan column for the paper. He declared himself a supporter of Padel, and then took a hatchet to Walcott, reprising the 1982 allegations, which were set out in a book called The Lecherous Professor published in 1984. The book is not about Walcott – he features on pages 29-33 and again briefly on p. 36.

Walsh’s cynical column does exactly what the 100 anonymous envelopes did.

So do we have anything but Padel’s word that it wasn’t him?

Some irony was introduced by a Sunday Times piece by the mischievous Sian Griffiths (17 May again), claiming it’s widely known that a Padel poem called “Home Cooking”, which ends with a fuck on the kitchen table after a couple have glazed a Sainsbury’s free-range duck, is about John Walsh. “She did not deny Walsh was the lover”, the ST writes.

Walsh is one of the weaker brethren among columnists, and it’s always been a surprise that he was once literary editor of the Sunday Times. Perhaps that’s why the paper’s journalists are so well-informed about his kitchen activities.

All Sunday’s papers write against Walsh and whoever sent the Walcott photocopies. All, that is, except Emily Dugan in the Independent on Sunday – she contrives to write the story without mentioning him once.

In the Observer Catherine Bennett directs some well-deserved sarcasm towards Walsh (17 May). But she makes a point nobody else has the courage or knowledge to make: Padel is “a mediocre versifier”. That is absolutely right– she’s certainly not in the Carol Ann Duffy class.

Oxford’s decision is a disaster. Ruth Padel is a weak poet – “Home Cooking”, as a subject, suggests that – and she hasn’t got anything interesting to say beyond 600 words. An hour’s lecture won’t amount to much. She’s a conventional thinker, a nineteenth-century leftover. She lives off the boring fact that she is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter. To her credit, she sounded genuinely upset by Walcott’s withdrawal.

If she thinks the activities of her ex-lover Walsh have “poisoned” her appointment, why doesn’t she just resign?

Come on, Ruth: you’re not going to win the Nobel, as Walcott did. There’s still time to get out.