FROM childhood, John Weightman was fascinated by language. The son of a Northumbrian coalminer, he considered himself to be bilingual from his earliest years, since he learnt to speak two distinct dialects, both of which more or less disappeared during his lifetime. He won a scholarship to Hexham Grammar School and took a first in French at the federal Durham University (now Newcastle University). He studied at the University of Poitiers just before the war and before joining the BBC World Service. Throughout the war, he was the only Englishman to read the news to France with its coded messages for the Resistance.
He stayed as a journalist in the French service of the BBC for five years, after the war, until his appointment as a lecturer in French at King’s College London. Though he was in his forties when he began to write reviews and articles, his wit and originality were quickly recognised, and he became a respected essayist. He reviewed for The Observer, and contributed to Twentieth Century magazine and Encounter. His theatre and cinema reviews for Encounter for a while drew him into the demi-monde, and on a memorable occasion he took his family and friends to an illicit viewing of Deep Throat, the pornographic film. “Now I know what it would be like to be a medical student,” was his comment.
He played a considerable part in acquainting the British with postwar French thought. Though he was inclined to reject the ideas of Sartre and the Existentialists, and later of Roland Barthes and the exponents of Critical Theory, he gave praise where he felt it was due. His vivid description in Encounter, in 1961, of Sartre lecturing at the Sorbonne became well known. He “spoke simply, clearly, rapidly, yet doggedly and solidly, like an expert bricklayer building up a wall in front of your eyes. He went on and on, without a pause, for two and a quarter hours, so that by the end the audience, though completely fascinated, was as collapsed and wilting as people during the final stages of a long train journey. You felt that he might have gone on all night and stopped only as a concession to frailer humanity. It was a wonderful performance — the sort of lecture that ploughs up the minds of the hearers as a tractor ploughs up a field. I sat next to an American professor, who said enthusiastically as we came out across the courtyard: ‘St Thomas must have lectured like that.’ ”
Likewise, in a review in The Times Literary Supplement, in which he discussed Barthes’s book on Racine, and an attack on it by another Frenchman, Raymond Picard, he declared that a great deal of la nouvelle critique merely “draped itself in a philosopho-poetic profundity”. But he acknowledged that Barthes’s “abstruse siren song” was far more seductive than Picard ‘s “brisk commonsense”, disposed though he might be to prefer the latter. In the TLS on another occasion he advised Alain Robbe-Grillet, author of the novel La Maison de rendez-vous, to “give up pretending that art has to be as incomprehensible as life, and come out into the open as a precise and gifted eroticist”.
He was a regular contributor to BBC Radio’s The Brains Trust and The Critics and always maintained a wide circle of friends outside academia. Even after his appointment as Professor of French at Westfield College, London University, he contributed many pieces to the New York Review of Books. He and his wife Doreen translated from the French the most significant works of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as other books, for which they received several prizes. For his contribution to French culture he was appointed Commandeur dans L’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
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He was devastated by the death of his wife in 1985 and for a while would say he regarded himself as “posthumous”. But he recovered his spirits and forged for himself a rewarding life, enjoying his many friends and grandchildren, learning Russian and reviewing.
He enjoyed washing-up, ironing and hoovering as this was “creating order out of chaos” and filled an absurdist void by “creating an artificial absolute”. Though he disliked intellectual pretension, he found himself more than once selected for Pseud’s Corner in Private Eye, a ribbing he took with good humour.
Though for most of his life Weightman regarded himself as essentially an essayist, with some of his best work collected in The Concept of the Avant Garde (Alcove Press, 1973), in the last four years of his life he set out his idiosyncratic ideas about the nature of language. A trilogy was published privately: The Cat Sat on the Mat: Language and the Absurd; Reading the Bible in the Run-up to Death and Memoirs of a Language Freak.
When he was asked his religion in hospital he said: “Absurdist”. He always regarded nature as a huge practical joke.
He is survived by a son and a daughter.
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John Weightman, French scholar, was born on November 29, 1915. He died on August 14, 2004, aged 88.