‘He wrote a few good sentences’
Wilfrid Sheed, who died Wednesday morning at the age of eighty, may have been the most naturally gifted writer who ever wrote regularly for Commonweal. At Slate, Timothy Noah claims that Sheed “possessed the most captivating writing style of any journalist writing in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and that includes Mailer, Wolfe, Talese, and various other dandies of the New Journalism.”
The son of Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, the godson of G.K. Chesterton, Sheed probably could have written some interesting books even if he hadn’t been a great writer: he had so many stories to tell, so many charismatic friends and acquaintances. But because he was so talented, he could turn even the most unpromising subject — a dull play or book, an editorial meeting — into great journalism.
Among his many gifts as a writer was his versatility: Sheed did all the voices, and did them well. As a memoirist and moralist (for him the two often went together), he could write with eloquent simplicity, as in this piece about growing up Catholic before Vatican II and hanging onto one’s faith afterward. Writing as a satirist, Sheed could be deadly funny and deadly serious at the same time, as in this guide to hatchet jobs. He wrote more than a few of those himself, including a famous takedown of Norman Podhoretz’s infamous memoir, Making It. (Many years later Podhoretz refused to shake Sheed’s hand because of that review.) But Sheed also knew how to bury his hatchet in a bad book while somehow managing not only to leave the author intact but also to defend him against his less scrupulous critics, as in this characteristically nuanced review of Edmund Wilson’s The Cold War & the Income Tax.
[Wilson's] prose (possibly the best non-fiction American prose since Thoreau) has become rather shapeless, possibly even careless. The tone is that of a man who doesn’t expect to be contradicted; he addresses his subject as if it had never been discussed before—and will never need to be discussed again. There is no suggestion here of failing powers, only of failing intensity and concentration, like a Yankee after his twelfth pennant.
Sheed knew, as Wilson did, that it was silly to judge an important writer by his worst work, or to refrain from criticizing bad work because it was written by an important writer. More than that, Sheed had an eye for the essential quality — the ground note audible in all a writer’s work, both the good and the bad (cf. his discussion of Hemingway here and his essay about William F. Buckley, Jr. here).
Sheed’s most famous quality was his wit, which was dry, quick, and ruthless. He scuppered foolishness gladly. I won’t spoil his reply to an angry letter from Michael Novak in the NYRB (you can read the exchange here – and you should). Suffice it to say Sheed knew how to follow some of the advice he gave in that essay about hatchet jobs:
Since the last thing a hatchetman wants is sympathy, the thing to aim at is a hair-line cut, almost invisible until the victim moves and his head topples off. An angry letter from him is equivalent (change metaphors there) to the death lunge of the brave bull. Three or four lines in riposte will sever his aorta for good.
By 1974 he had it down to four or five words.
Sheed and his wit were usually on the side of the underdog. He was a man of great sympathies, as well as great loyalties — to people and to institutions. He asked that a Latin Mass be said at his funeral, and he wanted his headstone to read, “He wrote a few good sentences.” Bless him, he wrote no bad ones. Requiescat in pace.
LOL at Sheed’s response to Novak.
And at Novak’s silly remark about “those who despite their commercial background nourished pretensions of aristocracy”.
Sheed was descended from aristocracy — the most famous recusant family in England — the Howards, Dukes of Norfolk. His mother, Maisie Ward, was the child of Wilfrid Ward and Josephine Hope, niece of the 15th Duke of Norfolk. (Her grandfather was William George Ward, “the most brilliant of Newman’s Oxford disciples”. –Scotti)
RIP
Theatre critic Charles McNulty has a nice tribute to Sheed (along with some other theatre personalities who died recently) on his Los Angeles Times blog:
Michael Glazier, who began his career as a Catholic publisher by working at Sheed & Ward, hated Wilfred Sheed’s memoir of his parents. Sorry, but I don’t think he got the better in the little exchange with Michael Novak.
I wonder what Fr. Komonchak would say if he was told that he failed to appreciate Sheed’s curt reply and took Novak’s side because Fr. Komonchak’s background is, like’s Novak’s, Slovak. My guess would be that Fr. Komonchak would say that was silly, and he would be right — for the same reason it was silly of Novak to claim that Sheed failed to appreciate his book because of Sheed’s English background.
I highly recommend Sheed’s 1966 novel, Office Politics.
Matt, you’re right — Novak was definitely outclassed in that exchange. It takes nothing away from Sheed to add, though, that it didn’t take much to take him down.
Matt, I have no love for Michael Novak, but I don’t think it’s silly to point out that ethnic bias exists among people of privilege, whether it’s in the (Irish dominated) American church or elsewhere. If you’ve never been at the receiving end of such bias, it’s hard to take it seriously perhaps.
Rita — I would point to Gerelyn’s citation of Novak’s preposterous remark. And Novak was no slouch at stereotyping: note his assertion about a “…a natural modesty New Yorkers cannot approach.” I’ve been to New York plenty of times, and New Yorkers have been invariably helpful and polite. I live on the Main Line outside Philly, and it contains the rudest, most obnoxious, and immodest people I’ve ever encountered — and they are of all ethnic and religious “persuasions.”
Sheed has always been one of my favorite writers and one who brought me into the Commonweal orbit, if only on the periphery. I have to prune my collection of books to make room for new ones but Sheed’s books will always remain in my library.
Among my claims to fame is the fact that I once sat next to him at the bar at The Lion’s Head, a pub in Greenwich Village. I could overhear his conversation with an apparently impoverished writer who wanted to go to Europe but had a hundred reasons why he couldn’t afford the trip. Sheed didn’t have much sympathy for the writer’s angst. He told him to just do it – kids barely out of high school were doing it all the time. I don’t know the outcome for the writer but he persuaded me.
I’ve just reread his review of a book tracing some of the ferocious disputes between Commentary and The New York Review of Books in the sixties and seventies. Sheed complained that the author of the book reduced matters of principle to personality conflicts, although he was quick to concede that audiences seem to crave that kind of treatment.
“As soon as it was presented as a colorful clash of egos, of talented babies, the nation could fling into its favorite stance of feverish condescension toward New York intellectual life. How parochial, the cry goes up, and how basically unimportant! In fact hundreds of people write in to say how unimportant it is, all the way from Fiji. One should do so well with important subjects. At Commonweal, where I used to work, a breakthrough article on Latin America usually drew one letter, perhaps from the ex-president himself. A dull subject, like Burton and Taylor (or its theological equivalent), drew stacks of mail from all over.”
Substitute Palin for Burton and Taylor and alas ruefully utter the obligatory words “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
Perhaps the Latin Mass he wanted at his funeral will include these words:
In paradisum deducant te Angeli:
in tuo adventu suscipiant te Martyres,
et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem.
Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat,
et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem.
Nice job, Matt. The man could write and he made sense at the same time. Not an easy feat. I love the description of the meeting that Callahan called. Those were the sixties. That Callahan seemed so different than the one who went on to pursue research. Sheed just captured that whole meeting so well. Seems that Sheed and Ward was the publishing house at the time. In the fifties all that existed in the Catholic world seemed to be Sheed and Ward. Bishop Sheen made a good penny for them. Give us more of that stuff and even Commonweal history.
Another stellar literary critic, also Anglo-American in his sensibility, died within days of Sheed.
“John Gross, the editor of The Times Literary Supplement in London in the 1970s and a book critic for The New York Times in the 1980s who was known for his fluid style and easy erudition, died on Monday in London. He was 75.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/arts/12gross.html
Re: “Christian Gentlemen: A Chapter of ‘Commonweal’ History,” Wilfrid’s brief memoir of his days at CWL.
How far apart could anyone have really been since both Steinfelses edited the Hastings Center Report for Dan’s Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Science, as well as editing Commonweal albeit at different times. Was it principle and opinion that divided the young turks from the old turks? Or was it energy levels? Or maybe it was the smokers and the non-smokers.