Wilfrid Sheed: Likeness

“Childhood lays itself out, like a novel, he suggests, complete with central observer, fixed characters, and linear plot. Later, life disperses itself into anecdotes. At twenty-one, it no longer strictly matters whether the author went first to Ireland and then to Spain, or Spain first. And after thirty, he could stitch the pages in backward for all we care.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"V. S. Pritchett: Midnight Oil," p. 224
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Life , Childhood

“I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the "typical liberal" — as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"Spock Mugged" (1973), p. 91
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Reading

“Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations — that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"A Moral Problem" (1974), p. 88
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

People , Health , Jealousy , Art

“It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could not possibly like that one, would indeed consider him a menace. Literature is a battleground of conflicting faiths, and nobler passions than envy are involved.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"The Interview as Art," p. 209
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Faith , Literature , Passion , Reading

“Not that there weren't real communists in the labor unions, and real spies in Washington, but these had nothing to do with the show that was being put on for us, which seemed entirely designed to Make Us Take This Thing Seriously. From abroad, where I was for much of the time, it looked as if the United States were trying to act like a superpower by holding its very own show trials.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"Program Notes," p. xiv
Essays in Disguise (1990)

Time

“Professor Bell, in his tortured efforts to sound fair and impersonal, arrives at an aesthetic principle too edifying for Art to bear. He says in effect that you can explore evil, drawing "on the tap roots of the demonic," but you may not approve it. But when you draw on those tap roots, who knows what you will find? Writers just back from their season in hell are likely to be covered in goat blood and tend to rave. The moralists can sort out the evidence later. But the writer with the correct attitude could not have entered hell in the first place.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"Honoring Ezra Pound" (1972), p. 59
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Art , Hell , Effort , Evil

“His interviewing self is, or was, an extra person, like the Holy Ghost, generated by self-contemplation.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"The Interview as Art" (1976), p. 208
Referring to W. H. Auden
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Personality

“Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home everywhere, but was probably more so someplace else, if he could just find it.”

Wilfrid Sheed

The House That George Built (2007)

Home , Soul , Parting

“It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics.”

Wilfrid Sheed

In Love with Daylight (1995)

Way , Time

“He was truly after an art in which the creator could be as intelligent as he liked, but in which intelligence must be transmuted entirely into form, so that no lumps of thinking are left showing.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"Ernest Hemingway" (1977), p. 240
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Art , Intelligence , Thinking

“Off she'd go to the hospital, a place I believe she secretly liked because they treat you like a child there.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"Miss Jean Stafford," p. 71
Essays in Disguise (1990)

“Standing still as a statue in the October shadows, he looked, grotesquely, more like a patriot than anything usually seen on a baseball field. A trick of light perhaps. Yet what famous athlete last died for a cause bigger than himself? Clemente could sometimes seem like a pest, a nagging narcissist, with only his burningly serious play to deny it. Yet when that plane crashed carrying relief supplies to Nicaragua we saw what he had meant all along. It was like the old Clemente crashing into the right field wall in a losing game: the act of a totally serious man.
By chance I met Clemente once, in the humble role of autograph-seeker. He was doing wind sprints down at the Pirate training camp in Bradenton, Florida. And although I claimed I was getting an autograph for my son (true, for a change), he looked at me with a hidalgo’s contempt – at a grown man simpering over a blunt pencil; he turned his back abruptly and did another wind sprint, then slashed his name onto my scorecard and sauntered away. To hell with you, Clemente, I thought. But on the way out, I saw him funning with three old ladies from Allentown, Pennsylvania, and I have never seen sweeter courtesy.”

Wilfrid Sheed

From the foreword to Clemente! (1973) by Kal Wagenheim

Way , Game , Hell , Light

“Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).”

Wilfrid Sheed

"Dirty Business" (1973), p. 83
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

People , Feeling