R.I.P. Wilfrid Sheed

[Reza]

Wilfrid Sheed obituary

Novelist and critic who straddled the Atlantic with his pithy prose
* Michael Barber
www.guardian.co.uk>guardian.co.uk,
Monday 21 February 2011 19.01 GMT

Wilfrid Sheed obituary
Time magazine called novelist and critic
Wilfrid Sheed "certainly the best American
reviewer of books".

A good question for a literary quiz would be to
ask which American author and critic set his
first novel at Oxford University in the 1950s.
The answer is Wilfrid Sheed, who has died aged
80, and whose Oxford novel was A Middle Class
Education (1960). He wrote eight more – notably
Square's Progress (1965), Office Politics (1966),
The Critic (1970, also published under the title
Max Jamison) and Transatlantic Blues (1978) – all
of which sold respectably. But it is as a man of
letters – equally at home writing about books,
theatre or sport – that Sheed will be chiefly
remembered. "Why," asked a fellow critic, "does
the man bother with novel-writing when his talent
for criticism is so great?" In the opinion of
Time magazine, he was "certainly the best American reviewer of books".

Sheed was born in London. In 1940, aged nine, he
went with his parents, the Catholic publishers
Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, to the US, a
formative experience. Polio, contracted when he
was 13, cut short an "unpromising" sporting
career: in future he could only walk with the aid
of a stick. But this did nothing to diminish his
interest in sport, particularly baseball and
boxing, which he always said he would rather
write about than anything else. His prose,
described as "Ring Lardner meets Cardinal
Newman", is full of sporting metaphors such as:
"[Muggeridge's] style is to jab your head off
with basically the same kind of sentence, in
combinations so fast and stinging that you can't
keep your hands up." He asserted that SJ
Perelman's obsession with "mock-ornate sentences"
meant that "his prose was distorted like a pitcher's elbow from unnatural use".

Back in Britain after the war, Sheed was enrolled
at Downside, the Benedictine public school in
Somerset. This was not a success. He thought of
himself as American and was homesick for
"Pepsi-Cola and Yankee Stadium". But his parents
were determined he should go to Oxford
University, and there he went, in 1950. To his
surprise, Sheed enjoyed Oxford, where he drank a
lot of beer, watched a lot of cricket and tried
to concoct funny minutes for the Lincoln College
Junior Common Room – "the best discipline I ever had".

Torn between two cultures, he complicated matters
further by spending a year in Australia, his
father's birthplace. Ironically, this made him
feel more English, as England were playing
Australia at cricket and Sheed felt duty-bound to
support them. Colin Cowdrey, whom he'd met at
Oxford, introduced him to both teams – a
chastening experience. Great athletes, he
concluded, were best viewed "from about a hundred
feet away". The same was true, he later discovered, of great writers.

By now, Sheed had convinced himself that he did
not belong anywhere. He decided to settle in New
York, where a "chronic foreigner" such as himself
would not feel out of place. His parents had
close links with various Catholic journals there,
for which he freelanced while writing his first novel.

Owing more to Kingsley Amis than to Evelyn Waugh,
A Middle Class Education proclaimed that Oxford
undergraduates drank beer and chased girls as
enthusiastically as their redbrick counterparts.
One reviewer wondered how the hero managed to win
a graduate scholarship to America despite never
opening a book or attending a lecture, but most
of his colleagues were more appreciative. They
praised Sheed's ear for dialogue and his comic
scenes, predicting, correctly, that he was now on the map.

Meanwhile, in America, Sheed had begun to make a
name for himself as a pithy essayist, his style a
"curious transatlantic brew" that reflected his
cross-cultural upbringing. But unlike Gore Vidal,
to whom he was sometimes compared, he never wrote
for British journals. You could read him in the
UK only between hard covers, in collections such
as The Good Word and Other Words (1979).

This was a pity, because he was one of the few
American critics with an insider's grasp of the
English and their foibles. The godson of GK
Chesterton, Sheed had met most of the
intellectual Catholic hierarchy in Britain and
America. Though he did not share his parents'
religious fervour and was wary of the label
"Catholic writer", the church casts a long shadow
across his
fiction.
For instance, Monty Chatworth, the
media-celebrity hero of Transatlantic Blues
(1978), describes himself as a "born-again
atheist". But 30,000ft above the Atlantic, he is
seized by the need to be shriven, and makes his
confession to a cassette recorder he addresses as
"Father Sony". Another novel, The Hack (1963), is
about the crack-up of a writer who churns out
uplifting stories and poems for shoddy Catholic magazines.

Assailed in his 50s by post-polio syndrome, a
recurrence of the disease's paralytic effects, a
depressed Sheed began to drink heavily and became
addicted to sleeping pills. He was eventually
cured after spending a year in a sanatorium. In
1991, after 30 years of cigar-smoking, he
contracted cancer of the tongue. Not expecting to
live, he committed his medical history to paper
under the title In Love With Daylight. When,
against the odds, he survived, he added the
subtitle A Memoir of Recovery before its publication in 1995.

Sheed's last book, The House That George Built
(2007), is a tribute to George Gershwin and his
peers – the American songwriters of the 20s, 30s
and 40s. It has yet to find a UK publisher despite glowing reviews in America.

For most of his writing life, Sheed lived at Sag
Harbor, a coastal village on Long Island, New
York. His second marriage was to Miriam Ungerer,
a food writer. She survives him, together with
two stepdaughters, the three children of his
first marriage – Francis, Elizabeth and Marion – and four grandchildren.

• Wilfrid John Joseph Sheed, author and critic,
born 27 December 1930; died 19 January 2011