Wilfrid
 Sheed presents a problem to anyone proposing to review one of his books
 more or less in good faith. My drugstore editions of his novels are 
crusted over with reviewers' enthusiastic ravings, the kind that suggest
 a limited education or backstage payola; but Sheed himself has sardonic
 words for such goings‐on in “Max Jamison,” his novel about the perils 
of reviewing, and in “The Politics of Reviewing,” the lead essay in his 
new collection of criticism of books, films and plays. And I'm somehow 
supposed to review this book of reviews, by a brilliant reviewer who 
knows all the tricks and openly despises most of them, in a publication 
whose editor, John Leonard, has supplied Sheed's book with an exuberant 
Foreword in which he suggests that he wishes Sheed could write all the 
reviews for The Times Book Review. One feels pretty threatened even 
before geginning.Sheed's own theory 
of reviewing isn't much help: “for the slicks you do need certain 
rudimentary entertainment skills—a comic use of the first person, a bag 
of shiny phrases. For the rest, simple waltz steps will do.” Once things
 like that are said out loud, first‐person comedy turns into 
selfconscious blurting (see above), shiny phrases go rusty in the hand 
and the poor reviewer can only lurch around the ballroom (one–two–three,
 one–two–three) hoping no one's really watching.There,
 are few simple waltz steps in “The Morning After,” but it's hard to 
praise Sheed's success at an admittedly minor art without seeming to 
fawn, and hard to carp without pretending to purities as phony as low 
sycophancy. (“Mr. Shakespeare's coruscating wit and rich poetry have 
made him our most successful commercial playwright, but ‘King Lear’ 
shows once again that the hardest and most relevant questions of our 
times escape him, to say nothing of the mysteries of the human heart.”) 
This book is everything that it will be called by its 
reviewers—dazzling, hilarious, astringent, serious without pomposity, 
strong without rage, without o'er‐flowing full — and yet Sheed's 
critical performances, like his novelistic performances, deserve a more 
complicated response than cheers and whistling.His
 way of being present in his own writing is in effect a refusal of 
success through the means that come easiest to his intelligence and wit,
 an almost insulting indifference to our readiness to admire him, our 
eagerness to settle, after all, for so little. His work is much in 
demand at the quality and slick publications alike, and one sees how his
 shameless lack of sham would tickle the “inside” world of writers, 
editors, publishers and professional reviewers, where the pretense that 
the game of literature is deadly serious, somehow less political, 
commercial and self‐advancing than the other games in town, must get 
positively suffocating.Even
 narcissistic authors and corrupt reviewers, who after all usually know 
or at least nod to their own little failings, must enjoy Sheed's 
exposures of narcissism and corruption, so long as the names are changed
 and some of his own blood gets spilled along with theirs, as it 
certainly does. But the drugstore bookbuyer may pardonably feel confused
 by that sort of fun, and the habit of self‐irony looks different from 
outside the literary shop talk world.Seen
 from outside, Sheed's literary temperament and methods look resolutely 
unfashionable and a good deal more serious, though these qualities are 
partly (and perhaps not accidentally) obscured by his mastery of the 
Mid‐Atlantic style, as in this sample sentence, from a review of 
“Thérèse and Isabelle”: “The big scene, the one they said couldn't be 
made, features two feet (or at the most, three) sticking out demurely 
from in back of an apse or chancel or whatever they call those things, 
while a slew of giddy subtitles fill in the rest.” That's a lovely 
amalgam of Bertie Wooster and Ed Hackendorper (whom you met in Chicago 
at the sales convention), and Sheed, who has the advantage of being a 
genuine Anglo‐American, as one learns from his touching essay 
“Confessions of a Sports Nut,” can give, pointers to all of us who aspire
 to sounding amusing and urbane, from Bill Buckley to Squire Mailer 
himself.Still, he understands that 
style ?? more than words and rhythms. A?? a critic he gives approval to 
writer whose language breaks down received categories of apprehension, 
re‐creates the world through “a con stant play of metaphor and acute 
literalness,” but for him these recreations are suspect if they're 
achieved by the writer's getting all personal and formless in the 
contemporary way. Submission to form becomes a kind of credo, and it 
seems almost inevitable that many of the virtuosi he admires —Updike, 
Walker Percy, Chesterton and Belloc, and (in another stylistic country) 
Eugene McCarthy—interest him for operating within a formal outlook 
that's religious in general and often Roman Catholic in particular.This
 outlook he defines as a determination to see things in one's own way, 
respect the texture of experience above intellectual formula, avoid 
finalities where they're impossible or irrelevant to living. He's by no 
means a simple electronic Christian Critic, plugging works into his 
spiritual circuitry to see if the fuses blow — he's stern enough, for 
example, with Graham Greene, when Greene cheats a little. But unhappy 
couples never seem to get di vorces in his novels, and he likes writers 
who are religious at least in accepting the reality, and affinity, of 
“pain and death and art,” the hard and necessary recognitions he (in a 
literary mugging that makes one gasp) tears the skin off Norman 
Podhoretz for side‐stepping in “Making It.” “Have you got anything 
serious you'd like to say?” Max Jamison's estranged wife once asked him.
 In fact be did, and so does Sheed, when the fun and games of his style 
lets us have a glimpse of the Christian moralist within, his mind on 
other, darker things all the while.This
 is all admirably unfashionable, but it can tempt him into unfairness, 
even to Norman Podhoretz and certainly to Mailer, Pinter, James Agee, 
Antonioni, Death‐of‐the‐Novel theologians like Robbe‐Grillet and Susan 
Sontag, the “New Journalism” — any apostasy from the artistic verities 
he is called to uphold. Even if he's right about all of them, his 
defenses of the faith do sometimes get tangled up in that bright, 
self‐debunking style, the refusal to conceal the means being employed, 
fob off talent as magic, that John Leonard praises but that reminds me 
uncomfortably of self‐destruction mechanisms like Max Jamison, who 
observed of himself: “He used to compare criticism with the priesthood. 
One of his best gags.” Continue reading the main story“The
 Morning After” as a title makes its own point about reviewing, about 
what its pleasures consist of and are finally worth, and it's 
fascinating, if a little sad, to watch so serious and gifted a man 
daring himself to respect the work he's so good at, pointing at his 
professional head a gun that, for all you or I or he knows, may be 
loaded after all. Sheed is probably the best professional reviewer in 
the business, and (as they say in blurbs) one of the best writers 
around; but he sometimes seems determined not to let us think so, as if 
the most important things that concern a man have nothing to do with 
writing at all. In the long run, they surely don't, but in the sprints 
and hurdles this understanding can get in a writer's way

The Morning After; Selected Essays And Reviews PDF

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