Word: sheed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...matter what he thinks of himself as a creative talent, Sheed--like Jamison--considers criticism a secondary art. This is, at first, disappointing to seekers after fire and advocacy. It certainly must have disconcerted Dwight MacDonald followers when Sheed took over the Esquire film column, which Sheed held between 1967 and 1970. Ice and detachment are apt, after generations of disinterested dons, to seem way-stations on the road to irrelevance. But in Sheed's practice, his Catholic temperament and catholicity of taste lead to a greater freedom for play with the unworthy than that of other critics. Since...
...Sheed is not without sins, original and otherwise. Several of his film reviews are "automatic criticism," relating not to the work at hand but to mere opinionation. A review of Persona is remarkably evasive, a Bergman beatification with nothing but gratitude to show for itself. Attacking film violence, he hits some home truths about its brutal, de-personalizing necessities, but is too general and removed from specific detail to be persuasive. One of his Common weal theater pieces is, in fact, a conscious (and hilarious) demonstration of how unexamined criticism comes to be written when the drama considered is flaccid...
...However, Sheed can't seem to write a book review lacking some artful penetration. His Couples piece shows him at his best: his careful analysis of formal structure as it supports textual meaning; his defense of those meanings by the literalness of their exposition and their felt impact; his statement of the novel's limits and worth in view of its author's career and its readers' lives. While Sheed is intent on letting the novel speak for itself, his writing undercuts and bolsters his subject at appropriate turns: "But enough meaning is enough. The book can also be read...
...Sheed's political writings blatantly reveal his limits. An "I-am-only-a-writer" stance is thrust into the foreground, whether he describes Eugene McCarthy, or the other '68 election tragedies of Los Angeles and Chicago. His examination of personalities is revealing, but insulated from any examination of issues. Here, Sheed's Commonweal Catholicism restricts him as much as he claims it did Eugene. One gets the feeling that politics doesn't interest him excessively; that his basic emotional reaction to a political situation is so personal, and his intellectual impulse so morally abstract, that the modesty...
Aside from his purely literary abilities, Sheed's work demonstrates the combined virtues of classical education and traditional liberalism. Discredited in politics and literature, G.K. Chesterton may inhabit mote-lined library shelves, but Sheed remembers the man's wiser aphorisms and brings them to bear on current culture. Whittaker Chambers may have been an abhorrent character, but he wasn't totally manic, and Sheed notes that his trial testimonies stand up pretty well years later. As artistic and social fads come and go, Sheed will probably remain, looking at them slightly askance, and somewhere finding a transcendent meaning...