Word: sheed
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Many film critics have quit writing regularly on film after stints much shorter than Andrew's (which has continued, in one form or another, since 1956). Macdonald, Morgenstern. Sheed and Kanfer come swiftly (and recently) to mind. But these men then moved into the different fields to which they were committed even while they handled their film chores. Sadly, Sarris hasn't dealt with anything but movies, most of the time in a tone of directorial hero-worship. That he has made a business on the basis of pop culture dreams and apologia is a phenomenon that only a youthful...
Violette Leduc's death last month was not accompanied by any of the usual obsequies reserved for Literary Figures. Genet has made no great show of his mourning: Stephen Spender has not lamented her passing in the New York Review: Wilfrid Sheed has not given her a page of print in the Times Book Review. I first learned of her death a week ago while reading a dated issue of Time in a doctor's waiting room. She was a rejected in death as she had been all her life...
READ Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies and all the autobiographical sidetracks over psychic frustrations and coed heartbreak, though usually filled with raucous humorous, seem part of an introverted cultural temperament spent somewhere in the '50's, dated with Salinger and old Italian films. Read Wilfrid Sheed's Max Jamison, the chronicle of an honest theater critic's fall, and the author's ruthless lapsed-Catholic cynicism as he looks at a mass culture eating its discriminators might take you back to the self-protective cliques of '60's bourgeois intelligentsia...
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...
...Sheed is, finally, despite all the Catholic apologia, an original--not a leader or philosopher of any school. He is both tough-minded and entertaining. Read The Morning After, and "The Good Word" in the Sunday Times. Pray that he tackles films once more. And forgive him his forfeits and trespasses...