Word: wilfrid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BLACKING FACTORY and PENNSYLVANIA GOTHIC, by Wilfrid Sheed. A polished novella and a long story-both about adolescence-emphasize the consequences of failing to let go of the past...
...BLACKING FACTORY and PENNSYLVANIA GOTHIC by Wilfrid Sheed. 246 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
When Charles Dickens was twelve, his debt-hounded family yanked him from school and sent him to work in a ratty London warehouse where blacking paste was made. His ordeal lasted only a few months, then he returned to school. But, as Wilfrid Sheed notes in a preface to this brace of new fiction pieces, a sense of shock and abandonment stayed with Dickens the rest of his life. He could not even bring himself to mention the episode until 25 years later, when he wrote bitterly of "the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless...
...like the idea of funny fiction," says Wilfrid Sheed. "When I started writing, my first impulse was toward humor, but I soon learned that I wanted to use it for serious purposes." Sheed's first models were the "flat but musical" styles of such Americans as James Thurber and Sherwood Anderson; later, he added the English writers Cyril Connolly and E. M. Forster. Now he describes his fictional ideal as "Flaubert and James with the language of Wodehouse and Perelman...
...second act consists of the Merchant's Tale (in which Wilfrid Bram-bell regularly stops the show with a prenuptial bossanova in a nightshirt), followed by the Wife of Bath's moral story of the overamorous Knight and the witch who turns into a beautiful young girl when she is convinced that he really loves...