Word: wilfrid
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...months, something not unlike civil war has been simmering in Ulster. This is the week of Eire's national elections. If that were not enough, June 16 is Bloomsday. It is a good time to reflect on the ways and woes of the Irish, and TIME asked Novelist Wilfrid Sheed to do so. Sheed is only part Irish (on his father's family's side). But as an English Catholic schoolboy and an American writer of quality (Square's Progress, The Blacking Factory and Pennsylvania Gothic), he has had the opportunity and inclination to observe...
Writing in the New American Review, Wilfrid Sheed offers the intriguing, if overly pat explanation that McCarthy is a "Commonweal Catholic." This is Sheed's term for those members of the generation of U.S. Catholics, now aged 35 to 60, who combine "oldfashioned religious training" with progressive politics shaped by unionism and papal encyclicals on the worth of labor. This kind of Catholic clings to "an abstract, quasi-scholastic style" marked by witty references to arcane books and thinkers. The type is "congenitally mistrustful of ambition and scornful of those who push themselves beyond their merits." When such...
...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...
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...