Spreading the Good Word

In the late 1970s, I was a teenager in Winona, Minnesota, a sleepy Mississippi River town defibrillated by three colleges and a few residual hippies. I aspired to be a writer.

The prevailing mood in Winona was, let’s just say, sincere. Besides Orwell, Kerouac, and school assignments, I was reading an anthology called 25 Minnesota Poets #2. The cover featured cream type against a brown background on sensible matte paper. It might as well have been printed directly on wheat. A few lines describing an oppressive shop teacher, excerpted from poet Stanley Kiesel’s contribution, give a sense of the tone: “Pop could see—plain as pliers— / poems swimming in my fingers.” The collection included some excellent poets, but it lived and died by the heartfelt declarative sentence. Even the local humor—think A Prairie Home Companion—was about as edgy as a quilt. Without knowing exactly why, I was unhappy with the literary culture that the anthology represented and yearned for something else.

Then, in 1978, I discovered Wilfrid Sheed. In an appreciative Rolling Stone review of the novel Transatlantic Blues, Greil Marcus wrote of Sheed that it must be frustrating to be the best book critic in America while having your novels dismissed as brilliant but minor. Wait, what? I’d never heard of Sheed before reading Marcus’s review. Now, in my adolescent way, I wanted to know everything about him.

Born in London in 1930, raised in England and the United States, and educated at Oxford, Sheed had published numerous works of fiction and criticism. I sensed that such a critic might point me toward what was lacking in my reading life, which had been limited to the American classics. Fortunately, Northern Lights Books, the new independent bookstore downtown, had a copy of The Good Word and Other Words, a recently published collection of Sheed’s essays. The title referred to the monthly column he wrote for The New York Times Book Review in the early ’70s. This was one of the most prestigious platforms ever offered to a Times critic.

The first thing I noticed was the sentences. I’m not sure that, for all my teenage literary enthusiasms, I had ever thought of the sentence as a separate thing, as something that could be crafted, with a value distinct from other narrative components, such as plot or argument. But Sheed’s sentences were engines of insight and something I didn’t recognize at first: joy.

A few examples. On Evelyn Waugh’s fascination with the landed gentry: “A writer who would rather be dined by Lord Chowderhead than praised by [Edmund] Wilson is a genius or he’s nothing.” On the disgruntled NFL star Dave Meggyesy’s evocation of fans watching football in a state approaching sexual frenzy: “At my place, aphasic torpor would be closer to it.” I had to look up both “aphasic” and “torpor,” and, when I did, I realized they were perfect. On the Watergate hearings, which everyone I knew had taken very seriously: “And so it went, each man a marvelous specimen of political comedy, which occurs whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of doing nothing; i.e., all the time.”

I had never encountered a writer so confident or a tone so elastic. So this is what happens when a Catholic, Oxford-trained mind intersects with a jaunty midcentury American voice. The elasticity didn’t simply apply to diction; Sheed’s syntax inspired envy. In an essay about the novel of manners, he speculates about one set in the counterculture: “And no dowager ever made one more conscious of saying the wrong thing or expressing the not-quite-right attitude as a hippie in full feather. ‘Oh, man, you just don’t know’—the strains of Emily Post still linger in that one.” But there was much more to his work than an agile, charismatic style. There was a brightness to this voice, and a crowded, convivial aspect to these collected columns that reminded me not of a lone poet on a matte prairie but of another touchstone of my childhood: the parties in my favorite sketch comedy TV show, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. They were populated with jaunty celebrities grooving to ’60s cocktail music, then freeze-framing to exchange inane quips. It may seem an odd comparison and even a vulgar one. But Laugh-In was a memory of effervescence that I carried into the ’70s gloom. I was witnessing the last flashings of a midcentury energy that Sheed had glimpsed as a young man, coming to these shores during the Second World War.