Wilfrid Sheed, b. 1930
Good sentences, the ebullient critic and novelist Wilfrid Sheed wrote in 1990, are sent into the air like a series of jazz licks. “You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.”
Photograph by Leonard Mccombe/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Sheed made the waiters, and everyone else, smile on a regular basis throughout his five-decade career. He wrote some 20 books, from comic novels to an illness memoir, but his essays are where his solos still soar. His four collections — “The Morning After” (1971), “The Good Word and Other Words” (1978), “Essays in Disguise” (1990) and “Baseball and Lesser Sports” (1991) — deliver an electrical charge: they’re learned, fearsome, timeless and funny. All four can be had for pennies on used-book Web sites; together they are the literary bargain of 2012.
Illustrations by Melinda Josie
His baseball essays will make you weep with pleasure and with hurt. Sheed was born in London — his parents founded the eminent Roman Catholic publishing house Sheed & Ward — but he grew up near Philadelphia and longed to be an all-American baseball hero. Those hopes were dashed at 14 when he contracted polio. For the rest of his life, he walked with a cane. His pain fed his prose like an underground well. Few voices were as eloquent about why athletics matter in our lives. “Sports constitute a code, a language of the emotions,” he observed, “and a tourist who skips the stadiums will not recoup his losses at Lincoln Center and Grant’s Tomb.”
Sheed’s book reviews and literary essays — composed for The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere — nearly always began with a bang. “Mushy reviews are a breach of faith,” he declared, and the skin on his compositions was salt-crusted. One review began: “Of Ezra Pound, as of Bobby Fischer, all that can decently be said is that his colleagues admire him.”
Another began this way: “Scott Fitzgerald is a sound you like to hear at certain times of the day, say at four in the afternoon and again late at night, and at other times it makes you slightly sick.” Another stated: “Books about suicide make lousy gifts.”
Sheed’s essays — misanthropic yet Nabokovian and light on their feet — embraced what he called “the whole crazy chorus of American letters and subletters.” He wanted to live in a mental world that was filled with “Gershwin playing all night in penthouses, while George Kaufman fired one-liners into the guests and Harpo scrambled eggs in their hats.” Open any of Sheed’s collections, and the party hasn’t slowed down a bit.
Dwight Garner is a book critic for The Times.
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