The writer and wit, Wilfrid Sheed, son of Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, and godson of G.K. Chesterton, died yesterday at the age of eighty. Here’s a fitting obituary:

The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/

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January 19, 2011

Wilfrid Sheed, Writer of Gentle Wit, Dies at 80

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/christopher_lehmannhaupt/index.html?inline=nyt-per

Wilfrid Sheed, the wittily satirical man of letters who drew upon his Anglo-American background to write bittersweet essays, criticism, memoirs and fiction about cultural life on both sides of the Atlantic, died on Wednesday in Great Barrington, Mass. He was 80.

The cause was a bacterial infection, the family said. Mr. Sheed had recently moved from a nursing home in Southampton on Long Island to one in Great Barrington so he could be closer to his wife, Miriam Ungerer Sheed, who had moved there to live near a daughter. The couple had lived for many years on the East End of Long Island.

Born to the founders of the eminent Roman Catholic publishing house Sheed & Ward, Mr. Sheed was from an early age thrown in with writers, intellectuals and serious thinkers about religion, among them the English writer G. K. Chesterton, who was his godfather. He mined his resources industriously, making for himself a much-admired writing career.

“I guess I sort of backed into writing,” Mr. Sheed told Publishers Weekly. “I have taken off from family experiences sometimes as if they were daydreams.”

He wrote, in one form or other, for a half-century, without losing much steam. His last book, published in 2007, was a history of American popular music titled “The House That George Built: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole and a Crew of About Fifty.” It was a critically acclaimed best seller, one that Mr. Sheed had labored over for many years despite debilitating illnesses, dictating parts of it.

As an avid baseball fan whose boyhood fantasies of diamond glory were dashed at 14 by the onset of polio, Mr. Sheed often said that as a writer he could play any position – a utility man of letters. But novelist was clearly a preferred role.

His gently comic fiction focused on self-perceived variations of himself. His early novels concerned American and English schoolboys (“A Middle Class Education” in 1960); a writer of inspirational pieces for minor Catholic publications (“The Hack,” 1963); a bore who learns to live with what he is (“Square’s Progress,” 1965); the beaten-down denizens of a small liberal magazine (“Office Politics,” 1966); and a too-brilliant film and theater critic (“Max Jamison,” 1970).

His later novels were about a politician stricken with polio as a teenager (“People Will Always Be Kind,” 1973); a talk-show host reared by old-line English Catholic parents who couldn’t decide whether they hated England or America more (“Transatlantic Blues,” 1978); and a writer/publisher engaged in cutthroat literary politics on eastern Long Island while planning the next summer’s softball league (“The Boys of Winter,” 1987).

Mr. Sheed’s characters are almost invariably stricken with an agonized sense of self-awareness, exacerbated by their Roman Catholicism. They all but die of hyperconsciousness, laughing as they go to their fates.

When not writing fiction Mr. Sheed turned out nonfiction like “Clare Boothe Luce” (1982), a gentle portrait – part memoir, part biography – of an emotionally brittle figure in publishing and public affairs whom he knew as a youth, spending a summer in her house. “My Life as a Fan” (1993) was a memoir of rooting for big-league baseball that said fresh things about a dozen clichéd subjects. “In Love With Daylight: A Memory of Recovery” (1995) told of his surviving polio, drug and alcohol addiction, and cancer of the tongue. (“Affliction can land where it likes,” he mordantly wrote.)

” ‘Physically challenged’ indeed!” he blurted out at one point in that book. “We were challenged and we lost, baby, and that’s all she wrote.”

Wilfrid John Joseph Sheed was born in London on Dec. 27, 1930, the younger of two children of Francis Joseph Sheed, who emigrated from Australia with a background in law to become a street-corner evangelist, and Maisie Ward, a fellow Catholic Revivalist and author who was eight years her husband’s senior, a descendant of a proud English Catholic family and, at six feet tall, a striking figure on the streets of London.

Together they founded Sheed & Ward (now an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield), which, besides publishing work by Chesterton, published the Catholic social worker Dorothy Day http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/dorothy_day/index.html?inline=nyt-per , the historian Hilaire Belloc and the poet Robert Lowell http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/robert_lowell/index.html?inline=nyt-per .

In 1933 they moved their principal office to New York, where “for 30-odd years it was the central publishing house of serious Catholicism,” William F. Buckley Jr. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/william_f_jr_buckley/index.html?inline=nyt-per>  wrote in a review of Mr. Sheed’s “Frank & Maisie: A Memoir With Parents” (1985). That book, in breezy style, ranges across several generations, beginning with a great-grandfather, William George Ward, a mathematician, former Anglican priest and militant Catholic follower of Cardinal John Henry Newman.

Of his own youth Mr. Sheed wrote: “All I knew was that no amount of respectability in other sectors could make up for this one eccentricity: we were gypsies, oddities. ‘My parents are publishers,’ I would emphasize. But their Catholic publishing seemed almost as bizarre as their Catholic tub-thumping in the starchy secularity of England. So I resigned myself to the delicate pleasures of outsiderness at an early age.”

After attending Downside in Bath, England, he immigrated with his family to the United States in 1940 to escape the German blitzkrieg and lived in Torresdale, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb. After a long recuperation from polio, he returned to England and enrolled in Lincoln College, Oxford, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1954 and a master’s in 1957.

Returning to the United States, he settled in New York and went to work for Jubilee, a Catholic magazine founded by Edward Rice in 1953 and described by Mr. Sheed as “the Catholic answer to the Beatniks.” He started there as a movie and book reviewer and was an associate editor from 1959 to 1966. From 1964 to 1971 he was drama critic and book review editor for Commonweal, the liberal Catholic magazine.

His criticism was so lively that it was a continuing argument among his readers as to whether he was a critic who wrote novels or a novelist who wrote criticism. Reviewing “The Good Word: And Other Words,” a 1978 collection of Mr. Sheed’s essays, John Leonard http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/john_leonard/index.html?inline=nyt-per  noted in The Times that Mr. Sheed himself had called his criti
cism “speculative work like fiction.”

“How can we review Mr. Sheed’s style?” Mr. Leonard wrote. “It is part Chesterton and part Evelyn Waugh http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/evelyn_waugh/index.html?inline=nyt-per  and part Cyril Connolly. He nods at Mr. Cheever, Elizabeth Hardwick http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/elizabeth_hardwick/index.html?inline=nyt-per  and Jean Stafford. He is clean, but sly.” But Mr. Leonard concluded: “Behind the warm irony is cold anger. He identifies Tom Wolfe http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/tom_wolfe/index.html?inline=nyt-per>  and John Simon as ‘moralists,’ ‘unrelenting,’ ‘unforgiving’ and ‘heartless’; he might be looking into a mirror.”

Mr. Sheed married Maria Bullitt Darlington in 1957 and they had three children; the marriage ended in divorce in 1967. He is survived by his second wife, Ms. Sheed; a sister, Rosemary Luke Sheed Middleton; three children from his first marriage, Francis Sheed, Elizabeth Carol Sheed and Marion Tango Nelson; his stepdaughters, Phoebe Alexis Ungerer and Dominique Michelle Strandquest; and four grandchildren.

Mr. Sheed regularly wrote book reviews for many publications and was a contributor to The New Yorker http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/the_new_yorker/index.html?inline=nyt-org  and other magazines. He wrote a literary column for The New York Times Book Review, “The Good Word,” from 1971 until 1975, and was a Book-of-the-Month Club judge from 1972 to 1988.

He disdained typewriters and computers and preferred to write in longhand, as he did with much of his last book, “The House That George Built.”

Garrison Keillor http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/garrison_keillor/index.html?inline=nyt-per , reviewing that book for The Times, called it “a big rich stew of an homage,” adding, “Wilfrid Sheed’s jazzy prose is a joy to read.”

In the book Mr. Sheed proposes that an era might be defined in terms of women’s fashions “and the consequent rise of impulse dancing on improvised dance floors.”

“You can’t really jitterbug in a hoopskirt or bustle,” he wrote. “Swing follows costume, and the big news was that by the 1910s skirts had become just loose enough and short enough to liberate the wearer from the tyranny of twirling through eternal waltzes in ballrooms as big as basketball courts, and freed her to do fox-trots and anything else that could be done in short, quick steps on, if necessary, living room floors with rugs rolled up. So that’s what the boys wrote for next. By the 1920s, the whole lower leg could swing out in Charlestons and other abandoned exercises.”