The Catholic Answer to the Beatniks

Office Politics by Wilfrid Sheed. McNally Editions, 352 pages. 2024.

“He certainly knows how to hold a magazine, thought George. It was like watching a first-rate actor demonstrating magazine-holding.” The man is Gilbert Twining, editor of The Outsider, a distinguished little magazine. He is the great man of Wilfrid Sheed’s Office Politics, reissued into a literary world that looks much as it did when Sheed’s novel came out in 1966, at least in terms of compensation (nominal) and annoyance (abundant). The Outsider’s circulation is down, the walls need a fresh coat of paint, and Twining’s subordinates are indulging in an “insane conspiracy” against him. Twining is right to be suspicious: a power struggle over The Outsider begins almost the moment he’s out of the office. Holding a magazine is one thing, but hanging onto it turns out to be another.

Sheed himself never had to worry about his place in letters. In an essay called “The Politics of Reviewing,” he wrote, “As anyone knows who has tried it, growing up highbrow in Anglo-America is the toughest childhood left.” He was the latest in perhaps four generations of men of letters. His parents Frank and Maisie were the principals of the influential Catholic publishing house Sheed & Ward, based in London, who cashed in on a newly fashionable Catholicism; Sheed’s godfather was the writer/apologist G.K. Chesterton. He spent the first decade of his life in the UK, when his family fled to Pennsylvania to escape the Luftwaffe, returning for a degree at Lincoln College, Oxford.

Sheed once remarked to an interviewer, “I guess I sort of backed into writing.” This is a coy thing to say if you have written nearly twenty books. These include several novels—debut in 1960, the last in 1987—and the balance in nonfiction, principally memoirs and biographies. The most notable of those is either his book on white jazz or the memoir about skulking around an estate owned by publishing magnate Henry Luce, who coined the term “the American century,” and Luce’s wife, the proto-Thatcherite Clare Booth. Sheed wrote for the New York Review of Books, Commonweal, and Esquire, and was once called “the New York Times Book Review’s favorite reviewer and essayist.” While his death in 2011 occasioned dozens of obituaries, none improved on a compliment paid to him when he was young: “The Catholic answer to the Beatniks.”

Aporias like that are the ordinary response to Sheed. No one found it easy to say exactly what he cared about: a collection of his essays is called The Morning After, capturing the fogged, disordered, ambiently regretful sensation of reading a lot of him at once. In his fiction he has an unusual skill for critical misdirection; if he often fails to hit his mark, it’s because he trusts we have forgotten where he’s aiming. It isn’t obvious that Sheed, a minor writer who struggled to master his preferred themes (marriage and faith), deserves a revival. One way to account for the reissue of Office Politics is that it sounds like the kind of thing someone might buy: someone who would buy a baseball hat designed by a magazine but doesn’t subscribe to many of them. Another is that it’s easy to be ambivalent about Sheed, even to like what he gives us. To use one of his character’s phrases: “On a cosmic scale,” does it really matter what he’s trying to say?

Things at The Outsider are bad. The magazine is “a broken-down opinion machine,” doing little more than “staggering through life in an endless dribble of opinion.” Twining, imported from England from his post at the head of The Watchman, has failed to turn the place around. The new guy in this “greasy little play pit,” “boy editor” George Wren discovers the eminence is kind of a boor when the boss takes him downstairs for a few martinis. Twining is a “superb technician” before he gets into his cups, then “florid and stagy,” unsubtle, lavishly “old boy.” After ten years stacking copies of The Outsider on his bedside table, and despite his young wife Matty and their new baby, Wren gave up a better paying position at CBS for this. “A job there as number-four editor had excited him at first out of all proportion, and he had been warding off a letdown ever since.” The letdown arrives with Twining’s ambush and the desolation of the martinis, and he doesn’t stop falling until the end of the book. As another editor remarks to Wren: “You must have noticed that The Outsider is basically a one-man show. . . . The whole magazine expresses one man’s personality. And however interesting that man may be—”

But at least Twining is interesting; the rest of the staff hardly bothers. On editorial, there’s Brian Fine, corpulent senior editor, and Fritz Tyler, his skinny, cynical junior. The business side has the saurian, “right-wing” ad-man Philo Sonnabend, and needy, wheedling office manager Olga Marplate. Twining’s underlings are all somewhat carelessly drawn, strict opposites rather than counterparts or complements. Even Sheed has trouble disambiguating them: lean Fritz “ought to be fat,” while Fine “should have been thin.”

Unfortunately, Twining won’t always be around to lend his gravitational authority to the office, suffering a heart attack while on a fundraising tour in California. Even before the office knows if Twining is alive or dead, the editors begin undermining his plans for the issue going to print. Little do they know that Twining, having divined the potential for mutiny, enlisted Wren as his agent. Fine makes his move, but the pieces he commissions—turgid stuff from one of “Canada’s leading economists” and a sloppy thinkpiece about “emerging Africa”—earn him a resentful outburst from Wren, and his regime collapses without so much as a shot. Fine, learning that Marplate has some cash socked away, thinks he’s figured out how to maintain his grip on “the captain’s” rudder. He doesn’t count on her obstinance: “She’s eaten the money . . . God, I hate fat people.”

Boorish asides like these might distract a reader from noticing that Office Politics has become an inheritance plot, a polyester, bridge-and-tunnel version of The Spoils of Poynton or Howard’s End. The engine of the plot is meant to be the trials of virtue in which each editor tries to stay atop the pile, but the explicit claims the novel makes about its object are loftier: we’re meant to believe in The Outsider as a serious undertaking, “the most civilized magazine in the United States,” and these “shrunken,” “lumpen” pencil-pushers are traducing the whole thing with their ambition.

The Outsider’s editors are always calling it “liberal,” but the only discernibly partisan presence is the unnamed narrator, with his jokes about “wogs,” “fags,” “Chinamen,” and “coloreds.” The narrator, close on Wren, describes an editorial philosophy encompassing “radicalism with responsibility, humanism without crankiness, everything paired off with its common-sense opposite,” all somehow “adding up to urbanity, lack of fluster, loyal, courteous, brushes teeth after every meal.” No other character attempts a satisfactory explanation of their political program, but all worry the definition of “liberal” hysterically: something to do with “war orphans,” maybe, or a flattering word that “covers simply everything.” Just because nobody at The Outsider is litigating what it means isn’t to say there is no consensus: “If the word liberal meant anything at all by now, it meant that you didn’t hate people.”

Fine could have used the advice. His experiment in governance fails when he embarrasses Marplate to tears, and Tyler takes over by seducing Harriet Wadsworth, a rich widow and dilettante who happens to own 35 percent of the magazine. Her motive, credulously, is the magazine’s theater column, currently abused by regular columnist Wally Funk, a pompous obsolescent “halfway to wearing a cape on opening nights.” Wadsworth’s stake combines with the 25 percent held by Twining’s wife, happy to repay Twining after learning his heart attack was suffered atop another woman. Wren’s conscience eventually gets him, and a letter he writes to Twining causes the old man to resurface.

Twining suggests that Wren join him as he goes to visit Fine, the first in a tour during which Twining serially dispatches his competitors. The conference smooths into anticlimax: Twining condemns Tyler for letting Fine flounder instead of helping him produce a decent issue. This is, he alleges, one of the “more wanton pieces of cruelty I have ever come across—and what that bodes for the new editor of a liberal magazine, I wouldn’t care to say.” Wren spits: “Liberal, liberal. Christ, what a stupid word.” Another writer would have stopped here. Sheed, believing further instruction necessary, delivers a conclusion so didactic it would be incredible anywhere else: Polly, Twining’s wife (they’ve reconciled), calls Wren and tells him Twining has decided he should take over as editor. This has nothing to do with what has happened in the book. It derives not from the logic of the plot but Sheed’s maudlin, conventional beliefs about how the world is.

From the outset, the novel forfeits its most attractive topos by collapsing its principal subjects—the magazine, Wren, and Twining—into one trinitarian system. Sheed doesn’t bother with making the conflict plausible because it’s all a straightforward allegory about how things work out. You’re a young man, then you’re developed by family life’s frustrations (an “inarticulate,” idiot-mystic wife) but also its rewards (infant son, a “rotten materialist”), and rounded out by the intercession of an older mentor (this relationship decidedly Wauvian). When properly deserving you get a prize, and, circulus in probando, also the confirmation of your virtue.

It’s tedious even if you already buy what he’s selling, and it’s hard to imagine a reader in the sixties feeling differently. Even the characters aren’t persuaded. By the time Wren finally comes out on top and Twining’s wife Polly begs on behalf of “the commander” for Wren to take her husband’s job, he has realized “it didn’t really matter who edited the damn thing anyway,” although now he’ll have a place to publish his poems. So power does matter, even if we can’t be bothered to think about it. 

A puzzling thing about Office Politics is that Sheed took a run at the same idea three years earlier with a novel called The Hack. The plot stakes its sense of drama on whether a Catholic man named Bert—a “leading spiritual hack”—will write his annual Christmas poem, and whether it will be published. Toward the end, Bert’s priest, mentor, and editor at the Catholic magazine The Passenger rejects Bert’s poem, apparently ending his career. God’s representative to the reading public, Fr. Chubb, tells Bert’s wife: “A magazine like The Passenger simply isn’t worth a man’s lifework . . . It’s not a literary magazine, or anything like that.” This is poor consolation, but it is a fairly mature understanding of the world—it isn’t that Bert lost some privileged aesthetic or spiritual access, he just stopped getting work, and there’s nothing virtuous about being in work in the first place.

Sheed’s books aren’t really about religion, in the expected sense. They aren’t Catholic satires in the Chesterton and J. F. Powers tradition, and they’re absolutely not satires of Catholics, like Kingsley Amis’s One Fat Englishman. His novels are instead about sex, principally not having it. This is usually achieved through variations on the idea “What would it be like if all the men disappeared?” One of his protagonists forgets where his wife is and resolves the problem by moving to Spain, where he almost sleeps with another expat. Otherwise, the novels are cramped dioramas of drunk or overworked egoists suffering spiritual crises in classic sixes.

Sheed’s plots are a pretext for unrelentingly close, airless, static views of a protagonist to whom nothing happens: it’s like watching a car chase in an older movie, where each twitch of the wheel causes a scream of tires, but the highway behind the driver is as serene as a commute into Duluth. The adolescent unease about women—often detectable as an arch, super-Jamesian subtlety about who is fucking, but sometimes as unexplained cruelty and violence—pursues a reader through Sheed’s novels: Square’s Progress, a later effort, has a sensitive protagonist who “wished he knew the names of trees, the brands of dogs, the derivations of words.” He also brings the novel to its happy resolution by calling his wife a “useless, selfless bitch” and punching her in the face. The narrator of Office Politics reports of Fritz Tyler his feeling that “handling [Harriet’s] body at regular intervals had given him confidence, the whip hand.” In Max Jamison, a book about a theater critic, the protagonist sends his estranged wife a letter “threatening her with a savage beating, and another after that with actual death.” These are played for laughs, cackled over by the wife’s new boyfriend—hysterical critic has prolix breakdown—but are not reproduced for the benefit of the reader. That’s fine, since they probably weren’t funny anyway.

Philip Larkin’s response to critics who suggested his life was uniquely dreary was to ask: “Do they kill a lot of dragons for instance?” This is also the right attitude to bring to a workplace novel like Office Politics. Nobody cares about a boring job, but an average audience won’t see themselves in an extraordinary one. Audiences are prepared to accept every fictional workplace as allegorical: while each reader is an individual, all coworkers are the same. Under these conditions a lot of inapt, mawkish bullshit can be passed off as wisdom.

When Sheed’s writing is pleasurable, it’s because of its zaniness: he did not go out and learn anything before writing this book. This is the kind of thing John Bayley meant when he wrote about his wife, Iris Murdoch, that “her books create a new world, which is also, in an inspired sense, an ordinary one. ” Murdoch’s achievement derived from understanding the kinds of things people believe and do, so even when those things are strange and “new” they’re plausible and “ordinary.” When Sheed’s world is ordinary it is because it’s secondhand; worse, he doesn’t even believe we’ll believe it. He wants to be a minor writer, although a popular one, but his self-consciousness about his character (Anglo-American yet anglophile) and taste (orthodox) make reading him like trying to pet a kicked dog. The difficulty with Sheed is that he exaggerates the limp, appealing so keenly for the title that one would feel bad withholding it.

This is a different problem than admiring him, which has been done despite his limits. The writer of Sheed’s Guardian obituary quotes “a fellow critic” asking, “Why does the man bother with novel-writing when his talent for criticism is so great?” A collection of Sheed’s essays includes the talented critic’s review of a later James Baldwin novel: “Is it, then, that Baldwin, like so many writers, can only dial from the one booth? . . . It is not simply that his white people look alike like Chinese waiters—good writing can be done from a fanatic’s point of view.” (This from the man who can’t start an essay without quoting his godfather.) Sheed’s Baldwin review was published in 1968. If this is your opinion of the capacities and character of the person who wrote Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, years after they were published, then it’s possible books aren’t really for you.

In an essay on the art of the hatchet job for Commonweal, Sheed wrote that “the old hatchetman is like the old gunfighter in the movies; there are always plenty of young hatchetmen waiting to chop him down in his turn.” In literature, this is a good thing—most standard accounts of the value of criticism rely on readerly disaffinities—but, sometimes, one is just not as straight in the saddle or fast on the draw as he used to be. (As Sheed writes in Office Politics, after two years “most critics should be shot anyway.”) When someone goes and reassembles the old hatchetman, even when he’s long underground, the job must be done again. Sheed asked for his headstone to read: “He wrote a few good sentences.” It’s hard to like someone who so badly wanted the last word, and who so nearly deserves it.