Sheed's Specters of the Past

THE BLACKING FACTORY and PENNSYLVANIA GOTHIC by Wilfrid Sheed. 246 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.50.

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."

For the young protagonist of Sheed's feverish short novel, the equivalent of Dickens' blacking factory is a backwater English secondary school called Sopworth College. Jimmy Bannister, 15 and feckless, is suddenly uprooted from his American adolescence and packed off to Sopworth. Both menacing and seedy, Sopworth gives him an advanced course in the three Bs: boredom, bullying and befuddlement.

His interviews with the headmaster, a Waugh refugee nicknamed Dr. Rabelais, are symptomatic. The man seems plunged in a "burrow of vagueness." As Rabelais drones on in a voice reminiscent of "old curtains," Jimmy feels "woofed more and more tightly into an endless tapestry." The poor lad cannot tell whether his questions are being answered, or even remember exactly what the questions were. For consolation he flicks mentally through colored-slide images of the post-World War II America that he thinks he misses.

Suspended Sensibilities. But back home during summer vacation, Jimmy finds that the subjects of those slides shrink, blur and become distorted. He half realizes that he is beginning to see old friends, new cars, his father and the N.Y. Yankee., through the eyes of an English schoolboy. He decides that the world of tea and Sopworth isn't so bad after all--until his re-entry into it, when he is buffeted more harshly than ever. Crikey! Now his sensibilities are hopelessly suspended somewhere in mid-Atlantic.

In an agony of alienation from both the real America and the real England, he opts for comforting myth. Just before making a deranged attack on Dr. Rabelais, he embraces those colored slides once and for all, even though he knows they are "terrible, terrible lies."

Sheed has already disclosed in a prologue what all this leads to. In later life, James Bannister becomes owner and resident propagandist of two right-wing radio stations in California. Aloof and "Eastern" in the West, he fervently eulogizes his conception of a departed America while railing against English decadence in an incurable English accent. But Sheed's tale is more than an ironic pathology of the right-wing mind, more, even, than a wry diagnosis of a severely fractured nationality. It also captures the comic anguish of a youth who begins to understand himself just at the moment when he loses the sense of who he is.

Death-Dealing Vision. Charley Trimble, the teen-age protagonist of the long story Pennsylvania Gothic, knows all too well what he is, if not who. He is a potential suicide. After all, his father killed himself. He was obsessed by the "spoliation of nature"--human and mineral--in the once aristocratic Philadelphia suburb where the family lives. Charley, idle and lonely, powerfully infected by his father's preoccupation with decay, conceives a death wish of his own. A neighbor woman, an ancient relic of the town's past, wages a moral and psychological battle to exorcize it, finally succeeds by dying herself. But Charley lives on, haunted by the fear that he had really meant to kill her.

Even this grisly story is lightened by comic touches. Charley's family gathers gloomily around the radio and hears Gabriel Heatter, the doom-laden commentator, warn "of dreaded pyorrhea." On another occasion, Charley, in adolescent bravado, adds "the suicide caper to his repertoire of small talk, using it to fascinate women." Alas, it only bores them. As a companion piece to Factory, the story sharply emphasizes Sheed's overall theme: the harmful consequences of clutching at visions of the past, whether they are mythical but life-sustaining visions like Jimmy's or real but death-dealing ones like Charley's.

As in such earlier novels as Square's Progress and Office Politics, Sheed constructs a bright, cutting prose from the dross of everyday slang. He wields that prose with a subtle ear for speech rhythms and a sardonic eye for the telltale gesture. In this new volume, he also musters a quality that had been somewhat lacking in his earlier, coolly satirical work: a sense of urgency. The milieu of childhood that occupies him here seems to have tapped deep, previously unsuspected currents of emotion. Still the accomplished novelist of manners, he is now taking a more searching look at the matters that those manners reflect.

"I don't 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."

The mixture in all this of English and American, humorous and serious, is what gives Sheed's writing its characteristic texture. His crisp craftsmanship seems to come from the English satirical tradition, but beneath this veneer the American grain runs deep: he knows his way intimately around the moral and physical landscape of the U.S. middle class. Sheed relishes the ridiculous but champions the sane and normal. His protagonists are ordinary guys desperately trying to fend off the world's idiocies and evils long enough to define themselves and do the decent thing. They rarely succeed completely. Solitary Baseball. The fourth-generation writer in his family, Sheed was ?orn in London, the son of Maisie Ward and Frank Sheed (of the Catholic publishing firm Sheed & Ward). When he was nine, his family moved to Torresdale, Pa., a town not unlike the setting for Pennsylvania Gothic. Finding the literary atmosphere at home oppressive," he plunged passionately into sports. The only trouble was that in lonely Torresdale, ''there was no one to play with. I became perhaps the outstanding solitary baseball player of my generation." When he was 14, a polio attack "interrupted that unpromising career."

By then, Sheed was enrolled in Downside, a Benedictine prep school in England somewhat resembling Sopworth in The Blacking Factory. Eventually, he took a degree in history at Oxford, spent a year with his father's relatives in Sydney, Australia ("more eccentricity per square foot than anywhere"), and settled in Greenwich Village as a writer. His first novel, A Middle Class Education (1961), earned him a small reputation that has grown slowly but steadily. Last year his fourth novel, Office Politics, was nominated for a National Book Award. Now, at 37, he is justly rated as one of the nation's most gifted writers.

Critical Cascade. Sheed, who is married and has three children, does his writing in a studio on Manhattan's West Side. With one of his cherished Hoyo de Monterey cigars always within reach, he scribbles in longhand with a No. 2 pencil. He half-consciously removes his clothes as he works. Precisely why he does that is a mystery but, whatever the reason, it enables him to produce a cascade of critical pieces in addition to his fiction. He is book editor of Commonweal, film critic for Esquire, and a freelance reviewer for at least half a dozen other publications. He undertakes this extra work partly for the money, but he also thoroughly enjoys it. "Criticism," he says, "is the last refuge of the light essayist." In Sheed's case, it may be a refuge, but it will hardly be the last.

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