Cracks Wise and Otherwise

By John Skow

THE GOOD WORD AND OTHER WORDS by Wilfrid Sheed Dutton; 300 pages; $10.95

The difference between a critic and a reviewer is that a critic can pick his fights. A reviewer must be able to take on anyone in the bar. Wilfrid Sheed is a reviewer, and in his weight class, one of the best in America. He has the good taste to know that glibness is slightly shabby. But in this new volume of analysis and in vective, what he writes about E.B. White's style ("White's notes to the milkman achieve effects that the others sat up all night for") could be said by others about Sheed's own prose.

In a piece about Watergate literature, for instance, he speaks of "the firm jaw and the empty sentence. Any good comic writer can do you a Sam Ervin, but How ard Baker is a work of art." Examining the predicament of fiction writers in an age when all psychological twitches are resentlessly understood, he observes: "Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it any more. A few rap sessions, some fearless touch ing, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and lago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time."

On a more volatile subject, Sheed concludes: "At present, most reviews of books by blacks are critically worthless. White reviewers tend to babble ingratiatingly, as if they'd just received a death threat."

"The first extravagant praise," he notes, "kills writers like frost. Whom the gods would destroy, they first oversell."

There is just as much uncommon sense in the observation that once E.M. Forster was identified as a homosexual, a uni versal writer was diminished to the status of "a propaganda counter in a winless war. 'We've got Whitman, and I'm pretty sure we've got Byron, and we're still working on the big case, Shakespeare,' say the Gays. And the Straights reply by hanging on to Shakespeare's Dark Lady for dear life and giving up Whitman altogether.

"But who can read any of them intelligently with all this gabble going on? In the big game of is he or isn't he, the author is the one sure loser."

Most of these pieces appeared in the New York Times Book Review, for which the reviewer wrote a column, now regrettably defunct, called "The Good Word," or the New York Review of Books. Sheed's opinions seem right most of the time, but not so invariably right as to be insufferable. Too much Tightness shuts off debate and stifles the thought process. Sheed provides a good mixture of wisdom and nonsense, so that the reader finds himself saying, "Yeah, yeah, right," and then, "Now wait a minute!" He is properly appreciative of Edmund Wilson, sound on Walker Percy and P.O. Wodehouse, and amusing about the mandarins of New York film reviewing. He goes awry when he tries to deal with Hemingway, perceiving the oafishness and neuroticism but for the most part missing the art. Never mind; for Sheed's work, the good word is an honest title. Describing his trade, the author writes: " 'Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail,' is how Sam Johnson, blues singer, described the writer's life." A lovely, far away phrase, that "blues singer," in a fine, argumentative book.

--John Skow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.