Honor thy father and thy mother is a sound precept in life, but dubious advice for a writer. From James Joyce to Tennessee Williams, from Virginia Woolf to Mary Gordon, modern literature has thrived on an undercurrent of patricide and matricide. Monstrous parents, it seems, are what gifted children barely survive in order to write about them with inspired resentment. Loving memoirs tend to rank second only to corporate histories of tool-and-die companies as the kind of book any reader can put down. In the face of this, Wilfrid Sheed, a witty, acerbic critic and novelist (Office Politics, Transatlantic Blues), has managed to compose a mellow family chronicle that turns literary and psychological tradition on its head. This is more than a memoir; it is an occasion.
For almost a half-century, Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward were inseparably joined by the name of their Roman Catholic publishing house, Sheed & Ward. But to their son they were powerfully eccentric individuals who happened to be linked by marriage. Frank was first and last "the man at the piano," demonstrating his photographic memory for the music and lyrics of any song he had heard more than once. He had risen, noisily, from the Australian working class. Maisie, eight years Frank's senior, proceeded from a long line of English-gentry Catholics for whom being Catholic constituted a full-time career. Even so, she relished slapstick, and "the hint of disarray in a dress-for-dinner world sent her into howls of relief."
Plausible legend has it that the Sheeds met on a soapbox. For most of their marriage they appeared to coexist on one platform or another, like figurines on a wedding cake. Sheed estimates that his father alone delivered some 14,000 outdoor sermons, manning pulpits in Hyde Park and on street corners from his native Sydney to his favorite adopted borough, Manhattan.
Frank, who had done brilliantly at Sydney Law School, argued his case like a barrister, presenting "legal briefs" for God. Maisie "knew what she knew" and made her converts with her enthusiasm for everything Catholic, from the Latin Mass--she was, says her son, a "liturgical junkie"--to the jokes of G.K. Chesterton.
The Sheed household, including Wilfrid's older sister Rosemary, was the most movable of holy feasts. One or both parents were continually getting "mysterious marching orders." Maisie did not exaggerate when she titled a reminiscence To and Fro upon the Earth. In 1940, when Wilfrid was nine, the call took the family to the U.S. and kept them hopping from way station to way station. Young Wilfrid, the eternal transfer student, felt like a newspaper tossed on a lawn. Not even when he was struck by polio at the age of 1 3 did his parents slow down their perpetual motion in the service of the Lord.