Keeping us honest

...By then, of course, he The wars won-Modernism having Not that he had fallen silent, or disap- had parted company with Partisan Re- become standard fare in the Literature peared, a fate not unknown to others of view, the divorce following an acrimoni- departments of every agricultural college his generation and kind...

...But I say this in tribute: how ers" against "pontificating windbags .. . That's the sort of thing Sheed has to often does one think a writer worth the mounting the pulpit in any cause whatput up with, while gnashing his teeth...

...control around the clock: that constable, theirs, and frontiers never crossed- The feast awaits you...

...Contmonweal: 1 18 And then the falling-off: not a diminu- Brandeis as the Smolny Institute...

...miraculous balancing-act where a single they are as sparkling on second reading Writing in 1971, Sheed laments "-e loss wrong move would be fatal...

...Partisan, the ideologies Porter and Andre J. Dvosin, with a Memoir published during his lifetime and here* of anti-Stalinism (Left, Right, Center) by Mary McCarthy, Houghton Mifflin...

...Rahv wrote Waterbuffalo in Polemic, his native tongue, in a strong Theology residual Russian accent (in fact his native Opens a broad window into the East...

...attitudes...

...Here is that he would have permitted others to do assault he launched against the New a balanced inquiry which en- so, even for reasons of historical interest...

...Rahner writes from an experience in Chicago and literature and church in the world today and the rela- experience of Western European sec- psychology seem to be the mediating distionship between our answers to these ularization and philosophy is the mediat- ciplines...

...One can be witty lie...

...A control Vietnam, Michael is already a legendary figure back home freak" is what Michael Herr is describing in his book Disbecause of his skill in stalking a deer and his self-discipline in patches when he talks about the "lurps" on night patrol in always killing it with one shot...

...On the face of it, where Rahv is ponderous (and that is his characteristic voice), Sheed is agile...

...there was a sense of incon- the times, reordering the definition of scarcely recognizable to a generation gruity, a voice speaking in a void, no culture, changing the terms of discourse which came of age a decade, to say noth- longer attuned to time, place, historical and argument...

...circumstances...

...generally" and "truth and justice" and and not a writer...

...The language, or dialect, is spoNo Handle but we wouldn't listen...

...markers of the distance he traveled while Sense-demolished the academic dog$3.95 Paperback at the same time revealing intellectual mas of the '40s and 'SOs...

...served as a missionary in Thailand and in Singapore and is now senior lecturer need to do so was overpowering, that you Sheed has been called "witty" so long in Religious Studies at the University of were hearing familiar echoes...

...humor, and compassionto seem a term of subtle abuse to him, a --Occasional Bulletin Paper $3 95 "What Is To Be Done...

...Wilfrid Sheed...

...Of course he is that, ef- Cloth $795 lectures from it-on theory and practice, fortlessly, naturally, by a sort of sponon the strategy and tactics of revolution, taneous combustion: helplessly, on con- At your bookstore on creating a "disciplined" "Van- sequence of special chemistry...

...quently...

...The man is a civilizing 'The Good Word and Other Words, by Wil- ticular, word and gesture, spirit and act...

...the Philippines, Burma, India, Taiwan, Vietnam and Indonesia come alive Wil, `rid Shee perfectly pitched voice, neither quite when viewed through the mind and heart where he would, there were no new Dos- English nor quite American, cannily of a theologian who recognizes his own need to understand his audiences:' toevskys, Tolstitoys, Gogols, Kafkas, combining elements of both and mixing -Concern Paper $4.95 Hawthornes, Melvilles, Jameses any- them with a third into a distinctive freshwhere to be found: so far had we fallen...

...to the full life of the mind, comes to a FORTRESS PRESS Getting out meant making the connec- distinguished career...

...and I thought, you used to work the house...

...Before he ever goes to bility which the movie itself doesn't own up to...

...Each of these recent books is quite and the disciplines used to mediate reve- Enabling people to live a new life in valuable, often insightful and challenglation and experience...

...Freedom, radical freedom for open- Entering into relationships of freedom DISPUTE about the meaning of John ness to the fullness of human existence, and trust and love would appear to be the Paul II's many statements in which is not translatable into social free- defining elements of being Christian for Mexico reflect two features of re- dom, characterizes the Christian for Karl John Shea (Stories of God , Thomas More cent books in religion: a keen desire to Rahner (Foundations of Christian Belief, Press, $8.95...

...the vicissitudes of the student movement purges, the nature of Stalinism was PR, "his" journal, he must have felt, in the late '60s and early '70s with a garishly illuminated for all who would had been usurped, its own uncorrupted shifting mixture of excitement and dis- see...

...Even McCarthyism seemed to and the emotion of the occasion, d many of the ossified old radicals a matter "democratic socialist" or small-letterfor deliberation if not outright support...

...Mailer drove him mad, long way around, son...

...sparkle(sf with his closely annotated copy of Lenin's insight...

...Sheed has contrived out of his Singapore, Thailand Japan...

...Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES categories of Marxist analysis and politi- gion appears to be the mediating disciPhilip Mumion cal economics...

...but there can be origins and even some persistent strains, no doubt they helped end the tyranny, at bookstores literary and political, in his later major and that in itself, by returning literature or from the publisher work...

...kept watch over in the course of the Moscow trials and believers in unsullied first principles...

...Hong .` trans-national migrations a distinctive, Kong...

...bother...

...The constable is on duty at all type essays by Kosuke Koyama, who convince yourself, because the inner times...

...and rendered How should faith respond to the sub-language you will barely make lifeless the poems and novels influenced the moral and ethical demands out certain slight but significant differ- by, at their worst deriving from, that critof advanced science and technology...

...A matter, one feels, of' Mind you, they might not approve of the personal style and an intentionally proman's manners or the cut of his clothes vocative way of distinguishing himself but still, yet, after all, on the other hand, drastically from old colleagues who all the same...

...but I also think he would not have But don't be taken in by the affable man- ers should attend to their business, Sheed written those lines, or not in that way, ner...

...balmed in a formal shapeliness enclosing they explore such critical Rahv himself never saw fit to include nothing...

...The present the question alters in pressure and form...

...Now and again I balk, or pause long, at go on and gloss every other word in the he is a writer and a wit...

...He is, as one of his to killing as if they had been born to it...

...version of Marxism (as he saw it) abanmay...

...faith and life...

...own place: an achievement no less than in the 1930s, a tumultuous time driven by But some vital spark was obviously that of altering the intellectual temper of urgencies, frenzies, wars, dislocations missing...

...Appearances (I believe it's been said) deceive...

...but SAUL MALOFF, a novelist and critic, is a reguit didn't mean abandoning all previous lar contributor to Conunonweal and other positions out of loathing for Stalinism...

...I mean to or direct from the publisher guard" party, on the nature of the "class say it can't be faked, or got by hard Write for complete catalog enemy," on armed insurrection and the sweaty labor (not that aspect of his writORBIS BOOKS opportune historical moment for it: ing, which we may call "style," without Maryknoil...

...It would tion, nuclear energy, and re- tions, needless to say, and it is doubtful be too much to claim that the powerful source management...

...pline...

...In short, his last years, though they in American cultural history...

...what Robert De Niro played in Taxi Driver, where a returned But the plain truth is that in the madness and disillusionment Viet vet goes back into training, as if he were at boot camp of Vietnam, the sort of qualities that Michael took there again, in order to prepare for a spree of assassination and perished or were perverted just as readily as any other Ameri- murder...

...he had warned us nature...

...Taken all in all Philip Asia s leading theologian was originally written as devotions for his family The eled periodicals...

...and worked away at the book on The break virtually defined the intel- doned or dishonored together with all Dostoevsky that had been gathering in lectual atmosphere of the period: the his mind for a lifetime and which, great Party and the Stalinist anti-aesthetics of `Essays on Politics and Literature 1932pity, still had some long way to go at his "proletarian literature" on one side of 1972, by Philip Rahv, edited by Arabel J. death, though the fragments separately the barricades...

...where Rahv is classic, immersed in the large issues, solemn, Sheed is nothing if not contemporary, regarding the running experience of day-to-day squintingly, his Also by leathery cragged features partially con- Kosuke Koyama: cealed behind the mask of a crooked, mirthless,unforgiving smile...

...China...

...Few if thus, to my mind, closing a bit too impa- leave off without mentioning a wonderany current writers on writers and writing tiently a complex, bloody question which fully moving essay in "ancestor worcan release as much flashing light in a of its nature will always be with us, and ship," a testament in homage to his parthin (and in many a thick) volume as needs to be argued in season and out as ents, Frank and Maisie Ward Sheed, Sheed does in a paragraph...

...or, if I may strain this or that pronouncement, assessment passage...

...Look two of them standing there, you might KOSUKE K09AMA suppose...

...to journalism of Gloria Steinem when she first breath to the last Sheed moves along and contains as well a scattering of re- commenced her career of "shilling for that finest of wires with perfect-with views and essays on assorted subjects, women's lib (a cause I generally favor) insolent-ease, leavng not a dry eye in literary, political, general-cultural, some on TV...

...These essays reflect ences, something like a champing at the ical theory and practice-coldly emthe diversity of opinions as bit and intimations of things to come...

...RAHV & SHEED, UNACCOMMODATING CRITICS Keeping us honest and shape and provide ample reason to on the other...

...Shea writes from pastoral clarify what it means to be Christian or Seabury, $19.50...

...and as its seem a vestige of a remote historical era, were spent in a kind of exile, were hardly dominant editor and personality Rahv's some figure out of afin de siecle located unfruitful, much less indolent...

...The movie's own term, "freak," betrays this possihimself a prototype of the cowboy...

...He was a born polemi- Tom Hayden was their Lenin and cist, and his natural disputes lay molder- Trotsky...

...questions and both our own experience ing discipline...

...anti-Stalinism, he had joined the great migration of for- reconcilable differences over fundamen- now in the postwar period which ushered merly "alienated" intellectuals into the tal nature, purpose and direction...

...became in those newly assimilated quar- Yet even if it was little more than the ters the sole ground of politics, an an- name he gave to his sense of the systemic FAITH tipolitics, the form acquiescence took: moral and social bankruptcy of sophistically antiradical in rhetoric, illib- capitalism and his longing for a decent eral in practice, a predictable reflex...

...Not altogether inflexibly, of Literature was a matter of life and death, THE course: it should be remembered that he far too serious a matter to leave to the began his career in criticism while he was professors and other exegetes in a bad still in the CP, practicing what was then time made hideous by those endless regarded as Marxist criticism in the of- isometric exercises in a mandarin "forFUTURE fices of New Masses and the original mal" or "textual" criticism that made essays edited by Partisan Review when it was still an teaching schematic, diagrammatic, imPAUL ABR ECHT adjunct of the Party, fairly dutifully poverishing...

...land...

...50 questions either resolved or superseded, they understood and knew nothing, dwelt the battleground plowed under and Rahv outside History, especially their own an- MENTATi0KS left behind as the discussion moved off in cestral history...

...Queen Lane tions that would...

...be his life's workP.Wsdetphia, PA 19129 classic American literature, the great 19th-century Russians, Modernism...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...He got out and so steadily it must sometimes come Otago, New Zealand...

...civilized discourse-or betmouthing the old platitudes, though if ter still high conversation-all but imyou look closely and your ear registers possible, indeed suspect...

...This long awaited devotional book from ing in back issues of defunct or remod- Never mind...

...2 March 1979: 117 brands of socialism, its old radicalism his own eyes he remained a Marxist, for a transmuted into the basest metals of time of the Trotskyist bent, then a nativist conservatism or a cold-war lifelong maverick party-of-one"liberalism" which came to the same depending on the mood of the moment thing...

...A control freak" is own friends says, "a control freak...

...Sheed is a witty writer...

...But the tion of powers so much as a sense of great kids let him down...

...I incomparable example of how Gffsi,ore think Sheed wrong in general and in par- is spoken there...

...For in the false consensus of "end of ideolprofessoriat (Brandeis, in his case), with some years before that, in fact, Partisan ogy," established as the ascendant what mixed feelings we can readily imag- had been in the process of becoming a ideology of philistine and intellectual ine...

...but I can't bear to wary, on the lookout, unblinking...

...and read them veiled insult...

...Dulles writes disciplines...

...and Sheed is a master conjuror of appearances...

...That was the high period of SAUL MALOFF suppose that the whole would have richly the journal, the late '30s and '40s, the WHEN PHILIP RAHV died in 1973 at the fulfilled the promise of its excellent achievement that secures its lasting place age of 65 he had long since come to parts...

...The defining de- God, a life "mediated especially by faith ing, and richly fruitful for our common mand on the Christian, according to Jon and worship," is the primary task of the search for identity and responsibility...

...written when that noble woman was still collection * contains the New York Times The instance here is a small one, as this alive...

...Opposition to submitted gladly or guiltily to the process Stalinism, once a principled position en- of assimilation and nullification which he tirely consistent with a radical critique of called the "embourgoisement of the capitalist society-indeed, it can be ar- intellectuals"-like them he might be a gued, a necessary condition of it- professor but all similarities ended there...

...10.95, 300 pp...

...in fact I balk rather fre- is well served by stacking "good writin his wit, his wittiness...

...How can one possi- prayers Paper $4.95 "new" -contemptible reviewers as op- bly get from Rahv to Sheed...

...communist...

...To begin with I would want to look very and on is to keep us honest...

...Criticism-the essays are collected in his courages informed debate but they are of interest nevertheless, as major work, Literature and the Sixth and action...

...if you read the Crucified Mind charted and has no foreign policy to and listened to them carelessly you could Here is another collection of meditationspeak of...

...Well, the posed to critics...

...and humane social order, his "MarxWhile the accommodating intellectu- ism" richly invested his criticism with a SCIENCE als arranged peace with Cold War moral seriousness and sense of society America on favorable terms-a late mar- and the world-of the interaction of literriage of convenience though they pro- ature and society-that were of an order AND tested it had really been love at first altogether different from the quasisight-Rahv remained fixed in hiS old official academic criticism of the time...

...The control of feeling is superb-a Book Review columns of that name, and question goes, but take it for what it is...

...Terry Southern was the enemy of culture: Only it's not so long as, looking at the so much had Rahv lost perspective...

...ness and buoyancy, an idiosyncratic sigthe culture lay in ruins...

...ken on a small, self-sufficient island with For a brief time the "kids" of the a population of one: call it Offshore-the on the Cross Movement seemed to remind him of the language, not the island, which is un- An Asian Meditation on old days and reenergized him...

...Exactly the way a gentleman of them surprising, as again and again harder than this on your articles and do conducts himself on that island, and an we're made to see where the really in- more for truth and justice besides...

...other directions...

...NY 105:15 Waltham, Mass...

...ing of two or three decades, later...

...This quality he shows as a Vietnam, the beautiful, clear-eyed boys from Ohio who took hunter is what gets him through Vietnam...

...as the Finland Station...

...Another way of expressing consciously from the experience of per- from experience of working out a reason- the value and limitations of current vasive poverty and injustice in Latin able Catholic identity in an intentionally theological projects is to relate them to America and uses the mediating pluralist society and philosophy of reli- the tortuous history of the theology of Commonweal: 120...

...but from the as on first and will be on third and fourth...

...A strong, supple intelligence is in rather peevishly argues, ideologists to today...

...they weren't serious...

...It was very sad...

...they were barbarians...

...In that sense Rahv's criticism issues as biological manipula- these early pieces in any of his collec- was passionately anti-academic...

...time Party organ as its principal intellec- tically altered by the veering winds as to issued pronouncements and contributed tual opposition and magnet for other dis- have become unrecognizable or at least occasionally tb other periodicals, notably affected writers and intellectuals when, unacceptable to himself, the last of the The New York Review...

...Wrath, the polemicist's Rahv embodied the cultural and intellec- meditations reveal Dr Koyarna s rich and fueling emotion, spent itself on ludicrous tual history of his generation, and repre- fertile imagination as well as his innermost thoughts an the nature of Christian targets-the r'porno-aesthetes" and sents the best of it...

...and to inquire whether the issue the point, a writer whose singularity lies or observation...

...Sobrino (Christology at the Crossroads, church, according to Avery Dulles (The Each, however, must be understood Orbis, $12.95) is discipleship in building Resilient Church, Doubleday, $7.95), within the limitations of their respective on earth the Kingdom of God, a kingdom and, we might infer, achieving this new grounding experiences and mediating of justice So`.-,-ino writes self- life marks the Christian...

...founded a new "little" magazine, journal qualitatively different from the alike and in virtually identical termsthe short-live if not entirely ill-fated one Rahv had co-founded in the '30s Rahv must have felt rather like a general Modern Occasions, which reflected his (with William Phillips and others) fol- deserted by his legions, his banners appolitical and literary biases and provided lowing his split with the Communist propriated by the onetime enemy, his him with a lectern from which he could Party and the reconstitution of that one- causes discarded or forgotten or so drasquarterly instruct the nation and world...

...For one example of many: Writ- ever...

...Beautifully combrnnq sub"swingers," the hustling, faddish, cul- As Wilfrid Sheed represents the best of stance and facility of expression, 50 Meditations reveals a theologian at his tish, standardless visigoths of the his...

...In magazines...

...collected allow us to discern its tendency and the aesthetics of literary Modernism 366 pp...

...A little tardily, ous separation marked by deep, then ir- and polytechnic institute...

...embarrassment): a writer's head works 2 March 1979: 119 that way, or it doesn't, and there's an end teresting and lively subjects unsuspected closely at those words "shilling" and of it, more's the pity...

...force whose appointed mission offshore frid Sheed, Dutton...