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FRANK & MAISIE:
A MEMOIR WITH PARENTS by Wilfrid Sheed New York. Simon and Schuster. 1985. 296 pp. ISBN-13: 9780671449902 reviewed by Patrick Killough I. For barnesandnoble.com REVIEW TITLE: G. K. CHESTERTON WAS HIS GODFATHER REVIEWER'S RATING OF FRANK & MAISIE * * * * * FIVE STARS FRANK AND MAISIE: A MEMOIR WITH PARENTS by Wilfrid Sheed (1930 - ) is about five generations of his family -- if we include a few sentences on his three children. He begins with his great grandfather, William George Ward (1812 - 1882). That Ward was a mathematician, Anglican priest, Oxford graduate, follower of future Cardinal John Henry Newman and radical foe of everything Protestant in Christianity. Disappointed in the Church of England, Ward gave up Anglican orders and took a wife. His 1844 IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH urged that the Anglican Church re-submit itself humbly to Rome. In reaction, Oxford University stripped Ward in February 1845 of his two degrees. Seven months later William became a Roman Catholic. Newman was not many months behind. Great grandfather William George Ward sticks in author Wilfrid Sheed's memory as 'the buffoon of the Oxford Movement' (p. 42), who, after being deprived of his Oxford degrees, signed his letters 'William Ward, undergraduate,' then flung 'himself into the far right corner of his new lodgings' --Roman Catholicism, hoping to find 'a papal bull with his breakfast every morning, along with his TIMES' (43). The family stayed militantly Catholic through William George's son Wilfred Ward, who did famous biographies of both his father and Cardinal Newman and through granddaughter Mary ('Maisie') Ward who did famous biographies of her own father and of Cardinal Newman. To a young friend Wilfred Sheed once said of family ghost John Henry Newman, 'He's just a fellow who lives at our place.' In 1925 six-foot tall Maisie Ward married even taller but nearly a decade younger Francis ('Frank') Sheed. He was an Australian educated at Oxford, a Catholic convert. They lectured, they stood on soap boxes facing hecklers in London's Hyde Park. They founded in both London and New York the Catholic publishing house Sheed & Ward. And they had two children, Wilfrid and Rosemary. They were prodigious Roman Catholic intellectuals, she always and unmistakably of the English gentry, Frank recalling the open spaces of Australia. Maisie did biographies of Chesterton and Robert Browning. The memoir FRANK & MAISIE drops many, many names, mostly Catholic, like feminist, pacifist, social worker Dorothy Day and other writers published by Sheed & Ward. These include G. K. Chesterton -- Wilfrid Sheed's godfather --, historian Hilaire Belloc, apologist and detective writer Monsignor Ronald Knox and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, whom Wilfrid Sheed castigates as a shoddy writer and intellectual lightweight. Frank Sheed also published American poet Robert Lowell, Jacques Maritain and other Catholic notables. Father Leonard Feeney, S. J., Massachusetts Irishman, loomed large in Sheed/Ward lives and in their family kitchen debates. The diminutive Jesuit began well with light verse but 'aged sourly' (107). Feeney's loud intellectual hardness and narrowness, betraying to Wilfrid Sheed the priest's sense of intellectual inferiority, played late 1940s American Catholicism's yang to Fulton Sheen's mushy yin. Wilfrid Sheed's sister Rosemary visited Father Feeney around 1945, found him sickly, protected by fanatic followers but, against her will, also charismatic. Evelyn Waugh visited him a year or two later and was 'terrified' (108) as Feeney passed over ever more strongly from prophetic to downright zany and sectarian. Sheed & Ward published the very short Father Feeney's wildly popular FISH ON FRIDAY and THE LEONARD FEENEY OMNIBUS. Picture that size difference when absorbing the following Feeney quip. "Once, in his playful days, he had stood between Frank and Maisie at a street crossing and said, 'I feel like an ampersand' '' (108). FRANK & MAISIE rollicks breezily down the decades. If you want to make sense of how the still immigrant church of Al Smith and the 1920s morphed into that of John Kennedy and the 1960s and beyond, this book is for you. The publishing house of Sheed & Ward made it at least possible for educated Catholics to read the documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962 - 63) with understanding. Frank and Maisie were as shocked as any in the terrible 1960s by the sudden onslaught of cafeteria Catholicism, priests and nuns by the thousands fleeing their vocations and the widespread collapse of 'till death do us part' Catholic marriages. Author Wilfrid Sheed himself won an annulment of his first marriage on the newfangled psychology basis reluctantly approved by the Vatican. Frank and Maisie, along with son Wilfrid and daughter Rosemary, were globe trotters long before the jet setters. So there is much in FRANK & MAISIE of England, Australia, Italy, America and points in between. To Frank Australia proved 'the perfect country' and Maisie was always the English Lady wherever she was, including India. Although the book's style is light, even bouncy and painfully cutesy at times, this is not a fast read. Too many names, too many places, too many ideas and revolutions therein for a reader to romp distractedly through. But fun and very instructive, if you do not let your attention wander. -OOO- OTHER TITLES RECOMMENDED: -- Maisie Ward: ROBERT BROWNING AND HIS WORLD,GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON. -- Frank Sheed: THEOLOGY AND SANITY, THEOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS Dallas, Texas 08/11/08 http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Frank-and-Maisie/Wilfred-Sheed/ e/9780671449902/?itm=2 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- II. for amazon.com Review's Title: Title of this review: "Finding new ways to be a Catholic", August 15, 2008 Reviewer's rating of FRANK & MAISIE * * * * FOUR STARS Remember the Catholic publishing house of SHEED & WARD? Hold in your creative imagination that that is spelled "Sheed AMPERSAND Ward" of London and New York. Its founders in 1926 were a married couple, Australian theologian Frank Sheed and biographer and member of the English gentry Mary ("Maisie") Ward. She was six feet tall, he inches loftier. They published many Catholic writers, British, French and American. Bishop Fulton Sheed was one income-producing writer in Sheed and Ward's stable. Five foot something Father Leonard Feeney, S.J., poet, biographer, punster and wordsmaster was another. One day on a street corner standing between his towering publishers, Father Feeney said to Frank & Maisie, '"I feel like an ampersand." The Feeney remark comes on page 108 of reminiscences of Frank, Maisie and himself by their son Wilfrid Sheed: FRANK & MAISIE: A MEMOIR WITH PARENTS (1985). A difficult work to put in a pigeonhole, FRANK & MAISIE is biography (sort of) of famous parents, autobiography (sort of) of less famous son, sketches of places (England, USA, Australia and quite a few others) and people (mainly famous) including the author's godfather G. K. Chesterton, friends of his parents (almost all of them prominent Roman Catholics) and incisive sketches of times of change, especially the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60, and 70s of the Twentieth Century. The writing style is eclectic, witty, sometimes cutesy, arch, and too often for my taste playing up the author himself when I would really like to learn more of Frank and Maisie. Other than himself and his parents, Wilfrid Sheed contents himself with mere sketches of the many, many authors, priests, bishops and friends of Frank and Maisie Ward. These sketches are, be it said, often fine enough to stay in the mind. One especially apt one is of his maternal great-grandfather, the Englishman William George Ward. The future Cardinal John Henry Newman, while still an Anglican priest, attempted a reform of the Anglican faith in the direction of Rome, called the Oxford Movement. William George Ward was "the buffoon of the Oxford Movement" (42). He was sweet-tempered but candid and "a tireless and ferocious battler in the fields of the Lord, or the pope anyway." Ward abandoned Anglican orders, married, went over to Rome and invited all Anglicans to repent their sins and join him as a Catholic. For this Oxford University stripped him of his degrees, after which William Ward signed himself "undergraduate." He was a forerunner of Cardinal Manning and other English converts who became more papal than the Pope. His ideal was to receive "a papal bull with his breakfast every morning, along with his TIMES" (43). He told one interlocutor, "Madam, you will find me strong and narrow. ... Very strong and very narrow." Mother Maisie reminded son Wilfrid of her grandfather for her charm combined with candor and fearlessness in a transcendentally good cause -- Roman Catholicism. FRANK & MAISIE ambles on with sketches of Cardinal Newman (William Ward's onetime mentor and later ecclesiastical foe), Father Ronald Knox, Jacques Maritain, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Lowell, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, schismatic American Jesuit Father Leonard Feeney and on and on. Particularly fine are Wilfrid Sheed's evocations of the moods of certain time periods in Britain, America and elsewhere in an evolving Catholic and post-Catholic world. "The
late forties was for Catholics a age of movements, family movements,
pacifist movements, interracial movements -- you could always pick one
that matched your temperament ..." (207). "Finding new ways
to be a Catholic might almost be called the theme of the fifties,
if the fifties had a theme" (212). "To be Catholic was to be alive, or at
least to have a shot at it" (214).
Wilfrid's father Frank Sheed embraced the throwing opening of doors to the world by the Second Vatican Council (1962 - 1963) as an obedience-commanding act of the Holy Ghost (253), especially revival of a Frank crusade: permanent deacons. Son Wilfrid, however, noticed that less theologically-minded Catholics took the great Council to be saying, "anything goes." To mother Maisie the post-Vatican II church was sometimes hard to take, e. g., chewing the Eucharistic host rather than letting it melt in the mouth (256). For readers born after 1920, FRANK & MAISIE is a pleasant, nostalgic stroll down memory lane. For those born after 1990, almost every thing will be new, even if it is, after all, history. The book does not lend itself to skimming: too many abrupt changes of style, locale and persons. It calls for and deserves close reading. -OOO- Your Tags: wilfrid sheed, frank sheed, maisie ward, leonard feeney, ronald knox, fulton sheen http://www.amazon.com/Frank-Maisie-memoir-parents-Wilfrid/dp/B000VZBX3C/ref=sr_1_1?ie =UTF8&s=books&qid=1218383564&sr=1-1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= III. epinions.com Title of this review: "I feel like an ampersand." by aohcapablanca, Aug 16 '08 Here I am reviewing yet another book. The book, published in 1985, was penned by novelist Wilfrid Sheed, but is neither novel nor any other form of fiction. It is called FRANK & MAISIE: A MEMOIR WITH PARENTS. I opened its covers for my own narrow reasons. After I found what I wanted, I kept on reading and now I review it for you and what I hope are your reasons. Why the author made much of Leonard Feeney, whom he disliked. My reason for reading FRANK & MAISIE was to research a man I knew in advance would play only a tiny role in a novelist's recollections of his famous mother and father who in 1926 had founded perhaps the best known Catholic publishing house of all time: Sheed & Ward. For I was to give a talk in August 2008 at the University of Dallas drawing parallels between the soon to be beatified Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801 - 1890) and a once widely admired but long since "disgraced" Irish-American priest and critic of Newman, Father Leonard Edward Feeney, S. J. (1897 - 1986). Like those of his fellow American, Bishop Fulton Sheen, Leonard Feeney's titles were gladly and profitably published by the house of Sheed & Ward: FISH ON FRIDAY, for example, and A LEONARD FEENEY OMNIBUS. Over only a couple of pages (106 - 109) Wilfrid Sheed brings Feeney to life as he does a few dozen other members of his parents' worldwide circles of Catholic friends and writers. Thus, poet and essayist Father Feeney was "a blithe young man (who) ... aged sourly." Even his funnier pieces showed hints of "prudish hysteria." Like other American Catholics of his generation, Feeney felt "intellectual inferiority." So he lashed out at "clever" Harvard University and secular learning. Most Catholics felt at home with Bishop Fulton Sheen and his mushily cute, undemanding version of the Faith. But in 1948 Feeney turned narrow and earnest. He then produced "a mixed bag of brilliance and nuttiness." At its core was neuroticism and downright hatred of Jews and other "enemies" of Catholicism. Feeney became the pet priest of a bunch of ultra-traditionalist young Catholic fanatics who had decided that God denied salvation to anyone not baptized with water into the Roman Catholic faith and personally loyal to the pope. Feeney was charistmatic, as Wilfrid Sheed's sceptical sister Rosemary had to admit when she visited him in 1945, around the time of his apparent breakdown. Clare Booth Luce induced English novelist Evelyn Waugh to visit Feeney, whom he declared "quite mad." Feeney was then on the brink of turning from prophet into zany. The main reason, in my opinion, why Wilfrid Sheed spills so much ink over a man he considers his brilliant, orthodox parents wrong to have cultivated is simply to make us admire the cleverness of the title of Sheed's book's title: FRANK & MAISIE. Note the ampersand ("&") between FRANK and MAISIE. That ampersand is there to remind readers of their famous publishing firm SHEED & WARD. Bear in mind, as well, when you read the following line that Maisie Ward was six feet tall and her husband Frank Sheed was even taller, while Father Feeney was not much above five feet. "Once,
in his playful days, he had stood between Frank and Maisie at a street
corner and said, 'I feel like an ampersand' " (p. 108).
Father Feeney, the playful "ampersand," was excommunicated in 1953 by Pope Pius XII and remained so for the next 19 years. In the meantime he and his followers created a unique extra-canonical experiment in ultra-conservative Catholic striving for perfection: Saint Benedict Center and the vowed-to-Feeney "Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary." Removed to Still River, thirty miles west of Cambridge, Massachusetts where they had started, the Slaves included 12 married couples and their 39 children. The parents vowed celibacy and lived as monks and nuns. Their children, styled Little Brothers and Little Sisters, after age three, were taken from parents and raised on the premises by Big Sisters as if in a Catholic orphanage or boarding school. Both Bishop Sheen and Father Feeney represented, in Wilfrid Sheed's view, the old immigrant Catholic church in America as it began to fade away, "both equally sterile. They have left no spiritual children" (112). The other 99% of FRANK & MAISIE: a sketchy overview. No matter whom or what he writes about: parents, sister, self, grandfather, great-grandfather and beyond, British, Australians, Americans, writers, publishers, journalists, continents, and on and on, Wilfrid Sheed cuts diagonally across and into his subjects with the same flashes that illuminate his Leonard Feeney. Wilfrid Sheed idolizes his more famous parents, especially, however, his father Frank, a famous popularizing Catholic theologian, the darling of the Vatican. In the heady 1950s Frank daringly published avant garde writers whose theological boldness outstripped his own. But he was tolerant of even misguided talent. Frank said to son Wilfrid: " 'Every intelligent man is four-fifths right,' he once said to me in reference to, of all people, Sartre' " (212). Of the Scots, Frank said: " ... they love philosophy ... (but) they are no good at it" (292). Mother Maisie was more a lecturer than conversationalist. She said: " 'I believe Cardinal Newman may have been a little vain ... Or 'I'm afraid that GK was drinking rather heavily toward the end' " (181). GK was G. K. Chesterton. And, oh, by the way, GK happened to be Wilfrid Sheed's godfather. Wilfrid Sheed watches, initially with little or no comprehension or empathy, his famous father and mother decade after decade. As time passes they become more in the text, he becomes less. Theirs was a world of passionate religious conviction, of speaking from soap boxes in London's Hyde Park, lecture tours around the world, of creating and running a publishing firm and meeting almost all of the best known several thousand Catholics in the world. These included Chesterton, Belloc, Ronald Knox, Romano Guardini, Maritain, Robert Lowell and on and on. Wilfrid Sheed captures in phrases at times worthy of Oscar Wilde the spirit of the 20th Century, decade by decade: the between-the-wars 30s, the Catholic experiments of the 40s, the social doctrines of the 50s, the 60s, with the Second Vatican Council and the "anything goes" interpretations of its "opening to the world," the numbed 70s and the adrift 80s. I would not call FRANK & MAISIE profound. But it shines, it is brilliant. It is smart, chatty and a tour de force vision of the 20th century from the point of view of an Australian lawyer theologian, his lightly aristocratic English wife and their globetrotting novelist son. The book has no index. So you cannot simply look up a favorite name dropped by Wilfrid Sheed and skip all the rest. You have to read the whole book. I picked it up merely to read about Leonard Feeney. But I kept on happily reading for insights into dozens of other persons, two or three continents and into the whole topsy-turvy twentieth century. There might, I think, be something in FRANK & MAISIE for you, too: a convincing family love story, people who take their religion seriously and have great fun doing so, writers, talkers, publishing, traveling, soap box orating and much more. Enjoy! -OOO- Pros: Sheed & Ward: world's most famous Catholic publishing house. Passionate religion. A family love story. Cons: Somewhat over-written for contrived stylistic and verbal effect. A bygone era. The Bottom Line: Wilfrid Sheed, the novelist author, is alive and writing. A good introduction to his way with words. His loving parents and their hundreds of writers were giants in their day. Overall Product Rating: * * * * FOUR STARS Above Average Recommended: Yes http://www.epinions.com/Frank_and_Maisie_A_Memoir_With_Parents _by_Wilfrid_Sheed/skp_~1/search_string_~wilfrid%2520sheed%253A%2520frank%2526maisie =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= IV. for alibris.com Title of this review: The Son of Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, August 16, 2008 By abuatticus, black mountain, NC If you grow up known to one and all as "Frank and Maisie's son," you might feel resentful when it comes time to reminisce about them. Not so WIlfrid Sheed, novelist (THE BOYS OF WINTER) and biographer of playwright Clare Boothe Luce. Shortly after his famous father's death, Wilfrid began writing FRANK & MAISIE: A MEMOIR WITH PARENTS (1985). Frank was Australian lawyer and theologian Frank Sheed. Maisie was Mary Sheed nee Ward, biographer of Robert Browning and G. K. Chesterton. Married in 1926, in the same year they founded what was to become the most famous Roman Catholic publishing house in the world, Sheed & Ward. They had two children, Wilfrid and Rosemary. Wilfrid always loved his cheery, intensely devout parents but was slow in coming to appreciate their greatness. They discovered and published widely read Catholic writers of Europe and North America: Jacques Maritain, G. K. Chesterton (Wilfrid Sheed's godfather, who dashed off a cartoon of his baptism), Hilaire Belloc, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Father Leonard Feeney, S. .J. (FISH ON FRIDAY, THE LEONARD FEENEY OMNIBUS), Robert Lowell, Romano Guardini and on and on. Wilfrid met them all and traveled with his parents, sister and grandmother between Britain, the USA and Australia. Read FRANK & MAISIE for its Oscar Wilde-like flashes of insight in persons (such as detective writer and Bible translator Father Ronald Knox), places (wartime Britain, any time Australia), politics and turning points in American history. An example of wit, insight and turn of phrase: the Second Vatican Council of 1962-3. At that time "some
fairy godmother of dubious origin granted us almost everything we
(Catholics) wanted, after which nothing was quite the same" (p.
218).
Theologian Frank Sheed read "Vatican II as a ratification of his life work" (253). Son Wilfrid saw the Council differently, bright decent men "negotiating
over the previously nonnegotiable" and "simply the sheer sensibleness of it all:
these were just the decisions we would have made ourselves. And no sane
person can be impressed by a church of his own devising" (253f).
Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward loved each other deeply and it showed. They really enjoyed their Catholic faith and it showed. Maisie's magazine editing grandfather had been a hotheaded young disciple of John Henry Newman when both were Catholic-leaning Anglicans and opposed to Newman when both became Roman Catholics. It seemed natural, then, that Cardinal Newman became virtually a family member of every subsequent generation of first Wards then Sheeds. Advice on FRANK & MAISIE: "Take the book and eat it up" (Revelation 10:9). -OOO-" http://www.alibris.com/booksearch.detail?invid=9531338769&qwork =2441408&title=frank+maisie&qsort=&page=1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-= file: books/sheed_frank&maisie |