Frank and Maisie

National Review, Nov 29, 1985 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

SOMEWHERE, Auberon Waugh wrote that he did not himself undertake to write a book about his father, or to edit his father's letters and journals, because he could not surmount the first and operative obstacle, namely, What to call him? "Mr. Waugh" might just have pleased the old man, who in one of his letters revealed that he countenanced intimacy and formality, despising only informality. But only if Mr. Waughs breed little Mr. Waughs is that contrivance congenial both to the dead father and the live son. To whom, as also to the deceased subject of such a book, the use of "Dad," or even "Father," would have rankled; and if he had referred to him simply as "Evelyn," Auberon wrote, the clouds above would verily part, and his dead father would smite him down for the sin of informality. Accordingly, he turned the job over to someone else to do. Wilfrid Sheed only just succeeds in getting us used to "Frank" and "Maisie," but leaves us overwhelmingly grateful that he did not turn the job over to anyone else.

Oh, it is entirely likely that down the line one or more biographers will write about Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. They are infinitely interesting, and indeed it would not surprise if their legend were approached by those who want to recall that extraordinary pair of evangelists in another mode than the formal biography. They would make fit subjects of a profound and moving novel. Certainly they would easily fill out an intellectual biography dealing with Catholicism in the twentieth century. and even--yes--a musical comedy. I can hear it now, and without a strain of sacrilege. And for those who can read hagiography, and wish also to read about a couple actively alive during this century, let them look--vainly, I conjecture--for fitter subjects than this couple, so dimly remembered.

Never mind. Three-quarters of all Americans do not (a recent poll reveals) know how Al Smith was, and I would venture that 99 per cent do not remember the name of Dorothy Day, close friend of Frank and Maisie (I adopt, with some pain, Wilfried Sheed's usage), the saintly ascetic who was careless enough to confuse Christianity and socialism. But just two decades ago, Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward were the central figures of lay American Catholicism. All the more piquant given that neither of them was born American, and that lay Catholicism, during the same period, was popularly in the hands of others, who practiced above all docility, a virtue, but not an exclusive virtue. The Brooklyn Tablet had more loyal constituents, which is okay by me, though of a different kind, which I regret.

To deal quickly with the background. Frank Sheed was an Australian who studied law and traveled to London, where his Christian afflatus quickly soared. He became a street evangelist, speaking at Hyde Park Corner and elsewhere the Gospel according to the Holy Roman Catholic Church. He met there a woman engaged in the same profession, eight years his senior, descendant of a proud English Catholic family, and Frank Sheed married Maisie Ward. For twenty years they preached the Gospel, on street corners, at seminars, at meeting halls, wherever the drunks, the skeptics, the pedants, or the curious would gather. Their audiences were greatly disconcerted because there was nothing of the Major Barbara in Sheed and Ward. Serious, yes, always; but also penetrating and kind and witty. Frank's style, in the words of his biographer, was a "tap dance between asperity and charity." Hers? "I remember her also on the platform, looking so frail and vulnerable until somebody crossed her; at which point she turned, just like that, into Churchill. Her mind when aroused was incredibly swift and sharp, and I was every bit as cautious about arguing with her as I was with Frank--if the argument was serious. Frank had no peer at the Silly Argument."

And although Frank and Maisie never did any one thing to the exclusion of other things, they waited until 1927 to found, in London, the book-publishing firm of Sheed and Ward, bringing its principal office to New York in 1933, where for thirty-odd years it was the central publishing house of serious Catholicism. Although Fulton Sheen was a Sheed and Ward author, the mind turns more readily to such as John Courtney Murray, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and, of course, Chesterton and Belloc.

Something very interesting suddenly happened, the potsherds of which Wilfrid Sheed elects only to touch on here, with that obliquity that so well suits his style. It is that when the Vatican Council came, something unanticipated set in among Catholics. Priests and nuns became laicized, Catholic schools closed down, churches substantially emptied, dogma relaxed--and what also set in was the demise of the publishing firm of Sheed and Ward. To be sure, Frank and Maisie were old now, and surely no other couple save Ferdinand and Isabella has combined the talent, the energy, and the capacity to lead that this couple did. But one has the feeling--indeed, the author here encourages it--that even if they had been much younger, somehow the firm of Sheed and Ward really had nothing very much left to say after Vatican II. And that of course is something some of us regret, who believe there was never a time when more needed saying than now: which brings me to address the main feature of Frank and Maisie.