Wilfrid Sheed knew many things: baseball (his love), the Great American Songbook (the subject of his last book), the Catholic Church (his home), G. K. Chesterton (his godfather). But he really knew magazines. He knew magazines from the outside, as a contributor, writing for the New York Review of Books—there, he described Mary Gordon’s debut novel as “funny, exact, various” and Evelyn Waugh’s snobbery as “a joke, which doesn’t make it less real”—as well as for Esquire, the New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. He also knew magazines from the inside, serving as an associate editor at Jubilee from 1959 to 1966 and as the book-review editor at Commonweal in the 1960s.
This familiarity with the world of magazines, its crummy offices and frenetic closing days, sometimes led Sheed to wry affection. “There has never been a cult of personality at Commonweal,” he wrote in a reflection for the magazine, “for which, on the whole, the Lord be thanked and the saints be praised.” It also could lead to a kind of depressive realism. He recognized what it was like to have a piece due and not much to go on. “Max picked up the play again, reluctantly, and resumed the dreary business of accreting an opinion,” he writes in Max Jamison, his 1970 novel about a disillusioned critic. (Is there any other kind?) If Sheed knew the pain of trying to juice eight hundred words out of a bad play, he also knew what it was like to receive the result of such a struggle. “Shabby unsolicited manuscripts concerning which he had to scribble shabby opinions…that was Thursday morning for you,” he writes in the recently reissued Office Politics. That 1976 novel comically depicts life at The Outsider—a small but venerable magazine that, with its simultaneous commitment to, and critiques of, liberalism, shares some DNA with Commonweal. (After the title page, Sheed asserts, “The Outsider resembles no magazine living or dead.” Trust the novel’s details, not the author’s note.)
The magazine is an odd, Goldilocks-like form: not as substantial and therefore, one might fear, not as enduring as a book; not as time-bound and therefore, one might assume, not as topical as a newspaper. In Office Politics, The Outsider has “21,000 subscribers, down from 27,000.” That’s too small to be like the New Yorker, which at the time could claim to shape America’s taste in fiction, its politics, and—with its famous cartoons—its sense of humor. (In 1970, the New Yorker had a circulation of around 450,000.) But The Outsider is also too big to be like the Criterion, T. S. Eliot’s little magazine that prided itself on its small, discerning readership.
Writing for magazines can’t really pay the bills; editing them isn’t much better. So why devote your life to magazines of culture and opinion, as Sheed did? And what would such devotion look like: Maximizing readership or concentrating on quality? Cultivating a singular house style or creating a space in which many voices can sound? Playing for the short or long term? Sheed’s career is one answer to such questions. You devote yourself to magazines because their very oddness allows for the full flourishing of your writerly sensibility, because their capaciousness can accommodate the various talents and interests that make you (hopefully) a writer worth reading. Office Politics, at least on its surface, offers a different kind of answer. You devote yourself to magazines for the same reason you devote yourself to anything in this fallen world: for praise, no matter how little merited; for power, no matter how puny.
Office Politics demonstrates that a job is rarely just a job. If you’re not careful, it changes how you speak and who you are, shaping not just your style but your soul. When George Wren first arrives as the youngest editor at The Outsider, he is shocked by the dingy surroundings: “His first surprise had been to find so august a journal being pasted together in such a woe-begone office.” Over the course of the novel, the senior editors take long, boozy lunches and beg rich donors for money; they blackmail and browbeat each other in increasingly pathetic anglings for power. George is young(ish) and unformed. Most importantly, he’s uncommitted in the game of thrones that is life at The Outsider, and so his coworkers see him as a pawn to be moved about and, if need be, sacrificed. Gilbert Twining, the editor in chief and living embodiment of (seemingly) civilized liberalism; Fritz Taylor, a once idealistic but now relentlessly ironizing editor who has been at the magazine for four years; Brian Fine, the try-hard editor who has never recovered, professionally or psychologically, from the sudden withdrawal of Twining’s favor: all of them “think it’s important who edits a magazine that 21,000 people thumb through, leave coffee stains on, [and] read while they’re on the john.” That is to say, they think who edits such a magazine is all that’s important. The publication itself is secondary, even tertiary; “The jockeying of ego is the real story.”
Sheed is very good on the small details of office life. Office Politics features painfully awkward meetings and even worse after-work drinks. It captures what life is like at the beginning of the week (“Monday morning was no man’s land between home atmosphere and office atmosphere”) and what it’s like at the end of the week (“He would have said the Gettysburg address was too damn long on a Friday”). All of the modern office types are here. There’s the new guy with a confident disposition and no expertise brought in to tidy things up, a consultant avant la lettre. “I’d like to get some idea what you do, George,” this oaf declares. “What’s your end of the operation exactly?” Then there’s the wiseass who thinks he’s above it all while tirelessly battling for a better position. There’s the old-timer who appears kindly but secretly hates everyone. There’s the office manager whose campaign to paint the office a new color is endless. “It seems to me it isn’t right to be influenced that much by anybody, to think about anybody that much,” George says of his boss toward the novel’s end. You don’t have to have worked in magazines to appreciate the sentiment.
But if you have worked in magazines, or if (like me) you just love them, the specifics of Office Politics are even more delightful. The down-at-heel office space, with its “four tiny editorial offices separated by duckboard partitions,” is perfectly imagined, from the water coolers that demand “groveling for a little dribble of warm water” to the staff “sitting under blinking fluorescent lights that nobody got around to fixing.” (I have been to the Commonweal office for lunch and Christmas parties; this is accurate.) The problem with starting to quote Wilfrid Sheed is that it’s hard to stop; the man was constitutionally incapable of writing a stiff sentence. Here he is on putting out a new issue of an old magazine. Editors, avert your eyes:
Putting together another copy of The Outsider seemed to be a new low in pointlessness; it was like wheeling an old gentleman down to the promenade for his afternoon airing. No one expected anything new and exciting from The Outsider; but a few were comforted to see the old fellow making his weekly appearances.
Did this happen to all magazines? He supposed it must. The editors clamored for new ideas, but always found something wrong with them, and were drawn magnetically to the old ones; and old subscribers woke up just long enough to deplore any change in layout, any modification of the puzzle page. George had been encouraged to come up with new ideas, but after five had been turned down in the first month, he had mercifully stopped having them. He thought like an Outsider editor himself now.
And here Sheed is on an excessively mannered staff writer. Critics, now it’s time to avert your eyes: “Wally had actually been quite a good critic in his day, with enough native intensity to last about two years—after which most critics should be shot anyway.” (Sheed echoes this thought on the critic’s ideally short-lived life in Max Jamison: “Most of his [critic] rivals gave up one by one and hitched themselves to universities or foundations. That was the normal thing. Broadway was worth no man’s whole lifetime.”) Sheed observes how an editor can remake a magazine into his own image and so do it lasting harm: “It was really quite a good magazine, objectively considered: yet she saw Gilbert in every line, especially the ones with semicolons, and this made it all seem curiously pointless.” And he gets at how small this world seems, not just to those outside The Outsider but even, if they’re being honest, to those inside it: “What the hell, it was only a dinner. Nothing very terrible was going to happen at a dinner—a dinner, furthermore, for three editors of a minor magazine of opinion. You had to know the people, Matty, to understand how trivial it really was.”
This all makes it sound like Office Politics is the story of George Wren having the scales fall from his eyes and seeing the literary world in all its emptiness. But something more complicated is going on. For one thing, the novel’s first paragraph begins after paradise has already been lost: “Behind the moldy green cabinets was a door marked fire exit, with a red light over it. Nobody ever went out that way, it would have been quite pointless.” George is already plotting his escape, if not permanently from his career then at least from the office for the day. (He hopes that if he leaves via the fire escape, Twining won’t see and strong-arm him into a drink.) Decay has set in and the emergency lights are flashing. The characters in Office Politics, and the professional and personal worlds in which they move, are already fallen.
I’m wary of calling Sheed a Catholic novelist. After all, here he is on just this label:
Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh stuck their heads briefly out of the Christian [closet] and had to fight their way back in. Because, in an instant, the scavengers had their number—they were Catholic novelists, which explained everything: every plot twist, every two-bit aperçu. The uncreative are grateful for these skeleton keys. Originality is promptly flattened like tinfoil. Catholic novelist, Catholic woman novelist; the more words you can pile up front, the less remains to be done.
Sheed’s Catholicism certainly isn’t a skeleton key to his imagination, and the word “Catholic” appears only once, and jokingly, in Office Politics. (Discussing a “stuffy, airless” piece on world population, George quips, “You know, it’s like the Catholics say, if everyone stands sideways, there’ll be plenty of room for all. Father Frogbinder, S.J., the sainted demographer, made a good point about that just the other day”—before being cut off.) Still, Sheed’s refusal of perfect innocence, his sense that purity is impossible in the life of the mind and in life, period, makes him, with apologies, an excellent Catholic novelist.
To see the world as fallen is not necessarily to see it with contempt, and Sheed’s novel, which focuses most regularly on George but also shifts into the perspectives of Twining, Fritz, Fine, and others, cuts its humor with real compassion. Twining brutally fends off those who would take his throne but ends up worn out, accepting his estranged wife’s love and handing the magazine over to someone else. George, who witnesses Twining beat back various coup attempts, first pities the victims and then the victor. Forgiveness is all: “The idea that Twining might be funny was really the last straw. George shrugged to himself in the dark. Funny. The poor miserable bastard. ‘Put him on,’ said George. ‘I don’t mind talking to him.’”
Minor magazines of opinion might seem trivial, but they also give life to a culture. I’ve never worked full-time at a magazine myself, though I did once serve as an intern at the Boston Review (a lot of time spent scrolling through Flickr for cheap images to accompany excellent articles), and I’ve been a contributor to Commonweal for more than a decade. I spend much of my days reading the kinds of magazines Sheed skewers in Office Politics. On the exercise bike, it’s the London Review of Books. Before bed, it’s the New Yorker. While waiting in the doctor’s office, it’s Harper’s. It can be fun seeing a writer take the piss out of something you love, even venerate. That’s certainly part of the fun Office Politics offers—and one senses it’s also part of the fun Sheed got in writing it. And yet, after Office Politics, Sheed continued to write for Commonweal and other publications like it. As Twining says, with self-satisfaction but also with a degree of truth, “The real thing was the professionalism that took this chaos and fashioned it into a magazine twice every month; a pretty good magazine.” Magazines are flawed, silly things. What better forum in which to think about the flawed, silly thing that is humanity?
Office Politics ends but, in its pages, The Outsider doesn’t. Another two weeks will come and another issue will go out. It will be pretty good, if not great; it will sing on certain pages and sag on others. Twinings will come and Twinings will go. The Outsider—fragile, absurd, worth preserving—will carry on. One hopes that its real-world analogues will, too.
Office Politics
Wilfrid Sheed
McNally Editions
$18 | 320 pp.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
