Bark and Bite

By Melvin Maddocks

THREE MOBS

by WILFRID SHEED

157 pages. Sheed & Ward. $6.95.

The best writers on that ever popular, ever portentous subject, the American character, tend to be members of the family--but by a sort of adoption only. They are not quite at ease at home. They look about them with a preternaturally bright, not overfond eye. They like to go off into a corner and smile ironically when the rest of the family sings, "For he's a jolly good fellow."

George Santayana, that New England Spaniard, was such an outside-insider. So is Wilfrid Sheed, who--to his public's edification and entertainment --cannot make up his mind whether he will sound like an Oxford-trained critic, an Irish pub wit, a defrocked Catholic priest or a simply first-rate novelist. In any role, he is never more than, say, three-quarters American.

This time, in three long articles, Sheed studies American character collectively, as men-in-groups: the labor movement, the Catholic Church, the Mafia. Though developed, as a great many of Sheed's essays are today, from book reviews (the last piece is an exception), Three Mobs is not your ordinary journalistic wrapup, to say the least. Readers who are dying to know the number of dock strikes in 1962, or finger an organization chart of the Mafia hierarchy, or check back on the minutes of Vatican II will not find The Facts here. To read Sheed is, rather, to invite caricatures by David Levine to dance in your head.

Here, for instance, is the American as son-of-Godfather: Bill Bonanno's thought processes, writes Sheed, "reminded me of Yogi Berra reading Gospel comics." Or the American as prototypical, George Meany-like labor leader, with "the gravelly voice, abraded in drafty meeting halls, the face of many weathers, and that style--watchful, patient, sufficiently charming for the political side of things. He tends to be built for sitting up all night, like a beer bottle, and his backside is probably as callused by now as his hands."

When Sheed is not dashing off social history as clever cartoons, he is apt to be carving out aphorisms: "As with God in the late Middle Ages, all that there is to know about the Mafia seems to be known by now except whether it actually exists." God keeps coming up again and again in Sheed's text except, of course, in an essay on the church in which he points out glumly that "sex had long since become more interesting than God" to American Catholics.

Homo Americanus. To call Sheed antichurch, anti-labor or even anti-Mafia is to underestimate how anti-everything else he may be. If he does not really like these subcultures, he suspects they are better than U.S. culture as a whole. What he complains about in America's tribes-within-the-tribe is not that they are too idiosyncratic but that they are not idiosyncratic enough. "Mobsters and bishops" share the same "heavy disingenuousness." Labor threatens to form an "Establishment troika with business and government." Fiery young Mafiosi will be left to "man the switchboard and analyze the computer, and be snuffed out at last by a missing credit card." Everything is losing its edge, dissolving into "uni-state." Poor Homo Americanus, looking for clues to himself in the codes of his sub-tribes, is getting less and less help.

If Sheed cannot take his mobs quite seriously, it is because he takes so seriously the needs they are failing to answer. Just as all art strives to be music, "every organization," Sheed assumes, "strives to be a religion." The true believers signaling wildly inside every American joiner, he concludes, "already wander the streets looking for stranger cults, wilder religions. The more bloodless buy books called You're Really a Terrific Person, desperately making the most of what's left when you lose defining associations." In the end, outside-insiders play prophet rather than reporter and are subject to a certain amount of repetition. Sheed's warnings may be as old as Santayana's. They have seldom been stated with more precision or more grace.

sbMelvin Maddocks

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