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Clare Boothe Luce By Wilfrid Sheed Dutton, 176 pp., $12.95 Wilfrid Sheed has recreated himself as the adolescent who found his first love; and to live through those days of ease and comfort from especially cruel usage seems to have exhausted every other impulse, even real curiosity about what Clare Luce had been before the summer of 1949. It must be joy to think of the private and drudgery to give an accounting of the public woman.

And so, I suppose, Sheed has failed from want of trying to be a proper biographer; but that is a small price to pay for his triumph as a memoirist. Mrs. Luce has had innumerable successes but even she is not likely to have had many larger achievements than the mark she left upon the heart of an unhappy 18-year-old. She could not have been what she was to Sheed if there had not been many times, before and since, when she has lived up to the platonic conception of the self; but this one can shiningly stand for them all.

MK

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Murray Kempton

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Clare Boothe Luce By Wilfrid Sheed Dutton, 176 pp., $12.95 Wilfrid Sheed has recreated himself as the adolescent who found his first love; and to live through those days of ease and comfort from especially cruel usage seems to have exhausted every other impulse, even real curiosity about what Clare Luce had been before the summer of 1949. It must be joy to think of the private and drudgery to give an accounting of the public woman.

And so, I suppose, Sheed has failed from want of trying to be a proper biographer; but that is a small price to pay for his triumph as a memoirist. Mrs. Luce has had innumerable successes but even she is not likely to have had many larger achievements than the mark she left upon the heart of an unhappy 18-year-old. She could not have been what she was to Sheed if there had not been many times, before and since, when she has lived up to the platonic conception of the self; but this one can shiningly stand for them all.