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In the realm of literary production, Holy Cross graduates
continue to do more than their part, producing important
and noteworthy works for the shelves of libraries and bookstores.
By Donald N.S. Unger  In
his most recent work, and in life, Patrick Creevy ’70
straddles the North/South divide.
One doesn’t have to be keenly geographically literate
to be intrigued by the bio-notes on Patrick Creevy’s
two novels, Lake Shore Drive (1992) and Tyrus (2002);
both inform the reader that the author teaches at Mississippi
State University and lives in the Chicago-area, which implies
something of a head-snapping commute. The more recent book
at least adds the clarifying statement, “between
terms he lives with his family in Evanston, Illinois,” which
still leaves a spate of questions unanswered. One has to
think that this amuses Creevy; he’s not careless with
words.
“How did I get into this mess?” Creevy asks rhetorically. “In
1976, if you got a job in English Literature, you took it,
no questions asked. This [Mississippi State] is where I got
my job, and where a few years later I got tenure. No mysteries
beyond that. And surely no matters of choice. But things
are strange. And I have loved this place from the day I got
here.”
Creevy received his degree from Holy Cross in 1970. He married
Susan O’Connor that August—the dedication to Lake
Shore Drive reads “to Susie, my angel since she
was fourteen.” After earning his Ph.D. from Harvard
in 1975, he began teaching at Mississippi State the following
year. So far, straight lines.
His wife’s undergraduate degree was in art history,
from Manhattanville. While in the first dozen years of raising
the couple’s four children, she earned a second degree,
in architecture, at MSU. But Starkville, Miss., didn’t
seem like the right place to hang out a shingle. Creevy took
a two-year leave from teaching; the family moved back to
Chicago so that his wife’s business enterprise could
benefit from what he refers to as that city’s “vast
Irish-Catholic network.” He himself went to work for
his father in the hospital supply business.
Susie’s architecture business flourished; their children
grew new roots in their northern schools. But, at the end
of two years, Creevy felt more strongly pulled back to MSU
and literature than seduced by the siren song of surgical
soap. The map began to be speckled with more complicated
dots. Thus the long commute.
“But we have a hundred-acre farm in Mississippi,” he
hastens to add, “spread over rolling hills, with old
trees and beautiful old cattle ponds. And Susie, who deeply
loves the farm and who has 13 years of roots here herself,
is starting to come down more and more as the years pass.”
And this North/South split, in many ways, deeply informs
the spirit of his most recent book, Tyrus, as it does,
inevitably, the spirit of his family.
“My 16-year-old daughter, who has Down’s Syndrome,
once spent a drive from somewhere near the Arkansas-Missouri
line to all the way past the Mississippi River bridge back
into Illinois at Cairo, naming all the people she loved in
Mississippi, and all the people she loved in Chicago.”
The novel, however, is as much or more about hate as it
is about love—or perhaps better stated—about curdled
love. It is an imagined version of baseball legend Ty Cobb’s
first weeks in the major leagues, at the beginning of the
20th century. It handles a complicated amalgam of themes
with deft and beautiful language: a twining of poetic prose,
letters, biblical and mythic images, historic fact and—as
Creevy explains in afterword—just enough bending of
the truth to be truer to the story.
The reality of Cobb’s life—both Cobb the athlete
and Cobb the man—is complicated and impressive, making
it easy to understand the mythic appeal. Start with the man:
His mother shot and killed his father shortly before Cobb
came up to the major leagues—perhaps thinking him an
intruder in the house, perhaps intentionally—surprising
her while she was having an affair. During his second season
with the Detroit Tigers, Creevy reports in the afterword,
Cobb had to leave the team for some weeks for psychiatric
hospitalization. His demons were real.
“It was the combination of the Hamlet-Orestes factor
and the American history factor and the baseball factor that
got me into the Cobb legend,” Creevy says.
On the athletic side, of course, Cobb is also hard to beat,
now as then. He was the first inductee into the Baseball
Hall of Fame, garnering 98.23 percent of the vote. He compiled
an unsurpassed .366 lifetime batting average, hitting over
.300 for 23 straight seasons, including three seasons over
.400—his career high a .420 season in 1915, this in
the era of the dead ball and the higher pitcher’s mound.
He held the all-time hit record until the mid-1980s when
Pete Rose took it away from him.
Is Charlie Hustle a modern analogue to Cobb? Creevy demurs.
And you get in his answer something of the flavor of his
book: “Is Pete Rose an analogue? Add sixty points to
his batting average and give him the speed and base-path
savvy of Rickey Henderson and then throw in a Michael Jordan
or Tiger Woods king-like dominance and you might get there.
But you’d still have to lift up Laertes to the level
of Hamlet. I forgive Pete, and I don’t dislike him,
and I never saw him hit the ball in any way but hard. But
we’re talking about very different orders of magnitude
when we set him alongside Cobb. And not just when it comes
to talent. Pete was fiery all right, but Cobb, with some
of the fiercest passions of our American history running
in his veins, as well as a family tragedy of fullest Shakespearean
weight, was angry like Achilles.”
Thirty years later, memories of Holy Cross remain fresh
for Creevy.
“I honestly can say I remember every classroom and
the feeling it had during every course I ever took at Holy
Cross,” he says. And his affection for the College was
passed on to other members of his clan—sisters Colleen
(Creevy Cording) ’78 and Janet (Creevy Avery) ’81
and brother, Robert ’84, all followed him to Mount St.
James.
“Of course,” Creevy says, “it’s my English
teachers I most remember— Tom Lawlor, Frank Devlin,
Ed Callahan, John Wilson ’58, John Mayer. They made
me want to do what I, in fact, have done for my life. It
beat the hell out of my Harvard days, too—that small
liberal arts college intimacy and that percolating Socratic
method. Thank you.”
Donald N.S. Unger is a writer of fiction and nonfiction
and a political commentator for NPR affiliate radio WFCR.
He lives in Worcester.
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