Harry McCreedy
By James Jeffrey Paul
Elderberry Press
182pp., $19.95

The life and times of Harry McCreedy

By Gregory J. Hand
web posted August 6, 2001 

A tyrannical boss and dysfunctional coworkers. A mother
institutionalized for the better part of a dozen years. A dead
father whose family is openly hostile to you and your sick
mother. A girlfriend almost twice your age, whose mental
problems rival your mother's, and whose own mother looks to
you to keep her daughter well. And you, twenty-two and fresh
out of college, have a savior complex and are out to try and help
everyone. That is, everyone but yourself. Welcome to the world
of Harry McCreedy.

Harry McCreedy, by James Jeffrey Paul, tells the tale of this
young man during the period of 1999-2000 and the struggles
that he faces during this short period culminating in his death;
which, incidentally, is revealed to the reader on page one of the
book. Harry however, trying to be the optimist, believes he can
solve the many disparate problems that life has dealt him, and is
very committed toward that end. He certainly has his hand full.

Harry's primary concern at work involves leading his fellow
employees on a revolt against their horrific boss Sally Mayhew.
It begins after he starts working at Port Arthur Shoes, when
Sally confides in him that she is up for promotion next fall. In
order for her to get the promotion she needs Harry, who is doing
a remarkable job, to not perform so well in the future lest he
show her as incompetent for not coming up with exciting and
innovative ideas herself. Progress can be made, she assures him,
but not too much, in order for her to blame her underlings for
being so ineffectual as to prevent her from improving the store
beyond those few, meager steps. This of course would not
include Harry, whom she sees getting promoted into her position
once she is out of the store and at the executive level, at which
point everyone but Harry would be fired.

Sally's idea disturbs Harry, who, despite the quirkiness of his
coworkers, generally likes them and wants no harm to come of
them. Confused and unsure of himself, as is his nature, he is
prodded into action by his girlfriend Sandra Trefontana's mother
Evelyn, who strongly encourages him to have everyone work
together to document Sally's abuses to submit en masse to the
company President at review time. By dangling her respect for
him, which he so desperately covets like the respect of so many
others, Evelyn is quickly able to convince Harry to carry out the
plan.

The store has problems other than Sally as its leader. Despite the
main showroom seeming, "almost as large as an indoor stadium,"
it only seems to have, including Harry, seven employees, three of
which are the store manager and two assistants, Harry and
Bernice. Sally spends most of her time shut up in her office, and
throughout the story the main place of congregation is the break
room, where the employees seem to spend most of their time. It
seems implausible that any work at all could ever get done in
such a store.

The work environment at Port Arthur is also a case study in the
theory of learned helplessness, defined as, "an apathetic attitude
stemming from the conviction that one's actions do not have the
power to affect one's situation." Sally is vicious and verbally
abusive, almost unbelievably so, but the employees just sit and
repeatedly take it. One would think that someone on the staff of
the Port Arthur Shoe Company would have quit, complained
about her behavior, or better yet, sued her and Port Arthur for
abuse, harassment and mental anguish. It is, after all, Washington
D.C., a town full of lawyers and victims' rights advocates. The
employees at Port Arthur are not apathetic; they are masochists.

The irony is not lost that Harry, who always fears Sally's
manipulations, can be just as manipulative; although Harry is
quick to assign his motives to his own altruism in helping those
around him. In fact, the two are more alike than either would
readily admit. Both come from wealthy families, and despite
Sally's ‘poor oppressed black woman' routine, which she falls
back on repeatedly, she actually comes from the wealthier of the
two families. Both are only working there to get ‘real world'
experience before moving onto better employment with their
respective families. Perhaps most significantly it is both of them
who two-face each other in a battle for control. However, it is
Sally who has the upper hand in their struggle, as she is able to
manipulate and play Harry for a fool at every turn.

While working at Port Arthur, Harry is also building a
relationship with Sandra Trefontana, a thirty-nine year old
executive secretary with the Department of Justice, who he met
at a Barnes and Noble bookstore. Very much alike in their
general timidity toward life, the two bond instantly. Their
infatuation is so immediate that it leads to the couple's first sexual
encounter towards the end of their first meeting.

Their relationship quickly develops into something more serious.
They are very good for each other, although completely co-
dependent, as they are able to support each other in their times
of weakness. Harry, unsure of his plan at work, always has
Sandra to help support his efforts to rid Port Arthur of Sally. In
turn it is Harry's love for Sandra that helps her to remain
emotionally healthy.

Also involved in his and Sandra's lives are their respective
parents, Elizabeth and Evelyn. As you may recall, Elizabeth
suffers from mental instability. Sandra, having also suffered from
depression and having had two mental breakdowns of her very
own, becomes very close to Harry's mother. Eventually Harry
and Sandra are able to rescue Elizabeth from her hospital, and
she comes to live with the two of them, where Sandra becomes
very much like the daughter Elizabeth never had. Harry, in turn,
becomes very close to Evelyn, as the two are mutually
concerned about Sandra's mental health and her ability to remain
strong.

There is also the matter of Harry's extended family that are, just
like Evelyn Trefontana, people that Harry desperately wants to
impress. Born of a rich, Boston family, he found himself
practically disowned when his father died and his "bohemian"
mother, to whom the family never warmed, had a nervous
breakdown and was hospitalized. He found his life passing from
abusive relative to abusive relative until he was able to get out of
college and out into the world. He was tossed between relatives
"because no one could tolerate him," although some were
apparently nicer than others. For example, his grandfather
treated him, "in a distant and stern manner," while his Aunt
Susan, "would scream insults at him and pummel him with her
fists." Aunt Susan sounds like a candidate for manager of the
Port Arthur Shoe Company.

The family is very strange beyond its habit of abusing children.
That there was some dislike for Harry's mother is to be
expected. Not everyone in a family gets along, and certainly
someone from a completely different upbringing could unwittingly
irritate or bother someone from a dissimilar past. However,
Harry's family possesses an almost collective mentality, where
‘the family' speaks with one voice, and has only one train of
thought. Everyone hates Elizabeth. Everyone dislikes and abuses
Harry. There are no dissenters in the group toward Elizabeth and
Harry, just varying degrees of hate and disdain, respectively.

Harry's father, "the shining star of his generation of the family,"
met, fell in love with, and married Elizabeth, and they produced
Harry. Although Harry was the progeny of a shining family star,
because of the disdain for Elizabeth, they did not care for Harry
either. To dislike the wife is one thing. To be cruel and abusive
toward the child, especially the only child of "the shining star" is
something completely different. That he was the "weak-willed"
child of a bohemian mother, or that he suffered from an "overall
weakness of character" that had "resulted from his mother's
defective genes" did not justify the seemingly incomprehensible
mental and physical abuse that Harry suffered for eight years of
his life.

Given the McCreedys penchant for, in some cases, criminal child
abuse and neglect over an obsession with seeing themselves as,
"fierce warriors in an endless struggle for their Faith and their
family honor, against the world" makes them, for all their self
absorbed greatness, the family from Hell. That a very insecure
Harry would continue, even as an adult, to go back for more is
inexplicable unless he is as mentally unstable as his mother.

What is most disappointing about Harry is that he is never able,
even with the love and support of his mother and new family in
Sandra and Evelyn, to overcome the need to be wanted by the
sleazy McCreedy clan. After the years of abuse and neglect, the
family only decides to embrace him after he is successful in his
career and about to be married. At a pre-wedding party that his
relatives threw for him, he was just amazed that, "his family
treated him not just with civility, but with affection, as if he had
never been an outcast. Even Aunt Susan, his most vicious
tormentor, treated him like a star in the family firmament." That
the woman had not been hauled away to jail for child abuse is
just dumbfounding. Her about-face treatment of Harry shows
how perverted the McCreedys really are.

When his cousin Frank offers him a high paying job at the same
party, Harry seriously considers it. Being the lackey that he is,
Harry is thrilled at the idea of being back in the McCreedy fold.
Sadly, he never once thinks to give them their comeuppance by
finally rejecting them and their communal stupidity.

It would seem to be the singular goal of Harry's life to please
others, especially the McCreedys, at the expense of his own
happiness. He quits his dream of teaching history to go into the
business world to please his abusive relatives. Evelyn Trefontana
disapproves of him dating her daughter, as Sandra is 39 and
Harry is 22, so in order to gain her approval by showing her that
he is a man, he takes her suggestion that he scheme against Sally.
When Harry's grandfather comes to stop by the store to visit
Harry at work, after he sees the picture of Harry's beloved
mother, whom Harry supposedly loves more than any other save
Sandra, Harry, "as fast as a lizard sticks out his tongue," turns the
picture face down on the desk to garner the approval of the old
man. His mother's health was in dire straights by virtue of the fact
that ‘the family' would not lift a finger to help in her treatment,
thereby forcing her "to depend on the inferior care of a charity
hospital," yet he jumped through hoops to get their approval.

Harry also suffers from a serious rescuing complex. He never
gave up on his coworkers through his plan to get Sally fired,
even though he could have quit (they all could have) and gone to
work somewhere else. Sandra was another version of his
mother, and both women had to be constantly looked after and
nurtured. In the end it was his need to please others, his need to
rescue others, and his inability to get beyond his own self-
imposed limitations that were his downfall.

The few strengths of Harry McCreedy are Paul's ability to create
lively, unique characters, each with their own quirks and many of
whom are haunted by their own demons, and in fashioning a
compelling story line to carry them through to the bitter end.
Despite the fictional nature of the story, it would work better for
the reader if it were perhaps more believable. Paul's writing style
has moments of brilliance, but overall is somewhat cumbersome.
The complexity of the various relationships in Harry's life, along
with the myriad of disorders being suffered by nearly everyone
around him, weighs down the entire story and results in the
reader struggling through certain portions of the book. Despite
Paul's characterization of Harry as needing to compulsively
rescue others, I couldn't help but wonder why Harry just didn't
buy a one-way ticket to Rio by page 23.

Gregory J. Hand is a political and social commentator whose weekly columns
disclose his personal passion for conservative issues. His columns appear
regularly at NewsCorridor, OpinioNet, and Ether Zone, and he is also a
contributing writer with Enter Stage Right. He has a B.A. in Economics from
Wofford College. You can view the complete catalog of all of his works 
on GregoryHand.com, and can reach him at ghand@gregoryhand.com.

Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com