Frederick Crews: scholar and wit

I knew my brilliant friend Fred Crews (1933- 2024) from my graduate school years in Berkeley in 1960 to our sudden bitter quarrel nearly 60 years later in 2017.  Tall, slim, handsome, preppy and athletic, he was born in Philadelphia and educated at Yale and Princeton.  Most notably, he published books on Henry James (1957), his undergraduate thesis; on E. M. Forster (1962), based on his doctoral dissertation; as well as The Pooh Perplex (1963), an amusing satire on dead-end literary criticism; The Random House Handbook (6 editions from 1974 to 1992); and many severe and influential articles in The New York Review of Books.  He had such prestige that a grateful assistant professor got tenure after Fred had savaged his book in the NYRB.  He was fierce and aggressive in his writing but, as the Israeli scholar Bill Daleski noted when I introduced them, polite and gentle in person.

In 1966, when Tom Parkinson gave me a hard time as my dissertation director, I asked Fred if he would take over.  He agreed to rescue me if Parkinson would release me.  But Parkinson wanted credit for directing my dissertation, became more polite—though never helpful—and kept me trapped as his student.

Fred was wealthy from his writing and his Berkeley salary, and from his wife’s earnings as a photographer of small children, but he always lived modestly.  He did have a ski cabin in the Sierras, once hit by an avalanche.  But his holidays could be austere: walking in the Swiss mountains by day and reading Kafka in German at night.

His wife Betty (who died a year after Fred) was amusing about her nutty Christian Science background.  She moved with nervous gestures and spoke in staccato speech.  She had a beaky nose, was wiry, muscular and intensely competitive, even when walking or swimming with friends.  Betty was intolerably censorious and domineering, and the more she talked, the quieter Fred became.  When he was dining with us, she constantly instructed him about how to use his utensils and how to eat his food: “Fred, take this one, not that one; don’t do this, don’t do that!”  Dinner chez Betty could be frosty and uncongenial.

At our house Betty exclaimed, “What!  You have two cars?”  I apologetically explained that my daughter needed one to drive to law school.  In a restaurant she forbade me to ask the delightfully accented waitress where she came from.  When Fred thanked me for putting a life of Napoleon in his mailbox, he said I should have rung his doorbell.  But I didn’t want to interrupt his work—or face Betty.  Fred and I agreed to meet without our wives.  When we had our monthly lunch, he gave me 50 minutes, the same time as a psychoanalytic session.  He once wanted to meet, but said: “Adolf won’t let me.”

Fred led a conventional life, but tried to create a new rebellious image in the late 1960s by riding a motorcycle, and living in the hippy and nude beach town of Bolinas, 30 miles from San Francisco.  When his daughter told a friend, “I have to go home for dinner,” the girl, who had to raid the fridge to scrounge meals, said, “Dinner at home? Far out!”

Ingrid, his younger daughter, was pretty but rebellious.  Fred tolerantly said the Rainbow Coalition would climb into her second-floor bedroom at night.  To get away from Betty, Ingrid moved permanently to Xalapa, Mexico, worked as a translator and court interpreter, married and divorced her lecherous Mexican husband, and had a mentally ill son.  After her divorce, she remained in Mexico, where her son was well cared for.  She didn’t earn much money and Fred may have helped to support her.

Fred loved to hear and tell a good joke and could be amusing.   When I told him about The Dove, a short film parody of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, he replied: “it is simply the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.  I played it three times, noting more wonderful gags on each viewing.”  In letters to me he called Dracula “that protracted blow job”; referred to Freud’s drug addiction as his “coke-clouded moment”; and criticised John Updike’s work as a “combo of pornography and theology: he has confused a damp crotch with a burning bush.”  He said the smart kids from Philadelphia went to Swarthmore, where my daughter was a student, and the dumb ones—like him—to Yale.  When his poet-colleague Robert Hass won a MacArthur Award, Fred said he had to give most of the money to his ex-wife.  Using an incongruous but witty Yiddish expression, called it his nudnik award.

Fred was six years older than me, a real academic star at a prestigious university, and felt more at ease when I remained his younger colleague rather than an equal.  He’d been a tennis coach in college, but thought I might be a better player and wouldn’t compete with me.  He was always encouraging, and willing to write effective letters of recommendation when I applied for jobs and grants.  Like my other distinguished friends—J. F. Powers and James Salter—he was pleased to pretend that I was a frantic writer, he a sluggish drudge.  He signed all my copies of his books.  The two most notable inscriptions were in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process (1970), a pro-Freud book: “I’ll sign it if you promise not to read it,” and his recantation in Out of My System (1975): “By now, this book is out of my system—but you are not.”

I dedicated The Biographer’s Art (1989) to him.  His blurb for my biography of Samuel Johnson (2008) read in part, “Meyers shows us a man whose wisdom sprang from misfortune, from a heroic will to prevail, and from intimate compassion with the wretched of the earth.”  He helped me get a Visiting Scholar year at Berkeley and to give an English Department lecture.  He said he retired early from Berkeley because he couldn’t stand the poisonous atmosphere of the fanatical Judith Butler and her extreme feminist disciples.

When the NYRB published my article, “Hemingway! Wanted by the FBI” (March 31,1983), which made headlines around the world, the editor Robert Silvers promised to send me books to review, but never did.  Fred said Silvers was a terrible snob and would never let me write for him while I was teaching at Colorado.  In February 1988 I invited Fred to lecture at Colorado and he spoke perceptively on “Reopening the American Renaissance”.  He hated to be under an obligation, didn’t allow me to pick him up at the airport or wait till he arrived for dinner—though of course we did wait for him.  Fred was undemonstrative and reserved, but he once surprised me by saying, “Betty and I are hoping to reciprocate your excellent hospitality soon.  Please contrive to get out here together.  We could put you up in the famous bed where the Rainbow Coalition use to tarry.”  On our last meeting he admired my new Mercedes and complained of foot pain, but wouldn’t let me drive him home.  He enviously said, “you have spectacularly good health.”

Freud ruined Fre(u)d’s life.  He began as a faithful disciple, then held a furious grudge against the god that failed.  He wrote a psychological study of Hawthorne (1966), published psychoanalytic essays and trained graduate students in that discipline.  He then rejected all Freud’s ideas as pseudo-science (like Christian Science), and spent eleven years writing an overlong book condemning his sometime master, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017), which alluded to Freud’s attack on religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927).

He thanked me in the acknowledgments and sent me a copy of the book.  I replied, “It’s written in a clear, sometimes witty style; has a lawyer-like examination of evidence, and is an impressive achievement.”  But I also had some doubts about his relentless attack on Freud and asked, “Who, apart from a few specialists, does your publisher think will pay $40 to read this 746-page Grand Inquisitorial evisceration . Was this book a form of revenge for the intellectually wasted years of your life?”  He admitted, “You may be right that the book is too long, overpriced and unfair to Freud.”  He got a severe but just review in the NYRB, a bitter end to his long connection with that journal that began in 1964, and eleven years’ work went down the drain.

Fred was afraid his book would fail and my criticism about its overkill had touched a raw nerve.  He got very angry, revealed his fears and defensively exclaimed, “you don’t know anything about me.”  He refused to accept my apology for offending him, and ended our lifelong friendship at the time when so many old companions were succumbing to dementia, disease or death.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had thirty-three books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents.  Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway came out in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest appeared with Mercer University Press in April 2026.

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