AT FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON: THE CRITICS’ REVIEWS
At Five in the Afternoon is a unique and moving memoir about experiencing cancer. It is a literary work, illustrating all aspects of the cancer theme – traumatic assault, mortality, endurance and redemption – through the lives of the personalities, and in particular the women, who grace its pages.
The author draws on his unique background in psychoanalysis, in the art of constructing television programmes, and on his broadcasting experience as newscaster where the human voice is privileged, to write about the importance of saying, about putting the world of the imagination into words.
The book is courageously truthful, and speaks of the masculine quest for the father, the necessity of freedom, of what it means to be a real man, the value and strength of women, and of how to cope with adversity, topics which are narrated against the background of a changing Ireland.
“His book is unflinchingly honest, and he breaks down the taboo around men speaking the unspeakable... What I have realised is that in writing about all aspects of the cancer theme – traumatic assault, mortality, endurance – Michael has created a personal myth to live by. His memoir graphically treats of themes which take enormous risks of courage to put into words, but through the exceptional quality of his writing, they have become a pillar of light which has enabled him to continue on in the warmth of its lustre, despite his loss and the limits that have now been reached.”
Mary Robinson, Foreword to At Five in the Afternoon
First review of At Five in the Afternoon by Shirley Kelly, Books Ireland 2009, page 209:
“There is, indeed, a rawness to Murphy’s writing, his pain and despair are laid before us like open wounds, but this is what makes it special. Time would surely have healed those wounds and robbed the book of its immediacy and its power. The title is a reference to the time of the bullfight in his beloved Spain, which he uses as an allegory for his own battle. But what begins as a rumination on death opens out into a celebration of his rich and eventful life, an impressionistic account of the trials and tribulations that have made him the man he is. He writes lovingly of his hometown, Castlebar, of his family‘s historical roots in the area.”
LATEST REVIEW OF AT FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON BY BRIAN BRENNAN, IRISH INDEPENDENT WEEKEND REVIEW, SATURDAY 31 OCTOBER 2009, PAGE 18:
Best known as a newsreader, Michael Murphy is also a distinguished psychoanalyst and an author of importance. In recent times he has been celebrated for his interviews on TV and radio in which he talked about his battle with prostate cancer.
His book is not just about cancer. It is an elegantly written memoir covering his Mayo childhood, boarding-school life in Newbridge, success in RTE followed by humiliation followed by further success, psychoanalysis, happiness and sadness in Spain and, in between, the cancer. Each section, or chapter, could stand alone as a stylish short story, although imbued for the most part with a sense of loss and mourning. But never with despair.
Murphy clearly loves Spain, where he seems to have spent his happiest times. His considerable descriptive powers are at their most lyrical here. He appears to have borrowed his title from the Spanish poet Lorca — a matador friend of Lorca’s was gored to death at five o’clock one afternoon — and he returns repeatedly to a bullfight metaphor when recounting his own battles. There is another parallel too. Lorca was murdered by a fascist gang early in the Spanish Civil War. They pinned a note to his body denouncing him as a homosexual. Murphy tells us that, although he doesn’t want to be married, he would like his union of 25 years to be recognised by the State, ‘so that Terry and I can have protection under the law’.
Murphy had a rough time with his prostatectomy and he describes the pain and the humiliation with the same graphic skill he brings to his account of a visit to a bullfight. His frank account of his operation ordeal would strike fear into any man aged around 60. But the prostate cancer sufferer is not necessarily required to take part in some sort of bloody bullfight.
Murphy does not tell us whether he was given the less traumatic option of hormonal treatment followed by radiotherapy. Instead, it appears he made a snap decision which may not have been the wisest. He writes: ‘When the consultant gave me the news about the tumours, instantly I said to him, ‘take them out’. I was so terrified by it that I didn’t want to wait the three months until the next consultation in order to have considered other options, whereas he was assuring me that prostate cancer is slow growing.’
Perhaps he considered that to digress in order to explain to his readers that prostate treatment was not always so terrifying an experience might have diverted attention away from his principal subject. Which is himself. He makes no apology for this, and indeed should not have to. It is his life. He echoes an ancient defiance in this regard when he writes: ‘From the cradle I’ve had to take on board that there’s a radical difference between the layered way that I think and other people’s thinking processes: ‘thus, gentle reader, myself am the groundwork of my book’. Thoughtfully, an addendum carries contact numbers for people worried about prostate cancer.
Michael Murphy has told his story on air, and in his book, in order to break a taboo of silence surrounding this quite common male affliction. At Five in the Afternoon is a brave and absorbing piece of work, but men should be assured that the story does not always have to be so horrific.
CRITIQUE OF AT FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON BY MARIE WALSHE IN THE REVIEW, A PUBLICATION OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR PSYHOANALYSIS AND PSYCHOTHERAPY IN IRELAND, AUTUMN 2009, ISSUE 16, PAGES 21/22.
At first glance, Michael Murphy’s memoir is indeed a formidable narrative. Its title “At Five in the Afternoon” refers to the traditional time of the bullfight, the intrepid matador’s appointment with destiny. The legend underneath the title reads “My battle with Male Cancer” emphasizing this fatal theme. I was not unaware of Michael Murphy’s treatment for cancer; I had heard his interview on radio during last year. I welcomed his candid account of the post-surgical complications, and I cringed in sympathy with him at Derek Mooney’s brutal question “Is there any lead in your pencil?” (on RTE Radio 1)… But, as Murphy’s experience here stipulates, cancer breaches the psyche’s defences as easily as it does the soma’s.
Murphy has written a poignant, moving memoir. He has woven language and heritage together to create a lyrical quilting of his suffering… Limited only by language, a limit he assails with verve and erudition, Murphy details the almost limitless suffering of the human condition. The language is frequently other, with Spanish, Latin, Irish, French and German references sprinkled throughout the narrative. As such, it mimics the analytic discourse of the other in its random associations, the metaphor-laden “as-ifs” and “what-ifs”.
This is a deeply personal account uttered in a public forum, and it is as his public persona that he writes: the newsreader of 35 years, now broadcasting the news of his own life-or-death battle. He depicts a brutal, Mayo childhood marked by separation from his four siblings. He is the second of his mother’s sons to have cancer, and he still grieves for that brother who took his place at their father’s table.
He introduces his alter ego, the analyst, his professional anonymity one more of the objects to be lost. The chapters split the narrative into themes, objects, relations, signifiers. Each separate battle with loss – a father, a brother, a friend, innocence, sexuality – charts a series of real, symbolic and imaginary woundings. Each anecdote marks another cut: family, seminary, surgery.
Of course his relation to his cancer is an Imaginary one; the scars and post-surgical incontinence are felt as an imaginary wounding, a narcissistic injury. His battle with male cancer has forced him to address his own male-ness as he re-lives his relation to male ideals: father, brother, abuser, lover, analyst.
He speaks at length of his own experience in analysis with a series of analysts: Freudian, Jungian and Lacanian. It was unsettling to read this chapter. Marie Cardinal’s anonymous “little doctor” in The Words to Say It is replaced here by the named analysts. My discomfiture at his disclosure of his analyst’s name, and of himself as analysand on the couch, surprised me. Le sujet supposé savoir is replaced by le sujet appelé; the pages are invested with the phallic signification of a name… This is a de-idealisation that Murphy challenges me to share: a rending of the mask that privileges the analyst’s anonymity. I wondered what his analysands must have felt, reading through these self-disclosures.
In his analysis, he identified his lifelong attraction for “negative attention”, for “humiliation”, the image he had of himself as a “scapegoat”. Perhaps it is this which compelled him to publicise his “mutilation”, his post-surgical emasculation. This is a series of radical “cuts” – by analysts, by colleagues, by family and friends, each one named as fully complicit. Perhaps, for Murphy, this naming knots up the Real and the Imaginary in a Symbolic invocation.
There are names throughout the book: people, places, pets. Of course for the reader, its attraction lies in the names that evoke a powerful transference reaction, names such as Cormac Gallagher, former course director at St. Vincent’s, names such as APPI. Is APPI mentioned anywhere else outside of the rarefied atmosphere of its own publications? I confess to a certain panicked reaction on discovering the chapter about Murphy’s presentation of papers to the APPI Congress in 2004. His description of that unfortunate experience depicts an organisation in chaos. What he perceived as the sadistic projections of APPI that day were another manifestation for him of the rejecting Other of his childhood; once more, a transference on a lacking, inconsistent Other.
The missing character in this narrative is Murphy’s voice; this is a book that demands a soundtrack. Radical prostatectomy notwithstanding, Murphy has gone back to broadcasting and his voice can be heard, once more reading the news, a solemn invocation. “I embrace my listener all over with my voice and capture them. It’s a seduction” he writes. At times, I found the text overlong, and it occurred to me that Murphy has been seduced by his own voice in this book, in his self-revelations here and in his extraordinarily frank interviews on radio and TV.
It is tempting to analyse this book and, consequently, this author. Perhaps it is what is expected of this review: a diagnosis of the author as neurosis; a reduction of his narrative to a set of signifiers. That would be a cut too far, I believe. Notwithstanding his many years in analysis, there is suffering yet, and his voice resonates with his suffering through this narrative, articulating it in an outpouring of the drive as parole. Murphy’s book is an admirable attempt to resolve his current symbolic impasse, the product of what he refers to as “sixty years of dammed-up internalisations”.
Review of At Five in the Afternoon by Vivian Boland, OP, Blackfriars, Oxford, in Religious Life Review, Volume 49, No 262, May/June 2010, page 187:
Michael Murphy’s is one of the best-known faces in Ireland, his voice even more so, since he reads the news both on television and radio. This enthralling memoir owes its existence to his recent battle with prostate cancer, a battle in which he looked death in the face, as the matador does at five in the afternoon. That it is about cancer, and male cancer specifically, already gives the book special interest for readers of Religious Life Review, many of whom are nurses, chaplains and counsellors, and many of whom will themselves be living with cancer. Its interest for this readership is heightened by the face that Murphy spent a couple of years with the Dominicans and that his experience continues to inform not just his memories but his self-understanding and the way in which he lives his catholic faith.
His recollections of his time with the Dominicans are not always exact in a strictly historical sense but that is not for the most part relevant to the kind of memoir this is. Murphy is a psychoanalyst, and these chapters read like narrative transcripts of flowing analytical sessions in which he is both analyst and analysand. The order is roughly chronological though not slavishly so, they can begin from whatever memory next comes to mind, and the same personalities, events, and concerns are visited again and again from slightly different perspectives.
There are many shocking revelations, and not just those associated with the treatment and consequences of prostatic cancer. The physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his father is one, and the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of others is another. One hopes that his departure from the Dominicans did not happen simply in the way and for the reasons that he gives. His memories of “Fr McLoughlin the metaphysician” (who was probably Fr Richard McLoughlin the biblical scholar?) and of Fr Henry Flanagan, the artist in Newbridge, are wonderfully touching and encouraging.
The key characters in the book, for good and ill, are men. A central chord in the music of Michael Murphy’s life is his ambivalent relationship with his father. He does not make any connection between this and his homosexuality: in fact the latter is simply taken for granted throughout and is not an issue for him, either psychologically or morally. There are other fathers too, not least those distinguished Dominican (McGauran, O’Beirne) in earlier generations of his family whose presence must have been a potent one. Saint Dominic remains a kind of father for him also as he recounts visits to Calaruega, Dominic’s birthplace and to the chapel at Vance, containing Matisse’s famous painting of Dominic. Murphy thinks of himself still as a “hound of the Lord”, preparing to deliver the news bulletin with a kind of priestly care since his task is to communicate the truth as clearly and effectively as he can to those listening and watching.
There must be many stories like this to be told in Ireland, by people who have experienced some or all of what Murphy has lived: sexual abuse, physical abuse, time in a seminary or religious community, homosexuality, the quest for acceptable ways of reconciling what one knows and feels with what the teachings and spirituality of the Church allows. Such stories, told in this way, require a different kind of atmosphere to that which normally attends the public square. There is much to be remembered and much to be forgiven. In the first place, and above all, there is much to be understood. Many people will be grateful to Michael Murphy not just for his courage in speaking publicly about the reality of male cancer but also proposing and illustrating another kind of discourse, one which is eminently Dominican and ecclesial because it seeks to speak the truth in love.
[Michael’s reply to this review can be read on the “Press” page of this website, under the heading “Michael’s response, in Religious Life Review, July/August 2010”]
