Toplight
Review by Walter Cummins
Peter Murphy relates the story of his adolescent and youthful perpetual drunkenness in the second person, addressing the person whose life he explores as “you” with a particular effect. Most often when writers use the “you” subject they mean to create a bond between writer and reader, as if the reader could be enduring the same experiences. But instead Murphy is capturing the distance between the man he is and the youth he was, a person whose deeds he recalls with a degree of detachment. This “you” is a person functioning in a form of stupor, obsessed with the persistent need for drink that makes him constantly tipsy, a person baffled from full awareness, someone capable of blacking out for entire days, an inauthentic Peter Murphy:
Four years later when you have your own car, you do your own car, you do a Dean Moriarity, put it in neutral, turn off the headlights and coast down a hill in the dark. Trouble is, you fool, your Bel Air has power steering, which means your steering wheel freezes and you almost go off the road. By this point, your life is like the Chevy, fast and out of control.
Yet people liked him, saw abilities that led them to offer him jobs and pick him to edit his school yearbook, for which he collects payment in advance, money that finances his drinking and that he tells himself he would repay but never does. Girls were attracted to him, including the dysfunctional The Crazy One, whom he knows he should break from yet stays with for several years in shared decadence.
Through his years of drunkenness, other people grasped the appeal of Murphy, a man with a drive to write poetry almost as much as he craved drink. Some saw the talent and offered time to help him develop his gift and eventually become the Peter Murphy who published books and became an acknowledged mentor to others, ultimately with a program named for him at Stockton University in New Jersey.
But why was the person of such ability so lost as a boy and young man? Was it the lack of sense of home and place? He was born in Wales, his mother Welsh, his father an American World War II GI. The family, including his older brother Paul, relocated to Queens in New York for his schooling that shifted between Catholic and public schools and for a time a boarding school that confused him even more. He was a poor student, in good part because of his drinking. He flunked out of St. Bonaventure University and then scrambled to find a place that would allow him to take twelve credits and maintain a deferment from the Vietnam draft.
His mother, a compulsive smoker, he was told died of lung cancer when Murphy was a child, but at age twenty he flew to London and then traveled to villages in Wales where he met his mother’s family. Their welcome convinced him to ignore his return flight and stay much longer in Wales for, as a chapter title indicates, “Becoming Welsh.” For the first time Murphy finds a place where he can be at home and work at connecting with his “you”:
You sail across the Atlantic three times in your first three years. Wales to New York. New York to Wales. Wales to New York. Then your mother Thelma dies, and you get moved from home to home, home to home, home to home. Despite this, and despite everything else that happens, you believe your childhood is normal, just like everyone else. But like most things you believe, you’re wrong.
Much of what he was wrong about came from ignorance and confusion, like his assumption that Catholic School and Public School were equivalent designations for buildings of classrooms based on different belief systems. It took him a long time to realize that functioning while continually drunk was not a standard thing to do. For years he accepted the family story that his mother had died from cancer until his father finally revealed she had committed suicide, severely depressed, overdosing on a bottle of aspirin. Essentially, Murphy had to come to understand he was responsible for choices that would determine who he was and what his life would be.
The crucial scene in which he faces a fundamental test, probably the most important of his existence, takes place in Newport, Wales, at the conclusion of a Bahá’i religious meeting he had attended still half drunk because he had promised the hosts, Viv and Rita, he would be there. When people are leaving, he craves a drink at the bar of the Windsor Castle Hotel, which had been his mother’s family’s business. But he is stopped by the hosts who ask him to sign the paper that pledges him to become a Bahá’i. Doing so means a commitment to giving up alcohol. Sticking to it means that he has changed his life in an essential manner. He does.
Soon after the signing Murphy returns to the U.S. Finally sober and working at operating a crane or hoisting machine, after two years of not drinking, he enrolls in Queens College as a geology major, also studying poetry and eventually publishing his work in significant magazines and eventually books.
The last chapter of the book is titled “Becoming Peter Murphy,” and concludes with his belief that writing, poetry, and Bahá’i saved his life. He can acknowledge that he is becoming a proper human being, which is “good enough for now.” At last, he knows who “you” is.
