The remarkable story of Homer and Langley Collyer, a pair of rich hermits who died in squalor some 50 years ago, has long been part of New York's mythology. The talented sons of an eminent and wealthy Manhattan family, they had lives that took a strange turn after the first world war: Langley came back from the battlefields mustard-gassed, they lost their parents in the 1919 influenza epidemic and Homer later went blind. Slowly the brothers withdrew from the world and clung together in an eerie, Miss Havisham-like existence that lasted several decades, during which they became compulsive hoarders and packed their house in Harlem with old newspapers and over 100 tons of junk, from prams and broken pianos to jars of medical specimens. Finally, acting on a tip-off and looking for the source of a vile stench, the police broke down the door and found the brothers' decomposing bodies.
The two have figured in several fictions since the 1950s and have even been joked about on Frasier. Now the highly regarded American novelist EL Doctorow has made them the subject of his new novel. Narrated by Homer, the saner of the pair, it charts the increasing eccentricity of Langley. Early in the book, the pair go out to nightclubs and even date women, but as their lives turn inwards Langley begins to accumulate newspapers and whatever else he can find: before long, there is a half-dismantled Model T Ford in the dining room (just as there was in reality). With the departure of their cook, the Collyers' last link with normality is gone. As they become more isolated the shutters go up, the utilities are cut off and Langley turns to making booby traps among the tunnels of rubbish.
The real men died in 1947, but Doctorow takes great liberties with their story, and his weird duo lives on to see the Vietnam era and the moon landings, becoming far friendlier and almost neighbourly in Doctorow's sunnier version of their lives. In reality, their house was besieged by local children throwing rocks at the windows, but Doctorow lodges a group of peacenik flower children with them for a happy, shambolic month, until they go dancing out of the front door again in a hippie conga line. At one point, Homer feels their old brownstone mansion is not just a house, "but a road on which Langley and I were travelling like pilgrims". In Doctorow's hands their lives have become an adventure - a kind of indoor road movie - and they have become a curiously heroic pair, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or a couple of Beckett characters.
The title has an oddly beguiling quality, like that of a children's book, and this winsomeness is part of the novel as a whole: it is sentimental, intellectually elaborate and filled with self-consciously fine writing. The blind sensualist, Homer, enjoys music ("it was not just a piano in front of you, it was a universe") and blackberries ("biting into their wet warm pericarped pulp"). Langley, meanwhile, develops his Theory of Replacements, in which nothing really changes, and his newspapers become part of a grand project to put together Collyer's Universal News: an eternal newspaper that will replace all the others with a single, one-off edition "that could be read forevermore as sufficient to any day thereof".
Throughout the novel, Doctorow uses the brothers as honourable outsiders to comment on the cultural and moral state of America. He has always been interested in New York history, social comment on America's faults, and fact-bending plays with reality (writing Freud into Ragtime, and the Rosenberg spies into The Book of Daniel). All those elements are here, too, but this is a novel uncomfortably balanced between large literary resonances on the one hand and the more disturbing reality of the historical Collyer brothers on the other.
Advertisement
Homer and Langley's real literary resonance should be with Edgar Allan Poe. Following the Collyers' fearful withdrawal into their dark crumbling house, the two met in real life with tragic and unsavoury ends, Langley crushed by one of his own traps and the helpless Homer - blind and paralysed, and without food and water - starving to death. The madness is missing from this version of the story, and what we have instead is an enjoyably kooky piece of big-hearted Americana about a couple of lovable oddballs.
Homer and Langley by EL Doctorow
Little, Brown £11.99 pp208