A Fine Mess

I doubt that very many of the present-day locals know who the Collyer brothers were, but there was a time when the names of Homer and Langley Collyer were known to everyone in New York City and a considerable number of people elsewhere in America. In 1947 their rotting corpses were found in the brownstone house that once stood at 2078 Fifth Avenue, where they had lived since 1909, surrounded by a hundred tons of junk, including a canoe, an X-ray machine, 14 pianos, the rusty chassis of a Model T, some 25,000 books, hundreds of bundles of old newspapers, and an assortment of glass jars containing pickled human organs.

How did such a bizarre state of affairs come to pass? No one knew, and no one knows. Homer and Langley Collyer were the children of a gynecologist who had moved uptown to Harlem in the days when it still harbored plenty of well-off whites. In 1919 Dr. Collier deserted his family, also for reasons unknown, and his sons took over the brownstone on Fifth Avenue and lived there for the rest of their lives. After illness confined Homer to a wheelchair and robbed him of his sight, Langley gave up his other activities and devoted himself to caring for his older brother.

The eccentricities of the Collyers, who never bothered to pay their bills and so were forced to do without gas, electricity, running water, or a telephone, were sufficiently familiar to their neighbors to have gotten them into the newspapers on more than one occasion. Still, they usually took care to keep out of sight, and it was only when an anonymous caller told the police that strange smells were coming from their house that the reclusive brothers made the tabloids at last.

Homer’s body was found after a two-hour search, but it took another two weeks for the police to uncover Langley, who was buried under a mountain of newspapers. Further investigation revealed that the house was full of homemade booby traps designed to ensnare burglars, one of which had killed Langley. Unable to escape or call for help, Homer starved to death a few days later. The crumbling house was soon torn down, and the lot on which it had stood since 1879 remained vacant until 1965, when it was turned into a park.

No letters or diaries were unearthed in the Collyer house, and little was known about the brothers beyond the bare facts of their life and death. The only first-hand description of their living arrangements comes from a 1938 newspaper interview with Langley.

“We’ve no telephone, and we’ve stopped opening our mail,” he told a reporter for the New York World-Telegram. “You can’t imagine how free we feel.” Two biographers subsequently managed to fill in some of the factual blanks, but to this day no one has succeeded in coming up with a satisfactory explanation of why the Collyers cut themselves off from the world.

Everyone loves a mystery, and the impenetrable mystery of the Collyer brothers effortlessly worked its magic on the American public. Their names became a byword for reclusiveness–Art Carney made mention of them in a 1956 episode of The Honeymooners–and though they have long since faded from the common stock of pop culture reference, novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters continue to be fascinated by the peculiar residents of the newspaper-crammed brownstone on Fifth Avenue.

Now E.L. Doctorow has written a shortish novel about the Collyer brothers and their times. As usual with Doctorow, Homer & Langley is a casserole of outright fiction and fictionalized fact, heavily sauced with deadpan irony, sprinkled with politics and written in the faux-na -f style of Ragtime, the book whose commercial success enabled its high-minded author to embrace the cushy lifestyle of a limousine liberal.

It is, of course, no secret that Doctorow is a man of the left, and that his books are vehicles for his ardent political convictions. In The Book of Daniel, his novel about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, he describes those enduringly popular heroes of the red-diaper set as the revolutionary heirs of Jefferson and Lincoln and Andrew Jackson and Tom Paine. As for Ragtime, the novel that made Doctorow rich and famous, suffice it to say that no one who reads this fable of the early days of American radicalism will be left in any doubt of its author s contempt for all things bourgeois.

Homer & Langley covers much of the same historical turf, the difference being that Doctorow s Collyer brothers do not die in 1947 but hang on until the 70s, long enough to see Richard Nixon laid low by Watergate. Once again history is turned into a passing show, and once again the details are systematically diverted to didactic ends.

Is it World War II yet? Then you can bet that the faithful servants of Homer and Langley will be convicted of the crime of being Japanese-Americans and hauled off to a concentration camp. In the world of E.L. Doctorow, all policemen are crooks with badges, all Negroes are noble, everything happens for a reason, and the reason is ever and always that America is no damn good.

But even though Homer & Langley is very nearly as heavy-handed as Ragtime, the main problem with the book is that it fails to bring the Collyers to fictional life, mainly because Doctorow is unable to supply a dramatically convincing account of how and why they became hermits and compulsive hoarders. Their retreat into the twilight world of madness is simply something that happens bit by bit.

Needless to say, this may be what actually happened to them–real life is rarely as neat as art–but it is not the stuff of which compelling novels are made, especially when they’re written in the etiolated, blandly coy prose to which Doctorow has accustomed us (“My parents are together for eternity at the Woodlawn Cemetery up past what was the village of Fordham, though it is all the Bronx now, and of course unless there s an earthquake”).

How might one put the unlikely story of the Collyer brothers to more effective fictional use? It happens that, in 1954, Marcia Davenport, a once-successful, now-forgotten novelist, wrote a bestselling novel about the Collyers called My Brother’s Keeper in which she supplied them with a cherchez-la-femme backstory involving an Italian soprano and an illegitimate child. I’d be the last to claim that My Brother’s Keeper is a serious piece of work, but it proves unexpectedly hard to put down, not least because of the skill with which Davenport weaves together her made-up plot with the real-life story that inspired it. Unlike Doctorow’s Collyers, Davenport’s Collyers make sense.

As for the real Collyers, they remain as unknowable now as they were in their lifetimes, and it is unlikely that anyone will ever get to the bottom of their folie deux. Not that such strange creatures can ever be dissected, least of all by the blunt instrument that is modern psychiatry. To call them victims of obsessive-compulsive disorder is like calling Hannibal Lecter the victim of an eating disorder. They cannot be explained, merely described, and the other great failing of Homer & Langley is that it doesn’t describe them memorably.

My Brother’s Keeper, by contrast, may not be a very good novel, but I can vouch for its memorability: I picked it up the other day for the first time since I’d read it as a boy, and I was startled by how many of the twists and turns of Davenport’s women’s-magazine plot were firmly lodged in my mind four decades later.

And what of the descendants of the Collyers neighbors? They aren’t much inclined, it seems, to talk about the strange white men who lived in the house on the corner of Fifth Avenue, much less to burnish their legend. The Harlem Fifth Avenue Block Association sought seven years ago to change the name of Collyer Brothers Park to Reading Tree Garden. “They did nothing positive in the area, they’re not a positive image,” said Celia Moultrie, the group’s president. But nothing came of her initiative, and the plaque on the fence that surrounds the park remains unchanged.

E.L. Doctorow takes a less jaundiced view of the Collyer brothers. “It’s all very well to make them characters and weirdos and quote odd things they may have said, but I thought it was a momentous thing they did,” he explained to the New York Times earlier this year. “It’s as if that house was another country. ”

Nor need you read very far in Homer & Langley to sense that he actually admires the Collyers. Why? Because they refused to play by the rules of the gilded age that spawned them. Indeed, the only period of American life in the 20th century that Doctorow’s Collyers find at all satisfactory is–surprise, surprise–the ’60s. One fine October day they cautiously emerge from their Harlem redoubt, stroll downtown to an antiwar rally in Central Park, bring a group of friendly hippies home with them, and discover to their amazement and delight that the time is no longer out of joint:

Somehow, though, I doubt that the members of the Harlem Fifth Avenue Block Association will soon be persuaded that there was anything momentous about the grisly fate of the last occupants of the house at 2078 Fifth Avenue. As Ray Charles remarked of the poverty in which he grew up, “It’s easy for people who eat warm food and sleep in warm beds to talk about it, but it’s detestable when you live it.” Few of those who have done so and lived to tell the tale are inclined to romanticize the marginal existences they worked so hard to escape.

Unlike E.L. Doctorow, they know weirdness when they see it.

Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and chief culture critic of Commentary, is the author of the forthcoming Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.