HOMER & LANGLEY
by E. L. Doctorow
Book Quote:
“There are moments
when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake,
I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair
to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is
not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but
itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become
more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and
having only my blank endless mind to live in.”
As one reads Homer
& Langley and is swept along on its strange tide, one tries to raise one’s
head intermittently to admire the craft. But that craft is, like the shoes made
by the elves in story, so seamless, so perfect, that it’s hard to grasp until
one is deposited on the other shore and left to linger for a while.
The novel uses the
theme of the real-life case of the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer,
who lived on 5th Avenue in New York from the 1880s to 1947. A case of great
notoriety, the brothers (suffering from extreme compulsive hoarding disorder)
effectively mewed themselves up within their house. Over the decades this filled
with newspapers, collections of mainly non-functional items, and garbage. They
disassociated themselves from the outside world to the extent that their
electricity and water supplies were cut off – a situation they did not attempt
to rectify. After their death (caused directly by the accumulated items within
the house), over 100 tons of hoarded rubbish were removed from the house.
The case is of such
notoriety that dramatisations and fictionalisations of it abound. Novels
include Marcia Davenport’s My Brother’s Keeper (1954) and Franz Lidz’s 2003
Ghostly Men (a history of the brothers). Stephen King used details from the
story in Salem’s Lot (1975). Movies either based on or inspired partially by
the story include “Unstrung Heroes” (1995), a movie based on Ghostly Men.
References to the case crop up in numerous TV serials, and at least six plays
have been based directly or loosely on the story. It is so well documented
there is little point in listing them all again here. Suffice it to say, the
case is well-known.
Unlike the bulk of
writing pertaining to this case, Doctorow does not focus on the squalor and
scandal of the situation: those aspects which are most titillating to the
popular media and the public. The first-person narrator, Homer (“I’m Homer, the
blind brother”) recounts the past years of their life within the house with a
diction so gentle, so unassuming, thoughtful and musical that it is well into
the narrative before we start to suspect things are seriously amiss. The novel
pretty much comments on itself when Homer’s “Muse” Jacqueline (the French
reporter) tells him:
“There is music in
words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking. (…) You think a word and you
can hear its sound. (…) words have music and if you are a musician you will
write to hear them.”
The sound of Homer
& Langley is of a soft voice by a fireside, never too fast or too loud, and
always considerate of the listener. The strange narrative is gripping not
because of drastic happenings or fast action, but because one doesn’t want to
get up from that fireside, or stop listening to the voice.
This is not to
ignore the laconic humour that pervades most of the book. The tone is so
deferential and quiet that quirky tongue-in-cheek moments creep up on us
unexpectedly. It’s ambiguous, though, as to how much self-awareness Homer has.
As to whose tongue is in their cheek, Homer’s or Doctorow’s, is not always entirely
clear.
Despite its genteel
tone and historical setting, the impression Homer & Langley gives by the
end of the narrative is that it has more in common with typically
post-apocalyptic settings and themes than with fin-de-siecle writing, the
latter of which it more closely resembles superficially. Why?
One of its main
themes is consumerism. Langley’s grand “Theory of Replacements” which leads to
the disastrous accumulation of junk inside the house states that “everything is
replaced.” Children are replacements for their parents, current events are
merely a cycle of typecasts which endlessly repeat each other: as one is
forgotten, another immediately takes its place. Langley, however, is a mass of
contradictions. Despite his cherished theory, none of the myriad of items he
brings into his own house are ever “replaced” – they merely get buried. The
brothers cannot find anything useful they know they have (such as candles in a
black-out) because they have long-since been covered in other items.
Langley’s fatalistic
view is that as humanity is such a polluter and exploiter, the sooner it blows
itself up the better, as it will make way for some other more worthwhile
species. This tends to be the conclusion that novels of apocalyptic devastation
often pose, and generally stems (as in this case) from a direct disgust with
consumerism and bureaucratised waste. Langley, however, is also the ultimate
consumer: always acquiring, never passing anything on. It is in this way that
Langley’s own theory of greed bringing about the demise of mankind is fulfilled
in miniature within his own house, when he is finally overwhelmed by his own
falling booby-trap of junk.
Langley’s more
confrontational nature in response to the pressures of the modern is the
perfect foil, however, to what is possibly the main focus: the world of Homer,
the narrator. What seems at first to be a gentle narration of a stoic, romantic
individual turns slowly towards us until we finally see it for what it is: a
comment on the process of growing old. At this point, it is useful to look at
which aspects of this story the author has decided to change.
Most pointedly, he
has made Homer blind at a much younger age than in reality. Homer Collyer
actually lost his sight at the age of 52, not 14 as in the novel. By depriving
the character of visual input at this age, Doctorow effectively chrysalises
part of his psyche into the innocence of a sheltered pubescent boy, to
highlight his lack of culpability for the famous squalor surrounding him. It
emphasises his idealism and romanticism. Another significant detail which has
been altered is that it was actually Langley who was the musician, not Homer.
Homer, on the other hand, was the one with law skills, not Langley as in the
book. The allocation of all “sharper” capabilities like law to Langley, and the
more sensitive ones to Homer again help to accentuate his romantic innocence.
So why is it so
important that Homer is not culpable? His role is to observe the progress of
time and not to alter it – and once again, here facts have been adjusted
dramatically to accentuate the effect. In the novel, the brothers live on in
their house well into the 1970s, possibly the 80s (making them almost a century
old), when in fact they both died in 1947. Doctorow has extended their lives by
decades to emphasise the difference between the life they knew as children and
the situation they find themselves at the end of it. As boys they rode in
horse-drawn carriages and the streets had the organic smell of manure and
leather. By the end Homer is nearly knocked down by a passing car, the air is
filled with exhaust fumes and the Cold War creates global fear.
The passage of time
brings changes, which the brothers try to interpret in their own way. People
come in and out of the house; lives are touched briefly, but always revert to
the status of the two of them, together in their isolation. And as the junk
accumulates, the isolation increases.
Because Homer is
blind, he relies on his other senses to interpret the world. He is particularly
proud of his sense of hearing, and Langley supports this by describing him as
bat-like. Homer navigates by hearing the differences in sound patterns as
objects are shifted around the room: as he puts it, by the volume of air they
displace. “I feel shapes as they push the air away, or I feel the heat from
things, you can turn me around till I’m dizzy, but I can still tell where the
air is filled in with something solid.”
Homer’s ability to
navigate the world around him decreases incrementally. As a boy, still fully
sighted, he says of himself: “I was in the fullness of my senses, then.” Then
he loses his sight, but with his fine hearing and his stoical acceptance he
does not feel it to be too much of an impediment. As the years progress he
realises more and more how much his lack of sight bars him from a normal family
life, until towards the end of the novel he also loses his hearing and the
world of utter isolation closes in with a totality that is unbearable.
Meanwhile, the
diminishment of visual powers has been firmly tied to memory. He narrates: “My
memories of our long-dead parents are considerably dimmed, as if having fallen
further and further back in time has made them smaller, with less visible
detail as if time has become space, become distance, and figures from the past,
even your father and mother, are too far away to be recognised.” While Homer
himself increasingly relies on memories, those very memories are described as
having a finite number of uses. Each time a memory is used (remembered), it
loses a little of its gloss, its immediacy, until the edges are vague and
features are generalised.
As the potency of
input sense capacity goes down and the material store of sustaining memories is
used up, the house around him increases its clutter – a factor which directly
makes his life difficult as he cannot navigate round the objects as he used to
do. There is too much junk in the way, he cannot feel the displaced air as he
did previously. The junk which obscures useful items like candles is the
material equivalent of the “memory junk” that accumulates as a person ages, and
itself forms a barrier between them and the outside world: in this case made
literal by the absolute barricading of the front door so that all ingress and
egress is barred.
Doctorow manages
the tempo of the isolation carefully. The real-life brothers’ major utilities
were disconnected in 1928, nearly two decades before their deaths, but the
account of this in the book comes very near the end. The long-drawn-out
downwards trend (masked to Homer partially by his own volition, partially by
his lack of sensory input) continues steadily until, as in the decay of an aged
body, things suddenly start to fall apart in good earnest. “Langley and I (…)
had metamorphosed, we were the ghosts who haunted the house we had once lived
in. Not able to see myself or hear my own footsteps, I was coming around to the
same idea.”
In the latter
stages, the two inseparable brothers are connected only by a small tunnel
through the debris, and as Homer can neither hear nor see his brother he says
again of him, as for his parents: “I sense the passage of time as a spatial
thing, as Langley’s voice has become fainter and fainter, as if he has walked
off down a long road, of is falling away in space. (…) It is almost as if the
reality is his distance from me and the illusion is his presence.”
Diminishment of
attachment to the living world experienced by so many millions of elderly
people in our increasingly ageing society is manifested in concrete form by the
vehicle of the Collyer brothers’ story. Homer and Langley is a small and
mellifluous piece which leaves a haunting, reverberating note of sadness of
ageing and regret at the transience of things, and is not easily forgotten.
(Book Review originally published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, Sept 2010)
