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E.L. Doctorow’s novel Homer and Langley, is based on the real life story of the two Collyer brothers of Harlem who lived alone in their childhood home on Fifth Avenue. Homer narrates the story, which takes place over the course of most of the 20th century. In this fictionalized account, Doctorow weaves numerous historical events into the lives of these fascinating characters in a lyrical and philosophical manner which belies the axiom that truth is stranger than fiction. The romanticization of their lives, does not do justice to the real life story which is particularly bizarre, albeit not without poetic and artistic merit.

Collyer House. 1947

In March, 1947, an anonymous person told the police there was a dead body in the Collyer house.The authorities did not have an easy time gaining entrance to the home. They started by trying to remove tons of garbage from the front foyer, which consisted of newspapers, phonebooks, furniture, boxes, and other miscellaneous debris. Unsuccessful in their attempts, a patrolman broke a window on the second floor in order to gain entry. After climbing through junk for two hours, he found the body of the elder brother Homer among the boxes and trash. Missing from the home, however, was Langley, the younger of the two recluses. The hunt for Langley began, and authorities searched for him as far away as Atlantic City. A disturbing realization took place three weeks later, unfortunately, when Langley’s body was was found ten feet from his older brother’s.

Because of the vast amount of garbage in the house, his body wasn’t unearthed until then. Langley had been crushed to death by one of his many booby-traps that he had made to deter people’s entry into their palace of junk. Langley actually had died first. He was crushed while bringing food to his elder brother, who was blind. Langley fed Homer a diet of one hundred oranges per week to try and restore his sight. Believing that the diet of oranges would restore Homer’s vision, Langley also saved every newspaper so that Homer could eventually read them when his sight returned.Authorities eventually removed more than 100 tons of trash from the Collyer brothers’ house. Some of the more unusual items included human pickled organs, the chassis of an old Model T, fourteen pianos, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, and more than 25,000 books. To the Collyer’s its wasn’t junk, but part of a poetic assemblage of objects. In sum, avant-garde environmental art.

Collyer house

The story does recall the Grey gardens of Edith Bouvier Beale, the eccentric first cousin of Jackie Kennedy who lived in isolation with her mother in a relationship characterized by strong and dysfunctional ties. Edith, maintained artistic aspirations and practiced her song and dance routines on a daily basis with her mother in a strange daily ritual that moved between argument, the arts, and reconciliation; all carried out in a tear down home without heating, plumbing and garbage removal.  With the recent passing of J.D. Salinger,another famous recluse,  reports of what will be found in the writer’s home are sure to recall the story of ”Little Edie”.

Grey Gardens 209. Michael Sucsy. '' But that is only partially the truth. There is a greater fear the story taps: that the dream is only a fantasy, that promise is only an intoxicant, and that one is driving inebriated to an end in which, to be perverse, shards of the dream get lodged in the head like windshield glass.''

”Mr. Salinger also perfected the great trick of literary irony — of validating what you mean by saying less than, or even the opposite of, what you intend.Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times in 1963, “Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation.’ ” Certainly, there, in the Collyer story, as Doctorow surmised,was an artifice of irony that went missing and astray from the descriptive hoarding complex theory that has been their defining moment.

In Doctorow’s book, Homer, the much more perceptive of the two, provides lots of details about their life, loves, and philosophy. One particularly poignant revelation came from a discussion during World War II. Doctorow wrote, “So for a day or two I did feel as Langley felt about warmaking: your enemy brought out your dormant primal instincts, he lit up the primitive circuits of your brain” The two brothers also interact with a large cast of odd and disparate characters. One, a writer from France, who travels about America “trying to get” America so she can “understand it” inspires the blind Homer  by urging him to write their story. She tells him, “You think a word and you can hear its sound. I am telling you what I know – words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them”

Grey Gardens documentary. 1975.

We keep objects, in part, because they are the closest representations we have of ourselves. These are the things that have formed the shape of our time. In excess, that nightmare of identity was materialized in the Harlem house of the Collyer brothers. Langley, the younger, prowled the streets at night collecting. It was as if they ended their life when their work was finished. Police found the blind Homer, in a ragged bathrobe, shoulder length hair, and lying next to a leaking container of rancid milk and a copy of the Philadelphia Jewish Morning Journal of February, 22, 1920.

Their father was a gynecologist and their mother was a passionate reader of the Greek classics. Homer studied law and Langley  majored in engineering at Columbia, though never held a job. They could never bring themselves to leave their Harlem house. It was as if their own fear kept them there. Two frail, genteel men with their fine old New York accents, barricading themselves against a world that was in every sense getting blacker and blacker. By the time the police and sanitation men were finished, 140 tons, or 280,000 thing pounds had been carted away. Thirty eight years of collecting. In their mind, they had established a logical and direct relationship with the material world. Their accumulations were very carefully arranged as a form of abstract expressionism meets intricate collapsable architecture and kinetic sculpture. There were precarious canyons of newsprint and alarm systems that would spew garbage and tin cans on the heads of the unwary and uninvited. There were narrow maze like tunnels connecting the floors.

''Little' Edith Bouvier Beale (1917 - 2002, right), a cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, at home with her mother 'Big Edie' (1896 - 1977) in Grey Gardens, a run-down mansion in East Hampton, New York, 1974. This is a scene from the Maysles brothers documentary 'Grey Gardens'. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)''

Certainly, the Collyer story symbolically suggests the complex scope of industrial society’s unprecedented need to shed substances that are used but no longer wanted. The irony is that a system capable of producing ten million cars per year cannot be slowed down to adjust to the irregularity in its operation that re-used,  and recycled components might cause. A labor force that is paid enough, or have been spoilt enough, to have the habit of buying back its produce cannot be put to work picking and digging for valuable sherds in the wrack of last year’s mechanical marvels, or yesterdays. The Collyer’s, like humanity was caught between two worlds. One was the preference to drown in the waste of their pleasures, held in check by a desire to control them in their environment in the hope of prolonging their lives. Ultimately, their own small world was not able to sustain the limited population of two living in it; a reflection of the assumption held by many that the earth will reach this tipping point as well.