A Fine Mess

Homer & Langley

A Novel
by E. L. Doctorow
Random House, 224 pp., $26

If you take a bus to Manhattan and keep an eye peeled as you roll through Harlem, you might spot a tiny park on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street. It's just big enough to hold a couple of benches and a few trees, and a plaque on the fence that protects the bright green grass from passersby identifies it as the Collyer Brothers Park.

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.