homer & langley

Homer & Langley is a novel by E.L. Doctorow, and it follows the lives of two brothers living in New York city from their boyhood to old age in their family mansion on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. The Collyer Brothers, were left alone when the flu pandemic of 1918-1920 carried their parents away not long after the older brother, Langley, returned from the Great War with his lungs burned and his body scarred by mustard gas.

The story is narrated in the voice of the younger brother, Homer, who has slowly lost hist sight in his early twenties, and so the brothers stay together in their family mansion, and try to take care of each other. They keep on the staff--the cook and the housekeepers--for as long as the money and the staff patience holds out, but both eventually drift away.

Perhaps it's post traumatic stress disorder (shell-shock in World War I) or maybe that, combined with the abrupt loss of his parents, but Langley isn't coping well and begins to obsess about a number of things, including getting his brother's sight restored, saving newspapers that his brother might one day read, helping his brother where he can by providing him with things he thinks may help, and a manic interest in a self-made theory that all things that happen are merely repetitions of things past, including people, which are the replacements for earlier generations.

Homer's voice calmly tells of his brothers eccentricities, their early adventures, his learning to play piano, the glamour of the roaring 20s in New York for two wealthy young brothers, and how their rudderlessness and idle combined with what was left of their wealth began to both isolate them from the world, and especially in Langley's case, from reality. By the 1970s, the two recluses live in a rabbit warren of hoarded stacks of newspaper and junk, through which the blind Homer can no longer find his way, and is afraid to try given that Langley's paranoia has driven him to booby trap the narrow paths against intruders.

The story ends as you might expect. A quick look online reveals what you may already know: that the Collyer Brother's story is true, and the facts in the case served as fuel for Doctorow's novelization. The birth order of the brothers was changed, and their story extended into the 1970s by Doctorow's story, leaving them at a ripe old age, when in fact they both died in their mansion in 1947 when Langley was 61, and Homer was 66. 

The house, after it was cleared of trash (120 tons, according to the Wikipedia article!) was declared by the city to the be unsafe, and in the summer of the year their bodies were discovered, the house was razed. In the 1960s, the city placed Collyer Brothers park on the site, which incidentally, is not across from Central Park, but further up Fifth Avenue in Harlem.

The real story seems much more bizarre and horrifying than Doctorow's fictional view of the inner thoughts of these brothers would have us believe. I don't think Doctorow really captured the insanity the two were clearly gripped by at the end of their lives, but perhaps Doctorow's theory is that Langley was crazy, and Homer was an innocent victim, swayed by the love of his brother and caretaker to portray him in a positive light. myeh.

E.L. Doctorow died in 2015.