In Rough Country (12 page)

Nearing the end of her massive book, like a valiant boxer staggering with exhaustion in the twelfth, final round of a championship fight, Boddy simply stops and tell us: “My aim [has been] less to offer a comprehensive survey than to propose further lines of inquiry:…dialectical, iconographic, and naturalist.” To the very end she is searching still for the mysterious essence of boxing, which, as Nietzsche would have perceived, is a far deeper and more “sacred” human activity than its mass-market appropriation can suggest:

Boddy quotes Carlo Rotella: “It takes constant effort to keep the slippery, naked, near-formless fact of hitting swaddled in layers of sense and form.”

This is a problem, if it is a problem, exclusively for the critic; the boxer knows a deeper truth, as Mike Tyson once said: “Other than boxing, everything is so boring.”

The New Yorker
“Book Bench,” January 28, 2009

J
ohn was a slightly older classmate in a vast high school populated by not-prosperous rural youths in some netherland of the 1950s. Of course, John was president of this class; no doubt, I was secretary. I've been reading John's work since I became an adult and can only content myself with the prospect of his new, so sadly posthumously published
Endpoint and Other Poems
and
My Father's Tears and Other Stories
and rereading the newly reissued
The Maples: Stories
as well as rereading his work through the remainder of my life. I think there must be a story or two, and even one of his more slender novels, which, unaccountably, I have not yet read. My students love “Friends from Philadelphia,” which was John's first published story in
The New Yorker
. What a seemingly artless little gem! My students are stunned by it and by the fact that John wrote it when he was hardly older than they are.

We had met a number of times—my (late) husband Raymond Smith and I visited John and Martha in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, on several very nice occasions. John was always gracious, warmly funny, kind, and bemused—and of course
very bright, informed, and ardent when it came to literature. When he gave a brilliant talk and reading at Princeton some years ago I was honored to introduce him to a large, packed auditorium. I teach his lovely stories each semester—John's language is luminous, sparkling, and glinting, with a steely sort of humor. Think of an iridescent butterfly of surpassing beauty that yet—if you persist in examining it—will yield a considerable sting. I could never gauge how serious John was about his Christian faith—or, rather, the Christian faith—though some sense of the sacred seems to suffuse his work in its most ordinary, even vulgar moments, at which Updike was a master at transcribing. “Snow makes white shadows, there behind the yews, dissolving to the sun's slant kiss, and pools itself across the lawn as if to say
Give me another hour, then I'll go
” (“Endpoint”). I will miss John terribly, as we all will.

by E. L. Doctorow

O
f archetypal domestic horrors that haunt Americans—an unnerving panoply of tabloid possibilities that includes the post-partum-depressed mother who drowns her children, the deranged father who slaughters his family and then himself, the formerly tractable teenager who becomes a drug addict, a serial killer, a goth practitioner of satanic rites, an Ivy League dropout—none is more terrifying than the agoraphobic-recluse-hoarder: the individual, usually though not invariably elderly, who has retreated into his dwelling-place as into a burrow, creates of his household a labyrinth of stacked newspapers and magazines, “collectibles” and trash, very often raw garbage, and very often domestic pets—dogs, cats—that, allowed to breed haphazardly, make of the dwelling-place a worse sinkhole of squalor. Few of us can imagine ourselves involved in deranged acts of violence but all too many of us can imagine ourselves the hapless victims of our possessions—paralyzed by things we're unable to sort out and discard, trapped by our own affluence, crushed, smothered, annihilated beneath tons of trash as in a grim allegory of
Consumerism's shadow-side. How else to explain our ongoing fascination with the Collyer brothers, Langley and Homer, whose decaying bodies were discovered in March 1947 amid more than one hundred tons of trash in the Collyer family brownstone on once-fashionable Fifth Avenue at 128th Street, and who were the subjects of a high-profile series of articles for the
New York Times
and, in 1954, a Book-of-the-Month Club best seller titled
My Brother's Keeper
by Marcia Davenport. (Davenport's novel, derided by literary critics for its tabloid melodrama, remains warmly recalled by readers well into the twenty-first century, as passionate testimonies on Amazon attest.) Once merely eccentric bachelor-brothers from a highly respectable Manhattan family who came to tragic ends, the Collyer brothers have become mythopoetic, larger than life. Once merely sensational, their story has become a kind of cautionary tale as memorable as any of Grimms' fairy tales.

E. L. Doctorow, a writer of dazzling gifts and seemingly boundless imaginative energy, our great chronicler of American mythopoetics in such brilliantly and variously executed novels as
The Book of Daniel
(1971),
Ragtime
(1975),
Loon Lake
(1980),
Billy Bathgate
(1989),
The Waterworks
(1994),
World's Fair
(1985), and more recently
City of God
(2000) and
The March
(2005) has turned his attention to the Collyer legend in his new, eleventh novel
Homer & Langley
. In contrast to the ambitious and multi-faceted
The March
, a chronicle of the Union Army's notorious march through Georgia and South Carolina under the generalship of Sherman, in the closing months of the Civil War,
Homer & Langley
is a subdued, contemplative and resolutely unsensational account of
the brothers' fatally imbricated lives. Told in the form of a first-person narrative by the elderly Homer—“the blind brother”—it's addressed to a French woman journalist whom Homer has encountered on the street, and with whom he becomes naively infatuated, in the final months of his life, though he scarcely knows “Jacqueline Roux” and will never encounter her a second time; it's a
Bildungsroman
in which virtually nothing happens to the protagonist except that, with the passing of years, and the diminution of his hearing as well as his blindness, Homer succumbs ever more passively to his elder brother Langley's paranoid fantasies and predilection for compulsive hoarding—“It was as if the times blew through our house like a wind.”

Protected by a modicum of inherited wealth from needing to engage in any crucial way with the outside world, the Collyer brothers age without maturing. As a young man, Homer is a promising pianist enrolled at the West End Conservatory of Music; his blindness is no handicap in the Collyers' social circle but rather an attribute—“[My] helplessness was very alluring to a woman trained since birth, herself, to be helpless. It made her feel strong, in command, it could bring out her sense of pity…She could express herself, give herself to her pent-up feelings, as she could not safely do with a normal fellow.” Homer has a thwarted love affair with a Hungarian housemaid who is accused—by Langley—of being a thief; both brothers fall in love with a pious young Catholic girl who enters a religious order and, years later, is one of four nuns raped and shot to death in a “remote Central American village”—a revelation that provokes the already misanthropic Langley to per
manently close the shutters of their house. Langley, the more troubled brother, attends Columbia University for a while but becomes permanently disabled—his lungs ruined by mustard gas and his soul gutted by the “monstrousness” of the world—as a soldier in World War I.

The brothers' characters are of less interest than the narrative uses to which their reclusive lives are put by Doctorow in his signature sleight-of-hand melding of private and public lives: during Prohibition, the brothers visit speakeasies, and become acquainted with gangsters; during the Great Depression, they open their brownstone to “tea dances” at which Homer plays piano; in the 1960s they mingle with hippies at an antiwar rally in Manhattan and allow a commune of hippies to “crash” with them for a month—Homer has a final love affair, hardly more than a few sexual encounters, with the flower child Lissey whose youthful body is attractive to him even as her ideas seem “silly.” It's in these sections in which, as in Doctorow's most widely read novel
Ragtime
, “real” people cavort with “historical figures,” that
Homer & Langley
is most buoyant and entertaining. But with the departure of the hippies from their already cluttered brownstone, the brothers' “abandonment of the outer world” becomes irreversible.

As in the much-lauded 1975 documentary film
Grey Gardens
, which depicts the lives of the two Edith Beales in their squalid East Hampton mansion, the appeal of the Collyer brothers' story lies in its lurid setting. Doctorow notes, following the bizarre inventory first published in the
New York Times
in 1947, not only the countless stacks—tons!—of newspapers “[that] had, like some slow flow of lava, brimmed out
of (Langley's) study” [p. 76] but also a complete Model T automobile, reconstructed in the dining room, in the hope of generating electric energy from the motor; many thousands of books spilling out of the brownstone's original library owned by the Collyers' physician-father, now long deceased; broken furniture, records, phonographs and turntables; children's toys, gas masks…

Yet there is a nightmare logic to the brothers' withdrawal to a suffocating safe haven where “our footsteps echoed, as if we were in a cave or an underground vault.” There is something of the romance of rebellion in Langley—initially—his postwar bitterness transformed “into an iconoclastic life of the mind”—but as the brothers age and are obliged to live ever more primitively, in a dwelling bereft of electricity, heat, water and even,
once they barricade the windows, daylight, the grubbiness and horror of their situation are impossible to ignore, even by the blind Homer:

As if foreseeing his and his brothers' lurid tabloid fate to come: “What could be more terrible than being turned into a mythic joke? How could we cope, once dead and gone, with no one available to reclaim our history?”

 

Historically, Homer Collyer (1881–1947) was the elder of the Collyer brothers; he didn't go blind until he was an adult, and had a degree in admiralty law, which he seems never to have used; Langley (1885–1947) claimed to have a degree in engineering from Columbia University—which claim was disputed by Columbia. In fictionalizing the brothers' story Doctorow alters the record in minor but significant ways: he updates the narrative by at least twenty years and makes of his Homer the younger and more sensitive brother, a concert pianist of musical ability but lacking confidence. The historical Langley wasn't a World War I veteran, still less a victim of gas warfare, but was the pianist of the family, not Homer; evidence would seem to suggest that Langley was severely psychotic. Doctorow's Langley is corrosively eloquent, a modern-day
Diogenes, or a prophet out of the Hebrew Bible; his cynicism suggests the later, embittered years of America's most popular and beloved writer Mark Twain. Here is Langley's Theory of Replacements:

Homer interprets his brother's theory as Langley's “bitterness of life or despair of it.” In Doctorow's novel Langley's obsession with saving newspapers isn't a random symptom of psychosis but an intellectual if quixotic project reminiscent of the maniacal effort of Flaubert's deluded seekers after truth Bouvard and Pecuchet—a fanatic effort of

Unlike the brothers of Marcia Davenport's
My Brother's Keeper
, destroyed by female duplicity and manipulation, amid a romantic-melodramatic plot involving a beautiful Italian soprano and a tyrannical family matriarch, Doctorow's brothers eke out their lives as victims of their own stunted personalities. No single, significant drama defines their lives, only just the whimsical vicissitudes of fate. There is a Beckett-like bleakness to Homer's final lines, addressed to his remote muse Jacqueline Roux:

The circumstances of the brothers' deaths were more sensational—and pathetic—than Doctorow indicates in
Homer
& Langley
: Langley was crawling through a newspaper tunnel to bring food to his blind, now-paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps was triggered causing him to be crushed beneath tons of debris. Homer starved to death. Yet it was Homer's body that was found first, while Langley, believed still alive, was the object of a highly publicized citywide “manhunt” for several days until his body too was found amid the rubble, only a few feet from his brother's body. In
Homer & Langley
Doctorow has evoked an American folk-myth writ small, a touching and poignant double portrait of individuals whom social background and class privilege could not protect from extinction.