“And then there was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin – an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition.” This is Homer Collyer, deaf since adolescence, anxious to stop trailing death, and let death get back to trailing him.
Narrated by the deaf Homer Collyer, E.L. Doctorow’s Homer & Langley is an exquisite nocturne, a necessarily aural narrative based on the strange lives of the Collyer brothers, two wealthy reclusive bachelors who lived together in a house on New York’s Fifth Avenue, hoarding junk on a until, found buried under their own debris in 1947, death finally overtook them.
It is one of the worst kept secrets in Parnassus that, a near-anagram, ‘E.L. Doctorow’ is the literary pseudonym of Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code. As one would expect, then, Doctorow chops and changes the occasions of recorded history with great nonchalance.
The unhurried perfection of the prose seems alone enough to keep Homer and Langley alive until at least the beginning of the 1980s. But a history containing no lies is always tedious, as Anatole France remarked, and from the documented detritus, E.L. Doctorow has created a towering montage of the last American century.
Langley believes in the possibility of timeless ephemera, an invented eccentricity which appears to be the cause of his compulsive hoarding. He buys every newspaper every day, studying and categorising their every story, so that one day he might, “fix American life finally in one edition, what he called Collyer’s eternally current dateless newspaper.” And if even news reports can be timeless, why not the ten different typewriters, the half-dozen bicycles, the human brains in brine or the beat-up old Model T Ford in their living room?
But Langley’s newspaper never materialises. It seems that the only way to not to have a newspaper go out-of-date is to not have a newspaper. Like death, or a collapsing column of old newspapers, Time is a mistress impossible to avoid.
