4. Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, pp. 82-108

From "WE NEEDED SOMEONE to clean house ..." through "...gotten past the front door."

An agency refers a Mr. and Mrs. Hoshiyama as house-cleaners, but when the United States enters World War II, one day the Hoshiyamas are forced to leave their home in Brooklyn and move in with the Collyers. There is some cultural conflict with Mrs. Robileaux at first, but she adjusts because "she felt bad for these people, she knew what it meant to have rocks thrown through your window."

Langley contributes "to what was called the War Effort by selling off the copper rain gutters and chimney flashing of our house." He also sells the walnut paneling in the library and their father's study, though Homer questions whether that really contributes to the War Effort. Langley retorts that "if some muck-a-muck sitting on his keister in Washington wants walnut paneling for his office, it will be relevant to the War Effort."

Homer enjoys having the Hoshiyamas there, and they spend evenings listening to him play the piano. But one day the FBI arrives to take them away. Homer protests furiously, but Mr. Hoshiyama restrains him. "The Hoshiyamas were born fatalists. it was if they and the FBI men seemed to understand one another so as to make me and everything I said irrelevant. Langley is out when they are taken, and becomes angry when he returns. "This house is our inviolate realm, Langley said. I don't care what kind of damn badge they flash." But there is nothing they can do.

The Hoshiyamas leave behind them a tandem bicycle, which Homer and Langley begin to ride every day. The excursions last through the spring until a tire goes flat, after which the bicycle built for two joins other bicycles in Langley's collection. The Hoshiyamas also left a collection of small ivory carvings, which the brothers decide to keep until they return, "though they never did and I don't know now where any of the little ivory carvings are -- buried somewhere under everything else."

Old men collecting for Jewish war relief begin to stop at the house, and one of them, Alan Roses, is welcomed by Langley because he wears a Victory Medal from World War I. Both he and Langley had served in the same division in the Argonne. Roses is full of information about what is happening to the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe, and Langley wonders, "How is it those old men who knocked on our door knew more than the news organizations?" Langley begins to scan the newspapers more closely: "The story was coming out on the back pages in dribs and drabs with no appreciation of the enormity of the horror." Both the atrocities and the indifference make Langley say, "Christ, what I wouldn't give to be something other than a human being."

They then learn that Harold Robileaux had joined the Army Air Forces and was overseas with a black squadron. And when Homer goes out, using a cane, he is approached by strangers who think he has been blinded in the service. They go to the movies with Mrs. Robileaux, who hopes to see Harold in one of the newsreels. Then one day they receive a phone call from Ella Robileaux, Harold's wife, who tells them of his death in North Africa. And they receive a V-record, a disk recording of Harold's voice that he had made and sent to his grandmother before his death. She misunderstands and thinks that it means he is still alive. At the end of the recording, he plays taps on his cornet, and after three or four listenings she realizes that he is dead. Langley goes out and buys gold-star pennants that he puts in the front windows on all four stories of the house. Then one day Mrs. Robileaux announces that she is leaving for New Orleans, to look for Harold's widow and baby. "Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past," and she leaves Homer and Langley on their own.

The end of the war leaves Homer depressed. Langley had accumulated a great store of gas masks during the war, as well as other army surplus, and for a time thinks of selling it at the flea markets. But "Langley never did work out the details of any business opportunity," so the military items join the rest of the detritus in the house. Except for the clothing, that is, which Homer and Langley take to wearing when their regular clothes wear out. Langley has also acquired an M1 rifle, which he hangs over the mantel beside his Springfield rifle from World War I. "We never touched them again and though at this point I cannot get anywhere near the mantel, so far as I know they are still there."

The Korean War and the nuclear arms race begin. The latter gives Langley some "hope that there would soon be a nuclear world war in which the human race would extinguish itself, to the great relief of God ... who would thank Himself and maybe turn His talents to creating a more enlightened form of creature on a fresh new planet somewhere."

Mrs. Robileaux's departure means that the brothers have to find a way of feeding themselves, which initially means dining out. But Langley grows concerned about the cost, and decides to cook at home. "I would sit patiently at the table long past the usual dinner hour, starving and in suspense, until something unnameable was laid before me." But Langley soon notices how thin his brother is going, so they start to eat out of cans, except for the oatmeal that Langley makes for breakfast every day.

Concerned about Homer's depression, Langley decides to buy a television set. It was the early days of TV, and Homer discovered that the screen "was square with rounded sides." Langley tells him to think of it as radio with pictures: "You don't have to see the picture. Just listen. You're not missing anything: what is static on a radio is like it's snowing on the TV. And when the picture does clear, it tends to float up off the screen only to rise again from the bottom." Eventually, Homer gives up on everything except news broadcasts and game shows. And the news shows are largely "about Communist spies and their worldwide conspiracy to destroy us," which doesn't cheer Homer up very much.

The game shows, on the other hand, are enjoyable because they are usually able to answer the questions before the contestants do, especially, in Homer's case, questions about classical and popular music, baseball and literature. Langley is good on history, philosophy, and science. They are so good that they think about applying to be contestants, but they realize that they don't quite fit the model of a TV game show contestant:

Of course I had some idea at the time that we were not sartorially typecast. He had told me the men predictably wore flannel suits and rep ties and crew cuts and women down-to-the-ankle skirts and blouses with big collars and bangy hairdos. Langley, who was now bald on top, had let the gray hair on the back of his head grow down to his shoulders. My own Lisztian fall from its center part was considerably thinned out. And our preferred dress was army greens and boots, leaving to the moths in the closets our old suits and blazers. We couldn't have gotten past the front door.

3. Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, pp. 51-82

From "NOR WAS THERE any true consolation ..." through "... an industrial mummy."

Vincent, their new gangster acquaintance, sends over a couple of prostitutes one evening, and Homer and Langley are reluctant to send them away for fear of offending their new "and possibly murderous" friend. So they accept the women's favors, but Langley "was convinced that one way or another we would end up paying for my gangster friend's generosity, and that we had not heard the last of him." But in fact they have.

Langley for a time takes up with a woman named Anna, who is a radical, or as Langley describes her to Homer, "some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist." But eventually she is deported back to Russia. Then Langley goes through a series of girls he meets in nightclubs, but finally marries a woman named Lila van Dijk. Unfortunately, she complains not only about his newspaper-hoarding but about everything else in his life, including Homer.

Their marriage gets off to a bad start at the wedding at her parents' home in Oyster Bay, when Langley comes dressed "in his usual baggy corduroys and an open shirt with the sleeves rolled." The final break comes when Mrs. Robileaux's grandson, Harold, arrives from New Orleans. He is a jazz musician and they create a room in the basement where he can practice his cornet. Harold tries to teach Homer to play jazz piano, but to no avail. Eventually, he forms a group with some other musicians, and use the Collyers' house as a place to rehearse. "We were all very happy about this except for Lila van Dijk, who couldn't believe that Langley would actually permit the Harold Robileaux Five to come play their vulgar music in the house without consulting her." And when they invite people in to listen, Lila has had enough and the marriage end.

The crowd that gathers for Harold's music gives Langley the idea of having tea-dances. He and Homer go to some dance halls to do research, and inevitably end up chatting with the women who worked there. "If they were satisfied you weren't a cop they might quietly make you a business proposition, which tended to happen to me more than Langley since you don't usually find police who are blind."

Langley decides they should hold tea-dances for people who weren't the type to frequent dance halls, and begins by inviting old friends of their parents and others they knew. Langley has begun collecting phonographs, so they use recorded music. The first guests are invited, but when people begin showing up without invitations, the brothers start charging admission.

I should say here that we were distinguished, we two brothers I mean, in having lost a good deal of our money well before the market crash, either from bad investments or our excessive nightclubbing and other spendthrift habits, though in fact we were far from destitute and things were never as bad for us as for other people. 

The tea-dances are so successful that they have to expand from the dining room into the drawing room and parlor. They charge a dollar per couple "and for that they got two hours of dancing, cookies and tea, and for an extra twenty-five cents, a glass of cream sherry." They discover that fast, lively music causes the dance floor to empty, and Homer explains to Langley, "The people who come to our tea dance have no fight left in them. They are not interested in having a good time. They come here to hold each other."

But the tea-dances take their toll: Siobhan, who has to move the furniture around and clean up afterward, is found dead one morning. She leaves a savings account of three hundred fifty dollars, which they give to Siobhan's church to take care of the funeral. They attend the burial in Queens with Mrs. Robileaux, whom they now call Grandmamma because Harold did. Harold has returned to New Orleans, and she worries that he's not doing as well playing in clubs as he claims. Homer experiences "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."

And then a notice gets in one of the newspapers about the tea-dances, and so many appear for the next one that they have to turn people away. The neighbors complain about the crowds, and a policeman shows up to say that they're violating an ordinance against operating a business out of a Fifth Avenue residence. He indicates his willingness to overlook it for a certain percent of the take, but Langley indignantly refuses. So in a week or two there is a raid, and the tea-dances are over.

Homer, Langley, and Mrs. Robileaux spend a night in jail. Langley is in a reflective mood and talks with Homer about the nature of popular music and its philosophical implications:

Well take that song where he says sometimes he's happy sometimes he's blue. 

"...my disposition depends on you."

Yes, well what if she's saying the same thing at the same time? 

Who? 

The girl, I mean if her disposition depends on him at the same time his disposition depends on her? In that case two circumstances would prevail: either they would lock together in an unchanging state of sadness or happiness, in which case life would be unendurable--

That's not good. And what's the other circumstance? 

The other circumstance is that if they began disynchronously, and each was dependent on the other's disposition, there would be this constantly alternating mood current running between them, from misery to happiness and back again, so that they would each be driven mad by the emotional instability of the other.

In the end, the charges are dismissed.

The house seems "cavernous" when they return, the furniture having been moved out and the rugs rolled up for the dancing. "And the odor of Langley's stacks of newspapers ... was now apparent, a musty smell that would be especially noticeable on days of rain or dampness." Records and phonographs were broken in the melee, and Langley decides to sort the rubble into cardboard boxes. "Naturally I didn't understand it as such, but this time marked the beginning of our abandonment of the outer world."

Homer is sick in bed when Langley decides to put a Model T Ford in the dining room, transforming it into a garage, "complete with the smell of motor oil." Homer can hear the sounds, "lots of grunting and hammering," as it is assembled, and thinks that Langley might be erecting a statue there. One day, Grandmamma Robileaux brings him a bowl of soup and says, "I knew when he came home from that war your brother's mind weren't right." She complains that her floor is "all tracked up with their boots, the back door off its hinges, black mechanical things, auto-mobile things, swinging through the window like clothes on a line." Homer is astonished, but assures her "There is some intelligent purpose behind this," though he hasn't "the remotest idea of what it might be."

So when he's well and goes back downstairs he asks Langley, "If you were going to bring a car into the house, why not a modern up-to-date model?" Langley explains that it was cheap, but Homer persists, saying that Mrs. Robileaux "wonders why something from the street has to be in the dining room. Why something made for the outside is inside." Langley asks how you can "make an ontological distinction between outside and inside," but Homer realizes that he doesn't really have a reason for doing it. The car was just something he had seen on the street and decided that "he must have it while trusting that the reason he found it so valuable would eventually become clear to him."

First Langley claims that the car is their "family totem," and then he conceives of a practical reason. He decides their electric bills are too high and decides to use the engine as a generator. But the smell of gasoline drives Homer and Mrs. Robileaux from the house. "Thereafter, the Model T just stood there accumulating dust and cobwebs, and filling up with stacks of newspapers, and various other collectibles. Langley never mentioned it again, nor did I."

2. Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, pp. 21-51

From "DESPITE THE ASSURANCES of ..." through "... and the house would be like a tomb."

Langley's "clear tenor" voice has changed to "a kind of gargle," and Homer can feel the gauntness of his face and the scars on his back. When the Armistice comes, he refuses to march in the parade: "It is for idiots." And army officials begin visiting because "he had left his unit before being legally mustered out and given his discharge papers." These are a prelude, Homer comments, to their later legal difficulties.

In addition to his own disability, Langley now learns of his parents' deaths. When he goes to visit their graves, Homer hangs the rifle Langley had carried above the mantel, "and there it has stayed, almost the first piece in the collection of artifacts from our American life.

Homer's affair with Julia causes tension with Siobhan, the senior maid. And Mrs. Robileaux, the cook, serves whatever she wants, which sometimes causes Langley to push his plate away and leave the table. Homer is baffled by his inability to resolve these tensions. He resigns himself to "the inevitable creep of time, which was what we had now in this house, I decided, the turning over of the seconds and minutes of life to show its ever new guise."

As Langley begins to recover, he takes up with Perdita Spence, a childhood friend whom he invites to dinner. But during dinner, after serving the first two courses, Julia sits down with them at table. Julia says, "How novel, Langley, to put your guests to work. But where is my apron?" Langley replies that Julia isn't a guest, "When serving she is one of the staff. When seated she is Homer's inamorata." Homer says, "It's a kind of hybrid situation." Silence follows, and then Perdita upbraids Homer for taking advantage of an impoverished immigrant. Langley takes her home, leaving Julia and Homer to finish their dinners.

As he is eating, Homer takes hold of Julia's hand. He realizes that she is wearing his mother's diamond ring. "We had a trial, naturally, Langley and I the sitting judges, Siobhan the prosecuting attorney." Julia claims that Siobhan gave her the ring to look more presentable at the table, but Siobhan denies it. Langley takes the family jewels and puts them in a safe-deposit box at the bank, and Julia "was gone from the premises as unceremoniously as Miss Perdita Spence, as if they were prototypes of the gender with which, through the years, Langley and I would, on one basis or another, find ourselves incompatible."

Homer turns to his music for consolation, but the only pieces he knows are the ones he learned when he was sighted, and he finds himself unable to read Braille musical notation and then play what he has read. So Langley buys him a player piano, with rolls that re-create the performances of the great virtuosos. By placing his fingers on the keys as the rolls turn, Homer is able to learn new pieces and then perform them on his own Aeolian. But the player piano also becomes the first of at least a dozen pianos that Langley collects. He "came to see pianos as machines, music-making machines, to be taken apart and wondered at and put back together. Or not."

Langley's "passion for collecting things," Homer says, is part of his "morbidly thrifty" nature: "Saving money, saving things, finding value in things other people have thrown away or that may be of future use in one way or another." It is "a world view" that Homer doesn't share, but has gone along with. And here Homer addresses himself to "Jacqueline, my muse....: You have looked in on this house. You know there is just no other way for us to be. You know it is who we are."

The new repertoire gives Homer what he needs for an occupation: playing piano to accompany silent movies. He hires an assistant who watches the films for him and whispers to him what is happening on screen. Mary Elizabeth Riordan, sixteen at the time, is a music student, and Homer supplements her salary with free lessons. She is an orphan, and when Siobhan takes a liking to her, they invite her to come live with them.

How easily and with such grace she accommodated herself to her situation. After all, what an odd household we were, with these many rooms that must have seemed daunting to a child from the tenements, and a serving woman who had instantly adopted her and given her chores as a mother would do, and a cook whose characteristic glower did not change from morning till night. And a blind man whom she led to and from his job, and an iconoclast with a loud cough and a hoarse voice who rushed out ever day, morning and evening, to buy every newspaper published in the city.

Theorist Langley has a theory of music: Prehistoric man had invented it "to sound the vast emptiness of this strange world by saying 'I am here, I am here!'"

Both Homer and Langley fall in love with Mary Elizabeth, but they "were in loco parentis, and always would be." When the talkies come in, and Homer loses his job, they send her off to the Sisters of Mercy Junior College in Westchester County. But Homer says, "I cannot at this moment bear to speak of what became of Mary Elizabeth Riordan," remembering the household gathering to bid her farewell.

Homer and Langley throw themselves into the speakeasy life of the Prohibition era, to nightclubs that Langley calls "the true democratic melting pot." At one, Homer meets a gangster named Vincent and tells him that when he drinks he thinks he can see: "I generated visions from what I learned from my other senses and added, by way of detail, my judgments of character and my attention to this one or revulsion for that one." Vincent is fascinated with Homer's blindness, and Homer is excited to meet a gangster: "I found it to be true generally with the criminals we ran into that as a class they were extremely sensitive." But when Vincent drives them home one night, Langley says it was a mistake: "I don't like it that now those scum know where we live."

But Langley is intrigued by Homer's claim to be able to see when he's drunk. It is an epistemological problem, he tells Homer: "there is endless debate as to whether we see the real world or only the world as it appears in our minds, which is not necessarily the same thing. So if that's the case, if the real world is A, and what we see projected on our minds is B, and that's the best we can hope for, then it's not just your problem."

Langley has now turned his attention to his "major project, the collection of the daily papers with the ultimate aim of creating one day's edition of a newspaper that could be read forevermore as sufficient to any day thereof." Hence the collection of the daily papers, which continues "to the end of his life when his newspaper bales and boxes of clippings rose from floor to ceiling in every room of our house." He counts and files newspaper stories according to categories, working toward the discovery of "the kinds of events that were, by their frequency, seminal human behavior." In the end he plans "to fix American life finally in one edition, what he called Collyer's eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need." It is a kind of Platonic newspaper: "The stories will not have overly particular details as you find in ordinary daily rags, because the real news here is of the Universal Forms of which any particular detail would only be an example."

In response to Homer's objections, Langley says that sports coverage, for example, would be reduced to the fact that "Whatever the sport is ... someone wins and someone loses." As for art, "If it is art, it will offend before it is revered. There are calls for its destruction and then the bidding begins." As for unprecedented events and new scientific discoveries, these are subject to Langley's Theory of Replacement: "Albert Einstein replaces Newton, and Darwin replaces Genesis. Not that anything has been made clearer."

But I'll give you that both theories are unprecedented. What of it? What do we really know? If every question is answered so that we know everything there is to know about life and the universe, what then? What will be different? It will be like knowing how a combustion engine works. That's all. The darkness will still be there. 

But Homer knows, and thinks Langley did too, that the newspaper project would never be completed. The important thing was that it gave "him the mental boost he needed to keep going -- working on something that had no end other than to systematize his grim view of life." But even then he would sometimes fall into depression, and Homer would catch it from him: "Nothing would seem to be worth doing and the house would be like a tomb."