5. Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, pp. 108-136

From "CHRIST, IF THERE was ever ..." through "... to destroy another with confidence."

Langley quickly develops a distaste for television, likening the American viewing public to the shrunken heads of the Jivaro, but one thing does capture their attention on it: "the hearings of a Senate committee investigating organized crime." And one of the witnesses turns out to be their old acquaintance, Vincent. Homer is the first to recognize him, by his voice. Langley says he's heavier and balder, but Homer is certain: "How many gangsters speak in a whisper with an attached wheeze in high C?"

The tabloids confirm Vincent's identity, with headlines like "Vincent Rats!" After the hearings end, Langley pulls the plug on the TV and they don't get it out again until the astronauts land on the moon. But a few weeks later the newspapers report that Vincent has been shot in an East Side restaurant. His associates carried him away, and there is no confirmation that he is dead. And then the phone rings at the Collyer house: A voice asks if this is the archdiocese, and Homer tells them no. Then there is a pounding at the door, and when they open it three men carry in a bleeding Vincent.

One of the three men is Vincent's son, Massimo, whose voice Homer recognizes as the man on the phone. The other two had driven Homer and Langley from the club that night long ago. Vincent's left ear has been shot off, and the men had recognized the house from their earlier visit. The phone call had established that Homer and Langley still lived there. Langley finds some gauze, tape, and iodine and begins to treat the wounded ear, and the men carry Vincent into the kitchen, where they put a mattress on the table for Vincent, who keeps up a stream of abuse of his son, to lie on. Homer notices that Massimo is very different from his father, suffering the abuse without complaint. "Some years later, when Vincent was finally shot to death, Massimo became the head of that crime family and was even more feared than his father had been."

Vincent doesn't recognize the Collyers, which makes Homer feel somehow humiliated. They remain at the house for four days, during which Vincent orders the phone removed, which Langley does gladly, yanking it from the wall and flinging it across the room where it breaks the glass on one of their father's bookcases. "The men were dumbfounded by the state of the hideaway they had chosen," and when they discover the Model T in the dining room Homer hears "them talking among themselves as to how glad they would be to escape from this place -- madhouse, I think, is the word they used."

Meanwhile, Langley types away on his newspaper project -- he has started collecting typewriters, including one with a Braille keyboard for Homer -- and Langley practices daily on the piano. On the fourth day there is a terrible crash and Vincent's men run to the kitchen to see about their boss. He is cowering in the pantry, and asks them, "You hear that?" They all heard "the rat-a-tat of something relentlessly mechanical, like the deadly sputter of a tommy gun." Vincent had been awakened by it and had fallen off the table. But Homer points to the ceiling and reveals that it is Langley typing in the room above, with the typewriter placed on a spindly card table. It created "a darker hammering tone that, I suppose, if you were a sleeping gangster who had recently been shot at, could have sounded like another attempt on your life."

When he figures out what it is, Vincent laughs, permitting the others to laugh as well, and decides that it's time for them to think about leaving what he calls "this rat's nest," and set about getting even with the men who had shot him. He finds one of Langley's army surplus helmets and some fatigues that fit him, and they put his blood-stained clothes in the washing machine. While waiting for his clothes to wash and dry, Vincent hears the typewriter again and tells Massimo to take care of it. "Massimo, showing an initiative in an effort to please his father, brought the typewriter down in his arms and Vincent took it and heaved it across the room and I heard it come apart with a silvery shatter, like a piece of china."

Then, when they're ready to go, they tie Homer and Langley to a pair of kitchen chairs, back to back. "You will never say a word, Vincent said. You will keep your mouths shut or we will come back and shut them for you." Homer is offended: "At no time did they consider us worth shooting." While they are sitting there, unable to move, Langley tells Homer a story about the time their parents took them "to a kind of religious resort on a lake somewhere upstate." Homer was too young to remember, but Langley recalls how pleasant everything and everyone was.

You couldn't walk a few steps without being greeted with big smiles. And I tell you, I had never in my young life been so terrified. Because what could the purpose of such a place be but to persuade people that this was what Heaven would be like? What other purpose than to give an inkling of the joys of eternal life? I was young enough to think there was such a thing as heaven ... to imagine myself spending eternity with the banjo band in their straw boaters and striped jackets, to think I might someday be stuck there among all these imbecilic happy people praying and singing and being educated in worthy subjects.... And I made a vow: I would do whatever it might take to avoid going to Heaven.

And now the Collyer brothers are tied up in their kitchen, which Langley takes as a reminder that "there is only life and death and such varieties of human torment as to confound any such personage as God." This cheers Homer up because their predicament "is just something else to deal with, so they remember how old and fragile the chairs are, tip themselves over and break free. They discuss going to the police, but Langley quotes Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and says they don't need anyone's help or protection.

Vincent had left a couple of hundred-dollar bills for them, and Langley goes out and buys some heavy louvered shutters for the windows and reinforces the front door with steel and a two-by-four brace. The shutters darken the front rooms, however, so after a while they open them again.

Langley then decides that Homer is "getting soft" and fits the Hoshiyamas' bicycle on a frame so Homer can exercise on it, and insists on a brisk walk around the block every day. He also begins forcing on Homer vitamins and health food that he finds advertised in a nudist magazine. And Langley decides to do something about Homer's deprivation when it comes to the visual arts by arranging "a course of tactile art appreciation," using some erotic "carvings of Oriental couples making love," as well as other sculptures he picks up at flea markets.

Then Langley decides that perhaps he can restore Homer's sight. "Rods and cones are what make the eye see, he told me. They're the basis of everything. And if a damn lizard can grow a new tail why can't a human being grow new rods and cones?" He tries working with children's finger paints to see if Homer can distinguish the colors by touch, which he can't. And he has him feel the paintings in the house that Homer remembers from the days when he could see. "I knew each painting by its placement, but visualizing it by touch was another matter, I felt only brushstrokes and dust." And Langley himself takes up painting while Homer plays the piano: "I was not to play pieces, I was to improvise and the resulting canvas would be the translation to the visual of what I had rendered in sound. Presumably, when the paint dried, in some synaptic flash of realization, I would see sound, or hear pain, and the rods and cones would begin to sprout and glow with life."

Homer goes along with it, though he considers "the possibility that my brother was insane." Finally, Langley gets so interested in painting for itself that he forgets about its therapeutic aims, to Homer's relief. And Homer's improvising at the piano makes him interested in composition, so he starts "working up études, ballades, sonatinas and, being unable to write them down, fixing them in my memory." Langley realizes what he is doing, so he goes out and buys a wire recording machine, and later some tape recorders, so Homer can hear himself and make changes in his compositions. "I felt that neither of the Collyer brothers had ever been happier at this time." Eventually both the paintings and the compositions fall by the wayside, and the pictures and recording disappear into the detritus of the house.

Langley does one final painting when the astronauts walk on the moon. He has Homer touch it, and he feels "a sandy surface embedded with rocks and cratered with mounds of what seemed to be some sort of sanded epoxy glue." Embedded in it is what turns out to be a golf club, and several small books whose pages are stiff with glue, "sticking up as if blow by the wind -- three or four of these in various sizes. Is there wind on the moon? I said. There is now, my brother said." Homer doesn't think it's very good: "I had no trouble visualizing it, was the problem." And Langley realizes it's an expression of his rage at the "crassness" of hitting golf balls on the moon and reading the Bible on its surface. "The entire class of blasphemies is in those two acts, he said. The one stupidly irreverent, the other stupidly presumptuous."

Homer, on the other hand, argues for the sheer achievement of going to the moon: "I would forgive those astronauts whatever they did." But Langley argues, "The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency." He does realize, however, that he will have to make a new category for his universal newspaper: "technological achievement."

The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we've made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we'll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.

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."