“THE HOUSE IS A MESS” IS ALL RELATIVE

The next time you find yourself thinking, “My house is a mess,” pick up a copy of the book Homer and Langley by E. L. Doctorow. I guarantee, your mess is nothing compared to that.

I’ve always been morbidly fascinated by hoarders and their garbage houses, knowing that they suffer from a form of OCD. E. L. Doctorow’s book about the brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, is a fictionalized first-person account dictated by Homer. However, the brothers were real, and their real-life story is probably even more bizarre than the novel. Theirs was the extreme garbage house.

Their true story begins at the end, in 1947, when the police in New York City received a phone message from an anonymous caller stating that there was a dead body at 2078 Fifth Avenue in a single-family, three-story brownstone building.

However, police attempts to enter the house were futile; all entrances to the house were completely blocked off with trash. Police could not get through the doors.

Finally, a day after the anonymous phone call, police used a ladder to enter the home through a second-story window. There, surrounded by stacks of trash, they found the body of Homer, the blind, partially paralyzed Collyer brother, who (autopsy showed) had died of a heart attack and starvation. But his caretaker brother Langley Collyer was nowhere to be found.

It wasn’t until three weeks later that authorities, sifting through the 136 tons of junk in the three-story home, found the rat-gnawed body of Langley. There was so much “stuff” in the house that the brothers had resorted to making tunnels to get from one room to another. The more reclusive the brothers got, the more paranoid they also became. Langley had rigged burglar/intruder traps around the house. While bringing food to Homer, who was eventually confined to his bedroom, Langley had tripped one of his own traps, and had suffocated under a huge pile of newspapers and other garbage.

E. L. Doctorow’s novel tries to help us understand what happened to the two brothers to lead to this scene in 1947. He takes the Collyers from their well-to-do childhood with their physician father and musician mother to their trash-filled existence at the end of their lives. What made Langley want to “collect” other people’s discards? Why the thousands upon thousands of bundled newspapers? What was the purpose of a disassembled Model T in the dining room? Ten pianos? The junk upon junk upon junk?

Langley collected and hoarded until the entire brownstone was completely filled, from top to bottom. He didn’t pay bills so eventually the two brothers lived without electricity, water, or heat. Langley left the house only at night—to buy groceries at a little neighborhood market and to sift through garbage and piles of discards, looking for ‘treasures’ to bring home.

Perhaps no one will ever know exactly what went on in the minds of these two brothers, but E. L. Doctorow makes an attempt to explain their mental journey in Homer and Langley.

If you want more information on these two reclusive brothers, there are some good web sites: Collyer Brothers Syndrome, Langley Collyer, and Squallor Survivors .

As for me, well . . . I suddenly have a strong urge to clean my house.