E L Doctorow's novel Homer and Langley (2009) is a heartrendingly beautiful imaginary history of the Collyer brothers.
Homer, the musician who goes blind gradually and gains a particularly sharp hearing in turn till a point when his hearing too, starts to fail and writing becomes his only way of gaining a sense of the external world outside of his frustratingly self-enclosed consciousness.
Langley, a First World War survivor keeps himself going with his bizarre experiments and philosophical theories, his magnum opus being the formation of an eternal newspaper which will contain all possible news items as archetypes and all that would happen after its final formation would be nothing but the iconic replacements of the fundamental patterns traced in that news archive.
And then there is of course the Collyer mansion in Manhattan which gradually turns into a grotesque museum of sorts with Langley's increasingly ambitious experiments with all kinds of scrap objects. The tactility of a space where objects are packed into thin air emanates a rare radiance of aesthetic beauty here.
The tragi-comic life of the Collyer brothers is shot through Doctorow's vividly sensuous imagination and offers us a profound insight into the melancholic beauty of literary writing when it becomes nothing short of a last resort:
"There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. The images of things are not the things in themselves. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where there is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in. If I could go crazy, if I could will that on myself, I might not know how badly off I am, how awful this awareness that is irremediably aware of itself. With only the touch of my brother's hand to know that I am not alone.
Jacqueline, for how many days have I been without food? There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?"
Homer, the musician who goes blind gradually and gains a particularly sharp hearing in turn till a point when his hearing too, starts to fail and writing becomes his only way of gaining a sense of the external world outside of his frustratingly self-enclosed consciousness.
Langley, a First World War survivor keeps himself going with his bizarre experiments and philosophical theories, his magnum opus being the formation of an eternal newspaper which will contain all possible news items as archetypes and all that would happen after its final formation would be nothing but the iconic replacements of the fundamental patterns traced in that news archive.
And then there is of course the Collyer mansion in Manhattan which gradually turns into a grotesque museum of sorts with Langley's increasingly ambitious experiments with all kinds of scrap objects. The tactility of a space where objects are packed into thin air emanates a rare radiance of aesthetic beauty here.
The tragi-comic life of the Collyer brothers is shot through Doctorow's vividly sensuous imagination and offers us a profound insight into the melancholic beauty of literary writing when it becomes nothing short of a last resort:
"There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. The images of things are not the things in themselves. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where there is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in. If I could go crazy, if I could will that on myself, I might not know how badly off I am, how awful this awareness that is irremediably aware of itself. With only the touch of my brother's hand to know that I am not alone.
Jacqueline, for how many days have I been without food? There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?"
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