Homer and Langley by EL Doctorow

I remember working with a group of learners once, and remarking how each of them, to differing degrees, had a tendency to distance the reader from their writing. What they were doing was telling the story at one remove – not literally in the pluperfect tense – but in the sense of much of the principal action having been completed at an earlier time than that of the main narrative. The effect of such writing is that much of the story is told almost in summary form and the reader feels excluded from it. It is a surprisingly common fault in beginner writers. 

I was reminded of this when reading E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley, because Doctorow uses precisely the same technique. He is doing it intentionally, of course, and his distancing is quite deliberate. Because distance, remoteness from the world, an abstract sense of unbelonging, is precisely what Homer and Langley is about. So, for example, early in the novel the protagonists’s maid receives a war letter informing her that her son is missing in action, presumed dead. Instead of relating this through dialogue, allowing the reader entry into the scene at that profound moment, it is told in narrative summary and loses, as a result, some of its emotional intensity. But where, with my learners, that would be a fault, with Doctorow he is turning it into a major strength of the writing, because it is underlining the character of the novel’s narrator, Homer Collyer. We can’t enter an empathetic scene when the tragedy unfolds, because Homer himself is unable to comprehend such concepts. He lives at a remove from the world and cannot truly be a part of it. 

This sense of disconnection from the daily travails of ordinary living runs through the novel to a remarkable degree. It is based – albeit very loosely – on the true story of the Collyer brothers in Manhattan in the early to mid part of the last century. Recluses and eccentrics, they lived in isolated squalor in their apartment in Fifth Avenue (moved in the novel closer to Central Park), gradually accumulating a houseful of junk and detritus. Literally so: every room was piled to the ceiling with newspapers, books, boxes, human organs pickled in formaldehyde, a Model T Ford chassis, chandeliers, banjos, bicycles, everything, an extraordinary panoply of junk. Over the years it became a “labyrinth of hazardous pathways, full of obstructions and many dead ends”. After their deaths in 1947, the authorities removed 100 tonnes of junk from the house and, because it was in such a state of ill-repair, the building itself was demolished. 

In the novel and in real life, the brothers set themselves against society. Homer is blind and Langley is badly scarred by his experiences in the First World War, both mentally and physically, with a terrible cough brought on by exposure to mustard gas. They withdraw from a society which they increasingly regarded with mistrust. They refuse to pay taxes, or their mortgage, or phone or electric or gas bills. Gradually, these amenities are cut off but the brothers remain undeterred. The Model T provides a generator for electricity. Langley scavenges across the city for food and water. The reality was a desperately sad story, but Doctorow has taken this rough material and made something quite beautiful with it. He has turned these brothers – strange, probably insane – into men of honour and reason. 

And in so doing he has, of course, cast a light on our own society and our blighted modern world. Because Doctorow extends the metaphorical reach of the brothers’ story by taking liberties with their history, allowing them, for example, to live on into the 1960s, when they are adopted by the young hippies as heroes of the counter-culture and into the 1970s, when they are finally abandoned to their fate. Thus, he allows them to be detached, to become almost chimerical chroniclers of the twentieth century from its elysian pre-First World War days to the beginnings of the modern technological and computer age. 

The fact that our narrator is blind, of course, presents us with yet another level of dissociation from the materiality of this modern world in which they are reluctant participants. And, again, this is a brave and highly impressive piece of writing by Doctorow: how does one tell a tale through the eyes of a man who cannot see? Doctorow sets himself this challenge and conquers it superbly. Homer Collyer cannot see the world, nor can he understand those who inhabit it, and yet, through this lonely, despairing man we are given a vision of the world which is starkly perceptive. Near the end, when he is deaf as well as blind, he writes, “I am grateful to have this [braille] typewriter, and the reams of paper beside my chair, as the world has shuttered slowly closed, intending to leave me only my consciousness.” In this way, the reader is simultaneously drawn inwards with Homer, to that dark and sad state, and outwards, to a world we take for granted but which he has reflected back at us with all its imperfections and peril. It is precisely because we are forced to view it through the lost eyes of an outsider that we can see beyond the veneer of the world into the austerity we all too often gloss over: Homer Collyer allows us, for once, to see ourselves as others see us, and it is an uncomfortable experience. 

Only occasionally does reality intrude on the brothers’ cloistered life. In the early days they run weekly dances until they are shut down by the authorities; twice, they come into contact with an underworld gangster – the first time beguilingly, the second more troublingly; during the Second World War they provide refuge to a Japanese couple until the couple are arrested and interned; latterly, they are adopted by hippies and their house becomes an alternative hang-out. But mostly the shutters are drawn and the world is repelled. Inside, Homer and Langley live their own, lonely yet determined existences. Langley is on a mission to classify every event and happening in the world and produce, from his labours, a comprehensive “eternally current dateless newspaper” of humanity which covers anything that could ever happen. Events like Watergate prove troublesome in terms of classification as generic types, but Langley remains devoted to his task. Homer, meanwhile, works on his music, playing his beloved pianos, and writes his life story. In keeping with the passive reporting style I mentioned in the opening of this review, nothing that happens to them feels direct, or organised, or redolent of ordinary living. It is typical of the oblique nature of the novel, for example, that their first encounter with computerisation is not a computer per se, but a computerised digital organ. Nothing in this novel is straightforward or commonplace. Everything is at a remove from our understanding of life. 

Robert Epstein, writing in The Independent, concludes an otherwise highly favourable review with the somewhat ambivalent observation that Homer and Langley succeeds if one can accept that “a historical novel need not do more than paint a picture of its protagonists”. I disagree that this is all Homer and Langley achieves. Despite the remarkable sense of inwardness, there is still, here, an analysis of the First World War, the Great Depression, the gangster era, the Second World War, Vietnam, hippies, Watergate, the assassinations of JFK, MLK and Bobby Kennedy, New York’s blackouts and so on. The twentieth century history of America is here in full, only it is presented in negative, in the human spaces beneath the history. It is an extraordinary, but hugely effective way, to analyse our human story. History is written by the victors, they say. Well perhaps, here, we have history written by the losers.

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

What do Harry Houdini, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, J Pierpont Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Booker T. Washington, Henry Ford, Evelyn Nesbit and Emma Goldman have in common? Fans of EL Doctorow’s 1975 masterpiece Ragtime will be jumping up and down with their hands in the air. All of these real historical characters – and a slew of lesser known ones, too – are central characters in this remarkable novel. We are fairly accustomed to novelisations of real characters nowadays – Charles Lindbergh in Philip The Plot Against America, for example, or John Brown in Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter or Fyodor Dostoevsky in JM Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg. And Doctorow, of course, returns to the device in later fiction too, such as his telling of the story of the Collyer Brothers in Homer and Langley, or General Sherman in The March. He had done it before, too, with The Book of Daniel, about the Rosenberg case, more famously immortalised in fiction in the opening line of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. But at the time, Ragtime was innovative. And controversial.

In a later interview, Doctorow noted:

I heard secondhand that the editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, was very critical of the book, that someone prepared a major review and he said no. I had transgressed in making up words and thoughts that people had never said. Now it happens almost every day. I think that opened the gates.

Ragtime truly is extraordinary in the way it melds real and fictional characters. Moreover, the technique is vital to the thematic thrust of the novel, given that it focuses on the establishment of the American nation and the development of the American psyche: the process of assimilation of millions of immigrants from dozens of countries, particularly throughout the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries was an extraordinary piece of national re-invention. It saw people almost literally become someone else as they threw off the trappings of their old lives and adopted new ones; it saw ordinary people grow to prominence and fame; and it saw famous citizens slide into lives of unutterable fantasy and delusion. America at this time was massively polarised between people playing out different types of ragtime – the ragged poverty of the underclass on one hand and, on the other, the syncopated, life-affirming joyousness lived out by those innocent rich who had no idea what was to unfold in the rest of the century.

Drawing the disparate real-life characters together are three fictional families around whom the novel revolves. Firstly, there is Father, Mother, the Little Boy, Grandfather and Mother’s Younger Brother, a middle-class, well-to-do family making a good living from Father’s fireworks and flag-making business (gunpowder and the sanctity of the flag – what could be more quintessentially American?). Secondly the immigrant family of Mameh, Tateh and The Little Girl, who initially live in abject poverty but (the surviving members, at least) end the novel with unimagined riches. And thirdly the black ragtime musician, Coalhouse Walker Jr., Sarah, a maid whom he makes pregnant, and their illegitimate baby. And so, of course, we have a cross-section of the melting pot that became America. The way these three families come together is clearly connotative of the establishment of this brave new country and we, the readers, are forced to recognise that beneath the veneer of progress terrible hardships and deprivations and cruelties abounded. For Coalhouse, in particular, a victim of terrible racism, the idealism of this young nation is a blighted notion indeed.

Part and parcel of the development of this new America is, of course, industrialisation. The Industrial Revolution may have started in Great Britain but it flourished in twentieth century America. Enter Henry Ford, and the principle of the assembly line. As Ragtime explains: 

From these principles Ford established the final proposition of the theory of industrial manufacture - not only that the parts of the finished product be interchangeable, but that the men who build the products be themselves interchangeable parts.

One can read Ragtime, then, as a critique of modernity and the dehumanising effect of progress and technological advance. The novel ends during the First World War, a calamitous event the immediate (though not the underlying) cause of which was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, another character who makes a cameo appearance in the novel. Indeed, the assassination itself, by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in August 1914, is dramatised in the narrative. Given that Modernist sensibilities regularly decried the First World War as proof of the calamitous turn that humanity had taken since the Enlightenment, such a critique of the novel’s thematic intentions might seem apposite.

And yet it is not sufficient, I think to explain the complexity of Ragtime. For all Doctorow’s unblinking gaze on the less salubrious aspects of American nationhood, it does not feel, to me, like a reactionary social critique of hubristic modernity in the way of Eric Voegelin and novelists who advanced his theories, such as Flannery O’Connor. Rather, I would say it is closer in tone to Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, which likewise did not flinch from portraying the seedier side of life but managed to do so without being either too critical or too sentimental. Doctorow, a beautifully nuanced writer, asserts a similar degree of balance. How does he do it?

Principally, he does it by nature of the narrative itself and, in particular, the three fictional characters who dominate it. The scene is set from the word go. This is the opening:

In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers, bay windows, and a screened porch. Striped awnings shaded the windows. The family took possession of this stout manse on a sunny day in June and it seemed for some years thereafter that all their days would be warm and fair.

That one word – “seemed” – tells us all we need to know about this edenic scene which is being suggested to us. Although their stories are, initially, separate, the three families begin to coalesce and it is clear that each impacts on the other in manifold ways. The connections of humanity are mysterious things, the community of being is a web we cannot see and do not control. A simplistic reactionary binary of technology/modernity – spirituality/tradition will not suffice here.

The very first chapter of the novel ends with The Little Boy speaking to Harry Houdini and telling him, apropos nothing at all, “Warn the Duke.” This means nothing at this stage, but it becomes clear that this little boy has some form of divinatory powers. Later in the novel, Houdini does indeed meet the Duke – Archduke Franz Ferdinand – but he doesn’t “warn” him and we know the outcome. Those little connections of humanity, those random chances, those coincidences and happy or unhappy occurrences that populate our existence: these are the stuff that matters in our lives. And those writers, like Cormac McCarthy, who suggest that, for all our hubris, our paths are ordained from the very first and we can have no say in our own progress, are simply wrong. Doctorow knows there is much wrong with our modern ways of life, but he is equally certain that the remedy is in our own hands. That is what Ragtime can teach us.