Indeed, it's hard to see how he could repent of an approach which led directly to the intoxicating unreliability of his best-known work, The Book of Daniel. He's been criticised for this free-and-easy treatment of historical figures by, among others, John Updike, who said of Ragtime that it "smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets". Abraham Lincoln in his civil-war epic The March, Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz in Billy Bathgate (which snagged him the National Book Critics Circle award and the PEN/Faulkner award), Harry Houdini in Ragtime – all make their appearances entirely in the service of the story. With Ragtime" – his novel of the jazz era – "I stumbled on the idea that a period of time was as good a constructive principle as a sense of place." But while figures from his country's past rise up as landmarks in his novels, they're portrayed either provisionally or downright fancifully. It didn't confer a literary identity on me the way, say, the Mississippi did Faulkner. "New York isn't a setting to me: it's life, it's volatile, it changes from generation to generation. Perhaps surprisingly, given the New York setting of so many of his novels, he says he lacks a geographical pole. The pliancy of the road novel, its easy subjectivity and whimsical, intuitive relationships with the events it encounters, stands as a metaphor for Doctorow's own flexible association with real-world history. Airy and open at first, it slowly silts up with the detritus of US consumerism ("artifacts", as Homer puts it, "from our American life") and, in the form of the newspapers which Langley collects daily, the nation's stories.īut the analogy has a wider application. The other passes through their house, which comes to embody a continent-in-miniature on which the brothers enact a symbolic colonisation. One waltzes them through the American century, where they meet representatives of its tribes (immigrants and refugees veterans, jazz musicians and mafia hoods hippies and bureaucrats) and take part in its seminal moments – selling off copper guttering for the war effort, painting bas-relief portraits of the moon landing. In the novel, Doctorow sets the Collyers off down two parallel paths. I realised at a certain point that I was writing a kind of road novel, with these two guys talking to each other as characters on the road do, not just for the length of a trip, but for the whole of their lives." "I found myself writing this line: 'I'm Homer, the blind brother'" – the novel's plangent opening sentence. "I didn't want to know, terribly, what the clinical details were," he says. This is something to think about."ĭoctorow didn't undertake any research for the book, preferring to fish back through his memories of the Collyers' story and expand on them, drawing the mythic elements out. I thought, they're still disturbing people, 50 years after they're dead! They've become folklore. I've known about the brothers for years, of course I wasn't the only teenager of the time whose mother looked into his room and said 'My God, it's the Collyers'!' But a few years back, I saw a piece in the New York Times saying locals were objecting to having the park named after them. "Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now'. "My books start almost before I realise it," he says, leaning forward in the study chair of his unfussy mid-town apartment. It was the spectacle of their reputation being hauled over the coals once more that led to their story, which had simmered in his head for years, offering itself as a subject. The verminous association is symptomatic, he believes, of the way in which the brothers' characters have been traduced over the years something that's still going on to this day. His latest novel, Homer and Langley, takes the brothers' legend and moulds it, shifting their house into the heart of Manhattan and allotting them an extra 30 years' life he prefers, he says, to think of them as "aggregators. It's a term of which EL Doctorow disapproves. After their deaths in 1947 (Langley under a landslide of rubbish Homer, blind and paralysed, from starvation), their house was broken open: the 130 tons of junk discovered within saw them posthumously ordained as America's most notorious pack-rats. It stands on the lot of what was once the home of Homer and Langley Collyer, well-born, educated, affluent brothers who slowly but surely turned their backs on polite society, shuttering their windows and giving themselves over to a shadow-life of squirrelling. A sign on the railings gives its name as the Collyer Brothers Park. On a quiet Harlem backstreet at the end of a row of stately brownstones is a grassed-over sliver of land, home to a handful of plane trees, a couple of flowertubs and a garden bench or two.
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