Ghosty Men: The Strange But True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders: An Urban Historical

First, I would like to thank my wife for keeping me from becoming one of the Collyer brothers.Homer and Langley Collyer were a reclusive pair of New York bachelors who died in 1947 in the Harlem brownstone they had, over decades, filled with junk. Just finding the body of Homer, the elder Collyer, became part-archaeological dig, part-spelunking expedition. Thousands of curious New Yorkers gathered in the street as police climbed over and tunneled through mountains of newspapers, magazines, unopened mail, empty cans, bicycle parts and musical instruments, dodging the booby traps the brothers had set throughout the apartment to discourage interlopers.The press ran with the story: Where was the fortune the brothers had reportedly squirreled away? Who were in the coffins supposedly in the basement? And where was the younger brother?There ought to be a moral in this somewhere. Heap up worldly goods and they will bury you. But the story of the Collyers, fascinating and horrible as it is, resists easy conclusions.Franz Lidz' previous book, Unstrung Heroes, tells about his own family of eccentric brothers. And one of them, Uncle Arthur, had more than a little of the Collyers in him. Like the Collyers, Uncle Arthur restlessly patrolled the streets and alleys of New York, picking up and carrying - or dragging - home everything that was not fastened down. (He was, at that, one of the saner Lidz brothers; others had to be institutionalized.)Throughout, Ghosty Men alternates tales of the Collyers, derived mostly from contemporary press accounts, with the author's living memories of Uncle Arthur. All were bachelors, all had lived with their mothers well into middle age. But while the Collyers successfully withstood efforts at eviction and meddlesome authorities, Uncle Arthur eventually succumbed to a family clean-up."The emptiness is a little hard to get used to," he said, ruefully. "It makes me feel hollow."Perhaps that comes about as close as anything to explaining why these men sought to live inside a fortress of junk. Something of a collector himself, Lidz gathers a few quotes from psychiatrists. But in the end, he is as baffled as anyone. Hoarding apparently is just a human instinct; sometimes it gets out of hand.But those of us guilty - or perhaps only addicted to - Collyerish behavior can take comfort from these interwoven stories: We are not alone. Fortunately, most of us hold ourselves in check, or are held in check by prudent spouses and loving or concerned families.The Collyers had none such. The sad thing about their lives was not that they hoarded, but that, unlike Uncle Arthur, they somehow slipped through the web of human attachments that softens or accommodates our wilder instincts.

In 1991, Franz Lidz published Unstrung Heroes, a bittersweet account of his childhood with four eccentric uncles. Here we met Uncle Arthur, a confirmed bachelor whose chief distinction was a passion for collecting junk. Uncle Arthur's acquisitive side had turned his New York apartment into an obstacle course of landsliding odds and ends. But as Lidz discovered, Arthur's habit was overshadowed by the Collyer brothers, a couple of siblings whose clutter-clogged Harlem brownstone became the stuff of legend in 1947. That's when police discovered the aged Homer Collyer's body at his Harlem residence - a home so crowded with sheet music, mantel clocks, musical instruments, empty bottles, ratty furniture, discarded clothing and assorted refuse that it took police hours to remove the corpse. But where was Langley, Homer's equally odd brother? The mystery inspired a manhunt that gripped New York for days, as the city's tabloids camped at the Collyer house and regaled readers with accounts of the Collyers' peculiar existence. Juxtaposing period accounts of the Collyers against his personal experiences with Uncle Arthur, Lidz recreates the saga of the Collyers and uses its lessons in dealing with his own family's eccentricities. The title of Ghosty Men comes from a neighborhood nickname used to describe the Collyers' spectral appearance. But Lidz sees the Collyers as flesh-and-blood characters, part of a broader pack rat tradition that has its own form of interior logic. Lidz's muse throughout the book is Helen Worden, a now-forgotten journalist who covered the original story of Homer Collyer's demise. Taking a cue from Worden, Lidz lets the story of the Collyers stand on its own, largely avoiding the current fashion for pop psychology. There's a brief passage citing speculation that the Collyers' oddball behavior was caused by - surprise - their mother, but this isn't a clinical expose in the vein of Oliver Sacks. Instead, Lidz focuses on the more basic but no less challenging job of taking a story and telling it well. The modesty of his mission gives Ghosty Men an appropriately modest scale. A small book of 161 pages, its reads like an extended magazine article, absorbing but compact. As the Christmas season gets underway, the bookstore shelves will swell with mammoth volumes marketed as 10-pound gifts. Amid this heavy lifting, Ghosty Men promises to remind readers that good things can also come in small packages.

I've been fascinated by the story of the Collyer brothers for years, but had only found the most superficial accounts of their lives. Even as a youth, I was a budding hoarder (magazines, newspapers, Congressional Records, old phone books), and my mother told me about the Collyers and the 100-plus tons of junk that was found inside their Harlem brownstone after their deaths in 1947. It was clearly a cautionary tale and it worked, to a degree. But who were these men? What led Homer and Langley Collyer to entomb themselves in a crypt of their own making? Franz Lidz tells their story with a great sense of compassion and understanding. His sympathetic treatment of the Collyers in large part stems for his affection for his own Uncle Arthur, also an eccentric hoarder, if on a much lesser scale. Chapters about the Collyers alternate with Uncle Arthur's story; the reader is left with not just a better understanding of the mysteries of the collecting impulse, but of that mysterious, wonderful power we call love.--William C. Hall

New York City firefighters call them "Collyers" - junk-jammed apartments or houses littered with old newspapers, deteriorated cardboard boxes and decaying debris. The term goes back more than 50 years when New York's famous hermits, Harlemites Homer and Langley Collyer, stockpiled their four-story brownstone mansion with so much junk that no one could enter their building safely. The New York Department of Sanitation ordered its workers sprayed with DDT before cleaning up the Collyer's building in 1947.In Ghosty Men, Franz Lidz describes the Collyers (dubbed by the media as the "Hermits of Harlem") as preeminent junk collectors. Holed up for more than 25 years, the Collyers had been caught in a turn-of-the-century time warp as Harlem turned from a white, upper-class suburb to a predominantly poor, black community. The brothers, rarely seen in public, were tight with their money, and dressed 40 years out of step, with high-buttoned serge suits and flowing Windsor silk bow ties.At the time of their deaths, Lidz writes, the Collyer brothers had accumulated 140 tons of rotting junk, consisting of everything from fractured frying pans to crushed umbrellas. "Chipped chandeliers and tattered toys, and everywhere, everywhere, newspapers, thousands and thousands of newspapers, stuffed under furniture, stacked in unsteady piles against the walls," Lidz writes.While the Collyers set the standard in junk collection, Lidz doesn't solely focus on the two - but skillfully weaves their captivating, screwball legend around the story of his Uncle Arthur, considered by family members as the lost Collyer brother.Lidz admires Arthur's commitment to extreme squalor and says his uncle was "actually the last flowering of a generation of hoarders, an obsessive breed of Collyerian pack rats who never pass a dumpster without lifting the lid."Shoelaces were as important to Arthur as Faberge eggs were to Malcolm Forbes.Arthur lived with his brother Harry. Unlike the Collyers, they made an odd couple. Harry wasn't a collector, and Arthur's junk got on his nerves. And also unlike the Collyers, Arthur and Harry enjoyed their celebrity when Lidz's book Unstrung Heroes (a story about them) was made into a movie. Langley and Homer Collyer never enjoyed the spotlight, Lidz notes. Much to their aggravation, they had gained notoriety in 1938, when World-Telegram reporter Helen Worden wrote a story about the reclusive brothers. After Worden's piece ran, they measured their notoriety in column inches.His uncle never gained the Collyers' celebrity. And even though Uncle Arthur started picking up stuff from the streets at 15, he never quite got over the feeling that he couldn't meet the Collyers' high standard of junk connoisseurship."I'd walk by their house and wonder what of value did they have," Arthur told Lidz. "You gotta have brains to collect that much stuff . . . They had their junk up to the windows. I didn't have that much."When Harry moved to a nursing home, Arthur expanded hi

This book is a miracle of research, and Mr. Lidz writes well and with a miss-nothing intelligence. The Collyer brothers and his uncle are brought vividly to life; we hear and see them. It is an important book: it has resonance, it contains worlds; it satisfies.