Harlem's famous horders.
This isn't to suggest that Franz Lidz is a bad writer. He's not. Lidz did well with Unstrung Heroes, a 1991 book about his four screwball uncles (later made into a movie). His regular dispatches for Sports Illustrated?he writes often and well about boxing?compose some of the magazine's best writing.
But like its subject, Ghosty Men is a mess. The book, as its subtitle suggests, sets out to tell "The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders." This is only partially true, though, as Lidz wanders off here and there to spin more tales about his goofy uncles. He would've done well to stick to the point.
After all, the ostensible subjects of the book are a pair of crazy coots named Langley and Homer Collyer, siblings who spent roughly half a century filling their Harlem mansion with other peoples' junk. The Collyers collected anything and everything they could get hold of: Mantel clocks and baby furniture and hundreds of pounds of old newspapers. Dressmakers? dummies, abandoned bicycles and a dozen gas chandeliers. Old photos, old ads, old tires, old school papers and old theater programs. Somehow, they even managed to get a Model T into their basement.
They were locally famous, their lives and their grand mess chronicled by city scribes. The Journal-American, Lidz writes, "dubbed them the 'Hermits of Harlem.'" As that paper's Arthur "Bugs" Baer put it in 1947, "These human packrats accumulated a stashaway of clusterings that out-shambled the ramifications of an idiot's inventory."
This is compelling stuff, but there is not enough of it. So Lidz revisits the subject of his first book: those crazy Lidz uncles. Fully one-third of the book is devoted not to the Ghosty Men of the title, but to Arthur Lidz's obsessive-compulsive hoarding?he was something of a minor-league Collyer brother in terms of his junk stash?and Harry Lidz's often delusional worldview. These gents are entertaining enough, but this is two books now?two books on Lidz's uncles. God knows what kind of damage he'll do if he ever gets around to writing about his immediate family.
Even more troubling is the sense that at times, Lidz is simply flinging words at the page. At one point, he devotes four consecutive pages to quoted newspaper headlines about the Collyers' exploits. The point, of course, is that the brothers enjoyed an odd form of Gotham celebrity during the first half of the 20th century; but three or four headlines would've been sufficient to make the point. Instead of four, we get 29 headlines in a row. Someone stop this man before he transcribes again.
Then there are the poems. An entire chapter, albeit a short one, is devoted to Uncle Leo Lidz's long-forgotten verse, which the author found while cleaning up Uncle Arthur's mess. "They were the poems Uncle Leo wrote until he went mad in the Harlem tenement," explains Lidz. Suffice it to say they are not good. Yet the book quotes no fewer than nine of ol' Leo's poems?so much poetry that one begins to miss those old-timey newspaper headlines.
With Ghosty Men, Lidz tries hard to link a pair of unrelated stories in the hope that they will form something of a love letter to everything that is crazy but endearing about New York City. The idea itself is a bit sketchy. The execution is even worse.