BOOKS & ARTS

ERRING LINES UP a series of all-American hoarders like Homer and Langley Collyer, the white brothers who barricaded them- Hselves in their Harlem mansion against the increasingly African-American society that came to surround them, until they were found dead and buried in 1947 in mountains of booby-trapped possessions. This is fol- lowed by a consideration of Andy Warhol’s remarkable private stash of art and ephem- era, which juxtaposed paintings by Picasso and indigenous artifacts from Northwest Coast Indians with mustard packets and airsickness bags, discovered crammed in his Manhattan apartment after his death, in 1987. And the Albert and David Maysles film (1975), which documents the reclusive lives of the aging Edie and , cousins of Jacqueline Ken- nedy Onassis, in their decrepit mansion. Along the way, Herring sketches in some key phases of the transformation of collect- ing into a mass pastime for consumer soci- BETTMANN-CORBIS The Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, became synonymous with hoarding after they ety in postwar America. He describes the were found dead at home in City in 1947. boom in the collectibles industry, propelled by such seemingly innocuous titles as James Michael Ullman’s How to Hold A Garage Sale (1973), written for “people with collecting instincts but more modest budgets,” as well Rise of the Clutterologists as numerous specialist guides and price lists to facilitate the accumulation of items as By JAMES DELBOURGO varied as ashtrays and piggy banks. “A lot of what we do is like biology,” quipped the col- OLLECTORS ARE INSANE. The point chews framing his account by reference to lectibles guru Terry Kovel in a 1980 inter- has been made many times, many consumer culture. One might easily observe view, “devising categories and subcategories ways. Movies in the 60s did so in that while the poor hoard, the rich collect, but for things that have never been categorized style. In The Collector (1965), based on perhaps Herring was wary of slipping into before.” Herring’s suggestion is that these CJohn Fowles’s debut novel, a deranged butter- economic reductivism. Instead he interprets bland but ultimately sinister pimps of kitsch fly collector played by Terence Stamp kidnaps the pathologization of hoarding as a form enabled, in turn, the rise of the clutterol- a female art student and tries to make her part of social conformism that seeks to impose ogists to save the hyperaccumulative from of his collection. “All collectors are anal-erot- “normalcy” on a “deviant lifestyle,” language their own stuff. ics,” the British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones he links rhetorically to sources such as the Herring also excavates a key scene in the stated in 1918. For Freudians, like Jones, Christian Right. annals of collecting: the production of a cer- collecting was to be understood by reference Herring cites the American Psychiatric tain Gothic horror when private collections to the anal-retentive phase of childhood de- Association’s listing of hoarding disorder as a are opened to public audiences. Herring velopment. For the poststructuralist theorist relative of obsessive and compulsive disorders presents three examples: the huge crowds that Jean Baudrillard, collecting was an activity in the 5th edition (2013) of the Diagnostic and appear outside the Collyers’ mansion after appropriate to childhood but suspect in Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), their deaths; the Maysles’ filming inside Grey adults, symptomatic of a “depleted humanity” and the TV show Hoarders, which sensation- Gardens; and the auction of Andy Warhol’s unable to move from the love of things to alizes the plight of people threatened by the collections at Sotheby’s. “When you first a love of people. contents of their own homes, though he does came in here, you thought, ‘What a weird Modern views of collecting as patho- not dwell on either one. Dismissing scans that thing,’ ” commented the estate lawyer on en- REVIEW logical or perverted have often em- point to “different patterns of glucose metabo- tering Warhol’s apartment. What was weird phasized this theme of twisted love: lism in the brain” and speculations that “some- was the miscellany and the seeming equality The Hoarders Things are treated as people and people thing at chromosome 14 may be associated of all its contents. Nothing seemed to have By Scott Herring as things. Thus in Eric Rohmer’s film with hoarding,” he takes aim at the self-serving been sorted according to hierarchies of value, (University of Chicago La Collectionneuse (1967), the character loop he perceives among a range of expert leaving the collector’s true intentions, and Press) played by Haydée Politoff collects lovers “clutterologists”: the diagnosticians, psychia- very identity, in question. as though they were mere objects, leaving trists, and professional organizers who want to Not for nothing did Sotheby’s sort War- a trail of existentially disquieted par- save people from their own possessions. hol’s miscellany into clear categories for amours in her wake. Clutterology involves a certain linguistic its six-volume auction catalog. “Is it just a Scott Herring’s book The Hoarders totalitarianism. There is “abnormal acquisi- bunch of stuff, or is it invested with a higher tackles the contemporary medicalization of tion,” “extreme accumulation,” “proper object meaning?” asked one journalist at the time. “hoarding” as a psychiatric disorder. Taking conduct,” “clutter addiction,” “clutter rehab,” What seems especially paradoxical about aim at the reification of hoarding disorder “clutterbuddys” at “Messies Anonymous,” and hoarding in America today is that consumer by doctors and professional organizers, this the Institute for Challenging Disorganiza- accumulation is both an imperative and an is a book less for psychiatrists than for those tion, the likes of which promote “an orderly, illness. Maybe Herring is right: We should interested in the idea of hoarding in American satisfying, supportive lifestyle free of clutter leave hoarders alone rather than reprogram culture. Herring’s argument could be glossed and the drive to collect.” them with drugs — or is it only the rich who as follows: There is no such thing as hoard- There clearly are people who obsessively have the right to destroy themselves through ing, and this is a book about it. overload their homes with piles of goods and accumulation? Shop till you drop, unless the An associate professor of English at In- ephemera, and who love the sheer physical psychiatrists and organizers get you first. diana University at Bloomington, Herring possession of hoarded things. However, that largely ignores hoarding’s deeper historical hoarding in contemporary American society James Delbourgo is an associate professor of histo- relationship to cherished objects in centuries has more to do with the political economy ry at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. He past — as in the hoarding of treasure — and of capitalism than with brain chemistry and is at work on a book about Sir Hans Sloane and the practice of money hoarding. And he es- chromosomes seems a safe bet. the origins of the British Museum.

B16 THE CHRONICLE REVIEW MARCH 27, 2015