Collections of Nothing, by William Davies King
At the start of this memoir, the author, a college professor in California, describes a scene from his divorce. He walks into the garage of his former family house, and looks at his possessions, which his wife has put there. He sees the stuff you’d expect — the shirts, the tools, the ‘bags of shoes’. And he also sees his collection. This is the subject of this book, and it’s pretty weird, because this guy is a ‘collector of nothing’. He’s an obsessive collector of junk. And when he looks at this junk, in this garage, he has a moment of clarity. He realises how weird he is. ‘These things looked like signs of hoarding,’ he says, ‘which is a diagnosis, not a hobby.’
This book, then, is an attempt, by a middle-aged man who has just suffered a mid-life crisis, to explain his obsession with collecting junk. When I say junk, I mean serious junk — he has, he tells us early on, 43 labels from tins of tuna. Or rather, he doesn’t tell us how many he has; he lists them, alphabetically, from Albertson’s Solid White Tuna to Vons Chunk Light Tuna. ‘Middle-class life,’ he says, ‘is also a collection.’ The things that middle-class people collect are houses, cars, children and respectability. This guy, on the other hand, collects envelopes, biscuit boxes, and bags that have contained cauliflowers — among many, many other things.
He tells us the story of his life. He grew up in Ohio, the son of a doctor. Named William Davies King, after his father, he became Dave to his father’s Bill. Dave had an older sister and two younger brothers. The sister was disabled. There was intense, toxic sibling rivalry between Dave and his sister. She used her crutches as weapons. He started to collect stamps. One day, he ruined the collection by sticking the stamps onto sheets of paper with Scotch tape. He now had a collection of things that nobody else would want.
And this became the theme of Dave’s collecting — he wanted things that others did not. One day, he remembers, his sister ‘hit me hard (with words or fists or crutches I cannot remember)’, and he locked himself in the bathroom, ‘and realised at last what a lake of tears I had inside me, what thermonuclear anger I hid even deeper.’ As a child, Dave was frightened of his sister, guilty for being able-bodied, withdrawn and, as he puts it, ‘so constantly homesick and so sick of home’.
Later, he was sent to Phillips Academy, Andover, a posh school in New England, and later still studied drama at Yale. At school, he collected, and displayed, odd bits of metal, such as ‘brass finials’ and ‘crumpled bumper chrome’. At Yale, he became something of an artist, exhibiting a collection of broken chairs, which he pinned to a ceiling ‘with long poles’. He liked the broken chairs because they looked ‘handicapped’. He wrote tormented poetry about his family. He hung a ‘black wire rat trap’ above the table in his dining room.
Dave flirted with performance art. For one piece, he walked towards his audience with a box over his head, carrying a chair; later, he ‘shouted at the audience to get out’. In another, he sat on a chair and broke a pane of glass. He left university and became a janitor. He worked in a library. Then he started collecting cereal boxes and the labels from food packaging. ‘The prospect of having a binder filled with bacon boxes was one of my early dreams,’ he tells us.
Dave, then, is a pretty unusual guy. Sometimes he seems to understand this, sometimes not. He has an enormous collection of food labels — which, he says, can be seen ‘as a first-class achievement’, or ‘as a river of pain’. I kept thinking Dave was not for real. Do people really collect the insides of envelopes and the labels from bottles of mineral water? He says he spent eight years in therapy, but it was three years before he talked about his collecting mania. He says it’s difficult, on a date, to know when to mention that you are obsessed with decades-old cereal packets. In patches, Dave King is a very good writer. But also, as he says, ‘I make a good patient, which is a little sad’.
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