by Olivia Laing
I loved that statement, loved especially the final line. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life. That’s the dream of sex, isn’t it? That you will be liberated from the prison of the body by the body itself, at long last desired, its strange tongue understood.
5
THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL
IT’S FUNNY, SUBLETTING, MAKING A life among someone else’s things, in a home that someone else has created and long since left. My bed was on a platform, up three wooden steps so steep I had to pick my way down them backwards, like a sailor. There was a boarded-up window at the end that opened on to an air shaft, through which music and conversation would periodically drift and stick. A dumbbell tenement, the kind described in Low Life, Luc Sante’s incantatory account of Old New York. People had been coming and going through those rooms for years, leaving jars of lip balm and tubes of hand cream in their wake. The kitchen cupboards were filled with half-finished boxes of granola and Yogi tea bags and no one had watered the plants or dusted the shelves in months.
During the day I rarely encountered anyone in the building, but at night I’d hear doors opening and closing, people passing a few feet from my bed. The man who lived in the next apartment was a D.J., and at odd hours of the day and night waves of bass would come surging through the walls, reverberating in my chest. At two or three in the morning the heat rose clanking through the pipes and just before dawn I’d sometimes be woken by the siren of the ladder truck leaving the East 2nd Street firehouse, which had lost six crew members on 9/11.
Everything felt permeable, silted up, like a room without a lock or a cavern periodically inundated by the sea. I slept shallowly, often getting up to check my email and then sprawling aimlessly on the couch, watching the sky turn from black to inky blue above the fire escape, the Chase bank on the corner. There was a psychic a few doors down and on sunny afternoons she’d sit in the window of her room beside a model skull, sometimes rapping on the glass and beckoning me in, no matter how violently I shook my head. No bad data, no revelations about the future, thanks. I didn’t want to know who I might or might not meet, what was lying in wait ahead.
It was becoming increasingly easy to see how people ended up vanishing in cities, disappearing in plain sight, retreating into their apartments because of sickness or bereavement, mental illness or the persistent, unbearable burden of sadness and shyness, of not knowing how to impress themselves into the world. I was getting a taste of it, all right, but what on earth would it be like to live the whole of your life like this, occupying the blind spot in other people’s existences, their noisy intimacies?
If anyone can be said to have worked from that place, it’s Henry Darger, the Chicago janitor who posthumously achieved fame as one of the world’s most celebrated outsider artists, a term coined to describe people on the margins of society, who make work without the benefit of an education in art or art history.
Darger, who was born in the slums of Chicago in 1892, had certainly existed on the margins. His mother had died of puerperal fever when he was four, a few days after giving birth to his sister, who was immediately adopted. His father was crippled, and at the age of eight he was sent away, first to a Catholic boys’ home and then to the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, where he received the dreadful news that his father was dead. After running away at seventeen, he found work in the city’s Catholic hospitals, in which uncertain refuge he spent nearly six decades rolling bandages and sweeping floors.
In 1932, Darger rented a single room on the second floor of a boarding house at 851 Webster Street, in a run-down, working-class region of the city. There he stayed until 1972, when he became too ill to care for himself and so went unwillingly to the St Augustine Catholic Mission, where coincidentally his father had also died. After he moved out, his landlord, Nathan Lerner, decided to clean the room of forty years of accumulated rubbish. He hired a skip and asked another tenant, David Berglund, to assist him by dragging out piles of newspapers, old shoes, broken eyeglasses and empty bottles, the collected hoardings of a devoted dumpster diver.
At some point during this process, Berglund began to unearth artworks of almost supernatural radiance: beautiful, baffling watercolours of naked little girls with penises, at play in rolling landscapes. Some had charming, fairytale elements: clouds with faces and winged creatures sporting in the sky. Others were of exquisitely staged and coloured scenes of mass torture, complete with delicately painted pools of scarlet blood. Berglund showed them to Lerner, himself an artist, who immediately recognised their value.
Over the next few months, they discovered a vast body of work, including over 300 paintings and thousands of pages of written material. Much of it was set in a coherent otherworld: the Realms of the Unreal, a place Darger inhabited far more dynamically and passionately than he did the everyday city of Chicago. Many people live constricted lives, but what is astonishing about Darger is the compensatory scale as well as richness of his internal sphere. He’d begun writing about the Realms some time between 1910 and 1912, after he escaped from the asylum, though who knows how long he’d been thinking about it, or visiting it in his mind. The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion would eventually run to 15,145 pages, making it the longest known work of fiction in existence.
As the unwieldy title suggests, The Realms of the Unreal charts the progress of a bloody civil war. It takes place on an imaginary planet, around which our own earth circulates as a moon. Like its American counterpart, this war is being fought over slavery; specifically the slavery of children. In fact, the role of children is among the most striking elements of the work. While gorgeously attired adult men fight on either side, the spiritual leaders of the struggle against the wicked Glandelinians are seven prepubescent sisters, while the victims of their multiple atrocities are small girl children, often stripped of their clothes, revealing the presence of male genitals.
The Vivian Girls are endlessly resilient. Like comic book heroines, they can withstand any amount of violence; escaping every peril. But the other children are not so lucky. As both the written and visual material makes graphically clear, the Realms are a place of infinite cruelty, in which naked little girls are routinely strangled, crucified and disembowelled by uniformed men in gardens filled with luscious outsized flowers. It is this element of the work that would later draw accusations of sexual sadism and paedophilia.
Over the years, Darger also wrote a second enormous novel, Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago, as well as an autobiography and multiple journals. But despite his astonishing productivity, he apparently never tried to show, promote or even talk about his work, making and containing it within a succession of three small boarding house rooms. As such, it’s not perhaps surprising that when Berglund went to the St Augustine Mission to ask about the thrilling find at Webster Street, Darger refused to discuss it, making the enigmatic statement it’s too late now and asking that the work be destroyed. Later, he contradicted himself, saying that it could be preserved in Lerner’s custody.
Either way, when he died on 13 April 1973, at the age of eighty-one, he left behind no explanation for the things he’d made, the art he’d created so painstakingly and over so many years. In the absence of any surviving relatives, it was Lerner and his wife who took on the roles of advocate and champion, coordinating and driving Darger’s growing status in the art world, and selling his increasingly costly paintings to private collectors, galleries and museums.
It’s rare that a body of work emerges into view so totally severed from its maker, and it’s particularly problematic when the content is both so disturbing and so resistant to interpretation. In the forty years since Darger’s death, theories about his intentions and character have proliferated, put forward by an impassioned chorus of art historians, academics, curators, psychologists and journalists. These voices are by no means convergent, but broadly speaking they h
ave established Darger as an outsider artist nonpareil: untutored, ignorant, isolated and almost certainly mentally ill. The extreme violence and physically explicit nature of his work has inevitably drawn lurid readings. Over the years, he’s been posthumously diagnosed with autism and schizophrenia, while his first biographer, John MacGregor, explicitly suggested that he possessed the mind of a paedophile or serial killer, an accusation that has proved enduring.
It seemed to me that this second act of Darger’s life compounded the isolation of the first; divesting him of dignity and drowning out or speaking over the voice he’d managed to raise against considerable odds. The things he made have served as lightning rods for other people’s fears and fantasies about isolation, its potentially pathological aspect. In fact, many of the books and articles written about him seem to shine more light on our cultural anxieties around the effects of loneliness on the psyche than they do on the artist as a real, breathing person.
This process troubled me so much, in fact, that I became obsessed with accessing and reading The History of My Life, Darger’s own unpublished memoir. Some of its text has been reproduced, but not in its entirety; another form of silencing, particularly when one considers how many volumes have been published on his life.
After some digging, I discovered that the manuscript was in New York, along with all Darger’s written work and many of his drawings, part of a collection purchased from the Lerners in the 1990s by the American Folk Art Museum. I wrote to the curator asking if I could visit and she agreed to let me spend a week, the maximum concession, reading through his papers, the words he’d actually used to record his existence in the world.
*
The archive was on the third floor of a huge office building near the Manhattan Bridge, down a maze of shiny white corridors. It doubled as a store for objects not currently on exhibition and so I sat at a desk surrounded by a melancholy zoo of wooden animals draped in white sheets, among them an elephant and a giraffe. Darger’s memoir was in a brown leather binder, cracking at the corners and stuffed with grubby sheets of blue-lined paper. It began with page after page of copied passages from the Bible. At last, on page 39: The History of my life. By Henry Joseph Darger (Dargarius); written in 1968, when he was retired and time was hanging heavy on his hands.
Not everyone possesses an instantly distinctive voice, but Darger did. Precise, pedantic, humorous, elliptical and very dry. The memoir opened: ‘In the month of April on the 12, in the year of 1892, of what week day I never knew, as I was never told, nor did I seek the information.’ What’s odd about this sentence is that the first few words seem to be missing, so that one must extrapolate that this is Darger’s date of birth. An accident, no doubt, though it should also serve to make the reader wary, conscious that they are entering into a narrative of gaps.
Darger’s account of his very early childhood was more benign than I’d been expecting, partly because he elided the death of his mother, focusing instead on his relationship with his father. They were poor, yes, but their life was not entirely devoid of pleasure, though Henry did have the heavy responsibilities that inevitably fall to children of sick parents. ‘My father was a tailor and a kind and easy going man.’ ‘Oh how good the coffee he could produce by boiling – as he was lame I bought the food coffee milk and other supplies and ran errands.’
His reflections on childhood were interesting. There was never a sense of a we, of being part of a merry herd. Rather, an impression of himself as outside, acting first as an aggressor and then protector to those smaller and more vulnerable than himself. The aggression was caused, he thought, because he lacked a brother and had lost his sister to adoption. ‘I never knew or seen her, or knew her name. I would as I wrote before shove them down, and once foolishly threw with my fingertips ashes in the eyes of a little girl by the name of Francis Gillow.’
Much has been made of this scene, and another in which he described being ‘a meany’, pushing a two-year-old to the ground and making it cry: ballast for building an argument about Darger being a sadist or a madman. But who didn’t enact some violence on a sibling or stranger when they were small? You only have to sit by a playground for half an hour to see how physically aggressive many small children are.
Later, a shift occurred. He began to experience a deep tenderness for children that would persist right through his life. ‘Then babies at that were more to me than anything, more than the world. I would fondle them and love them. At that time just any bigger boy or even grown up dare molest or harm them in anyway.’ It’s this sort of language that gives rise to the suspicion of paedophilia, though Darger certainly saw himself as the counter-opposite of an abuser: the self-styled protector of innocence, alert to vulnerability, to the possibility of harm.
The boy arising from the grubby pages was bright and stubborn, intolerant of irrational adult structures. Precocious of mind, able to grasp the failings of the rote way he was being taught, on one occasion explaining to a teacher the ways in which the histories of the civil war diverged and contradicted one another. But despite his intelligence, Darger wasn’t popular at school, due to his habit of making what he described as strange noises with his nose, mouth and throat.
He’d expected his antics to amuse his fellow students, but instead they were annoyed and called him crazy and feeble-minded and sometimes tried to beat him up. He had another odd habit too, a way of throwing with his left hand, ‘like pretending it were snowing’. People who saw it thought he was mad and he said if he’d realised why he’d have done it in private, since the accusation of insanity would soon have dreadful consequences for him.
By this time, his father had handed him over to the custody of the nuns at the Mission of Our Lady Home, a place he disliked so much he would have run away, if only he could have thought of how ‘to be elsewhere taken care of’. He was eight, a child who despite his ability to shop and run errands was sensible of his need for adult protection. His father and godmother both came to visit, but there seemed to be no question of him returning home.
In his final year at the Mission, he was because of his strange habits taken several times to see a doctor, who told him eventually that his heart was not in the right place. ‘Where was it supposed to be?’ he wrote ironically. ‘In my belly? Yet I did not receive any kind of medicine or any kind of treatment.’ Instead, on a grim November day he was hustled out of Chicago and taken by train to what he described as some kind of home for feeble-minded children. Decades on, he was still enraged. ‘I a feeble minded kid. I knew more than the whole shebang in that place.’
In the most recent Darger biography, Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy, the writer Jim Elledge summons a powerful array of historical testimony, including a legal case, to prove the appalling conditions at this asylum, where children were routinely raped, choked and beaten, deceased inmates’ body parts were used in anatomy lectures, one boy castrated himself and a small girl was scalded to death.
There is no mention of any of these horrors in Darger’s own account. ‘Sometimes was pleasant and sometimes not so,’ he says, and: ‘Finally got to like the place.’ This doesn’t mean, of course, that he was not among the abused. The laconic tone might be the stoicism of no choice, or the numbness that follows on from violence, the isolating, silencing layers of fear and shame. Perhaps not, though. There has been too much speaking into this kind of absence; too strong a desire to fill the holes in Henry’s story. It was a violent place; he was there: those are the facts, the limits of the known.
Here too I must say something about time. As with David Wojnarowicz’s account of his childhood, the sense of time in Darger’s record is often blurry or uncertain. There are many sentences along the lines of ‘I do not remember the number of years I lived with my father’ or ‘I believe I was at the asylum 7 years’. This temporal unsteadiness is a consequence of too many moves and too little explanation about them, relating too to the absence of a devoted parent, who helps to organise a child’s memories by telling their story back
to them and keeping them appraised of their chronology, their place. For Henry, there was no one to keep track; no agency and no control. The world he inhabited was a place in which things happen to you, abruptly and without warning, where one’s belief in the predictability of the future is severely undermined.
A case in point: when he was ‘somewhat older, probably in my early teens’, Henry was informed that his father had died, that he was completely at the mercy of the institution, and no longer possessed a family or home. ‘I did not cry or weep however,’ he writes, his Is like shepherd’s crooks. ‘I had that kind of deep sorrow that bad as you feel I could not. I’d been better off if I could have. I was in that state for weeks, and because of it I was in a state of ugliness of such nature that everyone avoided me, they were so scared . . . During the first of my grief I hardly even ate anything, and was no friend to any one.’ Loss after loss, causing withdrawal after withdrawal.
Like time, the subject of home is also a source of puzzlement. At the bughouse, as people called it, the older boys were made to spend their summers working on a state farm. Henry liked the labour, but he hated to leave the asylum. ‘I loved it much better than the farm, but yet I loved the work there. Yet the asylum was home to me.’ But and yet: devices for yoking contradictory thoughts together.
In fact, although he enjoyed the meals at the farm, loved to work in the fields and believed the family who ran it were very good people, he tried several times to run away. The first escape attempt ended when he was caught by the farm cowboy, who tied his hands to a rope and made him run back behind the horse, a scene vividly animated in Jessica Yu’s beautiful documentary about Darger. It’s hard to think of a more brutal illustration of being powerless over the course of your life, lashed and dragged in the wake of larger forces.
