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Henry Darger: Life and Works

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Henry Darger: Life and Works art press 300 outsider art Henry Darger: Life and Works JEAN-MARC SCANREIGH, FRANÇOISE BIVER Five months before his death, an 80-year-old man learns that the secret enterprise of his life has been found out. “Throw it all away,” he says, convinced that what he has been doing in his room for 60 years will be judged as others already judge him, as “crazy.” These “people” include Nathan Lerner, an artist and professor at the Chicago Bauhaus who was nice enough not to evict him when he became his landlord in 1960. Henry Darger died in April 1973, a few days after Picasso, confounding the benevolence of his landlord with that of the Lord above, who finally stirred himself and accorded the old man an empathetic look and perhaps the sweet presentiment that Lerner wouldn’t throw anything away. Thus saved from destruction (1) was the raw prose of 15,145 typewritten sheets bound into 15 volumes, doubtless the longest work of fiction ever written, plus an appendix 10,531 pages long, six volumes of weather reports, time lines, a History of My Life—30,000 pages in all! Additionally, there were hundreds of drawings including three collections so enormous they are barely manageable, made of wide strips about three meters long and 70 centimeters wide, covered on both sides with watercolor drawings. This ensemble—indissociable from the place where it was “invented,” a small room stuffed with maniac collections, religious tracts and old prints—bears a title as strange as it is interminable: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Before delving any further into the story, the first viewers of Darger’s work must have been utterly dumbstruck by the drawings. Hordes of little girls, usually naked and adorned with penises, gambol in panoramic country scenes with a certain perverse naïve charm. This gaiety comes to a quick end when the reader discovers, hidden like Easter eggs, scenes of strangulation and evisceration. You realize that the children swarming against a background of spring gusts and fluttering butterflies are at the mercy of persecutors who are truly horrible despite their tin soldier airs. Who Was Henry Darger? Only the first 126 pages of his 5,084-page biography contain verifiable elements. The rest recount the ravages of an imaginary hurricane, a long digression that turns into an involuntary metaphor that says a great deal about his perception of the world and his mode of expression. Darger was four years old in 1896. His mother died after the birth of a sister who was soon adopted and disappeared from his life. He didn’t know her name or his mother’s, either. By 1900 he was a bizarre schoolchild, vaguely pyromaniac and violent. He was a good reader and writer, fascinated with Civil War history, but that didn’t prevent him from being wrongfully stuck in an orphanage and later placed in a home for the mentally retarded in Lincoln, Illinois. After the death of his father, who at any rate had been unable to deal with him, the 17-year-old Henry ran away and went back to his hometown Chicago where he found a job as a hospital handyman. He never had a family. He spent his life doing menial work, cleaning and washing up, always with the same nickname as in his childhood: “Crazy.” But he had a secret life. By day he worked in the hospital; by night he rebelled in the secrecy of his closed room where he invented his real life. Starting in 1911, drawing inspiration from the Bible and children’s literature, he began to devote his fabulous energy to the story of an imaginary universe just as complex as the real one. Despite his note cards, he got lost in the proliferation of repetitive scenes and characters with fluctuating identities. Despite his literary naivety, he was undeniably extremely inventive. Writing was an outlet that let him say it all, to live out all the roles, to intervene in his own intrigues like a demiurge. Slyly he even threw God off by putting his own personal pantheon up against Him: seven sublimely beautiful and invincible sisters, the Vivian Girls. The narrative of their heroic revolt would take 15,145 pages and 11 years of his life. These unshakable children sent out on missions of salvation again and again were the healing balm that helped him bear the pain of being severed from his family as a child and his social insignificance. Just like his invariable daily mass. Catholic worship, with its Virgin cajoling her male baby, offered just what he needed to console him for what he had lost, untangle the ambivalent feelings toward the sister who took his mother, and comfort him with the vision of an undifferentiated angelic childhood. Very likely Darger remained ignorant of sexual realities, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to adopt a child. In vain: You’re too crazy, Henry! “Asperger’s syndrome,” say psychological experts today, a kind of autism that leaves the intellectual faculties intact. Yet we are impressed by how “normal” he was: his flight from the asylum, his ability to main financial independence all his life (even during the Depression he didn’t lose his job!). As an artist he was equally surprising. He made use of modernity, typed up his handwritten pages and had photo enlargements done by professional photo labs. Realizing that the naked girls he gave them to enlarge might be shocking, he drew provisional panties on them. He was equally lucid about himself. He learned to get around his own weaknesses in anatomic drawing and was conscious enough of the fictional character of his writing that he resolutely situated the story in the “realms of the Unreal.” Like many others, he posed himself the eminently reasonable question of how God could remain silent in the face of the atrocities of wars and the murder of children. Gifted with a personal solidity that let him withstand alienation and solitude, he had nothing left but trashcans in which to stash the century. Holed up, believing that he was acting under the eye of God, he ceaselessly responded to the trashcans. What he did says a lot to us. Here we will yield to the temptation to make a slightly extravagant commentary just because the story of Darger’s creative destiny invites us to do so. 1912: Darger is furious because he can’t find a favorite photo of a little girl murdered in Chicago the year before. This image, a morbid echo of his missing sister, would haunt all his writing and drawings. As a reprisal against divine inertia, Darger throws himself into a description of the killing of 56,789 children butchered like cattle. This transgressive gesture—the kind that art is able to exteriorize and uphold—never left his room. Just the opposite of the subversive European who left the Old World behind to inflame visitors to the New York Armory Show with a rather inoffensive nude, one might be tempted to say. If Darger never heard that piece of news, nevertheless he seems to have been on the same wavelength that from Chicago to Paris exhorted artists to reappropriate bottle racks from a department store and pick up readymades the big city no longer wanted. Yes I Am 1914: The year of the world war Darger so well described in his pages. This one involved the countries of the Real. Reading American and German newspapers—Darger was the son of German immigrants—brought back to him the impact of Civil War photos, the first of their kind, with those of the Crimean War, to reveal mangled corpses, the previously unshown side of war. It’s difficult not to think of another lonely man with a double life, busy during these same troubled times writing improbable but all too plausible stories, which a more educated Darger would have undoubtedly understood, if, of course, the author had happened to live in Chicago instead of Prague and wanted to throw into some trashcan a draft of In the Penal Colony. 1924: Once again, we’ll get fancy here. The signatories of the Surrealist Manifesto would surely have approved of Darger, but what would they have made, if somehow it had come to their attention, of the strange convergences between his biography and that of an obscure alter ego three years his elder who was to give his inner demons a “surreal” existence? From an impoverished family, tormented by artistic urges, living off odd jobs and often sleeping in the asylum at night, losing his father in late adolescence, excused from military service because of a weak constitution, crippled when it came to women and finally experiencing a sort of epiphany in his fantasies of total war, this man, unlike Darger, finally turned his dreams into reality. At the end of the First World War, living reclusively by his own wits, he brought forth a “Glandelinian” manual for the war to come: Mein Kampf. Darger was just a fiction writer whose inventions required nothing but images. He began making collages and photomontages that couldn’t have been closer to Schwitters’ stipulations for his merz—except that there was nothing oppositional about Darger’s. But the latter, failing to succeed at the dominant aesthetics, learned, like his fellow artists, to make positive and emancipated use of discards found in trash cans. 1929. Darger is 37. The stock marked crash is the backdrop for the appearance of a comic strip character who touched him in his soul: Little Orphan Annie.
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