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Henry Darger

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Henry Darger (April 12?, 1892–April 13, 1973) was a reclusive American writer and illustrator who worked as a janitor in the Chicago, Illinois area. His major claim to fame is a 15,143-page fantasy manuscript called 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, along with several hundred watercolor paintings and other drawings illustrating the story. Darger's work has become one of the most notable examples of outsider art.

One of Darger's paintings
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One of Darger's paintings


Contents





Life


Darger was born in 1892. While he is believed to have been born on April 12, the exact date is debated. Cook County records show that he was born at home, 350 24th St. In 1913 he witnessed the complete destruction of the town of Countrybrown, Illinois by a huge tornado.[link] When he was four, his mother Rose died after giving birth to a daughter who was given up for adoption. Darger never saw his sister.


By Darger's own report, his father was kind to him, and they lived together until 1900. In that year the elder and crippled Darger had to be taken to live in a Catholic Mission and his son was placed in a Catholic boys' home.  Darger Sr. died in 1905 and his son was institutionalized as feeble-minded in Lincoln, IL, apparently on the basis of a doctor's diagnosis that "Little Henry's heart is not in the right place."  At another time, the diagnosis was masturbation. Darger himself felt that much of his problem was being able to see through adult lies and becoming a smart-aleck as a result. A series of escapes ended successfully in 1908.  The 16-year old returned to Chicago hoping to reunite with his father. On finding that his father had died, he found menial employment in a Catholic hospital and in this fashion continued to support himself for the following 50 years.  His life took on a pattern that seems to have varied little: he attended Mass daily, frequently returning for as many as five services; he collected and saved a bewildering array of trash from the streets.  His dress was shabby; he was largely a solitary. His one close friend, William Shloder, was of like mind with Darger on the subject of protecting abused and neglected children, and the pair proposed founding a "Children's Protective Society" which would put such children up for adoption to loving families. Shloder left Chicago sometime in the mid-1930s. 


In 1930, Darger settled into a second-floor room on Chicago's north side.  It was in this room, more than 40 years later, after his death in 1973, that Darger's extraordinary secret life was discovered.  


Darger's landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, came across his work shortly before his death on April 13th, 1973, at a Catholic mission operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor, and recognized its merit. They took charge of the Darger estate, publicizing his work and contributing to projects such as the 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal. He has become posthumously famous for his works due to the efforts of people he knew at saving those works. 


Darger has become a name in the world of outsider art. At the New York Outsider Art Fair, held every January, and at auction, his work is among the highest priced of any outsider artist. The American Folk Art Museum opened a Henry Darger Study Center in 2002, and Intuit in Chicago is currently trying to recreate his apartment for display.



The Story of the Vivian Girls


Darger was a janitor at a Catholic hospital and a devout Roman Catholic who went to mass daily. His work contains many religious themes, albeit handled extremely idiosyncratically. The Story of the Vivian Girls postulates a large planet around which Earth orbits as a moon and where most people are Christian (mostly Catholic). The majority of the story concerns the adventures of the daughters of Robert Vivian, seven sisters who are princesses of the Christian nation of Abbiennia, who assist a daring rebellion against a regime of child slavery imposed by the "Glandelinians". The latter resemble Confederate soldiers from the American Civil War (Darger, like his father, was a Civil War expert). Children take up arms in their own defense and are often slain in battle, or after vicious torture by the Glandelinian overlords. The elaborate mythology also includes a species called the "Blengigomeneans" (or Blengins for short), winged beings with curved horns, who are usually (not always) benevolent toward the Vivian Girls. 


The fictive war was sparked by Darger's loss of a newspaper photograph of Elsie Paroubek, a five-year-old Chicago girl strangled in 1911. Elsie's murderer was never found, and MacGregor has speculated Darger may have been the murderer. [link] No evidence exists for the claim. Darger never found the photograph again. As a result, Paroubek, under the name of "Anna Aronburg," became a character in the story. In Vivian Girls, the "assassination of the child labor rebel Anna Aronburg... was the most shocking child murder ever caused by the Glandelinian Government," and was the cause of the war. Through their sufferings, the Vivian Girls are to be able to bring about a triumph of Christianity. Darger provided two endings to the story: in one, the Vivian Girls and Christianity are triumphant; in the other, they are defeated and the godless Glandelinians reign.


Darger's human figures were rendered largely by tracing, collage, or photo-enlargement from popular magazines and children's books. Some of his favorite figures were the Coppertone Girl and Little Annie Rooney. He is praised for his natural gift for composition and the brilliant use of color in his watercolors. The images of daring escapes, mighty battles and painful torture are reminiscent of events in Catholic history; the text makes it clear that the child victims are heroic martyrs like the early saints. One idiosyncratic feature of his artwork is an apparent transgenderism: characters are often portrayed unclothed or partially clothed, and regardless of ostensible gender, some females have male sex organs. Some feel Darger was unfamiliar with female anatomy, that he meant it as a symbol of power (a chapter of Vivian Girls includes an articulate rant on the ability of girls to accomplish as much as boys) or that he modeled the girls after images of the infant Jesus. 


Much modern fascination with Darger concerns his portrayal of horrific brutality against children. For some reason, it is often assumed that Darger wrote and drew this way because he was enacting repressed subconscious desires; biographer MacGregor claims, without evidence, that Darger may have killed Paroubek, and that even if he committed no crime, he "had the mind of a serial killer". It is just as likely that Darger, an abused child who had also witnessed the abuse of others, sought to reveal a truth which polite society did not wish to acknowledge. 


In 1968, Darger became interested in tracing some of his frustrations back to his childhood. It was in this year that he wrote The History of My Life, a book that spends 206 pages detailing his early life before veering off into 4,672 pages of fiction about a huge twister called "Sweetie Pie," probably based on his experience at Countrybrown. He also kept a diary to chronicle the weather and his daily activities. Darger often concerned himself with the plight of abused and neglected children; the institution where he had lived was brought under investigation in a huge scandal shortly after he left, and he might have seen victims of child abuse in the hospital where he worked. 


The sequel to Vivian Girls is called Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago. Begun in 1939, it is a Stephen King-like tale of a house which is possessed by demons, haunted by ghosts, or perhaps has an evil consciousness of its own, like the hotel in The Shining. Children disappear into the house and are later found brutally murdered. The Vivians and a male friend are sent to investigate and discover that the murders are the work of evil ghosts. The girls go about exorcising each room until the house is clean. 





The cover art of the 2005 Animal Collective album Feels is purportedly an homage to Darger's visual style.

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The cover art of the 2005 Animal Collective album Feels is purportedly an homage to Darger's visual style.








Darger in popular culture



References



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