DARGER & TOLKIEN

Fantasy & Science Fiction Column, May 2002

HENRY DARGER: IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL by John M. MacGregor Delano Greenidge Editions, 720 pp, $85.00

DARGER: THE HENRY DARGER COLLECTION AT THE AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM by Brooke David Anderson, Essay by Michel Thevoz translated by Catherine G. Sweeney American Folk Art Museum, New York, in association with Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 128 pp, $29.85

J.R.R. TOLKIEN: AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY
by Tom Shippey, Houghton Mifflin, 348 pp, $26.00

INSIDE OUT

Earlier this year, people in New York lined up to gaze upon vivid, large-scale images of a world not unlike our own, populated by a childlike race engaged in an epic battle with the monstrous forces of Evil which sought to enslave them. Dragons, demonic creatures, richly detailed landscapes, carefully wrought battle-sequences and eruptions of cataclysmic weather; all sprung from the imagination of a devout Catholic, born in 1892, whose world reflected a lifelong preoccupation with Christian mythos as well as the dark matter of Twentieth Century war and technology.

Peter Jackson's first installment of THE LORD OF THE RINGS? No: the paintings of Henry Darger, the so-called Outsider artist whose massive body of work, painted and written, has posthumously established him as one of the major creative figures - and certainly one of the most provocative - of the last century. Since its discovery in Darger's apartment a few months before his death in 1973, the immense trove of Darger's scroll-like paintings and collages, fictional text, and autobiographical material has incited the kind of interest one might expect from the successful translation, after nearly a century of failed effort, of the Linear A tablets from ancient Crete. Yet even as Darger's lifework is embraced by a critical establishment, that of another singular artist, J.R.R. Tolkien, continues to suffer critical condescension and often outright disdain, despite (and no doubt because of) its huge commercial success.

Tolkien and Darger were almost exact contemporaries - born a few months apart in 1892 and dying less than a year apart, Darger in late 1972 and Tolkien in September 1973. Though they lived and died in radically different worlds (Tolkien spent most of his life in England, Darger in Chicago), and had adult lives that could not be more diametrically opposed, their early years have an eerie, almost uncanny symmetry. Both were profoundly affected by early childhood losses. Darger's mother died a few weeks before his fourth birthday; Tolkien's father a few months after his. Both became orphans at an early age.. After his mother's death (from diabetes) the twelve-year-old Tolkien and his younger brother came under the charge of a benevolent priest, before being taken in by a relative-by-marriage. In 1900, Darger's ailing father entered a Catholic mission; his son was consigned to a Catholic boys' home, and upon his father's death five years later, the thirteen-year-old Darger was institutionalized (in 1908 he escaped). Both began work on their epics around the same time, 1913 for Tolkien, Darger a year or so earlier. Both used visual as well as written forms for their art. And both chose as fictional oeuvres the lifelong creation of a single, epic history of an imagined world: Tolkien's Middle Earth and Darger's Realms of the Unreal.

In HENRY DARGER: IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL, art historian John M. MacGregor has created a magisterial work that at times seems as immense and all-encompassing as the one which it explores. MacGregor is the author of the 1988 THE DISCOVERY OF THE ART OF THE INSANE, a seminal study of one manifestation of the form that has been variously called Art Brut, Folk Art, Self-Taught Art, Visionary Art, but which is now commonly classed under the catch-all term Outsider Art. The phrase is frustratingly elastic. It has been applied to artists as disparate as the Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd, a member of the Royal Academy, neither an outsider nor self-taught but unquestionably mad; Chris Mars, onetime musician for the Replacements and now a highly-regarded painter whose work deals with the familial fallout of schizophrenia; the folk artist Howard Finster, and the anatomical transcendentalist painter Alex Grey. "Visionary" is probably a more appropriate description, especially if modified with "obsessive" or "obsessional (which could also be applied to much of Tolkien's written work).

Perhaps the most poignant reaction to such personal, intense forms of creative expression comes from the artist Nathan Lerner, Darger's landlord and the man who, with a student assistant, discovered Darger's monumental accomplishment after his death -

"What made him do all these things that didn't have to be done?"

What indeed? Henry Darger may not have been insane, but he was as close to a poster boy for the Outsider Artist that we are likely to get. A few weeks before Darger's fourth birthday, his mother died of puerperal fever after giving birth to a girl. The infant, Henry's sister, was given up for adoption; her history is unknown, but it is clear that her disappearance, following his mother's death and his father's subsequent grief, became the central event upon which the adult Darger constructed his brilliant, severely disturbed and disturbing history of The Realms of the Unreal. After his stint at a Catholic boys' home, in 1904 the twelve-year-old Darger was placed in the Lincoln Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children. His father helped fill out the committal forms before his death in 1905.

Henry remained at the asylum until 1909. The reasons for his presence there were his propensity for dangerous behavior (attacking smaller children, perhaps displaced aggression towards the infant sister who had robbed him of his mother; he also attacked a teacher); setting fires; "acquired" self-abuse. This last appears to have been what motivated the assessing physician to pronounced the child "insane." Yet whatever severe psychological orders assailed him, the young Henry was not feeble-minded. He was intelligent and loved to read, particularly newspapers and military history (the Civil War was an especial passion); during his time at the boys' home he was probably impressed by the publishing business that was run by the Mission as a vocational tool for its inmates. MacGregor suggests that Darger may have suffered from Asperger's Syndrome, a comparatively mild form of autism whose traits include difficulty in establishing and maintaining human relationship, obsessional behavior and interests, and often normal or above-normal intelligence and verbal fluency.

Despite Darger's later casual dismissal - "Finally I got to like the place and the meals were good and plenty" - the asylum seems to have been a nightmarish institution, marked by violent outbursts and lacking in any compassionate interaction between its 500 employees and 1200 inmates. Summers provided a surcease, when Henry was sent to work on the State Farm outside the city. After several aborted efforts at running away, the seventeen-year-old Henry finally did so for good, returning to Chicago where he found work as a janitor at St. Joseph's Hospital.

"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a good deal of telling anyway."

So Tolkien muses in THE HOBBIT. And while the remainder of Henry Darger's life can only with great difficulty be construed as "good," it was certainly without great event, at least to any outside observer. In 1917 he was drafted and a few months later discharged for medical reasons. After that he worked as a janitor and dishwasher at various hospitals. In later years when he grew too frail for these jobs he was given other menial tasks. He seems to have ever had only one real friend. In 1932 he moved into the rooming house where he was to spend the rest of his life, most of it in a single large room. In 1956 the building was bought by the artist Nathan Lerner, an amiably bohemian landlord who created a small floating world of artists and musicians and art students who tolerated Darger's presence and made small gestures of friendship to the lonely old man.

Lerner was an exceptionally compassionate landlord: he neither raised Darger's rent nor complained about his tenant's housekeeping. He and the other residents of 851 Webster took turns helping Darger, providing the occasional meal, assistance with medical care; most important, they provided contact with a world outside the one in Darger's head. For by the 1960s Henry Darger had become one of those lost souls who populate the edges of any urban landscape, usually glimpsed from the corner of one's eye: a furtive, slight man - he was just over five feet tall - he wore the filthy ruins of his Army overcoat and spent hours every day wandering back alleys, poking through trash cans for refuse which he then brought back to his room. MacGregor quotes a visitor to Darger's room.

there was a tremendous amount of stuff. Newspapers and magazines piled in bundles up the ceiling. If there was one pair of glasses, there must have been a hundred. Rubber bands, boxes of rubber bands. Shoes, lots of shoes. But you went into the room and it was organized.Š The table was cluttered to a depth of two to three feet, except for a working area. He had all these drawings and pictures across the top. I was interested in art, and a little bit curious, but it was obvious that this was very private, a very private kind of thing.

Darger's neighbors often heard him talking to himself, carrying on lengthy conversations in which he took on different voices. He was in fact engaged in the final stages of a lifelong battle with God, a struggle which he had recorded in his vast multivolume epic, and which eventually found its way into his autobiography.

Had trouble again with twine. Mad enough to wish I was a bad tornado. Swore at God, yet go to three morning masses. Only cooled down by late afternoon. Am I a real enemy of the cross, or a very very sorry saint?

Ah yes: the eternal problem of the struggle with twine. And yet what do our lives really consist of, most of the time, but precisely this: life-or-death battles with the shopping, the commute, the boss, the kids, the spouse, the neighbors, the neighbor's dog. God? Each age gets the art it deserves, and no doubt we get the saints we deserve as well; in which case Henry Darger is infinitely worthy of the critical canonization he has received in the decades since his death. The end came a few months after he finally left Webster Street for a Catholic nursing home. He was eighty years old. Not long before he died Nathan Lerner entered Darger's room to clean it. As he said in a personal recollection,

It is a humbling experience to have to admit that not until I looked under all the debris in his room did I become aware of the incredible world that Henry had created from within himself. It was only in the last days of Henry Darger's life that I came close to knowing who this shuffling old man really was.

What Lerner found under the compulsively organized piles of twine and spectacles and newsprint was the eight-volume biography Darger had been working on since 1963 - and, in a number of old trunks where they had been stored, the trove of original artwork that has now made Darger world famous. In MacGregor's words,

"fifteen volumes, 15,145 typewritten pages, unquestionably the longest work of fiction ever written. In time the room also yielded the three huge bound volumes of illustrations for that work, several hundred pictures, many over twelve feet long and painted on both sides." By accident, the landlord had stumbled upon a concealed and secret life work which no one had ever seen: Darger's alternate world.

That world is a vast nameless planet orbited by our own Earth. The frontispiece of Volume One of its history reads

OF 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

The Vivian Girls! Seven plucky child princesses who, with their brother Penrod, battle the adult, male Glandelinians, enemies who exist solely to capture, imprison, and especially, torture the child-slaves of the Christian country of Abbiennia. Modelled largely upon the books he loved as a child - L. Frank Baum's Oz books, Johanna Spyri's Heidi stories, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, Booth Tarkington's PENROD series - Darger's epic follows the Vivian Girls through an endless relay of scrapes, plots, imprisonments, battles, escapes and cataclysmic storms.

Still, as Darger himself admits in a tone at once wistful and minatory, "This is not the land where Dorothy and her Oz friends reside." Darger seems to have had little innate skill as a draftsman: he created his scroll-like paintings and drawing by means of collage, tracery, photocopying and enlagring pictures, then hand-coloring them, creating an imagistic impasto that is breathtaking, surreal, deliriously funny and very often horrific. The figures of the Vivian Girls and the child slaves are taken mostly from children's coloring books and newspaper cartoons, Disney figures, advertisements, Illustrations from The Saturday Evening Post; the malevolent Glandelinian generals from newspaper photos and images of soldiers from the Civil War. There are also the beautiful dragon-like Blengiglomeneans and Blenglins, children with ram's-horns and gorgeous butterfly wings. The landscapes are vast, with Toon Town trees and blue-washed skies; though the usual weather consists of cyclones, tornadoes, hail, fire; the "insane fury of crazy thunderstorm." A sample of Darger's captions read "thrilling time while with bombshells bursting all around," "Children tied to trees in path of forest fires. In spite of exceeding extreme peril, Vivian Girls rescued them," and "Everything is allright though storm continues."

Within Henry Darger's mind, it continued for decades; a firestorm of conflicting impulses. Art critics make much of Darger's luminous use of color and his genius for collage, and certainly many of the paintings in the Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum are gorgeous and genuinely breathtaking: a watercolor of the dragonlike Blengins that resembles an Edenic vision filtered through Klimt; portraits of the Glendelinian Generals that anticipate the dizzy swirl of Terry Gilliam's Mony Python animations; a nine-foot panel that shows the Vivian Girls and their followers in an idyllic, flower-strewn setting that evokes the pastoral beauty of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

But this is not Oz. The girl slaves are usually naked (a good deal of the written text involves getting their clothes off); they often have male, but never female, genitals. There is no real economic purpose for their enslavement: the children exist solely to be tortured, in graphic and appalling detail, by the predatory Glendelinians, who crucify, disembowel, burn and flagellate them. In his exhaustive study, MacGregor compellingly suggests that in Darger's work we have the singular opportunity to gaze into the mind of someone who, under different circumstances, might well have been a pedophile and perhaps a serial killer of children.

Given America's continuing obsession with pedophilia and serial murder, it's not surprising that there would be a ready-made audience for work that has the seal of approval of a critical establishment. Yet the power of Darger's art doesn't lie in prurience, or even in the voyeuristic sense of looking upon the work of someone who, almost certainly, would have been frightened and angered by our attention. It's too strange for the former - like the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, Darger seems to have been innocent of the facts of human anatomy, and probably of human reproduction and sexual function as well - and too repellent, in many instances, to incite the sustained voyeuristic interest of most "normal" people. Separated from his visual work, his written text has the monotonous banality of the simplest pornography (only without the sex); but taken in toto, THE REALMS is as excruciating and detailed a portrait of the human psyche that we have seen: brutal, banal, transcendental, and with flashes of the divine. As MacGregor says,

"Darger's acute awareness of violence and evil in the world, and particularly in the lives of children, was unmistakably derived from the presence of monstrous drives and desires in himself. By withdrawing from the world, the mystic, far from escaping from temptation, opens himself to the encounter with evil in its purest form as it arises from within. Darger, like the Desert Fathers, was repeatedly overwhelmed by such temptations, but by encountering them in the Realms of the Unreal he defended himself against the danger of acting on them in the world."Evil, carried to impossible extremes, surely must attract the attention of God.Fantasy & Science Fiction Column, May 2002