Realms of the Unreal

Jennie Richee by Mac Wellman. Ridge Theater at The Kitchen, New York April 2001.

Girls on the Run by John Ashbery. 2000: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

"The world needs a narrative," Henry Darger wrote in 1950. And so the Chicago hospital janitor devoted thirty years of his life to creating one, in an obsessive, gargantuan feat of accumulation and imagination, fueled by the author's pain, isolation, and desire. After Darger's death in 1973, his landlord entered his tiny efficiency apartment to find 15,145 typed pages (single-spaced), a 5,000-page memoir, 318 paintings on double-sided scrolls unraveling to more than twelve feet, a version of the Bible, and seven tomes containing ten years' worth of local meteorological observations--not to mention letters, journals, and notebooks. Scattered all around his rooms, covering every conceivable surface, packed into trunks, and stacked from floor to ceiling were newspaper clippings, watercolors, paintings, and sketches of little girls, often depicted as hermaphrodites with penises. These girls were muses and objects for various of his fantasies; his great narrative chronicled the life of the Vivian Girls, a band of little girls on a special planet who fended off violent adult invasions of their childhood innocence. Other stories recorded in his notebooks graphically described their mutilations, stranglings, and slaughter, often followed by explicit condemnations of the sinfulness of such actions.

Darger did not deliver narrative cohesion to a world lacking in it; as it turned out, he needed his narrative far more than the world did. In the course of decades Darger's fantasy life displaced reality and became his world. Given his own painful family history, this was as much for the better as for the worse.

Born in Chicago in 1892, Henry Joseph Darger Jr. was the son of a German immigrant tailor he described as "a kind and easygoing man" and a Wisconsin woman who died giving birth to Henry's sister (subsequently given up for adoption). The younger Henry remained troubled by both of these losses throughout his childhood and expressed his feelings in a variety of antisocial ways, starting fires and fights (he slashed a schoolgirl with a knife), for which his father had to pay damages, and for which he was punished. As he grew older, his belligerence and animosity toward fellow children gave way to admiration. When his father could no longer work, the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy Home for Boys took Henry Jr. in; there he grew increasingly sensitive and isolated from the others, who often treated him harshly. (As Alfred Jarry did in his Ubu tales, Darger later exacted his schoolboy's revenge by rendering his mates as unflattering characters in his imaginary chronicles.)

Though he strove for piety and subscribed deeply to church principles (he had been baptized by a Catholic godmother), Darger frequently confessed to blasphemous sins such as burning holy pictures and beating images of Christ's face; the school doctor sent him (at the age of twelve or thirteen) downstate, to the Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children. He remained there for four years, and during this period conditions at the asylum became a public scandal: the staff was accused of abuse, and many children were neglected to the point of serious injury and even death. (There is no evidence that Darger himself was a direct victim of this abuse, but observing it must have left a permanent mark on his psyche.) After receiving news of his father's death, Darger ran away three times, eventually making his way back to Chicago, where he found a job as a janitor at St. Joseph's Hospital and (after a short stint in the army) remained for the rest of his life, living in his small apartment on the North Side from 1931 until his death. When not at his job, he led a solitary life, attending mass several times a day, searching for collage objects in neighborhood trash cans, and, primarily, painting and writing at home.

Following his death, Darger...