"Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal" by John M. MacGregor

The late Henry Darger is a darling of the outsider art world, a dishwasher who created a vast epic tale of naked little girls. But was he also something more sinister?

By Gavin McNett

Jul 23, 2002 | Henry Darger is doubtless the world's most celebrated lifelong menial laborer, having worked diligently not only as a janitor, but also in later life as a dishwasher and (finally) a winder of gauze bandages. Darger was truly a man of several careers, and John MacGregor's "In the Realms of the Unreal" represents a definitive, 10-year, 720-page critical study of his life and work. MacGregor's first chapter is gamely called "On the Autobiography of a Dishwasher," a nod to the fact that nobody in the Chicago hospitals in which Darger worked, nor perhaps in his entire life, would ever have believed he would be remembered, let alone lionized, now, 30 years after his death. Darger was a fireplug of a man, mentally ill in the unspecifiable way of the self-muttering recluse, and his fame comes from what was discovered during the cleaning out of the room he inhabited for 40 years, once he finally left its solitude, at 81, for a charity-ward deathbed.

Darger's landlord, Nathan Lerner, was an art-world figure with Bauhaus ties who tolerated Darger with a certain bohemian noblesse -- forgiving lapses in rent, ignoring strange behavior and strange noises, and even (if perhaps a bit ironically) throwing all-tenant birthday parties for him. But failing health finally forced the old man to move out in late 1972 (he died in early 1973), and when they opened up his close-smelling rooms and walked the narrow footpaths that wound from door to bed to bathroom through a ceiling-high mountain of clutter, they found the skulls and tibiae of several little girls, polished as though by long fondling.

Actually, no. But we'll get back to that. They found hundreds of paintings and collages that are now scattered among the world's museums, and the longest single piece of writing ever known: "In the Realms of the Unreal," a labyrinthine novel of more than 15,000 closely spaced pages for which the paintings serve as illustrations. Also an incomplete 8,000-page sequel, illustrated, and many thousands of pages of other writings -- including a gargantuan autobiography recounting Darger's troubled and institutionalized youth and his 53-year career as a laborer. In the latter (and this part is crucial and strange), the sole mention that he had any creative leanings at all comes in a passage in which he's complaining about the chronic joint pain that plagued him in later life:

"To make matters worse now I'm an artist, been one for years, and cannot hardly stand on my feet because of my knee to paint on the top of the long picture."

That's the only time it ever comes up, and Darger, who had no known family, apparently never said a word about his colossal creative output to any of his fellow tenants or co-workers. MacGregor's book makes it clear that like all "outsider art," Darger's writings and artworks were an encompassing private world to him, one which the tired dishwasher began to inhabit as soon as he arrived home from one of his 14-hour shifts and sat down at the typewriter or work table. He obsessively built it around himself, night after night, by the acts of writing and painting. And apparently the public Darger and the private one had very little in common -- and very little to say to (or about) each other. Their worlds didn't connect.

Darger's private world centered around seven little blond moppets called the Vivian Girls, whose adventures include ... But it's a 23,000-page story, and while of course I always read every relevant source in the course of writing a review -- and boy, was this one a doozy -- it's a bit involuted to go into in much detail. Actually, not even MacGregor has read more than a representative fraction of Darger's writing, and it's safe to say that nobody ever will. MacGregor's book and Michael Bonesteel's "Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings" are the only places in which significant amounts of Darger's prose are available in English, and it might come as a surprise that Darger, despite being a mentally ill laborer with a grade-school education, was actually better than many of the pulp writers working during his formative creative years ("Realms of the Unreal" was begun sometime after around 1910, when Darger was a very young man; he seems to have finished the first volume around 1932), at least in terms of sentences and paragraphs. (It can otherwise be said that his work would not have been weakened by a greater commitment toward concision.) An outstanding passage:

"He paused for a moment, many recollections overpowering him. He seemed to have unlocked the casket of his heart, closed for so many hours, as if all the memories of the past and all the secrets of his heart and life were rushing out, glad to be free once more and grateful for the open air of sympathy."

But basically the Vivian Girls are seven perfect, radiantly attractive, largely indistinguishable little girls who get into all sorts of children's-book adventures, often without any clothes on, during a war between their noble and Roman Catholic land of Angelinia and an evil empire of child slavery and child hatred called Glandelinia.

It's a nearly sexless story in the conventional sense (there's lots of hugging and kissing), but a ferociously bloody one, in which literally millions of little girls are tortured, strangled or otherwise killed and/or disemboweled in graphic detail, by the evil Glandelinians. Hundreds of millions of children and adults are destroyed by fire, flood, warfare, tornado, massive explosions and anything else you can think of. There are tens of thousands of named characters who sometimes switch names and identities and often have doppelgängers fighting on the other side of the war. Darger himself appears in many guises, with many variant names, including as a "protector of children" and as a Glandelinian murderer.

Next Page: A missing photo of a murdered girl

• View blog reactions