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

If there's a center around which the narrative revolves, it's the so-called Aronburg Mystery, the incident that Darger writes was responsible for beginning this cycle of war and catastrophe. It was the unsolved theft of a coveted newspaper photograph of Annie Aronburg, a murdered little girl. As MacGregor shows, such an event happened to Darger in real life, and caused him enormous, lifelong anxiety.

That's a brief redux apropos the "skulls" thing before, for there's been a huge controversy whirling through the art world over whether Darger was basically just a crabby mentally disturbed gentleman (which would be good for sales of Darger's work), or was, as MacGregor once famously said, "psychologically a serial killer" (rather likely from the book's description of his childhood violence and pyromania and other warning signs, but hotly contested by gallerists) -- and if the latter, whether he really did molest or murder anyone (MacGregor seems to have wussed out on researching that too deeply, but you really have to wonder). The real-life photo in question was of Elsie Paroubek, age 5, who disappeared in Chicago in April 1911, when Darger, at 19, had recently returned to the city from the mental asylum in which he spent most of his youth. Paroubek was later found strangled in a drainage ditch. Apparently, her photo and a notebook of early writings were stolen from Darger's belongings at a time when he lived dormitory-style with other hospital workers.

We haven't even touched on the art yet. To sum up an oeuvre of hundreds of illustrations, scores of which are reproduced here: The naked Vivian Girls, and all female children, are generally depicted with little-boy penises, although this interesting detail seems never to be mentioned or explained in Darger's text. Darger couldn't draw, and usually didn't try, instead tracing, arranging and coloring images clipped from magazines. His compositional gifts and skill as a colorist approached genius. Many of his paintings are rather charming and even childlike, while some are tableaux of tortures, massacres and mutilated bodies.

It's an incredibly complex and puzzling body of work, more so because of the rather few key elements it contains, repeated in practically infinite combinations: little girls with penises frolicking or carrying weapons; pastoral and military scenes; little girls being choked and disemboweled. What it all meant to Darger, we'll never fully know, although MacGregor seems to have the core principle nailed down firmly when he says that the artist never outgrew his childhood, never developed adult feelings or desires, and suffered a bitter conflict between his angelic, or "Angelinian," side and his glandular, or "Glandelinian," one.

MacGregor is an art historian who specializes in outsider art and is one of the last of the old-time Freudians (he studied with Anna Freud). His analyses of Darger's art and psyche draw heavily from the Freudian tool kit, and have a lot to do with repression and early-childhood trauma. It's highly convincing, although it seems to leave a few holes in things. Darger, at age 4, had a sister who was put up for adoption after his mother died in childbirth, and MacGregor identifies this as the signal event of Darger's life, upon which all his subsequent neuroses and crazinesses accreted. However, the possibility that his parents were assholes is not explored (it seems likely). Apropos the girl-penises, MacGregor writes that Darger might not even have known there was a difference between the male and the female anatomy. That seems pretty hard to credit, given that the young Darger grew up in a rough Chicago neighborhood and later worked summers on a farm.

Despite the incredible depth of MacGregor's research (and it is incredible), he's apparently known in the art-history field as a bit of a character, and he jokes about having picked up some of Darger's creative habits during the 10 years he researched his subject. (He wrote much of it sitting alone in Darger's own room, occasionally talking to the absent artist.) It's true: His work would not have been weakened by a greater commitment toward concision.

The book's text is also organized a bit like Darger's writing, which is to say, you rarely get everything in a straight line. If Darger's prose is liable to start in one place, meander up and down the hall for a while and then run around the block whooping for several hundred pages (literally) before circling back as though nothing had happened, MacGregor's only goes around the block for a page-column or two at a time. That doesn't at all keep "In the Realms of the Unknown" from being an engrossing read, although it's hard to get a synthesis on Darger and his work when you have to keep skipping back and forth through 720 pages, trying to clear up details that aren't where you'd think they'd be -- names and dates, context, chronologies. The index is sparse and somewhat crude, as though the indexing person got a migraine and gave up. It's a book that demands to be read either hard and thoroughly, or several times at leisure.

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