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

So, the tough question: Did Darger ever kill anyone? The answer is, we'll probably never know. Darger's ex-landlords, the late Nathan Lerner and his widow Kiyoko, seem to have managed the Darger estate in such a way that nobody who wants access to their material is allowed to ask the wrong questions, or to give the wrong answers, and MacGregor seems to have acceded to all their wishes. Eyewitness accounts have differed over whether Darger gave them his work or asked that it be thrown out -- MacGregor doesn't address the issue of ownership.

After Darger's death, the Lerners cut apart his self-bound volumes of artwork, scrambling their context as illustrations, in order to sell the pieces individually. MacGregor notes this in passing, in the passive voice, as though nobody in particular had done the cutting. And the cataloguing of the Darger work that was sold seems to have been so lax that nobody knows what paintings might've ended up where. MacGregor doesn't address that either.

Researchers, including MacGregor, have had to agree not to look for any surviving relatives of Darger's, who might possibly claim the estate. MacGregor didn't look for any -- including the lost sister. And most signally, the research on Elsie Paroubek, and on other children who might have disappeared in and around Chicago during Darger's time there, stopped when the police records on the Paroubek case couldn't be found. MacGregor gives no details on the case, which was elaborately reported in the Chicago Daily News; gives no possible scenarios; describes no other leads or competing bits of evidence; and doesn't show that he ever sifted Darger's writings in a prosecutorial frame of mind. If you were MacGregor, wouldn't you be curious? Hmm.

MacGregor does, however, begin his volume with this inscription, which precedes an introduction by Nathan Lerner -- suggesting that inner conflict is among the habits of Darger's he picked up during his 10-year immersion in his life and work:

All the Gold in the Gold mines
All the Silver in the world,
Nay, all the world,
Cannot buy these pictures from me,
Vengeance, thee {terrible} vengeance
On those who steals or destroys them.

-- Henry J. Darger

Hmmm.

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