Henry Darger
Henry Joseph Darger Jr. was an American janitor and hospital worker who became known after his death for his immense body of art and literature.
Darger was raised by his disabled father in Chicago. Frequently in fights, he was put into a charity home as his father's health declined, and in 1904 was sent to a children's asylum in Lincoln, Illinois, officially due to his masturbation. He began making escape attempts after his father's death in 1908, and in 1910 was able to escape, walking much of the way to Chicago. As an adult he did menial jobs for several hospitals, interrupted by a brief stint in the U.S. Army during World War I. He spent much of his life in poverty and in later life was a recluse in his apartment. A devout Catholic, Darger attended Mass multiple times each day and collected religious memorabilia. Retiring in 1963 due to chronic pain, he was moved into a charity nursing home in late 1972, shortly before his death. During this move, his landlords Kiyoko and Nathan Lerner discovered his artwork and writings, which he had kept secret over decades of work.
From around the early 1910s to the late 1930s, Darger wrote the 15,145-page novel In The Realms of the Unreal, centered on a rebellion of child slaves on a fantastical planet. The Vivian Sisters, the seven princesses of Abbieannia, fight on behalf of the Christian nations against the enslaving Glandelinians. Inspired by the American Civil War and martyrdom stories, it features lengthy, gruesome descriptions of battles, many ending with the mass killing of rebel children. Between 1912 and 1925, Darger produced collages, often only loosely correlated to the book. Later he made these with watercolors and traced figures taken from popular sources such as magazines and children's books. These paintings grew more elaborate over time, with some of his largest works exceeding in length. Little girls, often in combat, are a primary focus; for unknown reasons, they are frequently depicted naked and exclusively with male genitalia. Other writings by Darger include a roughly 8,000-page unfinished sequel to In The Realms of the Unreal entitled Further Adventures of the Vivian Girls in Chicago, a decade-long daily weather journal, and The History of My Life—consisting of a 206-page autobiography followed by several thousand pages about the destruction caused by a fictional Illinois tornado.
Darger made no efforts to publish his work, and it was unknown to others until shortly before his death. He is frequently associated with the outsider art movement, which focuses on self-taught creators outside the mainstream art community. His art was popularized by his former landlords and is now featured in many museum collections, with the largest at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City and the Intuit Art Museum in Chicago. Initial critical analysis of him and his work took a psychoanalytical approach, often focused on his many depictions of nude and brutalized children. Scholars have hypothesized several different psychological conditions Darger may have suffered from. Theories from earlier scholars that he was a pedophile or murderer have been discredited.
Biography
Childhood
On April 12, 1892, Henry Joseph Darger Jr. was born in Chicago to Rosa and Henry Darger. His father was a German immigrant born in Meldorf, who worked as a tailor, while his mother was a housewife from Wisconsin. Later in life, Darger frequently claimed that he was a Brazilian born in São Paulo with the surname Dagarius, although there is no evidence of this. In April 1895, his mother died of an infection shortly after giving birth to his sister. His sister was put up for adoption; Darger recounted that he had never seen her or known her name. Darger remained in the care of his father, who he later recalled as a "kind and easy-going man". Darger described initially hating children younger than him and bullying them, which he retrospectively attributed to a lack of siblings; however, he wrote that he grew deeply fond of children later in life.Darger attended grade school at Catholic schools operated by the local church. According to his later writings, he was able to transfer directly from first grade to third grade due to his ability to read. Relatively isolated, he often got into physical fights with teachers and other children when about seven or eight, allegedly slashing a teacher's arms and face with a knife. At some point, his poor behavior resulted in legal trouble, and he was moved to a "certain boys' home" in Morton Grove, but was taken home by his father after only a short stay. When Darger was eight, around 1900, his father's physical health declined further, and he became unable to work or take care of his son. Darger's uncles paid for his father to be put into a Catholic poorhouse, while Darger was baptized and put in the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy, a church-run home for homeless and orphaned boys. As the home was far away from any of the city's Catholic schools, Darger began attending public elementary school. The mission was locally nicknamed the "News Boys' Home" due to its practice of having its residents sell newspapers to pay for their stay.
Institutionalization
Darger disliked the boys' home and fantasized about running away. His father visited him occasionally, and at one point attempted for one of his relatives to adopt him. He was successful academically, but alienated his peers through what he described as "strange noises with my mouth, nose, and throat" and repetitive motions with his hand. His vocalizations had him briefly expelled from his elementary school, but he was readmitted with the support of his home's director. Despite his readmission, his caretakers seem to have viewed him as "feeble-minded" or insane. After a clinical examination in November 1904, Darger was institutionalized at the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois. During the early 20th century, children in such facilities were expected to remain in the asylum system for life. An intake form prepared by a physician and his father described him as mentally deficient purely due to his "self-abuse", which was marked as having begun around age six.During Darger's time in the Lincoln Asylum, it had a population of about 1,200 children and a staff of over 500. The institution was marked by allegations of severe negligence and abuse toward its children, including one child who died from burns while unattended in a bathtub. Darger was grouped into the higher functioning category of children at the asylum and made to attend school. Although he occasionally suffered physical punishments for misbehavior, he reported that he eventually "got to like the place", noting various friends he made there. When he was about thirteen, he began to be dispatched to a state-owned farm a short distance from the institution every summer with around fifty boys. They were tasked with farm work six days a week. Darger recounted that he enjoyed the work at the farm, but disliked being away from the asylum, which he viewed as his home.Darger was greatly affected by the news of his father's death on March 1, 1908. He reported being in a state of mourning for several months after, spending all of his time alone "in a state of ugliness of such nature that everyone avoided me". He was so uncomfortable with being relocated to the State Farm during the summer that he tried to run away. After a brief failed attempt to run away from the farm in June, he was able to escape by freighthopping with another boy from the asylum and return to Chicago. Shortly afterwards, he was caught in a storm and turned himself in to the police, who brought him back to the asylum. After another brief attempt the following year, he made his fourth and final attempt to escape in 1910. Darger and two other boys from the institution ran away from the State Farm and found work with a German farmer. When he no longer needed the boys as workers, they rode the Illinois Central Railroad to Decatur. Darger decided to walk the roughly from Decatur back to Chicago, often at night due to hot weather and difficulties sleeping.
Career and adulthood
Arriving in Chicago in August 1910, Darger stayed with his godmother, who helped him find work as a janitor at St. Joseph's Hospital, a Catholic hospital operated by the Sisters of Charity. He was tasked with cleaning both the hospital itself and the attached residences of its nuns. Darger was frequently mocked by the hospital's nuns who believed he was insane. He recounted in his memoirs being unable to take time off when ill and being threatened with institutionalization by one of his supervisors. Around this time, he began writing fiction in his journals. He may have also made his first pieces of visual art alongside this, or a few years afterwards.One or two years after his return to Chicago, Darger met a Luxembourgish immigrant named William Schloeder. The two became friends, Darger later recalling in his autobiography that he would often spend time together with "Willie" on weekends, often going to amusement parks. Out of the four known photographs of Darger, two of them show him accompanied by Schloeder, each at a fake caboose photo set located at Riverview Park. Darger and Schloeder may have been part of a "child-protection society" named the Gemini or the Black Brothers Lodge. Featured in a fictionalized form in Darger's work, the group appears to have done little actual work. Its existence is attested through an improvised membership certificate and a letter seemingly addressed to Darger discussing several members of the society and his "Lincoln friends", probably referring to the facility in which he was kept.
Darger made some attempts to adopt a child, possibly seeking to raise a family with Schloeder. In 1929 and 1930, he typed two anonymous notes inquiring about the process; one of these declares that "since the year 1917 he has constantly prayed for a means as it is called for his hopes of adopting little children". From the context in the notes, he appears to have consulted a priest about the process of adopting a child, and was likely considered unsuitable for it due to his lack of a wife, property, and his low income. It is unknown if he formally petitioned the church to adopt.
Following the United States' entry into World War I, Darger was drafted into the army in September 1917. He completed two months of basic training at Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois as a private of the 32nd Infantry Division. That November, he was sent to the Camp Logan training camp in Texas. Before the end of the year, he was honorably discharged from the military for vision problems, and he returned to work at St. Joseph's.
In 1922, Darger quit work at the hospital due to poor treatment of him by one of the nuns. He found work at the secular Grant Hospital the following day. During this time, he stayed with a German immigrant family, the Anschutzs, who operated a boarding house out of their home. Six years later, Darger returned to working at St. Joseph's, now employed as a dishwasher. He recounted working there through "years of misery" due to an intense dislike of his supervisor, but being unable to quit his position due to the mass unemployment and poor job market of the Great Depression. In 1932, he moved up the street to a rooming house, renting two small rooms on the third floor of the building. He completed his first major written work, In the Realms of the Unreal, around the end of the 1930s. Over the following decade, he wrote an unfinished sequel, and experimented with his visual art, greatly enlarging the size of his canvases.
Darger was let go from his job as a dishwasher in 1947; a supervisor told him that the nurses had grown concerned that the working conditions had become too difficult for him, and allowed him to continue eating lunch at the hospital until he could find a new job. A week later, he was hired at a hospital run by the Alexian Brothers, where he continued working as a dishwasher, albeit with shorter hours. At some point, the hospital installed a new dishwasher to be staffed only by women. He was initially tasked with washing pots instead, but the hot conditions caused heat illness, and he was switched to a job cutting vegetables for the kitchen.
Darger was seen as a good worker and was given multiple pay increases, but began to face difficulties due to the onset of chronic pain in one of his knees, and he was switched to a simpler job winding bandages. Infuriated towards God for the pain, he began to curse and yell at the deity, at one point shaking his fist at Heaven. He stopped attending Mass, and described "badly singing awfully blasphemous words at God" for hours during hard shifts at work. At some point, he read an illustrated magazine story about an outlaw condemned to Hell and tortured; this frightened him into attending Mass daily and frequenting confession.
In 1959, Darger's rooming house was sold to new owners, photographer Nathan Lerner and his wife Kiyoko Lerner. Initially frightened that he might be evicted, Darger was assured by Nathan that he could continue living in his unit. Schloeder died in 1959, causing Darger great emotional pain. In November 1963, Darger retired due to his worsening chronic pain. He disliked retirement, writing that it was a "lazy life". Darger was in poverty throughout his life; he probably never made over $3,000 in any year.
His poverty only worsened following his retirement. He was reliant on his Social Security income, and as he was no longer able to eat meals at the hospital, he had to frequent nearby restaurants due to the lack of a kitchen in his unit. The Lerners were reportedly protective of Darger, keeping him as a tenant despite suggestions from other landlords that they evict him, and lowering his monthly rent from $40 to $30 one year as a Christmas present. The Lerners mainly rented to young artists and musicians. Darger was a recluse in his unit; although he rarely socialized with his housemates, they frequently brought him food and cared for him when he was ill. During the late 1960s, he wrote his last major written work, The History of My Life.