It’s no wonder poets have taken a shine to Henry Darger’s art. The works evoke a lovely-dark, otherwordly world, in which a brightly colored tribe of girls (with or without penises) face all sorts of danger and violence. To quote Clayton Eshleman’s “Darger”: “[T]he dead little girls appear,/unborn seeds of childhood,/repetitious in a way that could not be made functional in language.” So strong are the images that it’s tempting for our ilk to try entering Darger’s “Realms of the Unreal” with words.
Even the bibliographic record of Darger’s best-known effort (a 15,000-page illustrated novel called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion) indicates an obsessive mind at work. The images too–the repetition within and across them, the fine detail–suggest fixation and the Darger tale, which must be in itself attractive to a group grappling with the growing professionalism of its ranks. For those not familiar with the story, Darger lived an extremely circumscribed life, working as a janitor, living in the same studio apartment for forty years, and working on projects that were very much his own. He grew up in an orphanage and received no formal art training. His obscurity was total. He wasn’t just unknown as an artist; he had no family and one known friendship, which was mostly by correspondence. In an interview, John Ashbery, whose book Girls on the Run is inspired by The Story of the Vivian Girls, said that no one knows whether Darger’s name was pronounced with a soft or hard G.
Darger’s landlords were artists who were kind to him as he grew old, keeping his rent low and finding him a place in a nursing home when he couldn’t make it up the stairs to his apartment. When he died, they inherited the contents of his apartment, found the treasure trove of paintings, collages, and miscellany (including a daily weather diary, an autobiography, and a novel), recognized the merit of his work, and brought it into view.
Darger is the purest kind of artist, entirely without the skills about which Eavan Boland is ambivalent. In the ongoing conversation about whether the proliferation of writing programs is good for poetry, whether art can be taught, it’s easy (and sometimes facile) to criticize creative writing programs.
You can’t learn to be a Darger in school, almost by definition. But I think there’s some good news for writing programs in the Darger story. With or without recognition, support, or skills, the Dargers of the world will keep on working, almost by definition; however, we only know about Darger because of the fortuitous meeting of an outsider with a couple of relative insiders. As Sean Casey hilariously pointed out, a handful of students may come to creative writing class hoping only that their genius will be recognized, but meanwhile there’s a chance that the others can become, at least, good landlords. Which is to say good teachers, good editors, good gatekeepers. In this light, the abundance of writing programs must be a good thing, at least so long as the insider culture of creative writing programs doesn’t become too insular. We need to make sure future generations of landlords will know a good thing when they see it, even if it comes from an unexpected place.