The Lonely City (18 page)

But what the physiological account of loneliness elides is the part taken by society itself in policing and perpetuating exclusion, rejecting the unwieldy and strange. This is the other driver of loneliness, the reason why certain people – often the most vulnerable and needy of connection – find themselves permanently on the threshold, if not cast entirely beyond the pale.

*

After Darger made it back to Chicago for good, he found employment in the city’s Catholic hospitals. Being a janitor was tough, relentless work: long days, no vacations and only Sunday afternoons off – a common enough experience, of course, during the years of the Depression. He kept it up for fifty-four years,
all told, excluding a brief spell in which he was drafted for the army, discharged soon after on account of his poor eyesight. In all that time his duties remained menial: peeling potatoes, washing pots or scraping dishes in the boiling kitchens, which during the brutally hot Chicago summers became so extreme that he was once sick for days with heat exhaustion. An even worse task was carting trash to be burned,
a heck of a job,
especially in winter, when he was often troubled by terrible colds.

What leavened those years, what made them bearable, was the existence of ‘a special friend’, Whillie (as Darger persistently spelt it, although his name was actually William) Schloeder, who Darger visited every evening in the years that he was working at St Joseph’s and Grant Hospital. Darger doesn’t say how he met Whillie, who worked as a night-watchman in the city, but over time they got close enough that he knew all the family: the sisters and in-laws, the nieces and nephews. Together, they established a secret club they called the Gemini Society. It was dedicated to the purpose of protecting children, and Darger made various playful items of documentation for it, which undermines the notion that no one ever saw his art.

In 1956, Whillie’s mother died and he sold the house and moved with his sister Catherine to San Antonio, where three years later he died of Asian flu. ‘5 of May, (I forgot the year),’ Darger wrote, ‘and since that happened I am all alone. Never paled [sic] with anyone since.’ The hospital wouldn’t give him time off work to go to the funeral and afterwards he could never find out where Catherine had gone, though he thought it might have been Mexico.

A couple of days after reading about Whillie’s death in the memoir, I was looking through a slim folder of correspondence – brief notes to priests and neighbours, mainly – when I found a letter Darger had written to Catherine. It was dated 1 June 1959 and it began with a formal expression of sorrow.
My dear friend Miss Catherine, surely did not feel at all good, the very sad news, my dear friend Bill, died May the Second, I feel as if lost in empty space.

Then there was a long section about a missed phone call, mistaken identities, another Henry in the kitchens at work. ‘Why didn’t you call where I live?’ he asks miserably. ‘Then I would have known, and if possible you could have me at the funeral.’ Because he was off sick he hadn’t got the news for three whole days. He apologises for not writing sooner, ‘because I was out of sorts and shaken by the news of his death. He was like a brother to me. Now nothing matters to me at all and I am going to here after live my kind of life.’ He promises to have a mass said and asks for a picture or something to remember Whillie by. He expresses the hope that she will receive consolation, adding: ‘a loss is hard to take. It sure is to me to lose him for then too I lost all I had and had a hard time to stand it.’

The letter was stamped
RETURNED.
Catherine had already vanished. After the severing of this final bond, Darger never made another friend. Instead, his world became radically unpeopled, which is perhaps what he’d meant by that curious statement
I will here after live my kind of life.
A few years later, in November 1963, he retired from the hospital, at the age of seventy-one. His legs were becoming increasingly painful and he was limping
badly, periodically suffering attacks so bad he couldn’t stand. Pain in his side too, so that he sometimes sat and cursed the saints for hours. One might have thought retirement would be a blessing, but he said he hated the
lazy life,
the lack of tasks to fill the empty days. He started going to mass more frequently, and spent many hours combing the neighbourhood for useful pieces of trash, especially string and pairs of men’s shoes.

From the outside – and there are plenty of witness statements, mostly collected from the other tenants at Webster Street – he seemed increasingly cranky and withdrawn. He holed up in his room, where he could clearly be heard talking to himself: either the blasphemous rants that he records in the memoir or conversations with people from his past; long, aggrieved arguments in which he would perform both parts.

The History of My Life
is not especially forthcoming about this period of Darger’s life because on
page 206
of 5,084 it segues from an autobiography into an enormously long and rambling story about a tornado called Sweetie Pie and the horrific damage it caused. A more concrete sense of what his retirement involved comes from the journal he kept in his last years. The entries are terse and repetitive, attesting to the outwardly narrow and constricted contours of his life. ‘Saturday April 12. My birthday. The same as Friday. Life History. No tantrums.’ ‘Sunday April 27 1969. Two masses and Communion. Eat Hot dog sandwich. I felt miserable from cold. Went to bed early in the afternoon.’ ‘Wednesday April 30 1969. Still in bed with a bad cold. Cold today and tonight much worse. Tormented me terribly. No mass or Communion. No Life History.’

Hardly any wonder Father Thomas, the parish priest at St Vincent’s, observed anxiously, ‘he is more helpless than I presumed’. This is a document of lack, in which there is no mention of friends or social activities beyond the church. It’s true that he did sometimes interact with neighbours. There were a few letters in the archive in which he asked David Berglund for small favours: to help with a ladder, or to give him for Christmas
what I need most,
a bar of Ivory soap and a large tube of Palmolive brushless shaving cream, gifts for which he’d thank him with cards printed with sentimental verse. Berglund and his wife also nursed Henry when he was ill, though he doesn’t mention this in his own account. But apart from these neighbourly interventions, there is a vast paucity of human interaction, combined with an internal furore of emotion, particularly rage.

The final journal entry comes at the tail end of December, 1971. Darger hasn’t been writing for a while, checked by a serious eye infection, which necessitated an operation. During the recovery period he didn’t dare go out, stopping instead in bed, the kind of laziness he loathed. Now he sounds miserable and frightened. ‘I had a poor a very poor nothing like Christmas. Never had a good Christmas in all my life,’ he writes, adding: ‘I am very bitter but fortunately not revengeful.’ But what, he wonders fretfully, will the future hold for him. ‘God only knows. This year was a very bad one. Hope not to repeat.’ The final words are ‘What will it be?’ followed by a dash – an expression of suspension, be it of time or disbelief.

*

My desk at the archive faced a set of metal shelves. On them were piled 114 boxes in varied shades of buff and grey. They looked drab and officey, the sort of thing you might use to store minutes or accounts, but what they actually held was evidence of Darger’s secret life: as the artist self, the maker of worlds, an identity he mentioned only in passing in his life history. (‘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.’)

As an artist, he was entirely self-taught. Although he possessed a remarkable gift for composition and had loved colouring since very early childhood, he was burdened by the belief that he couldn’t draw. Many artists are opposed to or uncomfortable about working free-hand, committing their own lines to the page. Sometimes this is about wanting to avoid determinism, à la Duchamp, who said about one randomised work: ‘The intention consisted above all in forgetting the hand.’

This desire resurfaces in the work of Warhol, who though magically gifted at drawing wanted to erase the evidence of the hand, preferring instead the chancy happenstance of machine processes, especially screen printing. Others simply doubted their abilities. Whenever David Wojnarowicz was asked how he got started as an artist, he’d say that as a boy he used to trace pictures – ocean panoramas, say, or images of planets circulating in outer space – presenting them to kids at school as his own work. Eventually a girl confronted him, insisting he draw freehand in front of her. To his surprise he found he could, and from then on the anxiety he’d felt about drawing fell away.

Darger never really experienced a lessening of that fear, but like Warhol he did find elaborate ways of circumventing line drawing, sharing too his pleasure at making art out of actual pieces of the world. How did he do it, though: making painting after painting with no training, a punishing job and only limited resources? The curator at the archive was himself an artist, and in between fetching boxes he explained Darger’s career to me, the painstaking way he’d honed and developed a working practice.

He’d started with found images, sometimes backing them on card or doctoring them in subtle ways, especially by painting over them, adding hats or costumes or simply piercing the eyes. Next, he progressed to collages, cutting images out of newspapers and magazines and pasting them into increasingly complex composites. The problem with this technique was that each component image could only be used once, meaning that he had to find more and more raw materials, either at the hospital or by going through the trash. It was wasteful of resources, and also frustrating, having to surrender a favoured image, to commit it to just one picture, just one scenario.

This is where tracing came in. With tracing, he could liberate a figure or object from its past context and reuse it dozens if not hundreds of times, inserting it by way of carbon paper into a diversity of scenes. It was economical, a thrifty process, and it also let him magically possess the image in a way that scissors didn’t, transferring it first on to tracing paper and then again through the blue sheets of carbon into the painting proper. One of his favourites was a doleful little girl holding a bucket, one finger in her mouth. Once you’ve spotted her, she crops up over and again,
a picture of abject misery and desolation. The Coppertone Girl, too: often with horns, or transformed into one of the winged creatures Darger called
blengins,
a world away from where she’d begun.

There were thousands of these source images: folder after folder filled with pictures clipped from colouring books, comics, cartoons, newspapers, adverts and magazines. They attested to an obsessive love of popular culture that reminded me again of Warhol, a hoarding and repurposing of just the kind of ordinary things that would later be embraced by Pop Art, something Darger never mentioned and quite possibly never saw.

Despite the rumours about his disorderly, chaotic habits, Darger had evidently been meticulous in organising this raw material, establishing thematic groupings: sets of clouds and girls, images of the Civil War, of boys, men, butterflies, disasters – all the divergent elements, in fact, that together make up the universe of the Realms. He’d stored them in stacks of filthy envelopes, which were carefully labelled with his own idiosyncratic descriptions: ‘Plant and child pictures’, ‘Clouds to be drawn’, ‘Special picture Girl bending with stick and another jumping away in terror’, ‘One girl with some one’s finger under chin Maybe sketch maybe not’. Some of these so-called
special images
were further labelled ‘to be drawn only once’, as if multiple replication would divest or drain them of their uncanny power.

His working practice became even more sophisticated when in 1944 he discovered that he could get images turned into photographic negatives and then enlarged at the drugstore on North Halsted, three blocks away from his house. Enlargement facilitated
the extraordinary complexity of his work, allowing him to play with scale and perspective, to compose elaborate scenes using foreground and background, to create kinetic and receding layers.

One box was stuffed with envelopes from the lab, each containing the original, the negative and the enlargement. The receipts were also preserved; seemingly small sums of $5 and $4 and $3.50, until you remembered that in all Darger’s life his salary never exceeded $3,000 a year, and that in the decade of his retirement he lived off social security. Nothing is more declarative of someone’s priorities than how they spend their money, particularly when they don’t have much of it. Hot dogs for lunch, begging his neighbours for the gift of soap, but 246 enlargements of children, clouds, flowers, soldiers, tornadoes and fires, so that he could incorporate actual beauty and disaster into his unreal world.

All the time that I was working in the archive, I was aware that there was a painting behind me, draped in sheets. It was enormous, at least twelve feet long, so that it was hard to imagine how Darger had stored it, let alone worked on it in his cramped little room. On my final day, I asked if I could see it and so the curator drew back the covers and let me look my fill.

It was made from multiple materials: watercolour, pencil, carbon tracing and collage. A caption had been handwritten on a pasted sheet of plain white paper:
This scene here shows the murderous massacre still going in before the winged blengins arrived from the sky. They came so quick how however that those fastened to the trees, or board, and those on the run escaped the murderist rascals or were rescued, and flown to permanent safty and security.
[sic]

Like many of Darger’s paintings, it showed a rural landscape, partially wooded and coloured in a lovely symphony of greens. There was a palm tree, a tree with huge hanging grapes, an apple tree, a pale tree giving forth large white blooms. In the foreground, there was a great profusion of flowers, spreading outward from a clump of crocuses, which rose like snakeheads from the bottom of the canvas.