Pages

Henry Darger wrote three, huge novels during his life—as well as kept a weather notebook every day for ten years, scribbled notes about his writings and his life in a journal, and compiled a number of scrapbooks of source materials that he then used for both his novels and his paintings.

His first novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, was his longest: over 15,000 pages. His second, called Further Adventures in Chicago: Crazy House by one of his first critics (because Darger had used both “Further Adventures in Chicago” and “Crazy House” as its title), logs in at well over 10,000 pages. His third, A History of My Life, is the shortest of his novels, a mere 5,000+ pages.

None have been correctly paged. Darger tended to paginate his novels after he wrote them, but in the process, he often got distracted and skipped ahead or fell behind in the numbering. For example, he might be paginating the manuscript 2,579, 2,580, 2,581… but, without realizing it, skip to 3,582 and continue the count from there: 3,583, 3,584, 3,585…. Or it could be the opposite. He could skip backwards, going from 459 to 259. The total number of the pages of his novels that are typically cited is only the number on the last page of the manuscript, the one that Darger gave it. None is correct.

And none of his novels have been published in their entirety, although brief excerpts from them appear in both John MacGregor’s Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal and Michael Bonesteel’s Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings. To read any of his novels, you have to read the original manuscripts.

Something mysterious happens on page 206 of A History of My Life. Between page 1 and halfway down page 206, Darger created a typical chronicle of his life. The book begins with an announcement of his birth, although he forgets to mention that it is his birth that he’s announcing—“In the month of April on the 12, in the year of 1892, of what week day I never knew, as I was never told, nor did I seek the information.”

Then on page 206, right after he discusses an accident that happened to a baker at Grant Hospital where he once worked, Darger makes a second peculiar announcement: “There is one really important thing I must write which I have forgotten.” With that, he launches into the story of a tornado that lays waste to a huge area of Illinois. There seems to be no reason for the shift from nonfiction to fiction. Darger doesn’t warn his reader before the change. He simply shifts gears and continues for another 4,000+ pages. Why? And why does he continue to write the phrase “The History of My Life” on the pages as a running head from beginning to end when the text is obviously made-up?

For the answers to these and other mysteries surrounding the life of outsider artist Henry Darger, be on the lookout for Throw-Away Boy: A Life of Henry Darger….