Bastard?

In his Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, John MacGregor made an interesting comment in a footnote about Darger’s parents. After briefly discussing Rosa Darger’s death, he mentions, “Arrangements for the burial were made by an individual simply listed as ‘Henry,’ which may imply that no legal marriage existed.” (#27, 673) “Henry” was Darger’s father’s name, too.

Scholars have made a great deal out of the death of Rosa Darger, and with good reason. It was obviously traumatic to the four-year-old Henry and deeply affected him. Perhaps even more important, with his wife dead, Darger’s father seems to have collapsed under the responsibility of raising his son by himself, and his boy was forced to deal with his father’s inability to continue his paternal responsibilities long after his father’s death.

Already an old man of fifty-two when Darger was born in 1892, his father was also physically disabled and probably an alcoholic. Although he and his three brothers were tailors, only they were successful. He was dirt-poor. Without Rosa’s steady hand, Darger’s father sank into what appears to have been a deep depression.

Disguising himself as a little girl who had stood watch over her mother as she died, Darger described his father’s reaction to his mother’s death in his first novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion:

… she had remembered the whole thing for it had been engraved upon her memory forever. But it was long before she understood its meaning. Then she remembered her father’s cruelty to her, not from pure senses, but that the loss of his wife so tragedly had driven him insane and he knew not what he was doing… The sight of her dying mother and of her father’s insanity, had inflicted a wound in the child’s soul that never healed… She never pretended to have forgotten as she might have done. She looked back on an early childhood that had because of this been a torture (8:386).

Rose Darger died in 1896, a few days before her son’s fourth birthday, giving birth to her daughter of “childbed fever,” an infection caused by a lack of sterile conditions. (It was also known as “puerperal septicemia,” “puerperal sepsis,” and “puerperal fever.”) Childbed fever was “the largest single cause of maternal mortality” from the time it was identified in the 1700s until the 1940s, and the thought of it terrorized all women of childbearing age. Its indicators were severe fever, intense flu-like symptoms, sharp and unrelenting abdominal pain, foul-smelling vaginal discharge, and abnormal, heavy vaginal bleeding. She died in the apartment that she, her son, and husband had shared on the second floor of the coach house behind 165 Adams, just west of the Loop. Her body was then taken to the Cook County Hospital where she was pronounced dead. Darger’s father gave his daughter up for adoption.

Darger mention his mother’s death once and his sister’s adoption twice in his autobiography, The History of My Life, which he began in 1968, when he was seventy-seven years old: “Also I do not remember the day my mother died, or who adopted my baby sister, as I was then too young…” (1) and “I … lost my sister by adoption. I never knew or seen her, or knew her name” (7).

It’s understandable that Darger would not have been able to discuss his sister in his autobiography except in passing, but why didn’t he give more details about his mother and her death? Was it that he really didn’t remember her, or was the memory of her loss too painful—even seventy years after the fact, when he began his autobiography—too disturbing for him to relive? Even if only four years old, he would have retained at least some sensory impressions from that first day of April in 1896, when she died.

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….

By the way, Darger’s parents were married—on August 18, 1890 by John Murphy, Justice of the Peace. He was forty-nine. She was twenty-nine. She’d been married before and is identified as “Mrs. Rosa Ronalds” on their marriage license. He had been married before, too, but their marriage license doesn’t mention that.

A Clue to Darger's Sexual Experiences

When Darger escaped from the Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children on July 29, 1909, he was seventeen and penniless and had no choice but to walk the nearly 200 miles that separated Lincoln, IL, where the asylum was located, and Chicago, his home. When he got to Chicago in early August, he went to his godmother’s home and stayed with her until she was able to get him hired as a janitor at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Beginning at that moment, he was employed steadily for fifty-four years at various hospitals, all on the Near North Side. Even during the Great Depression, when thousands of individuals across the U.S. were unemployed, Darger had a job.

Thirteen years later, tired of the way he was treated by the Daughters of Charity, the nuns who ran St. Joseph’s—and especially by the bully Sr. DePaul, who “had a bulldog like face,” Darger recalled, “and seemed to have the disposition of one”—he quit and immediately found a job as a dishwasher at Grant Hospital. He remained at Grant until 1928, when a shake-up in the staff made him believe that he was about to get fired, and he “left in a huff.”  

Now thirty-seven years old, he was worried about the future. For the first time since he was seventeen, he was jobless. His friend William Schloeder put in a good word for him at a local restaurant, hoping to pave the way for Darger to be hired on there, but nothing came of it.

In the meantime, Darger applied for jobs at various places near his home: at St. Joseph’s; at a place he never identifies “somewhere on Webster and Burling streets” where he “was insultingly told to go to the poor farm at oak forest” [sic]; and even at a café. A day or two after quitting Grant, he landed a job in the café, probably washing dishes but perhaps also cleaning up the place after it closed. A few days after that, he was re-hired at St. Joseph’s, not as a janitor this time, but as a dishwasher.

He worked at St. Joseph’s the second time for thirteen years, first under the supervision of a series of nuns but then under a layperson, Miss Casey, who gave Darger a supervisory role, overseeing a group of young women who worked in the kitchen. He even ended up firing one of them for misbehaving on the job. Although the other young women walked out in protest of his decision against their friend, Miss Casey supported him 100%.

In 1947, Darger went on the first real vacation of his life—the last two weeks of July through the first week of August. A few days before he left, a nun named Sr. Alberta had taken over as St. Joseph’s chief administrator. While he was gone, she discussed Darger with his supervisor, and together they decided to fire him. When he returned, Sr. Alberta gave him the bad news, but added that they weren’t letting him go because of “any wrong doing.” She told, Darger recalled, that it was because of his job: “the work was too much,” “the hours too long,” and it “could cause me to break down in my health.” She also told him he could “eat my meals there yet untill I got a new job” [sic] and suggested that, when he went looking for one, he try to get one that was “easier” with “much shorter hours.”

Within days, Darger applied at Alexian Brothers Hospital, and he was offered a job there a week after he was fired from his second stint at St. Joseph’s. He began as a dishwasher in mid-August 1947, although he ended up working in a variety of positions, including vegetable peeler and bandage roller. This was the first time he worked for men, a religious order called the Alexian Brothers, and eventually, he would again be put in a supervisory role, overseeing his helper, Jacob Feseri. He worked at Alexian Brothers until November 19, 1963 when he was forced to retire because of ill health. He was seventy-one.

Interestingly, a letter from 1928, that’s related to his employment, shines light on an important period of Darger’s life—not when he was a working adult, but when he was a child between six and eight years old. A recommendation, it was addressed “To Whom It May Concern” and signed by Schloeder. The brief letter and Schloeder’s signature are in Darger’s very distinct handwriting, and it’s obvious that Darger wrote and signed it when he resigned from Grant Hospital “in a huff.” Darger included Schloeder’s job—“Watchman at Phillip Rinn Company”—under Schloeder’s signature, and that phrase is a clue that solves a mystery about Darger’s sexual escapades during his childhood. What was that mystery?

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