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.