Death and madness - the story of Henry Darger

Darger had an obsession with little girls. First he hated, then loved them.

In the early summer of 1973, the American photographer Nathan Lerner made what is almost certainly the strangest discovery in the history of ... some would say "the history of art"; others might call it "the history of madness".

Under either heading, the story can variously be read as remarkable, pitiful, excruciating or awe-inspiring, and poetically improbable.

For many years, Lerner had been renting a small room in his Chicago house to an eccentric old man called Henry Darger.

Lerner didn't know much about the chap, who seldom spoke to anyone and dressed and acted like a tramp, endlessly rummaging in dustbins to reclaim bits and pieces. But he was, otherwise, well-behaved, and Lerner didn't think much about him, except when he heard the fellow talking to himself in different voices, late at night.

At the end of 1972, Darger moved into an old people's home. He died a few months later and, as there was no known relative to collect his belongings, Lerner resigned himself to hauling everything in the back room to the rubbish dump.

But when he opened the door to Darger's room, he was shocked at the sheer quantity of junk Darger had squirrelled away - broken toys, old shoes, beat-up crockery, Catholic kitsch, typewriters and endless empty bottles.

Lerner investigated the contents more closely, and his distaste gave way to astonishment. First, he found eight huge volumes of autobiography, The Story of My Life running to 5084 handwritten pages.

Impressive, but little more than a minnow compared to his next find, a fantasy novel called (this is the abbreviated title) In the Realms of the Unreal, which seemed to tell the story of a bloody war between the forces of good and evil on a distant planet.

Closely typed, it was precisely 15,145 pages long. To gain some idea of the scale, consider that the average English-language edition of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu will be about 3000 pages of readable type. Darger's novel is, at the most cautious estimate, five times longer than Proust's.

Lerner's final discovery was no less strange: a series of giant illustrations for Realms of the Unreal, stitched together in three volumes. Rectangular in form, the largest of these colour panoramas were usually more than 3m wide. Lerner found 87 of these oversized landscapes and 67 smaller works. What did they show?

Little girls, mainly - girls with blonde hair and pretty dresses, with bows or flowers in their pigtails, playing merrily in bright sunshine.

But look more closely and the scene is not so idyllic. Some of the girls have ram's horns growing out of their heads. Some, naked, have the genitalia of little boys. And some are being roasted alive in forest fires, or throttled to death by barbarian soldiers.

Lerner could only begin to grasp the significance of this haul, but he had no doubt that it was greatly significant. Well connected in the art world, he soon had curators, psychologists and other interested parties cataloguing it all.

In 1977, an exhibition of the paintings introduced Darger to the world. In 1985, the critic Michael Bonesteel wrote an influential article, "Chicago Original", for the journal Art in America, and Darger's posthumous fame was assured.

Darger's cryptic, sprawling output has been the subject of hundreds of scholarly articles. Critics - wisely or otherwise - have raved about his "prodigious" skills as a creator of pictorial space, his wildly innovative use of colour, and so on. He is the subject of a documentary feature film, which opens in Auckland's Academy theatre tomorrow.

The first 206 pages of Darger's autobiography concern actual events, but by cross-referencing his own accounts with public records, researchers have painstakingly put together a reasonably trustworthy account of his life.

He was born in Chicago on April 12, 1892. Darger claimed he had no memory of his mother, Rosa Darger-Fullman, and this is probably true, as she died shortly before his fourth birthday in 1896. The cause of her death was an infection developed after giving birth to a girl, Henry's sister, who was immediately given up for adoption. Darger never met her, never so much as found out her name, but this gap in his family shaped the rest of his years.

His father, Henry snr, was of German extraction and worked as a tailor. He was 50 when his wife died, and somewhat of an invalid, but for about three years he managed to raise his small son happily enough.

Between the ages of 5 and 8, Henry jnr developed three obsessive interests, the foundations for a lifetime of solitary brooding. The first was a passionate hatred for small children and especially for small girls.

But as time passed, this original passion changed its polarity and became a passionate and protective love for, as one writer put it, "his former enemies".

He also grew fascinated by violent weather: storms, tornadoes and all extremes of temperature. The changing patterns of light in the sky, the shifting of cloud formations, the passage from dark to light all held him rapt. In his adult life, he kept weather journals, in which his observations on the climate were punctuated by jeering remarks about professional weather forecasters and their errors.

Finally, he was obsessed by fire: part-terrified, part-seduced. In parallel with his weather diaries he kept a fire journal, writing accounts of fires he had witnessed or read about, devoting most careful attention to those in which firefighters had died.

By the time Henry jnr was 8, his father had become physically incapable of looking after the boy and placed him in a boarding school.

He seemed to settle surprisingly well. His teachers recognised that he was in many ways keenly intelligent, with a precocious appetite for history. His favourite subject was the American Civil War, and he enjoyed engaging his teachers in discussions about casualty rates.

But he did not make such a favourable impression on his schoolmates. His habit of making weird, loud noises alarmed them so much that they started to call him Crazy Darger.

As if perversely trying to live up to the name, he grew more erratic. Soon, probably some time in 1900, he was transferred to the Lincoln Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children.

Denied the coaching that would have kept his mind alert, he did the only thing possible - he plunged back into the resources of his imagination and began to construct an alternative world in minute, not to say encyclopaedic, detail.

When he grew older, he made several attempts to run away. Each time they caught him until, in 1909 when he was 16, he gave them the slip for good. He landed a job as a janitor at a Chicago hospital, and janitorial-type labour provided his livelihood for the next 50 years, with a brief hiatus of about three months in 1917 when he was called up for military service.

From that point on, Darger's only interactions with the larger world happened in church. A profoundly religious man, he took daily communion at 7.30am, and - work permitting - attended as many as four masses a day.

Some might think that a man of his high if erratic intelligence could eventually have found better-paid work, but, sadly, the nickname Crazy stuck. Those few people who dealt with him said that he struck them as rather childish.

Darger retired at 71 when he grew too weak even for light duties. He survived on a meagre social security allowance, living as a hermit in the back room of Lerner's house until spending his last six months in the old people's home. He died on April 13, 1973, aged 81.

Darger's autobiography, and his unparalleled life's work, scream out for interpretation and commentary, but it is by no means obvious that the well-intentioned effusions of art critics are the most appropriate response. One of the main qualities that divides so-called outsider artists from their mainstream counterparts is not a lack of skill, or even a lack of sanity, but utter indifference to the idea of an audience.

What: In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger
Where and when: Academy, from tomorrow

- INDEPENDENT