Jacket 17 — June 2002 | # 17 Contents | Homepage | Catalog | |
Michael Leddy
Lives and Art:
|
JOHN ASHBERY read from Girls on the Run on March 22, 2002, at the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan. The reading was one event in ‘Delving into Darger,’ a weekend series of talks and dialogues about the ‘outsider’ artist Henry Darger (1892–1973), whose work currently occupies one of the museum’s four gallery floors. A hospital orderly and janitor who lived alone in a rented room in Chicago, Darger wrote and illustrated 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. The 15,145-page single-spaced typescript recounts an epic struggle on an imaginary planet between the child-enslaving Glandelinians, some of whom are versions of Henry Darger himself, and the good Abbiennians, led by the Vivian Girls, seven young princesses aided by various heroes, some of whom are also versions of Henry Darger. |
John Ashbery, Sydney, 1992, Photograph copyright © John Tranter |
It is the several hundred illustrations accompanying the narrative (ranging from single pages to twelve-foot-long scrolls) that first generated interest in Darger’s work. Here, the sinister, sexually-charged violence of his story is presented via a bizarre pastoralism: young girls, often naked (with male genitalia), are pursued or strangled or eviscerated by adult-male armies, across landscapes filled with explosions, storms, and friendly-looking flowers and farmhouses. Darger made his figures by tracing and modifying images from magazines, newspapers, coloring books, and comics, then repeating them to build populous scenes of highly stylized violence and motion. The overall effect is at once terrifying and oddly cozy, something like a cross between the Bayeux tapestry and a Dick-and-Jane reader. In his appropriation of imagery from popular culture, his range (few outsiders are both writers and visual artists), and his sheer output (Realms is the longest imaginative prose-work ever written), Darger is a singular creator. Girls on the Run, full of color and movement and characters with names like Mary Ann and Tommy, is loosely based on his work (the poem’s title is followed by the words ‘after Henry Darger’). The girls are constantly under attack by violent enemy forces and being saved and surviving storms and evil armies. I was fascinated by little girls when I was a little boy, and their clothes and their games and their dolls appealed to me much more than what little boys are doing. Therefore I was sort of ostracized. (Rehak 15) Like Rick Blaine’s explanation that he came to Casablanca for the waters, Ashbery’s explanation defies plausibility and is, I think, meant to be recognized as doing so. It acknowledges only indirectly the most obvious feature of Darger’s work — the gruesome violence done unto the (often naked) bodies of girl children, focusing instead on the averting of that violence (‘being saved and surviving’) and offering a remarkable non sequitur in the recollection of childhood interest in what American boys once called ‘girl-stuff.’ Darger’s work of course is no more about girl-stuff than is the doll-art of the German surrealist Hans Bellmer. |
Ashbery’s explanation of his interest seems even more implausible when one recognizes that his experience of Darger’s art is far from cursory. His prefatory remarks noted four different encounters that preceded Girls on the Run — seeing Darger’s paintings in Lausanne, in Heidelberg (the Prinzhorn Collection), in Manhattan (the Phyllis Kind Gallery), and in books.[ 3 ] Given Ashbery’s distaste for explaining his work, I suspect that his responses to the Times and at the Museum were meant to be charmingly inscrutable — eliding the question of the sheer weirdness of Darger’s work, associating the work with lost Americana (dotted swiss and such), and representing his own boyhood under the sign of the sissy. |
|
Whatever else Girls on the Run is, it is testimony to a profound relationship between imaginative artists. I see two kinds of artistic relationships that help to account for Ashbery’s interest in Darger and, thus, for Girls on the Run. One involves marked affinities between Darger and other strange, singular creators who have long been important to Ashbery — Joseph Cornell, Raymond Roussel, and the imaginary Ern Malley, whose life-stories seem in various ways prefigurings of Darger’s.[ 4 ] A second more surprising relation concerns Darger and Ashbery himself. Despite Ashbery’s familiar insistence that his poetry is not specifically autobiographical (and that passages which appear to be autobiographical are not), a poem from Your Name Here offers an instance of genuine, unguarded autobiography that suggests a deeply personal identification with Henry Darger. ‘Outwardly routine and inwardly fabulous’:
|
|
‘Alone, cut off from the world,... works almost constantly’: Darger and Roussel
Ashbery has written more and more frequently about Raymond Roussel than about any other writer or artist.[ 5 ] For Ashbery, Roussel has long been the archetype of the strange, singular creator. Perhaps Roussel now shares that honor with Darger. ‘Nobody had any idea’: Darger and Malley
Both struck out on their own at the age of seventeen for a life of work (Malley by moving to Melbourne, Darger by escaping from an asylum). Each lived a solitary life in a proverbial room: ‘They said he was living in a room by himself,’ Ethel Malley wrote to Max Harris (Malley 10). And each left behind a body of work whose existence could not have been imagined: ‘Nobody had any idea that Ern Malley wrote poetry,’ wrote Max Harris (Malley 9). We don’t hear much about struggling young artists anymore. That stereotype has been replaced in the public imagination by the artist who becomes a millionaire at thirty by painting soup cans. The garret has become a half-acre loft with white floors. (Reported Sightings 351)
If the choice must be between stereotypes, it is clear which one Ashbery finds more congenial. His essay ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’ also reveals his wariness of institutional acceptance and his sympathy with artists on the margins: ‘the only artists who have any privacy are the handful of decrepit stragglers behind the big booming avant-garde juggernaut’ (Reported Sightings 392). Given Ashbery’s repeated statements about his early doubts of having a book published (much less a book that would gain an audience), his allegiance to ‘decrepit stragglers’ seems a matter of long-felt identification. ‘The History of My Life’: Darger and AshberyThe identification of insider with outsider becomes particularly poignant when we think further about Darger and Ashbery. Certainly there are artistic affinities between them — most notably their shared fascination with the primal reading-matter of comics and their collaging of found material.[ 9 ] But I think that a deeper, more personal identification helps to account for Darger’s claim on Ashbery’s imagination. Girls on the Run signals such an identification early on: Write it now, Tidbit said,
Details of life circumstances — Ashbery’s and Darger’s — help clarify what happens in this passage. The initial ‘I’ who drinks tea and writes appears to be Ashbery, who has cited tea-drinking as his writing ritual. The Henry who defies authority is of course Henry Darger, who was often heard in his room acting out quarrels with the rather severe nun who was his supervisor at work.[10] But in the play of voices in these lines, the distinction between the poet and Henry blurs: in the words of the Principal’s directive, the poet who drinks tea and the hospital orderly who slops sewage become one and the same. And though the speaker who replies to the Principal seems at first to be the poet (the ‘I’ who took the pen and was told to drink tea), he turns out to be Henry. ‘I’ is, literally, another. One wonders whether Henry’s defiant tone at the end of the passage — ‘I am no longer your serf’ — suggests Ashbery’s own refusal in Girls on the Run to write the kind of poem that the Principal (Harold Bloom? Helen Vendler?) might expect of him.[11] Once upon a time there were two brothers.
While Ashbery has insisted in many contexts that his poetry is not autobiographical, ‘The History of My Life’ is genuinely grounded in the facts of his life.[12] What is more: the poem is a further gesture of identification with Henry Darger, taking as its title the title of Darger’s handwritten autobiography. We had a mythical kingdom in the woods; various of our friends had castles in trees, and I was always trying to get plays that we could produce spontaneously. Then my younger brother died just around the beginning of World War II. The group dispersed for various reasons, and things were never as happy or romantic as they’d been, and my brother was no longer there. I think I’ve always been trying to get back to this mystical kingdom. (Rehak 10) |
|
In his History Darger laments the fact of age: ‘I wished to be young always. I am grown up now and an old lame man, darn it’ (Bonesteel 240). In Ashbery’s ‘History’ too, time is the enemy. The very idea of temporal sequence, in the form of the word then, introduces the poem’s first, sudden loss (ending the timeless once-upon-a-time of brotherhood) and its second, gradual one, the ever-diminishing horizon. As in the Gilgamesh narrative, the death of a brother presages the loss of one’s own life: ‘Then there was only one,’ and eventually there is no one. It is hardly coincidental that The History of My Life and ‘The History of My Life’ both end with destructive weather: the ‘great devouring cloud’ recalls the imaginary tornado whose path of destruction accounts for the last 4800 pages of Darger’s 5000-page autobiography.[13] Judy: ‘[O]ur fashions are in fashion / only briefly, then they go out.’ (3)
Thus Judy and company can never remain in one place for very long. They move from encampment to encampment and from chapter to chapter; at one point girls are ‘taken for a ride / into the next chapter’ (6). There are twenty-one such chapters (or sections), bringing us to the unlucky number of official adulthood by the poem’s end. As in ‘The Instruction Manual,’ one cannot stay — in a dream-vision of Guadalajara, or in childhood: ‘Did you read that book I was telling you about? Ach, it concerns puberty’ (46). They closed
In the midst of life we are in death, yes, but also still in life: ‘we shall never reach land / before dark,’ but ‘then it’s bright,’ and there is still a ‘fresh look, a twist.’ ‘Old men ought to be explorers,’ Eliot says in ‘East Coker’, and indeed Ashbery is one in this strange and beautiful poem. And young people should be explorers too. With the Eden of childhood lost, with the way back barred (by a flaming carousel?), Ashbery’s girls go on, venturing and adventuring, with the world all before them. In this epic of life on the run, ‘the spirit of going is to go’ (6), even if one is running westward. |
Notes
[ 1 ] An extended discussion of diagnosis can be found in MacGregor’s Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal (656–665). My poetry I don’t think is autobiographical. The parts that sound autobiographical — such as ‘Jean and Marcy and the kids’ — don’t exist. Other parts that don’t sound it are in fact autobiographical. In general my own autobiography doesn’t interest me as material for poetry (Boddy 21).
[13] Darger was obsessed with weather from childhood; his work is filled with storms and floods. From 1957 to 1967 he kept a daily weather journal, recording the endless discrepancies between forecast and fact. |
Works Cited
Anderson, Brooke Davis, Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2001. |
Jacket 17 — June 2002
Contents page This material is copyright © Michael Leddy
and Jacket magazine 2002 |