The Darger Manuscript

Despite the ongoing craze for anything related to "outsider" artist Henry Darger (four current books, countless articles and the requisite Natalie Merchant song), the real life's work of that remarkably religious janitor (who'd earned the nickname "Crazy" by the time he was eight) might as well be buried along with him.

Darger is best?almost exclusively?known for his epic drawings and paintings depicting prepubescent girls with horns, tails and phalluses fighting cosmic wars in an alternate reality. These are the works that have been on display since December at the American Folk Art Museum. But as curator Brooke Davis Anderson explains, Darger thought of himself as a writer first, and produced those famous artworks merely to illustrate his massive 12-volume, 15,145-page fantasy, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. The illustrations were begun in the 1930s, at least 20 years after Darger had started writing the text of his novel, which he produced first in longhand, then typed in an edited version.

Looking at the handful of manuscript pages displayed in the exhibit, it quickly becomes obvious that Darger was not only no intellectual slouch (his work is loaded with literary devices?e.g., the girls' battle against torturous adults in a land seceded from a larger nation is, Darger admitted, an extended metaphor for our Civil War) but also that he considered himself a serious author. He'd stepped up to the high rollers' table, the one most writers aren't willing to pay the cover to sit down at, and he didn't throw craps, either. As he wrote in an introduction to The Realms of the Unreal, "The poet, the painter and the artist, even if they were to seek this all out under the allurement of fiction or truth, could not have accomplished any more." Darger scholars contend that many readers would find the passages on torture in the book too graphic and too numerous?but hey, delete the little girls with penises and you might have another Lord of the Rings.

Yet as the situation stands today, one cannot find even a portion of the immense novel, not one excerpt from its significant body, anywhere in print.

"One reason the paintings became so famous is because both the book and the artwork were discovered by a visual artist," Anderson explains, referring to the late Nathan Lerner, one of Darger's few friends and the man charged with collecting the author's belongings from his apartment after he died at age 81. "I think he walked in and saw these colorful, 12-foot-long drawings and was just enamored with them."

Then there's the matter of who's been holding on to the novel since Lerner stumbled upon it. Apparently the book lived at least a decade with Darger scholar John MacGregor, a man who unfortunately no longer speaks with the press, declaring he'd rather "study [Darger] in peace and quiet."

Now, however, in a deal with Lerner's widow, the museum has acquired not only the artworks but the manuscript. So might we soon be able to read this giant "lost" tome?

Well, not soon. First there's the challenge of publishing a book that's more than 15,000 ms. pages long. There's also the condition of the ms. itself, which has been described as "very fragile."

In the meantime, Anderson hopes to have the entire text translated to microfiche?itself a monumental task?which someday the perseverant Darger fan will be able to read by appointment. The ultimate goal is that some nice gentleman from Random House will come along and give the Vivian girls their proper introduction to the world.

Until then, the dozen awkward volumes of the original and only extant copy of The Realms of the Unreal remain in a glass vitrine pushed up against the far wall of the museum exhibit, where the occasional fellow writer may pause to pay his respects.