As a young man, Henry Darger could have auditioned for the hero’s role in a Victorian novel. When he was 4, his mother died giving birth to his sister. Four years later, his father, a kind and easygoing tailor, was forced by poor health to put him in an orphanage. Darger ended up in an asylum for “feeble-minded” boys (on the basis of a doctor’s diagnosis that “little Henry’s heart is not in the right place”). In 1908, at age 16, he fled the institution. Unlike his Dickensian counterparts, though, Darger did not exchange the asylum for newfound fortune or the hand of an heiress. Instead he lived an obscure life as a janitor on Chicago’s North Side, punctuated only by brief spells in the military and one overwhelming event: witnessing the obliteration of an entire Illinois town by a tornado in 1913.
Darger’s adult life was outwardly uneventful, but his inner life was rich and strange, as demonstrated by the enormous artistic output discovered in his apartment after his death in 1972. At its center was the longest novel ever written, the 19,000-page “The Realms of the Unreal.” This gargantuan typescript, a congeries of science-fiction adventure, historical chronicle and weather journal, tells the story of the Vivian girls, seven resourceful sisters who battle the evil, child-enslaving Glandelinians on an unnamed planet. Darger illustrated his epic with hundreds of watercolor paintings, including panoramic scenes as large as 4 feet high and 10 feet long. Because he did not draw well, he composed his paintings by tracing figures he scavenged from comic strips, magazines and coloring books. These fantastic, brilliantly colored tableaux have brought Darger posthumous acclaim from such critics as Robert Hughes and Arthur Danto, and exhibition in museums across the country (including Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art last winter).
And now John Ashbery has devoted a book-length poem, “Girls on the Run” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $20), to Darger’s eccentric, beautiful creations.
Ashbery in his youth aspired to become a painter, and he has maintained a close relation to the visual arts throughout his life. For many years, he supported himself as an art critic, writing for the New York Herald-Tribune, Art News and Newsweek, among others. And the title poem of his 1975 collection, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” is a long meditation upon the painting of the same name by the Mannerist painter Parmagianino. The collection won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, catapulting Ashbery to as much fame as a poet might hope for (or dread). It is no surprise, then, that “Girls on the Run” takes a set of paintings as its point of departure. What is unusual, and delightfully so, is the contour of the poem’s journey.
One might expect a poem based on a painting to either describe carefully the contents of the painting (like William Carlos Williams’ “Pictures From Brueghel”) or ruminate thoughtfully upon the painting’s themes (like W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”). “Girls on the Run” does neither of these, although it contains moments of acute description and of subtle contemplation. Instead, the poem hurtles headlong through a world evoked by the paintings. The story it tells flashes by in fitful glimpses. Darger’s plucky heroines take center stage, with numerous other odd characters crowding the margins. These include Uncle Margaret, the redoubtable Stuart Hofnagel and one anonymous unfortunate who “sat, eating a cheese sandwich, wondering if it would be his last,/fiddled, and sank away.”
Like Darger’s work, the poem is a sometimes ungainly hybrid of epic and children’s book, in which Homeric similes (“Just as a good pianist will adjust the piano stool/before his recital, by turning the knobs on either side of it/until he feels he is at a proper distance from the keyboard,/so did our friends plan their day”) run up against “chapter” endings out of Winnie-the-Pooh (“Which is what they did/and so they left home that day”). It shares the paintings’ thematic landscape: the idylls of childhood happiness constantly menaced by threatening forces just emerging over the horizon, and the sudden violence of nature. Trees within the poem have a tendency to explode. The poem also mimics Darger’s art in its form. Darger disorients his viewer with shifts of tone and theme within his vast watercolors; often, what is depicted in one area of a scene has no discernible relation to the massive battle or storm taking place in the foreground. It is no surprise that such painting would attract the attention of Ashbery, our premier poet of twists and turns. His poem rises to the occasion with vertiginous shifts in diction and perspective:
If they had heifers on Mars, bub, this would be
all it is like and it would be peaceful in time for mom to go home,
but as it is, we’ll have to settle for Siena. As you
can see, the hands of the oversize clock are at 5:30;
the plastrons will be here soon. I forgot
they were coming. I have a handkerchief in this sandwich. Oh, give me
that. The . . . house is haunted.
A reader might justifiably wonder how to comprehend such quicksilver writing, a concern the poem itself raises: ” `I’ve got to get an angle on this, a firm tack of some kind.’ ” A first step toward appreciating this complex work may be found in some words of the artist Giorgio de Chirico, whom Ashbery quoted in a review of Parmagianino long before writing “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”:
“It must not be forgotten that a picture must always testify to a profound sensation, and that profound means strange, and that strange means little-known or completely unknown. For a work of art to be truly immortal, it must completely transcend human limitations. In this way, it will approach both dreams and the spirit of childhood.”
The poem’s abrupt disjunctions, connected by supremely polished syntax and the semblance of a narrative, invite the reader into an unfamiliar space, in which capacities for experience, both exalted and bitter, dulled by everyday life, can be renewed. An old avant-garde program, indeed an old Romantic one, but still potent in the hands of a disciplined and imaginative artist.
Viewed in such terms, “Girls on the Run” becomes an epic of the interior life. Ashbery even gestures at previous landmarks in the genre, Melville’s “allegorical whale-catching” and Proust’s Swann. The poem is by turns hilarious (“Thanks, the cowboy yells are most gratifying”) and deeply moving (“Our phrase books began to feel useless–for once/you have learned a language, what is there to do but forget it?/An illustration changes us”), and, like dreams and our most intense experiences, it is hard to explain after the fact why these phrases should have such effect. Its epic quality can be seen most clearly in its luminous final moments:
Does this clinch anything? We were cautioned once, told not to venture
out–
yet I’d offer this much, this leaf, to thee.
Somewhere, darkness churns and answers are riveting,
taking on a fresh look, a twist. A carousel is burning.
The wide avenue smiles.
Darger once wrote regarding his sprawling saga, “The heart must surely break before it can begin to even feel.” In this bravura finale, almost a Hollywood closure by Ashberian standards, the eminent poet witnesses the outsider artist’s testimony to the heartbreaking, transcendent power of art.
