by Olivia Laing
Undeterred, he tried a second time, hitchhiking a freight train to Chicago. After an alarming storm he lost his nerve, giving himself up to the police. ‘What made me run away?’ he asked himself in the memoir, answering: ‘My protestation at being sent away from the asylum, where I wanted to stay, as for some reason it was home to me.’
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In my lunch-breaks, I used to walk down to the waterfront and sit by the river. There was a carousel on the promenade, a real beauty, and as I ate I could hear the shouts of children being whirled around on the painted wooden ponies, chestnut, black and bay. Darger’s phrase about the asylum had lodged in my mind, and as I sat there I worried over it.
It was home to me is a statement that cuts to a central issue in loneliness studies: the question of attachment. Attachment theory was developed in the 1950s and 1960s by the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby and the developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth. It proposes that children need to form secure emotional attachments with a caretaker during infancy and early childhood, a process that contributes to their later emotional and social development and that if ruptured or otherwise insufficient can have lasting consequences.
This sounds like common sense, but at the time of Darger’s childhood the consensus among health care providers of all kinds -from psychoanalysts to hospital doctors – was that all children required in the way of nourishment was a germ-free environment and a ready supply of food. The reigning belief was that tenderness and physical affection were actively detrimental to development and could in fact ruin a child.
To modern ears, this seems insane, but it was driven by a genuine desire to improve child survival. In the nineteenth century, child mortality had been enormously high, especially in institutions like hospitals and orphanages. Once germ transmission was understood, the preferred strategy of care was to maintain hygiene by minimising physical contact, moving beds apart and limiting interactions with parents, staff and other patients as much as possible. While this did indeed successfully reduce the spread of disease, it also had an unexpected consequence, which took decades to be properly understood.
In the newly sterile conditions, children failed to thrive. They were physically more healthy, and yet they wasted away, particularly the infants. Isolated and untouched, they went through paroxysms of grief, rage and despair, before eventually submitting passively to their state. Stiff, polite, apathetic and emotionally withdrawn, their behaviour made them easy to neglect, further entrenching them in acute, unspeakable loneliness and isolation.
As a discipline, psychology was at this stage in its infancy, and the majority of practitioners either refused or were unable to see a problem. This was after all the era of the behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner, who believed babies should be raised in boxes, protected from the contaminating presence of the mother, and of John Watson, president of the American Psychological Association, who mooted bringing up infants in hygienic camps, in accordance with scientific principles and far from the damaging influences of their doting parents.
Nonetheless, a handful of practitioners in America and Europe, among them Bowlby and Ainsworth, Rene Spitz and Harry Harlow, had a strong instinct that what those institutionalised children were suffering from was loneliness, and that what they were pining for was love: in particular affectionate physical contact from a stable and consistent caregiver. They began to carry out research in hospitals and orphanages on both sides of the Atlantic, but these studies were dismissed as being too small, too easily misconstrued. It took Harry Harlow’s infamous experiments with rhesus monkeys in the late 1950s to really make the case for love.
Anyone who’s seen photographs of Harlow’s monkeys clinging to wire models or huddled in isolation chambers will know that these are deeply disturbing experiments, carried out in an uneasy hinterland between the scientifically valid and the ethically abhorrent. Changing the treatment of human children mattered to Harlow; for him the monkeys were simply collateral damage in a larger battle. Like Bowlby, what he was trying to do was prove the crucial importance of affection and social connection. Many of his findings tally with current research on loneliness, particularly the notion that isolation leads to a decline in social sophistication, which in itself elicits further episodes of rejection.
In the first of his attachment experiments, carried out at the University of Wisconsin in 1957, he separated infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers, providing them with a pair of surrogates, one made of wire and one wrapped in soft cloth. In half the cages, a bottle of milk was attached to the chest of the wire mothers, and in the other half to the cloth mothers. According to the dominant theories of the time, the infant monkeys should have selected whichever surrogate possessed the food, but in fact they exhibited an absolute preference for the cloth mother, clinging to her whether she had milk or not, and only darting to the wire mother to suckle before racing back.
Next, Harlow assessed the reactions of the infants to various kinds of stress. He gave another group access to either a wire or cloth mother, before introducing a barking toy dog and a marching clockwork bear beating a drum. Monkeys who only had access to the wire mothers were far more alarmed by these terrifying apparitions than those provisioned with the more comforting cloth bodies.
These results align with the slightly later work of Mary Ainsworth, who in the early 1960s explored how children’s abilities to handle stressful or threatening situations (the so-called Strange Situation Procedure) depends on how securely they are attached. It was Ainsworth who came up with the categorisation still in use today, formulating a distinction between secure or insecure attachment, the latter of which can be further subdivided into ambivalent and avoidant attachment. An ambivalently attached child is distressed by maternal absence and shows its feeling via a mixture of anger, desire for contact and passivity, while an avoidantly attached child withholds their reactions on the mother’s return, masking the intensity of their grief and fear.
Together, these experiments show the intensity of the need an infant has for an attachment figure. Harlow, however, still wasn’t satisfied that his work was emphatic enough. For his next experiment, he designed four so-called monster mothers. Each possessed a comforting cloth body, but they were also armed respectively with brass spikes, an air-blaster, an ability to fling their charge away or to rock it so violently you could hear the baby monkey’s teeth clashing together. Despite the discomfort, the infants kept clinging on, willing to face even pain in their quest for affection, for something soft to cuddle up to.
It was the image of these monster mothers that had come back to me when I read Darger’s statement about loving the asylum. The bleak truth Harlow’s experiment reveals is that a child’s need for attachment far outweighs its capacity for self-protection: something that is also apparent when abused children plead to stay with violent parents. ‘I can’t say whether I was actually sorry I ran away from the state farm or not but now I believe I was a sort of fool to have done so,’ Darger had written in his memoir. ‘My life was like in a sort of Heaven there. Do you think I might be fool enough to run away from heaven if I get there?’ Heaven: a place in which during his own time children were regularly beaten, raped and abused.
But the monster mothers wasn’t the only experiment of Harlow’s to illuminate a key aspect of Darger’s life. In the late 1960s, after he won the National Medal of Science, Harlow turned his attention from mothering to what happens to an infant if there is no social interaction whatsoever. He was becoming increasingly aware that it wasn’t just attachment to the mother that produced a socially and emotionally healthy infant, but rather a whole mosaic of relationships. He wanted to understand the role of social contact in development, and to see what effects a forced experience of loneliness would produce.
In the first horrifying round of isolation experiments, he placed new-born rhesus monkeys in solitary confinement, some for a month, some for six months and some for an entire year. Even the monkeys with the shortest sentence emerged from the
ir prisons emotionally disturbed, while those who were isolated for a full year were incapable of exploration or sexual relations, engaging instead in repeated patterns of behaviour: huddling, licking and self-clutching. They were aggressive or withdrawn; they rocked or paced back and forth; they sucked their fingers and toes; they froze into fixed positions or repeated strange gestures of the hand and arm. Again, it reminded me of Henry: the compulsive noise-making, the repetitive movements he made with his left hand.
Harlow wanted to see what would happen if these previously isolated individuals were introduced to a group environment. The results were devastating. When placed in the shared enclosure they were almost invariably bullied, while some aggressively approached larger individuals in what Harlow termed suicidal aggressions. It was so bad, in fact, that some had to be re-isolated, to keep them from being killed. In Harlow’s book, The Human Model, the chapter that deals with these experiments is titled ‘The Hell of Loneliness’.
If only this were confined to rhesus monkeys. But humans are social creatures too, and also tend to cast out individuals who do not fit easily into the group. People who are not socially fluent, who have not been given a loving training in how to play and engage, how to join in and situate themselves, are far more likely to elicit instances of rejection (one might think here of Valerie Solanas, fresh from prison, being spat at by strangers in the street). For me, this was the most disturbing aspect of Harlow’s work: the revelation that after an experience of loneliness both the damaged individual and the healthy society work in concert to maintain separation.
More recent research, particularly with bullied children, suggests that the targets of social rejection are often those who are deemed either too aggressive or too anxious and withdrawn. Unhappily, these are precisely the behaviours that arise from insecure or inadequate attachment or from early episodes of isolation. What this means in practice is that children who have had problematic attachment experiences are far more likely to suffer episodes of rejection than their peers, establishing patterns of loneliness and withdrawal that can continue entrenching well into adulthood.
This pattern too plays out in Darger’s life. The lacks and losses he suffered in his childhood are precisely those that shatter attachment, kindling chronic loneliness. What happens next is the grim old cycle of hypervigilance, the growth of defensiveness and suspicion, a note audible everywhere in his memoir. He perpetually revisits old disagreements with people from his past, ways in which they cheated him or let him down. ‘I hate my accusers and would have liked to kill them, but did not dare. I never was their friend, and am their enemy yet, even whether they are dead now or not.’ The impression is of someone profoundly lacking in social flexibility, someone routinely picked on, ostracised or bullied, locked into the self-defeating circuit of suspicion and mistrust which follows on from any substantial experience of social isolation or shattered bonds.
But what the physiological account of loneliness elides is the part taken by society itself in policing and perpetuating exclusion, rejecting the unwieldy and strange. This is the other driver of loneliness, the reason why certain people – often the most vulnerable and needy of connection – find themselves permanently on the threshold, if not cast entirely beyond the pale.
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After Darger made it back to Chicago for good, he found employment in the city’s Catholic hospitals. Being a janitor was tough, relentless work: long days, no vacations and only Sunday afternoons off – a common enough experience, of course, during the years of the Depression. He kept it up for fifty-four years, all told, excluding a brief spell in which he was drafted for the army, discharged soon after on account of his poor eyesight. In all that time his duties remained menial: peeling potatoes, washing pots or scraping dishes in the boiling kitchens, which during the brutally hot Chicago summers became so extreme that he was once sick for days with heat exhaustion. An even worse task was carting trash to be burned, a heck of a job, especially in winter, when he was often troubled by terrible colds.
What leavened those years, what made them bearable, was the existence of ‘a special friend’, Whillie (as Darger persistently spelt it, although his name was actually William) Schloeder, who Darger visited every evening in the years that he was working at St Joseph’s and Grant Hospital. Darger doesn’t say how he met Whillie, who worked as a night-watchman in the city, but over time they got close enough that he knew all the family: the sisters and in-laws, the nieces and nephews. Together, they established a secret club they called the Gemini Society. It was dedicated to the purpose of protecting children, and Darger made various playful items of documentation for it, which undermines the notion that no one ever saw his art.
In 1956, Whillie’s mother died and he sold the house and moved with his sister Catherine to San Antonio, where three years later he died of Asian flu. ‘5 of May, (I forgot the year),’ Darger wrote, ‘and since that happened I am all alone. Never paled [sic] with anyone since.’ The hospital wouldn’t give him time off work to go to the funeral and afterwards he could never find out where Catherine had gone, though he thought it might have been Mexico.
A couple of days after reading about Whillie’s death in the memoir, I was looking through a slim folder of correspondence – brief notes to priests and neighbours, mainly – when I found a letter Darger had written to Catherine. It was dated 1 June 1959 and it began with a formal expression of sorrow. My dear friend Miss Catherine, surely did not feel at all good, the very sad news, my dear friend Bill, died May the Second, I feel as if lost in empty space.
Then there was a long section about a missed phone call, mistaken identities, another Henry in the kitchens at work. ‘Why didn’t you call where I live?’ he asks miserably. ‘Then I would have known, and if possible you could have me at the funeral.’ Because he was off sick he hadn’t got the news for three whole days. He apologises for not writing sooner, ‘because I was out of sorts and shaken by the news of his death. He was like a brother to me. Now nothing matters to me at all and I am going to here after live my kind of life.’ He promises to have a mass said and asks for a picture or something to remember Whillie by. He expresses the hope that she will receive consolation, adding: ‘a loss is hard to take. It sure is to me to lose him for then too I lost all I had and had a hard time to stand it.’
The letter was stamped RETURNED. Catherine had already vanished. After the severing of this final bond, Darger never made another friend. Instead, his world became radically unpeopled, which is perhaps what he’d meant by that curious statement I will here after live my kind of life. A few years later, in November 1963, he retired from the hospital, at the age of seventy-one. His legs were becoming increasingly painful and he was limping badly, periodically suffering attacks so bad he couldn’t stand. Pain in his side too, so that he sometimes sat and cursed the saints for hours. One might have thought retirement would be a blessing, but he said he hated the lazy life, the lack of tasks to fill the empty days. He started going to mass more frequently, and spent many hours combing the neighbourhood for useful pieces of trash, especially string and pairs of men’s shoes.
From the outside – and there are plenty of witness statements, mostly collected from the other tenants at Webster Street – he seemed increasingly cranky and withdrawn. He holed up in his room, where he could clearly be heard talking to himself: either the blasphemous rants that he records in the memoir or conversations with people from his past; long, aggrieved arguments in which he would perform both parts.
The History of My Life is not especially forthcoming about this period of Darger’s life because on page 206 of 5,084 it segues from an autobiography into an enormously long and rambling story about a tornado called Sweetie Pie and the horrific damage it caused. A more concrete sense of what his retirement involved comes from the journal he kept in his last years. The entries are terse and repetitive, attesting to the outwardly narrow and constricted contours of his life. ‘Saturday April 12. My birthday. The same as Friday. Life Histo
ry. No tantrums.’ ‘Sunday April 27 1969. Two masses and Communion. Eat Hot dog sandwich. I felt miserable from cold. Went to bed early in the afternoon.’ ‘Wednesday April 30 1969. Still in bed with a bad cold. Cold today and tonight much worse. Tormented me terribly. No mass or Communion. No Life History.’
Hardly any wonder Father Thomas, the parish priest at St Vincent’s, observed anxiously, ‘he is more helpless than I presumed’. This is a document of lack, in which there is no mention of friends or social activities beyond the church. It’s true that he did sometimes interact with neighbours. There were a few letters in the archive in which he asked David Berglund for small favours: to help with a ladder, or to give him for Christmas what I need most, a bar of Ivory soap and a large tube of Palmolive brushless shaving cream, gifts for which he’d thank him with cards printed with sentimental verse. Berglund and his wife also nursed Henry when he was ill, though he doesn’t mention this in his own account. But apart from these neighbourly interventions, there is a vast paucity of human interaction, combined with an internal furore of emotion, particularly rage.
The final journal entry comes at the tail end of December, 1971. Darger hasn’t been writing for a while, checked by a serious eye infection, which necessitated an operation. During the recovery period he didn’t dare go out, stopping instead in bed, the kind of laziness he loathed. Now he sounds miserable and frightened. ‘I had a poor a very poor nothing like Christmas. Never had a good Christmas in all my life,’ he writes, adding: ‘I am very bitter but fortunately not revengeful.’ But what, he wonders fretfully, will the future hold for him. ‘God only knows. This year was a very bad one. Hope not to repeat.’ The final words are ‘What will it be?’ followed by a dash – an expression of suspension, be it of time or disbelief.
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My desk at the archive faced a set of metal shelves. On them were piled 114 boxes in varied shades of buff and grey. They looked drab and officey, the sort of thing you might use to store minutes or accounts, but what they actually held was evidence of Darger’s secret life: as the artist self, the maker of worlds, an identity he mentioned only in passing in his life history. (‘To make matters worse now I’m an artist, been one for years and cannot hardly stand on my feet because of my knee to paint on the top of the long picture.’)