by Olivia Laing
All these people talk about her hoarding, the pack-rat way she went through life. Watching, I couldn’t help but feel their reactions were at least partly about money and social status; about who has the right to ownership and what happens when people exceed the number of possessions that their circumstance and standing would ordinarily allow. I don’t know about you but if I was asked to put everything I own in a small room in someone else’s house, I might well look like a hoarder. Although neither extreme poverty nor wealth makes one immune to craving an excess of possessions, it’s worth asking of any behaviour presented as weird or freakish whether the boundary being transgressed is class, not sanity at all.
All the same, it would be foolish to suggest that Darger was not undamaged by his past, not the subject of some kind of breach with the external world. One of the strangest items I’d come across in the archive was a medium sized notebook which had been labelled Predictions, June 1911 – December 1917. It looked like an account book, with vertical pink columns filled with a tiny, cramped hand. As I deciphered the entries, I realised it represented an attempt to bargain with God, to make desired events take place in the real world by threatening violence against the Christian Angelinian forces in the Realms of the Unreal. These threats mostly concerned lost manuscripts and pictures, which if not returned would be avenged by dreadful losses in Darger’s imaginary war. Sometimes, though, they involved more practical problems, which one might have thought entirely divorced from the world of the Realms.
Grahams bank went to smash. Great sums of savings lost or threatening to be lost. Loss inescapable . . . Either Vivian girls or Christian nations shall suffer if money is not returned within January 1 1919. No mercy will be shown.
Or:
Christians will be saved now only if God permits me to gain the means of owning property so that I can adopt children without suffering them the dangers of unsupport. Only chance now left there will be no others under any condition – conditions so serious that progress on manuscript is delayed.
The threat-making began when Darger lost a newspaper photograph of a murdered child, Elsie Paroubek. In the wake of this apparently cataclysmic loss, Darger began his campaign against God. Some of his protests were carried out in the real world of Chicago – refusing, for example, to attend mass for four full years. The majority of his struggle, however, took place in the counter-world of the Realms. He sent avatars of himself, alter-egos like General Henry Joseph Darger, into the war on the side of the wicked Glandelinians. Worse, he tipped the scales of the conflict, making the Glandelinians win battle after battle, torturing and killing hundreds of thousands of child slaves, before cutting their bodies to pieces, so that the ground for miles around was covered in a hellish array of human organs: hearts, livers, stomachs and intestines.
Was God watching? How could he look away? But perhaps he didn’t exist at all or was already dead – a nightmarish, blasphemous thought that Darger had one of the pious Vivian Girls put into words, sobbing over the desolating notion of arriving to an empty heaven, of inhabiting a universe devoid of other beings. If there was no God, then Darger really was completely alone. Commit atrocities, become a windmill of slaughter: anything to get the attention of the divine eye, to prove that at least one being was aware of him, and felt his presence to be significant.
It’s not easy to make sense of this material, not just because of its extreme violence, but also because of the blurring of the distinction between the real and unreal, the sense that the two have become conflated or fused. Was the war in the Realms a way of letting violent impulses spill over without harming any actual human beings? If so, this would suggest that it was safely fictional, a contained place. On the other hand, does the book of threats reveal a genuine belief that what happened in the Realms counted in the universe at large; that it could in fact alter the heart of God?
It seems to be the latter, judging from a document Darger made in 1930. On a piece of paper, he’d typed a kind of self-interview about why his desire to adopt a child had been unsuccessful, despite praying consistently for thirteen years. It was apparent from his questions that he hadn’t done anything practical to achieve his aim. Instead, he was trying to force God’s hand by his behaviour in the Realms. ‘Is his threat about making the Christians lose the war if it is not answered anything to do with it?’ he asked himself, though the only answer given is an enigmatic letter C.
This is obviously not what one could call sane behaviour. It suggests a breach in object relations, an inability to understand the proper workings of the world, to be able to differentiate reliably between the internal and the external, the boundaries between self and other, imaginary and actual. At the same time it seemed to me entirely understandable that someone so wholly impotent and isolated in their own life might begin to construct a compensatory universe, populated by powerful figures, in which all the disordered and tumultuous feelings – the grief and longing, the terrible rage – could be permitted range and scope.
Was it possible that creating the Realms could be a healthy urge, a way of containing and controlling the disorderliness, the threatening psychic disarray? I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Darger had ended his memoir, the history of his life, by talking for thousands of pages about the destruction caused by a tornado: a great gout of words that attested simply to monumental destruction, to things smashed to smithereens by wild forces, the pieces scattered far and wide.
The notion of a psyche that is broken into bits is central to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theory of loneliness. Klein is often misunderstood or mocked by the too literal-minded, with her talk of good and bad breasts, but of all Freud’s heirs, she is the most adept at conjuring the dark world of the psyche, its competing impulses and sometimes damaging defence mechanisms. In 1963, while Harlow was locking monkeys into isolation chambers, Klein published the paper ‘On the Sense of Loneliness’. In it, she applied her theories of ego development to the condition of loneliness, particularly ‘the sense of being alone regardless of external circumstances’.
Klein believed that loneliness was not just a desire for external sources of love, but also for an experience of wholeness, what she termed ‘an unattainable perfect internal state’. It was unattainable in part because it was based on the lost loveliness of the infantile experience of gratification, of being understood without the need for words, and in part because the internal landscape of everyone will always be comprised to some degree of warring objects, of unintegrated fantasies of destruction and despair.
In Klein’s model of development the infantile ego is dominated by splitting mechanisms, dividing its impulses into good and bad and projecting them outward into the world, separating it too into good and bad objects. This splitting derives from a desire for security, preserving the good ego from destructive impulses. In ideal conditions, the infant moves towards integration (towards being the operative word: in Klein’s seasoned vision full and permanent integration is never a possibility), but conditions are not always ideal for the painful process of reuniting the warring impulses of love and hatred. A weak or damaged ego cannot integrate, because it is too afraid of being overwhelmed by destructive feelings, which threaten to endanger or annihilate the prized and carefully preserved good object.
To get stuck in what Klein termed the paranoid-schizoid position (itself a normal stage of childhood development) is to experience the world in irreconcilable pieces, and to find oneself likewise in bits. In the most extreme manifestations of this state, such as one might see in schizophrenia, a grave co-mingling takes place, so that needful parts of the psyche are lost or scattered and unwanted or despised parts of the world forcefully injected into the self.
‘It is generally supposed,’ Klein writes:
. . . that loneliness can derive from the conviction that there is no person or group to which one belongs. This not belonging can be seen to have a much deeper meaning. However much integration proceeds, it cannot do away with the feeling that certain
components of the self are not available because they are split off and cannot be regained. Some of these split-off parts . . . are projected into other people, contributing to the feeling that one is not in full possession of one’s self, that one does not fully belong to oneself or, therefore, to anybody else. The lost parts too, are felt to be lonely.
Loneliness here is a longing not just for acceptance but also for integration. It arises out of an understanding, however deeply buried or defended against, that the self has been broken into fragments, some of which are missing, cast out into the world. But how do you put the broken pieces back together? Isn’t that where art comes in (yes, says Klein), and in particular the art of collage, the repetitive task, day by day and year by year, of soldering torn or sundered images together?
I was thinking a lot at the time about glue, how it functions as a material. Glue is powerful. It holds fragile structures together and stops things getting lost. It allows the depiction of images that are illicit or hard to access, like the homemade pornography David Wojnarowicz used to make as a child from Archie cartoons, taking a razor and turning Jughead’s nose into a penis; that sort of thing. Later, he used to wheatpaste discarded supermarket ads on walls and hoardings in the East Village, on to which he’d spray-painted stencils of his own design, making his visions adhere to the skin of the city, its outward shell. Later still, he worked intensely with collage, bringing together disparate images – fragments of maps, pictures of animals and flowers, scenes from pornographic magazines, scraps of text, the haloed head of Jean Cocteau – to construct the complicated and densely symbolic paintings of his maturity.
But collage can also be dangerous work. In 1960s London, the playwright Joe Orton and his boyfriend Kenneth Halliwell started stealing library books and giving them weird new covers: a tattooed man on John Betjeman’s poems; a leering monkey’s face grimacing from a flower on the Collins Guide to Roses. For this crime of aesthetic transgression they were sent to prison for six months.
Like Wojnarowicz, they understood the rebellious power of glue, the way it lets you reconstruct the world. In their tiny bedsit in Islington, Halliwell painstakingly covered all the walls in a fantastically elaborate and sophisticated collage, cutting up Renaissance art books to create surreal friezes, face after regarding face rising above the bookcase, the desk and the gas fire. It was in this room that he beat Orton to death with a hammer on 9 August 1967, in a frenzy of loneliness and fear of abandonment, splattering the collaged wall with blood before killing himself by drinking grapefruit juice laced with sleeping pills.
Halliwell’s act demonstrates just how potent and destructive the forces Klein identified can be, and what it means to be truly overwhelmed by them. But this is not what happened to Henry Darger. He didn’t hurt another person, not in actuality. What he did instead was dedicate his life to making images in which the forces of good and evil could be brought together, into a single field, a single frame. It mattered to him, this act of integration, of devoted labour, of taken care. The reparative impulse, Klein called it: a process that she believed involved enjoyment, gratitude, generosity; perhaps even love.
6
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE WORLD
SOMETIMES, ALL YOU NEED IS permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame that grows up like thorns around it. During my lowest period in New York, almost the only thing I found consoling was watching music videos on YouTube, curled on the sofa with my headphones on, listening again and again to the same voices finding the register for their distress. Antony and the Johnsons’ miraculous, grieving ‘Fistful of Love’, Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’, Justin Vivian Bond’s triumphant ‘In the End’, Arthur Russell singing ‘Love Comes Back’, with its lovely permissive refrain, being sad is not a crime.
It was during this period that I first came across Klaus Nomi, mutant chantant, who made an art of being an alien, like no one else on earth. He had one of the most extraordinary voices I’d ever heard, soaring through the registers, a counter-tenor assaulting electro-pop. Do you know me, he sings. Do you know me now. His appearance was as bewitching as his voice: small, with an elfin face, his delicate features accentuated by make-up, his skin powdered white, his widow’s peak sharply delineated into a bootblack fin, his lips painted in a black cupid’s bow. He didn’t look like a man or a woman but something else entirely, and in his music he seemed to give voice to absolute difference, to what it is like to be the only one of your kind.
I watched his videos repeatedly. There were five of them: 1980s New Wave fantasias with their crudely magical effects. A hyperstylised cover of ‘Lightning Strikes’, in which he was dressed as a space-age Weimar puppet, all set for a cabaret on Mars. The same wonderful falsetto, the same strangely touching artificiality: the face now deadpan, now mystified, now sinister, now emphatic, a robot trying human emotions on for size. In ‘Simple Man’, he prowls the city as a private detective, then walks into a cocktail party in his alien getup, clinking glasses with glamorous women, singing all the while a refrain about never being lonely again.
Who was he? What was he? His real name, I discovered, was Klaus Sperber, and he was a German immigrant to New York City who became a star of the downtown scene and then briefly the world in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ‘I might as well look as alien as possible,’ he once said of his idiosyncratic appearance, ‘because it reinforces a point I am making. My whole thing is that I approach everything as an absolute outsider. It’s the only way I can break so many rules.’
Sperber was an outsider par excellence, a gay immigrant who didn’t quite fit even in the world of fabulous misfits that was the East Village. He was born in January 1944 in Immenstadt, near the border with Lichtenstein, during the final throes of the Second World War. He learned to sing by listening to records of Maria Callas and Elvis, but his beautiful voice was against him. He was a counter-tenor at a period when there was no place for male counter-tenors within the closed, conservative world of opera. For a while, he worked as an usher at the Deutsche Oper in West Berlin, and then in 1972 he moved to New York, settling on St Mark’s Place, just as Warhol had before him.
In another YouTube video, a snippet from a French television interview, he lists all the menial jobs he did back then: dishwashing, delivery boy, delivering flowers, cooking, chopping vegetables. Eventually he became a pastry chef at the World Trade Center, work at which he was exceptionally skilled. At the same time he began performing his idiosyncratic fusion of opera and electro-pop in downtown clubs.
The film I liked best was of his very first appearance, at Irving Plaza on 15th Street in 1978, performing at a night called New Wave Vaudeville. He appears on stage in a see-through plastic cape, with wings painted around his eyes. A science-fiction figure, gender indeterminate, he opens his mouth and out comes ‘Mon creur s’ouvre à ta voix’, my heart opens to your voice, from Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila. His voice is almost inhuman, climbing higher and higher. La flèche est moins rapide à porter le trépas, que ne l’est ton amante à voler dans tes bras. The arrow is less rapid in bringing death, than is your lover to fly into your arms.
‘Holy shit’, someone shouts. There is a barrage of stray claps and cheers from the audience, then total silence, total attention. He gazes unseeing, that theatrical entranced Kabuki stare (the gaze that can cure epidemics, the gaze, nirami, that makes the invisible visible), the sound pouring from him. Verse-moi, verse-moi l’ivresse. Fill me, fill me with ecstasy. Then there is a series of bangs and the stage fills with smoke. ‘I still get goose pimples when I think about it,’ his friend and collaborator Joey Arias remembered. ‘It was like he was from a different planet and his parents were calling him home. When the smoke cleared, he was gone.’
Nomi’s career exploded from that moment. At first, his shows were put together by a group of friends, who collaborated on writing songs, making videos and creating costumes, developing together the Nomi universe
, the New Wave alien aesthetic. On 15 September 1979 he appeared with Arias as backing singers for David Bowie on Saturday Night Live, both dressed in robes by Thierry Mugler. There was an elaborate live show, growing crowds, a tour of America.
Nomi wanted success, but he didn’t find it quite as fulfilling as he’d expected. According to the testimony of Andrew Horn’s affecting 2004 documentary, The Nomi Song, the alien act arose in part from a refined and hypermodern theatrical sensibility – that post-punk, Cold War infused infatuation with the apocalypse and outer space – and in part from a genuine sense of being freakishly other. As his friend, the painter Kenny Scharf, says in the film: ‘Everyone was a freak, but he was a freak among the freaks. But at the same time, he was a human being as well and I think he longed to have a boyfriend, relationship, more like love.’ His manager Ray Johnson put it even more strongly, observing that despite the sell-out shows, the crowds of fans, it was apparent ‘you were witnessing one of the loneliest persons on the earth’.
In the 1980s Nomi’s career shifted up a gear. He got a record deal, and made two albums, Klaus Nomi and Simple Man, recorded with session musicians, his old friends sidelined. Simple Man went gold in France and in 1982 he toured Europe, culminating in December with his last recorded performance, at Eberhard Schoener’s Classic Rock Night in Munich, with a full orchestra, in front of an audience of thousands.