In his 2023 novel, Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie, Lance Olsen explored Bowie’s shape-shifting contradictions to present a kind of post-genre treatise on the unknowability of people and history. His new novel, An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies, is another After book: A Novel After Henry Darger, who, unlike David Bowie, didn’t exist as a Before; Henry Darger was pure After.
He might have remained forever unknown to the world had his numerous collage paintings and voluminous writings, including a 15,000 page novel (yes, that’s page number, not word count) not been discovered by the landlord of his tiny unkempt apartment in Chicago, in 1973, when Darger lay dying in a hospital bed. His posthumous fame as an outsider artist was entirely unintentional.
It’s the unintentionality of Henry Darger that sits at the heart of An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies. Darger’s extraordinarily brutal life is formed by the glances and stares of intricately placed sentences that jump and spill in Olsen’s distinct, prismatic style. The first person voice, Darger’s voice, is not an act of ventriloquism but an orchestration of perception, collaging thoughts and memory in fractured, truncated sentences, placed out of time, aphoristic and broken further by ellipses, gaps: nothingness— much like Darger’s life. Childhood blends with old age, invented characters exist beside real life figures.
An ordered chronology suggests Darger had a brother who died in infancy and a sister given up for adoption after his mother, “delivered my sister eleven days short of my fourth birthday, shrieking, writhing, stinking, and expiring as she did so.” He was left alone with an abusive, alcoholic father—”a kind man he wasn’t”— who caught Henry masturbating and sent him to the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, where staff, “carefully folded the towels they choked us with to avoid telltale marks.”
Abused and bullied as a child, Darger spent the entirety of his adult life in poverty, working mostly as a custodian in Chicago’s hospitals, a down and out existence leavened only by his love for an older man, Whillie, whom he lost touch with but never forgot. Unbeknown to anyone, he was spending hours every night drawing, writing, talking to the characters and images that occupied his mind during the day when he mopped floors and endured the pain in his joints.
Henry Darger is shown to be forever dislocated from the ordinary, a lumpenproletariat outcast who cannot function like most people. He considers how he would like to own a dog but accepts the cost would make it an impossibility, he says, “I came to appreciate the extent to which such a notion would stay an abstraction for me, like trying to imagine how other people see the colour red.” It’s a phenomenological perception and a reminder that, in this novel, Olsen is not trying to accurately recreate how Darger saw red, that is not possible, it’s why we have language, to experience a felt reality that exists outside of objective truth— to witness the abstraction of Henry Darger is to be placed inside his tired, wild, scattered mind, a mind that is both his and not his.
“I fall into worlds,” Darger says. They are worlds that are both real and unreal, worlds of imagination and actuality. Reading An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies, provides a similar experience, it’s like falling into worlds, actual, imaginary, neither, both.
Darger’s voice is wry, often funny. He recollects his past with understated sardonic beauty. On his great love, Whillie, he says – “Give me more than the life I see. Is something I stopped saying the day I met him.” Yet beneath his sensitive, wryness, sits a twisted grief and a woolly confusion derived from trauma and ill health which is expressed through his work.
Henry Darger’s art and writing almost exclusively focused on children— their capture and enslavement, torture, herosim, playfulness, innocence. His drawings, mostly collages made with pages from cut up magazines he found on the street and drawn over with crayon and watercolour, depicted groups of sometimes naked, hermaphrodite children.
His giant novel, In the Realms of the Unreal, probably the longest novel written in English, featured the Vivian Girls, young princesses who attempt to free enslaved children. The Vivian Girls and various other of his characters swarm through Darger’s thoughts, indistinguishable from real figures. The obsession with children is never explained by Olsen, but Darger was locked inside a vicious childhood that never allowed him to be like other children yet also kept him forever child-like, both boy and girl, where he ended up, as children often do, opting to set his life inside a story.
Lance Olsen’s experiments in fiction have, over the years, been multi-media projects, featuring artwork by Andi Olsen— my personal favourite being the freakishly brilliant collage style computer visuals in Sewing Shut My Eyes (2000). Each chapter in An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies features a page with partially transparent photographs, a child and adult overlapping in the same pose— possibly the same person, young and old. A hand reaches into the frame and holds the original photo over the recreation. It’s disarming and unexplained.
John Berger always liked photographs in books to be non-tautological, to add something new on their own terms rather than replaying what already exists in the text. Berger famously said, “Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.” Darger’s ghostly layered child/adult portraits speak to themselves, they are a self contained mystery, yet planted inside the novel they become symbols of his own faintness, his static, undeveloped life that never really progressed from child to adult but remained in that one, put upon pose, that Olsen draws over, rubbing crayon and brushing watercolour in the form of language.
It’s possible the construction of the novel is a one sided conversation, a spoken document of some kind. Darger is in old age, he seems to have been returned to an institution, right at the end of his life, when he is being interviewed. There are only very occasional clues, such as when he asks, “is this conversation being recorded?”, or mockingly enquires, “how do you think I look?” It might be a therapy session. Darger may be drugged, his thoughts shuttering. Perhaps he is talking to the girl/woman in the photographs. He built a cocoon, a private space in his apartment.
“The walls of my room are, were, who knows for sure, crowded with the me of my paintings since I had come to believe nothing makes you feel cozier, than residing in an archaeological dig composed of your own ruins.” The Beckett-like morosity drifts even more erratically towards the end. We never find out who he is talking to, maybe it was only ever himself. Soon Henry Darger will become an After and, for Lance Olsen, the After is a land of opportunity, where sentences can disrupt history, a place where the image, the fragment, slots into a time that feels real, and yet never existed.
While Olsen’s Bowie book shifted perspectives, leaping from one lens to another, switching voice and genre, in An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies, he stays with Henry Darger the whole time, he exists within Darger, and, rather marvellously, becomes Darger’s Before.