About Henry Darger

[nostalgebraist]

Hey guys. I'm here today to tell you about a book I read recently, namely Henry Darger: In The Realms Of The Unreal, by John MacGregor. It's a study of Henry Darger, a man I instantly became obsessed with upon encountering his Wikipedia entry sometime last fall

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[nostalgebraist]

As a less than intelligent question, is there any single possible way one could read the actual text of The Realms in its entirety?

This is the first thing I wondered when I first heard about him! At the moment, the answer is "no." Nathan Lerner's widow retains the copyright on Darger's writings and is pretty restrictive about even getting excerpts published. At the moment, the best you'll be able to find is the excerpts included in books like Michael Bonesteel's "Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings" and the MacGregor book. (The Bonesteel book is probably the best place to go for excerpts.)

(Even after reading every article I can get my hands on about Darger, I don't understand why Lerner doesn't want the writings published in full. I remember reading that MacGregor once wanted to published an abridged, but still essentially complete, version of the Realms for public consumption, and Lerner said she didn't want him to do it because he took so long writing his biography and she didn't want to have to work with him so long on a new project. Which strikes me as an utterly silly reason, but who knows what was going on behind the scenes there. There's also an interesting point of view in a Ph.D. thesis on Darger by Faith Ann Shields -- available for free here -- who basically says that, after reading a lot of Darger's writing, she realized how truly violent, sexual and disturbing it is, and that people who profit from selling Darger's paintings wouldn't want the texts to be published because they would hurt sales by showing people just how messed-up H.D. was.)