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I think many people have been made curious about Henry Darger because of the song on my album Motherland. Henry Darger (1892-1973) was the author and illustrator of what could possibly be the longest unfinished fictional work of all time. His towering hand-bound manuscript of 17,000 pages was found in this obscure retired hospital janitor’s apartment after his death. Henry worked in obsessed isolation for six decades on his saga entitled, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

 

Natalie Merchant

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who'll save the poor little girl?
oh, Henry...
who'll tell the story of her?
Henry Darger

 

Natalie Merchant

 

who will draw the calvary in
risk his very own precious skin
to make our Angelinia a free and peaceful land again?
Henry
who'll love a poor orphan child?
Henry Darger

 

Natalie Merchant

 

I saw my first Henry Darger collage/paintings in the early 1980’s when the tale of Henry’s life was just emerging through rumor and scattered fragments of his book. He lived and died a recluse in Chicago where no one knew of his writings or paintings. There was a folk art gallery in New Orleans that had acquired a small pile of Realms of the Unreal illustrations. I was on tour with REM at the time, Michael Stipe and I visited the gallery where we had a first look at these images of seven little horrified girls pursued by a purple and orange winged cats or evil professors on horseback or resting peacefully under giant sunflowers. I was completely captivated and intrigued.

 

Natalie Merchant

 

When I was hired they showed me my desk, an old beat-up scarred wooden desk, and they told me that it had been O. Henry’s desk when O. Henry worked for the paper, as he had at one time. And I readily believed it. I could see the place where O. Henry had savagely stabbed the desk with his pen in pursuit of a slimy adjective just out of reach, and a kind of bashed-in-looking place where O. Henry had beaten his poor genius head on the desk in frustration over not being able to capture the noun leaping like a fawn just out of reach... So I sat down at the desk and I too began to chase those devils, the dancy nouns and come-hither adjectives, what joy.

 

Donald Barthelme

 

Gary: You ought never to have joined the Athenaeum Club, Henry: it was disastrous.
Henry: I really don’t see why.
Gary: It’s made you pompous.
Henry: It can’t have. I’ve always been too frightened to go into it.

 

Noel Coward