The Lonely City (17 page)

In the most recent Darger biography,
Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy,
the writer Jim Elledge summons a powerful array of historical testimony, including a legal case, to prove the appalling conditions at this asylum, where children were routinely raped, choked and beaten, deceased inmates’ body parts were used in anatomy lectures, one boy castrated himself and a small girl was scalded to death.

There is no mention of any of these horrors in Darger’s own account. ‘Sometimes was pleasant and sometimes not so,’ he says, and: ‘Finally got to like the place.’ This doesn’t mean, of course, that he was not among the abused. The laconic tone might be the stoicism of no choice, or the numbness that follows on from violence, the isolating, silencing layers of fear and shame. Perhaps not, though. There has been too much speaking into this kind of absence; too strong a desire to fill the holes in Henry’s story.
It was a violent place; he was there: those are the facts, the limits of the known.

Here too I must say something about time. As with David Wojnarowicz’s account of his childhood, the sense of time in Darger’s record is often blurry or uncertain. There are many sentences along the lines of ‘I do not remember the number of years I lived with my father’ or ‘I believe I was at the asylum 7 years’. This temporal unsteadiness is a consequence of too many moves and too little explanation about them, relating too to the absence of a devoted parent, who helps to organise a child’s memories by telling their story back to them and keeping them appraised of their chronology, their place. For Henry, there was no one to keep track; no agency and no control. The world he inhabited was a place in which things happen to you, abruptly and without warning, where one’s belief in the predictability of the future is severely undermined.

A case in point: when he was ‘somewhat older, probably in my early teens’, Henry was informed that his father had died, that he was completely at the mercy of the institution, and no longer possessed a family or home. ‘I did not cry or weep however,’ he writes, his
Is
like shepherd’s crooks. ‘I had that kind of deep sorrow that bad as you feel I could not. I’d been better off if I could have. I was in that state for weeks, and because of it I was in a state of ugliness of such nature that everyone avoided me, they were so scared . . . During the first of my grief I hardly even ate anything, and was no friend to any one.’ Loss after loss, causing withdrawal after withdrawal.

Like time, the subject of home is also a source of puzzlement.
At the
bughouse
, as people called it, the older boys were made to spend their summers working on a state farm. Henry liked the labour, but he hated to leave the asylum. ‘I loved it much better than the farm, but yet I loved the work there. Yet the asylum was home to me.’
But
and
yet:
devices for yoking contradictory thoughts together.

In fact, although he enjoyed the meals at the farm, loved to work in the fields and believed the family who ran it were
very good people
, he tried several times to run away. The first escape attempt ended when he was caught by the farm cowboy, who tied his hands to a rope and made him run back behind the horse, a scene vividly animated in Jessica Yu’s beautiful documentary about Darger. It’s hard to think of a more brutal illustration of being powerless over the course of your life, lashed and dragged in the wake of larger forces.

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.’

*

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 their 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.