Fantastic Metropolis

Quin’s Shanghai Circus, Edward Whittemore

Like The Fall of Chronopolis, here is another book that first blew my mind long ago and far away; by a strange coincidence, it too was originally published in 1974. Now Old Earth Books has reissued the novel, Whittemore’s first, along with his incomparable masterpiece, the Jerusalem Quartet. All these books are blindingly brilliant works of eccentric genius: hilarious, profoundly moving spy stories and secret histories on a first-name basis with the fantastic. Whittemore’s neglect by both the literary and genre establishments is shameful… but writers and a few discerning critics have always recognized his importance. Read him.

Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, John M. MacGregor

Darger (1892-1973) has gained fame as an outsider artist both for his stunningly beautiful and violent artworks and for the 15,000-page text, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, that those unforgettable artworks were composed to illustrate. Darger’s brilliant and terrifying creation of a fantasy world in which children, mainly girls (often depicted naked, and often with penises) are slaves to adults who brutally torture and murder them, must be counted as among the supreme artistic triumphs of the 20^th Century… and one that uncannily seems to predict some of the darkest tendencies of the 21^st. It is also one of the most fascinating and revealing looks into the mind of a psychotic individual since Schreber’s autobiography, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Like Schreber, Darger remained functional, though on a low level; a friendless recluse who escaped as a young man from the home for feeble-minded children to which he had been incomprehensibly committed as a child, Darger worked his whole life as a janitor in a series of Catholic hospitals, wrestling with God in the privacy of his conscience and, at night, alone, in the privacy of his small Chicago apartment, where, over the course of decades, without ever showing so much as a single sketch or word to anyone, he invented and mastered artistic techniques that astonish experts today and composed his own Iliad. Elizabeth Hand, in a brilliant essay in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, provocatively and persuasively painted Darger as a sort-of shadow figure to Tolkien, with whom he shares an amazing number of personal details. Carrying echoes of Carroll and Baum, the writings of whom were known to him, Darger’s work is, in the end, sui generis. It is of special importance, I think, to writers and artists in our genre: indeed, I would argue that it cannot be fully appreciated or understood apart from our genre any more than Tolkien’s work can. John MacGregor, a psychotherapist and art psychologist, author of the groundbreaking study The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (1989), is an indispensable guide into this simultaneously seductive and repellent world. A nice introduction to Darger’s life and work can be found online, although the art must be seen in person to be truly appreciated; on your next visit to New York, swing by the American Folk Art Museum on 53^rd Street.