In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Lance Olsen’s reimagining of the life of artist Henry Darger, An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies, is at once both tragic and transcendent.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Olsen (Absolute Away) gives voice to outsider artist Henry Darger, who died in 1973, in this admirable narrative…It’s an arresting portrait of a troubled figure.”
In his own words, here is Lance Olsen’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies:
Henry Darger (1892-1973) is one of those fascinating, secret-handshake, so-called outsider artists. I’m always startled and made glad how many small pockets of people know about him these days. I’m always startled and forlorn nobody knew about him when he was alive, saw a single one of his 350 unearthly collages, read a word of his extravagantly long novels (one measures 15,145 pages) until he was on his deathbed.
For decades Henry spent his days as a custodian mopping floors at various Chicago hospitals, his nights writing and making art that rendered the horrific adventures of the Vivian Girls, whose mission it was to rescue a smashed world filled with child slaves.
Because he left few traces behind besides his work, extraordinarily little is known for sure about his life, except that he existed hand to mouth for most of his 81 years in a cluttered 17.6-by-13.9 room at a boardinghouse, living as near to a solitary, repetitive existence as possible—except in his fiery imagination.
Henry simply wasn’t interested in attention, even less so in fame.
He created for no one save himself—and to save himself.
So how can you not want to write about somebody like that, spend a few years trying to speculate about and empathize with such a singular mind?
That curiosity and compulsion caught me when I stumbled across the first major comprehensive exhibition of his work at the American Folk Art Museum in New York in 1997. Twenty-seven years later I wrote the first line of my novel An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies: “Sometimes in the morning I remember thinking: it is the sorrow of leaving a place you’re not done loving yet.”
It’s a novel interested in exploring Henry’s radical interiority, his non-sequitur imagination, through an intensely subjective first-person point of view. At its heartbeat questions about for whom we really create at the end of the day; about reading as problem; about the importance of serious art as a hospital for soothing hurt rather than a business privileging quantity over quality.
Thirteen chapters. A song around each:
“Lost Girls” (Tilly and the Wall, 2006)
Based on Henry’s Vivian Girls, this one provides one of the epigraphs for An Inventory—
And your eyes are like screaming
And since there is no end, and no beginning
You will run
You will run
You will run
—and collars the atrocity exhibition called Henry’s childhood, when his disabled father had his eight-year-old son institutionalized at the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children for masturbating too much.
One of the fun research corners for me was discovering how many songs have been written about him by everybody from Natalie Merchant (“The Ballad of Henry Darger,” 2001) and the German indie band Get Well Soon (“Just Like Henry Darger,” 2012) to the noise-rock Lungbutter (“Henry Darger,” 2019) and Philippe Cohen Solal and Mike Lindsay’s concept album, OUTSIDER (2021), whose lyrics are appropriated from Henry’s writing.
“Another Brick in the Wall” (Pink Floyd, 1979)
At the asylum, he suffered acute negligence, beatings, and quite possibly rape at the hands of both the staff and his fellow inmates. Because of Illinois’s overcrowded prison system, adult criminals were housed with the children. Once you were institutionalized, the thinking at the time went, you would never leave. They were all just bricks in the wall.
“Fast Car” (Tracy Chapman, 1988)
So almost from the minute he arrived, Henry, being Henry, began planning his escape. It took him six years and four attempts before he succeeded, at which point he walked the 165 miles back to Chicago, no fast cars in sight. Starting from zero, he had nothing to lose.
“Not Strong Enough” (boygenius, 2023)
It’s difficult to tell for certain from the shadows he left in his wake, but it’s possible Henry was autistic, certain he lived most of his life as an impoverished misanthrope, and probable he was gay in a culture whose erasure of such identities was very close to absolute—even as he attended Catholic mass several times a day to beat down the fiends inside him, packed his room with religious memorabilia, and carried on a lifelong wrestling match with his furious god, because he didn’t know why he was the way he was.
“I Want You (Fever)” (Momma, 2025)
A year or two after he returned to Chicago, Henry met a man named William Schloeder (whom Henry sometimes referred to in his writings as “Willie,” sometimes as “Whillie), a nightguard thirteen years older than he, and entered a several-decades-long relationship with him. It’s conceivable Schloeder and he were just friends. It’s likely they were lovers. Schloeder lived with his mother and sisters, and seems to have tried to distance himself geographically from Henry more and more, finally moving with one sister to San Antonio. Early on, Henry went so far as to look into the possibility of adopting a child that Schloeder and he could raise together.
“Baby” (Warpaint, 2010)
Although they never saw each other again after Schloeder left Chicago, Henry never stopped thinking about him, was crushed when Schloeder’s sister wrote him a brief postcard to let him know his friend/lover had died of the flu. Henry wrote Schloeder into his novels, into the elaborate mythology he created, so Schloeder could continue to live as a hero in the book of Henry’s fantasy.
“Lola” (The Kinks, 1970)
Sexuality in Henry’s work was mystery and polyphony. Although he calls his protagonists the Vivian Girls, constructs them by collaging cartoons of girls out of magazines, comic books, tracts about the Civil War, and so on, he also lovingly freehands a penis on each.
“Bookends” (Simon & Garfunkel, 1968)
Which is to say the Vivian Girls were also stand-ins for Henry, for the injuries he abided as a child, hermaphroditic projections of the Henry that wanted to emancipate the child slaves of the world, which is to say emancipate himself, over and over again, for he learned trauma never follows a neat linear narrative arc. Trauma is perpetual bramble, tangle, fright, and briefly won fights. Your memories—they’re all that’s left you.
“My Body is Falling Apart” (Daisy, 1992)
Having no access to health care, Henry’s body slowly, painfully undid itself. By the time he was in his forties, he had pulled most of his teeth. He faced chronic stomach distress, chronic leg misery, chronic eye misery, increasing senility. He was bedridden for months when hit by a car in 1969, only to recover long enough to slip on the ice at the bottom of his boardinghouse steps. His landlords, the Lerners, helped him move into a nearby Catholic nursing home operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor.
“When It’s Cold Outside I’d Like to Die” (Moby, sung by Jacob Lusk, 2026)
What I especially love about this song is Lusk’s voice, which captures the stunning, eerie altérité of pure Henryness. When his neighor, David Berglund, was cleaning out Henry’s apartment for the Lerners after his death, he stumbled across Henry’s collages and writing in a trunk and stacked here and there. On a visit to the nursing home the next day, David told Henry about his find. “Throw it all away,” Henry responded. “Too late now.” He died the day after his eighty-first birthday and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Now an artwork by him sells for upwards of $800,000.
“My Way” (Frank Sinatra, 1969)
In my eyes what’s beautiful and grievous about Henry was his unwillingness to bend. He was a recluse. He was a grouch. He was hurt terribly by the world. He was continuous ache and sorrow. He made his art for an audience of one—maybe two, if he showed any of it to William Schloeder. He had no use for the opinion of others. He followed his own rhythms. And it broke him. His isn’t the story of transcendence, recovery, resolution, except as Kafka might have imagined it.
“Heroes” (David Bowie, German version 1977)
Here let us pay homage to Henry’s ancestry. His father, a tailer, was a German immigrant from Meldorf, a town in western Schleswig-Holstein. His mother, who died giving birth when Henry was four, was born in Wisconsin. Henry always told people he had been born and raised in São Paulo because he thought that sounded more enigmatic and stylish. In his room late at night, he would sometimes sing to himself in a madeup version of Portuguese. He was a kind of a hero. Nur diesen Tag. But just for one day.
“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” (Monty Python, sung by Eric Idle 1970)
Because only Eric Idle can be happy hanging on a cross.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his novel Always Crashing in the Same Car
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his novel Skin Elegies
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his novel My Red Heaven
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his novel Dreamlives of Debris
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his book [[ there. ]]
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his novel Theories of Forgetting
Lance Olsen is author of more than 30 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novels Absolute Away (Dzanc, 2024) and Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie (FC2, 2023). He is a Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency, two-time N.E.A. Fellowship, Connecticut Artistic Excellence Grant, and a Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar.