To write historical fiction is to know that the past finds many places to hide. For Heather Clark it was in her grandfather’s scrapbook, stowed away in an attic until after he died.
With a burgundy cover now so faded the gold tooling on the front barely stands out, it speaks to the experiences of a fresh-faced, perpetually grinning 19-year-old Irish American G.I. deployed to Europe in the last stretch of World War II, his trusty camera almost always slung around his neck. He returned ravaged by encounters in a war he refused to speak about for the rest of his long life.
Along with birthday cards and holiday telegrams, Army rosters and food ration certificates, Nazi uniform badges and Gen. Omar Bradley’s sternly worded “Special Orders for German American Relations,” the album includes Herbert J. Clark’s photographs of the place that had drained the smile from his face: Dachau.
His granddaughter is an award-winning literary historian and critic, whose “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath” (2020) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. “The Scrapbook,” however, is fiction, a debut novel inspired by her grandfather’s attic trove, which she had heard about, but hadn’t seen, until after his funeral.
“I wanted to see what happens in the space where biography and fiction collide,” she said.
Clark was seated with the album open in front of her recently, at a long table in the gray clapboard house in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., she shares with her husband, two children and many walls of books.
She had wondered how much courage it had taken for a gangly, happy-go-lucky boy like the newly minted Sgt. “Bud” Clark of Somerville, Mass., to train his viewfinder on one of history’s greatest evils, even as everyday German citizens, she said, “had looked away.” Her grandfather’s pictures, she added, were a record of “the gates of hell.”
Two generations later, the growth of Holocaust denial compelled her to write the novel. She centered it on a love story set in the 1990s between two young people with family histories reaching back to opposite sides in the war, “both dealing with transgenerational trauma.”
Deborah Garrison, Clark’s editor at Pantheon, described herself as “stunned” that Clark had written a novel. “But I felt from the very first sentence how gripped she was by that material,” Garrison said.
At the heart of “The Scrapbook” are Anna O’Brien, a senior about to graduate from Harvard University, and Christoph, a handsome German architecture student in Cambridge visiting friends. He has a fencing scar on his left temple and, as Anna discovers the more time they spend together, conflicted motives in his heart.
Clark used the wartime record she discovered in her grandfather’s scrapbook, which was compiled by two of his sisters, to help mold the historical chapters. The result intersperses the young couple’s story with a narrative that imagines their grandfathers as enemies connected by events on and off the battlefield.
In Germany, Christoph takes Anna to meet his affluent parents, their elegant home furnished with art and antiques that may, or may not, have been looted from Jewish homes during the war. Anna can glean her grandfather Jack’s military trajectory from his scrapbook. But just how much truth has Christoph been handed down about his grandfather who served in the Wehrmacht?
Compounding the sinister implications, “she puts him on a pedestal, and that’s dangerous,” Clark said. “Their romantic relationship is a metaphor for a power relationship that has the potential of falling back into totalitarianism and fascism.”
Parallels with what Clark sees as America’s current drift toward authoritarianism seem unmistakable to her. “This book feels timely in a way I didn’t think it would,” she said.
The memoirist and essayist Leslie Jamison is a fellow with Clark at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers this year. “I’ve been really struck by the way in which the novel puts the ferocity and obsession of young love into play with huge historical forces,” she said, “and at a point when there hadn’t yet been sufficient reckoning with the violence and horrors of the past.”
Bud Clark, along with many of his fellow servicemen in the 86th Infantry Division, was not prepared for the brutal revelations lying in wait inside the gates of Dachau. Known as the Blackhawks, they entered without an inkling of the skeletal wraiths about to greet them, the bodies piled waist-deep in front of the crematory, the corpses in boxcars sent from Buchenwald, the acrid smell of death at every turn.
“Very few GIs carried cameras with them,” Clark said of her grandfather’s 14 small, deckle-edged black-and-white images chronicling those scenes and mounted across two pages in the album. “It makes the photographs very rare.”
Only once did a sister persuade Bud Clark to speak briefly on video about what happened. After that, nothing.
Like most boys in the Clark family, he had gone directly from high school to work for Clark Steel Drum of Medford, Mass., the company founded as a cooperage by his father the century before. He returned to it after the war, retiring as its president at 85, his death six years later releasing the scrapbook from the attic.
Heather Clark was the first in the family to graduate from college, in 1996, with a degree in English literature from Harvard, which had recruited her as a rower out of Groton, the school she set her sights on just up the road from her family home.
Anna O’Brien’s biographical resemblance to Heather Clark is pronounced, as is Jack O’Brien’s to Bud Clark. But no German heartbreaker steered Clark’s life off-course, she said. Her years abroad were in Ireland — her first book was “The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972” — and at Oxford, where she earned her Ph.D. and met her husband, Nathan Holcomb, who had been three years behind her at Harvard.
Clark is returning to nonfiction, and to Plath, with her next book, “Waking in the Dark: The Boston Years of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich and Maxine Kumin.” There are echoes between Plath poems like “Daddy,” with its famous line “Every woman adores a Fascist,” and the themes of “The Scrapbook,” she points out: “It’s all there — the violence, the totalitarianism, the demands of submitting to the patriarchy.”
The pages of her grandfather’s scrapbook are brittle now, and she has to leaf through them carefully. She’s getting ready to part with the photographs. Her extended family is making plans to donate them to the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
The gift will be labeled “From the Herbert J. Clark Collection.”
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