Great American Scrapbook

Great American Scrapbook

We leave clues. Some are inadvertent. Some are intentional. Some revelatory. Others are insignificant

For at least 100 years, Americans have glued, taped, pasted and sewn many of those clues into scrapbooks. What they reveal — and conceal — about their owners is a story Falls Village designer Jessica Helfand tells in " Scrapbooks: An American History" (Yale University Press, $45).

"It occurred to me then that reading biographies never gives you the incredible, vivid rush that you get when holding actual letters in your hand — the postmarks, the pictures, the handwriting, the photos, the errors, the scribbles," Helfand, 48, says. "It's all so deliriously human."

Scrapbooks, Helfand writes, served as an emotional ordering of the trivial and the profound. Combining the impulse to collect, to self-narrate and to affirm, scrapbooks are both the residue of an individual and the artifacts of a civilization.

Scrapbooks, whose heyday Helfand defines as from 1900 to 1935, form a kind of visual folktale — reminding us that the trivial isn't always useless and that the common is invariably uncommon.

Despite their long popularity, "Scrapbooks" is the first book to focus close attention on the history of American scrapbooks — their origins, their makers, their diverse forms, the reasons for their popularity and their place in American cultural life. The intoxicating book, which includes more than 450 full color images, examines the scrapbooks of the ordinary and extraordinary, the celebrated and notorious and finds in them stirring human connections.

"Throughout this book, it's people grabbing what is there on their kitchen table and making sense of it," Helfand, who is a partner at Winterhouse design firm, and a senior critic at Yale University School of Art. "They grabbed gum wrappers and wrote about what was going on in their lives."

Helfand's interest in scrapbooking is a grand philosophical leap from her Yale days when the "neutral international language" was the lingua franca of the cognoscenti. In contrast, the scrapbooks that excited Helfand were those whose slapdash ordinariness was beautiful — the piece of peanut affixed to one page or the shard of a shovel to another. "It's an instant mnemonic device," says Helfand. "There is a fear that life moves very quickly. And you steel yourself against time moving quickly."

That, Helfand says, is likely why scrapbooks become particularly popular after traumatic cultural events, such as the Civil War, after which the scrapbook was largely created, or World Wars I and II. Helfand dates the more recent increase in scrapbooking to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"You could recognize in another person's scrapbook something you saw in your own life," says Helfand, who has looked at hundreds of scrapbooks compiled during the last 200 years. "These are universal things we all go through. You can't not look at a woman describing the birth of her first child and not see some aspect of humanity. By looking at other people's lives, I learned a lot about my own. It's humbling."

That humility would be welcome news to the hundreds of modern scrapbookers who blitzed Helfand with hundreds of e-mails three years ago when she wrote a scathing indictment of what she considered the sterility and uniformity of modern scrapbooks. After that blog entry was posted, Helfand said, "I was vilified by the scrapbookers. And the part of me that's a mother, a sister and a daughter felt really bad."

Also intrigued. Helfand wanted to get a closer look at how — and why — people kept these visual records, and how they changed over time.

"It's the decorative ornamental object that I really have an interest in," says Helfand, one of the country's leading designers, who has worked with The New Yorker magazine, filmmaker Errol Morris, Yale University, and American Masters/PBS, among others.

The scrapbook is perhaps the most mongrelized form of autobiography. It is part photo album, part diary, part cultural library, part romantic novel. Helfand's history contains color photographs from more than 200 scrapbooks; some made by private individuals and others by the famous, including: Zelda Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Anne Sexton, Hilda Doolittle and Carl Van Vechten.

Helfand found most of the scrapbooks through the on-line auction site eBay. She then devised a list of five criteria the scrapbooks had to meet (See box). And she continued, in detective-cum-historian fashion, by researching census and ancestral records to find out to whom these scrapbooks belonged. "It's forensics. It's sociology. It's art history. It's genealogy. You try to figure out: Is it real or disingenuous?"

Who, in other words, were these people?

There was Charlotte Christine Dobbs, of Marietta, Ga., who annotated a scrapbook full of material from her wedding gown and traveling suit, from her 1916 wedding. Or Teresa Viele's scrupulous recording of her scandalous divorce, which including accusations of adultery, insanity and cruelty. Or Jessie Southard Parker, a 16-year-old living in Belmont, Mass., just before World War I. The 1912 scrapbook contains ephemera from receipts, poems, family crests, ink drawings, calling cards, deed and Bible records — but not a single mention of the sinking of the Titanic, which happened in April of that year.

Yet another 16-year-old girl was obsessed with the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. She pasted a newspaper photograph of the baby's shoes on the opposite page, in which she outlines the family tree and imagines herself in the Lindbergh's plight.

What is striking, of course, is the negative space of scrapbooks; what's omitted is nearly as significant as what's included. So, for instance, the scrapbook of Frederick G. Nixon-Nirdlinger, a theater manager from Philadelphia, who recorded his 1909 grand tour from western Europe to Egypt and Greece in a lavish scrapbook. The stunningly appointed scrapbook includes ticket stubs, Moorish lace, receipts of the purchase of a helmet in Gibraltar, graphically scintillating menus from Continental motels — and virtually no mention of his wife of 18 years, who accompanied him on the tour.

That reason for the omission becomes clear in Helfand's narrative, which explains that Nixon-Nirdlinger divorced his wife soon after the trip, took up with the fetching Charlotte Nash, 20 years his junior, moved to Paris and sired two children by her before his beautiful wife fatally shot him in the neck in their home on the French Riviera.

(Nash was acquitted by a jury of seven bachelors, but the real surprise was that Nixon-Nirdlinger had written her out of the will. All the money went to his two children.)

"All of this happens and yet his scrapbook reveals none of the emotional turbulence that must have preceded his imminent divorce," Helfand says incredulously.

But that, of course, is part of the self-narrative dimension of scrapbooks. Just as it is unclear whether they are public or private, it is equally obscure whether they are intended for full disclosure or simply to record celebratory moments. Sociologists talk about "willful episodic time" as the human tendency to skip from social celebration to social celebration when recording their lives.

And yet scrapbooks reveal that discomfiting moments are also recorded. One Southern teenager records an act of fellatio she observed on a street corner in 1922 — this in a scrapbook that otherwise recorded school dances, invitations and dance cards.

It's that dissonance and the continual juxtapositions of scrapbooks that intrigue Helfand. "Why Rudolph Valentino next to a prayer card?" she asks rhetorically. "You have to read these things like a road map."

Still, Helfand can't bring herself to warm to the "Michael's Crafts" store-bought embellishments of today's scrapbooks, which she describes as "at once playfully juvenile and strategically shrewd, steeped in memory yet inextricably bound to materiality, and seemingly devoid of any critical editorial conceit." She continues:

"Scrapbooks today tend to be overstuffed and all-inclusive — precisely the antithesis of what we have come to think of as modern. Just as the vernacular of the 21st century embraces the everyday with blind exuberance, so too does it unwittingly reinforce the value of just about everything. And yet, in a culture that celebrates the everyman (think Reality TV) and glorifies the banal (think blogs), the scrapbook takes on renewed value: everyone's opinion matters, and everyone's every waking move is important."

Nevertheless, Helfand has begun her own "scratch book," of quips, sketches and the bon mots of her two young children.

"I find it is the best therapy," Helfand said.

Republican-American news services contributed to this report.
Source: BY TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

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