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When Averell Harriman and the Union Pacific Railroad opened the Sun Valley ski
resort outside of Ketchum, Idaho, in 1936, one of the very first guests to visit
and ski was Clara Gatzert Spiegel (1904-1997) of Chicago, Illinois. The wife of
mail-order magnate Frederick W. Spiegel, Clara was precisely the kind of visitor
the resort hoped to attract: wealthy, outdoorsy, and socially well-connected.
But unlike so many who came and visited, Clara Spiegel eventually made Sun
Valley her home, returning to the resort time and again before finally moving to
Ketchum in the early 1950s. Clara Spiegel was a novelist, short story writer,
big game hunter, trout fisher, world traveler, patron of the arts and culture,
and pillar of the social life in Ketchum and Sun Valley. A friend of Ernest
Hemingway’s, she was profiled in Town & Country and Current Biography;
her novels, written under the pseudonym Clare Jaynes, made the best-seller lists, and one of them was brought to the big
screen by Warner Brothers. Her passion, beyond writing, was the outdoors,
whether skiing in Sun Valley, big game hunting in Africa, or trout fishing in
the familiar streams near her Idaho home. She was out fishing just two weeks
before her death, catching a 23-inch trout while seated in a wheel chair. In
1999, her son Andrew donated Clara Spiegel’s literary and personal papers to
Boise State University, where they are part of the Idaho Writers Archive in
Albertsons Library.
Series II: Clare Jaynes Literary Papers Series III: Clara Spiegel Literary Papers Series IV: Journals and Travel Writings
Oversize Items
When Averell Harriman and the Union Pacific Railroad opened the Sun Valley ski resort outside of Ketchum, Idaho, in 1936, one of the very first guests to visit and ski was Clara Spiegel of Chicago, Illinois. The wife of mail-order magnate Frederick W. Spiegel, Clara was precisely the kind of visitor the resort hoped to attract: wealthy, outdoorsy, and socially well-connected. To establish its reputation as a destination for the smart set, the resort courted celebrities. Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper were among the early visitors who put Sun Valley on the map; so did bandleader Glenn Miller and Olympic skater Sonja Heine, who starred together in the 20th Century-Fox film, Sun Valley Serenade (1941). Clara Spiegel soon came into the limelight herself as the author of best-selling novels in the 1940s, but unlike the celebrities lured to there for publicity purposes, or the short-term visitors drawn by its snow and glamour, Spiegel eventually settled in Sun Valley, moving into a house she built to her specifications on a hill overlooking Ketchum. There, for more than 40 years, she enjoyed the outdoors life—fishing, hunting, skiing, and horseback riding—and established herself as one of the pillars of the town’s social life. “No one…entertains with more style and élan than Clara Spiegel,” wrote Town & Country magazine in a 1983 profile of the resort town, characterizing her as “a dynamic, highly independent woman…whose exuberant spirit of adventure personifies much of what Sun Valley is about.” [1] Clara Elizabeth Gatzert Spiegel was born on December 6, 1904, in her parents’ home at 4915 Washington Park Court on the south side of Chicago. Her father, August Gatzert, born in Germany, was a clothing manufacturer, active in industry groups and the Chicago Association of Commerce; her mother, Isabel Rosalie Florsheim, was a Chicago native whose father, Simon Florsheim, was a corset manufacturer. He also was born in Germany. Clara’s aunt Dolly (her mother’s sister) lived on the same block on Washington Park Court; grandfather Simon and grandmother Elizabeth Florsheim lived on the next street over. The Gatzerts were more far-flung; her grandmother Gatzert and an aunt still lived in Germany, and another aunt in Paris. Her parents spoke English, German, and French, and Clara learned each of those languages as a child.[2] Young Clara grew up with an older brother, Walter, and a governess, Maria Antonia Paulina Plaff, who lived with the family in a room adjacent to Clara’s. To Clara, she was a beloved figure, known as “Fraulein.” The household also included a waitress, a cook, a housemaid, and a houseman. Although her family moved away to a larger home when she was only six, Clara Spiegel retained vivid memories of Washington Place Court. She remembered the gypsy vans that plied the alleys, as well as the lamp lighter, the scissors sharpener, and the organ grinder and his monkey, who would dance for a penny. She remembered her neighborhood as one of brick and grey stone houses, “of nameless architectural styles which like their owners were pleasant, unobtrusive, and unpretentious.” “Beyond the sidewalks on each side [of the street] were ten-foot strips of lawn running to the curbs and spaced with shade trees which in summer umbrella’d the walks and porches from the direct sun. It was over the tops of these trees that I saw Halley’s Comet for the first time, held up in my father’s arms as he pointed out the star and its brilliant long, wide tail… ‘One only sees this once in a life-time,’ he told my brother and me, ‘so remember it well.’ He did not know nor suspect that 75 years later I would see it again from very far away…”[3] Washington Park Court, as Clara remembered it, was ethnically and religiously diverse. “There were Irish Catholics and German Jews and French Protestants and mostly Anglo-Saxons of whatever religion. It was a typical upper middle class, upper middle income, upper middle culture residential area where the inhabitants were neighborly neighbors and acquaintances but not necessarily friends.”[4] The Gatzerts were of Jewish origin, but if religion played a large role in their lives, it is not reflected in Clara Spiegel’s writings. She did write in general terms on the discrimination Jews faced in Chicago high society (“a conglomeration of the newly-rich”) in the years before World War I: “No Jew, however cultured or however rich, was ever considered for a position on a museum or orchestral board. No Jew, however good a horseman, was ever considered for membership in the local hunts or the local polo clubs. Jewish young women were not nominated for membership in the local Junior League, much less invited to join it. And no Jew’s name ever appeared in that new and formidably ludicrous publication known as the Social Register.”[5] As to any personal instances of discrimination, her papers are silent. Clara attended the Faulkner School, a private school for girls in Chicago, from kindergarten through high school. She also attended ballet school and rode with her father every day before breakfast, conspiring with him to keep from her mother any news of the many times she was thrown from the horse. When it came time to go to college, she journeyed East to enroll in Vassar College in Massachusetts. She studied at Vassar just one year before returning to Chicago, where, on December 1, 1923, a few days shy of her nineteenth birthday, she married Frederick W. Spiegel. Together they settled into a home in Glencoe, Illinois, one of Chicago’s North Shore suburbs. Frederick Spiegel was an executive with his family’s mail-order business, Spiegel, Inc.; during World War I he had driven ambulances with Ernest Hemingway in Italy and was counted among the novelist’s personal friends. Clara Spiegel settled into a life centered on her home, charity and community work, a busy social life with her husband, and eventually, their children. The Spiegels had two sons, Andrew and William. Much of their early social life centered on the Lake Shore Country Club, a Jewish country club in Glencoe. Clara served on the committee that organized the club’s annual musical skit in 1925 and chaired the committee in 1926. The printed program for “The Lake Shore Worries of 1926” credits her as one of three writers of the music and lyrics; Frederick was the stage manager. She also took up fox hunting and apache dancing.[6] In 1928 the Spiegels went on a two-month cruise to the Mediterranean. They sailed first to Spain, then on to Morocco, Italy, and France. “We rediscovered Europe, quite on our own, very young, green and enthralled with everything we saw and did. We found we could break the rather rigid mold in which we had been raised and expose ourselves to ways of life as foreign to us as the countries and the people.”[7] The letters Clara wrote home describing Vigo, Rabat, Rome, and other places they visited are among the earliest writings represented in her papers. Her developing literary style is evident even in these letters, and they represent the first of a lifetime’s worth of letters and journals chronicling her travels. During the 1930s, Clara began collaborating with Jane Mayer, a friend and classmate from her Vassar days who lived about a mile away from her, to write stories. During the summer of 1932, at Jane’s home in Glencoe, they completed an eighty-nine page typescript entitled “Guardian of the North,” an adventure-romance set in the Canadian wilderness. It was published in Five Novels Monthly in August 1933 under the joint pseudonym Janice Claremont.[8] Janice Claremont’s literary career was a brief one, however, for she soon was supplanted by Clare Jaynes. Over the next decade, using the Jaynes pseudonym, Clara Spiegel and Jane Mayer successfully placed more stories in other magazines, both British and American, including Mademoiselle, The Tatler, Liberty, and most notably, The New Yorker (“Visitors for the Soldiers,” April 17, 1943). They also contributed book reviews to Chicago newspapers. Their story “The Coming of Age,” published in Story magazine, was one of the O. Henry Memorial Award prize stories of 1942. It was the appearance of their first novel, Instruct My Sorrows, published by Random House in 1942, however, that first brought widespread recognition to the literary partnership. The story of a wealthy young widow (from the fashionable suburbs of Chicago) forced to redirect her life after her husband’s sudden death, the book became a best-seller and attracted favorable reviews in newspapers across the country. “A very fine first novel, written with verve and sensitive awareness,” wrote the Boston Herald; “a novel that is entertaining and…definitely superior to most stories of this kind,” according to Bess Jones in the Saturday Review of Literature. Despite a negative review from the Des Moines Register (“not much ahead of the dozens of sentimental agony serials with which the radio titillates the housewife”), Instruct My Sorrows caught Hollywood’s eye, and in 1946 Warner Brothers sent it to the big screen as My Reputation, starring Barbara Stanwyck.[9] Spiegel and Mayer followed up on the success of their first novel with three more, These are the Times (1944), This Eager Heart (1947), and The Early Frost (1952). Their literary success brought numerous invitations to speak at book clubs and writers’ forums, and the two were featured in full-page profiles in Wilson Library Bulletin and Current Biography. In their joint talks, in particular, they outlined their collaborative writing process. They tried to work five to six hours together while their children were at school, in an office hideaway with no phone and no interruptions. “We discuss plot and characters until to us the characters have taken on the forms of actual people. We write a full outline of our plot. Then we divide this outline into episodes and one of us writes one episode while the other does the subsequent one. We then revise each other’s drafts and continue in this manner, until the manuscript is complete.” Their preparation before actual writing was extensive: developing full biographies of every one of their characters, with more detail than ever appeared in their books, to the point of drawing maps of the places the characters would frequent, and, on paper, decorating their homes and filling their wardrobes. The pair generally tried to work every weekday, save for during World War II, when they both devoted their Wednesdays and Fridays to volunteer work. Both Clara Spiegel and Jane Mayer contributed their time to the Red Cross.[10] Locales familiar to Spiegel and Mayer figure prominently in their writings. Part of their first novel, Instruct My Sorrows, was set in Sun Valley, Idaho, a place Clara Spiegel was becoming increasingly familiar with since her first visit in early 1937. Though raised in the city, and well accustomed to big city culture and amenities, she fell in love with the Idaho outdoors. Her writing and travel journals (which begin in 1936) are silent in regard to her first visit, but in a much later memoir she looked back on her early experiences there. She discovered that “I could live two lives, the urban one of operas, theatre, exhibits, concerts and parties [in Chicago] and the equally wonderful one of the outdoors. I had found an outlet for my interest in hunting by learning to bird shoot and I had taken up skiing. I fell in love with the softly folded hills of Idaho and the sport they offered me and I spent several months each year there…My sons broadened too—in their shoulders and their brains—working on the trail crews which built the ski runs at Sun Valley. We fished and hunted and rode and camped and skied. We began to know something of what communion with a true wilderness can do for the soul.”[11] On one extended visit in to Sun Valley and Ketchum in 1939, Clara Spiegel became better acquainted with her husband’s friend Ernest Hemingway, who was there to hunt, fish, and finish up his novel of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. As Clara recounted to Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker, she helped him handle a backlog of mail by taking dictation for more than fifty letters; he reciprocated by offering advice on writing. Years later, she recalled some of Hemingway’s advice to her in commentary she herself prepared for a friend’s manuscript: “Long ago when H read a mss of mine to help me with my writing, he asked me how I liked a certain ¶ [paragraph]. I said I’d never been happy with it but couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. He knew. His advice was ‘Clara, don’t say it. Make it.’ It’s the best advice any writer could receive.”[12] Their work together in 1939 became the basis of a friendship of their own. Clara Spiegel and Ernest Hemingway dined, drank, and hunted together until the end of his life, and she became good friends with his wives Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh Hemingway and his sons as well. In 1949, Clara and Frederick Spiegel divorced. She maintained an apartment in Chicago for many years, but spent more and more of her time away. In 1952 she purchased two lots on the corner of Sixth and Walnut Streets in Ketchum, where she built a house of her own. She immersed herself in the social, recreational, and philanthropic life of the Ketchum-Sun Valley community. She hunted, fished, rode horses, and skied; she entertained several nights a week; she devoted herself to community causes, notably the Ketchum Community Library and the Ballet Foundation. The town’s lack of a library was a drawback to many of its newer residents who were drawn there by the resort lifestyle but felt culturally isolated in the small mountain town without a bookstore or library. The story goes that in September 1954, on the seventh green of the Sun Valley golf course, Clara Spiegel and two friends resolved to create a library.[13] A few months later, seventeen women met to found the Community Library Association and began raising funds. They operated a thrift shop, organized benefits, solicited private contributions, and engaged the men of the community to assist their efforts. An architect volunteered his services to design a building, and in 1958, on a lot donated by the Union Pacific Railroad in the heart of Ketchum, they opened the library in a striking 2800 square-foot structure filled with 3,000 volumes. The library eventually outgrew those quarters and moved, but it is still operated by the association founded by Clara Spiegel.[14] Spiegel’s absence from Chicago most of the time brought an effective end to her literary collaboration with Jane Mayer. The Early Frost (1952) was their last novel together, though they remained lifelong friends. In 1954 Spiegel signed a partnership agreement with ski instructor Fred Iselin (from whom she had purchased the Ketchum property) to produce motion picture and television scripts. They did write synopses and scripts for at least three ski and resort-related films, but none ever made it into production. Spiegel continued to write on her own, however, contributing occasional articles to Bon Appetit, Chicago Sun-Times, and other publications during the 1960s, and to local Sun Valley publications as late as 1990. She also wrote two unpublished novels (both set in resort locations) and an unpublished cookbook (“The Indolent Gourmet”), as well as a number of articles and an unpublished manuscript on a new passion, African big game hunting. Clara Spiegel made her first visit to sub-Saharan Africa in 1957. In Tanganyika she reconnected with Patrick Hemingway, whom she had known when he was a child but had not seen for many years. He lived there as a big game hunter and guide, and in September 1960 Spiegel returned for a month-long safari with him, his wife, their infant daughter, and a twelve-man crew of native trackers and bearers. This was the first of several safaris she took in the 1960s, and she decorated her Ketchum home with her big game trophies. She chronicled her African experiences in a manuscript she entitled “One-Woman Safari” and wrote several articles about them, two of which were published, one in the Chicago Sun-Times’ Sunday magazine, the other in the journal The Reporter. Spiegel’s second safari, taken in 1962 with her friend Mary Hemingway, was the subject of an article Hemingway wrote for Life magazine in 1963, a memoir of their experiences as well as a reflection on the Africa that Ernest Hemingway had so loved. Spiegel traveled widely in the 1970s and 80s, visiting friends and exotic locales, and documenting her travels in her journals and personal scrapbooks. In 1981 she made her first visit to New Zealand, which, after Chicago and Idaho, became a third home for her. She returned every winter (summer there), spending at least a month, and often more, based in Queenstown, where she fished for trout, attended horse shows, and visited and entertained New Zealand friends. She was in New Zealand in 1986 when she saw Halley’s Comet for the second time in her life.[15] Her fishing exploits were chronicled in the January 1993 issue of the New Zealand publication Southern Fishing. She shared her perspectives on aging with the Queenstown Mountain Scene: “You have those geriatric things that happen whether you like it or not, but I don’t believe in dwelling on them.” As to a formula for long life, the eighty-eight year old Spiegel had none. “I don’t do anything that’s good more me! I drink all sorts of things that are bad and stay up late.”[16] Only when she hit 90 did Clara Spiegel begin to slow down. Even so, she continued her visits to New Zealand until 1996 and was still seen fishing in the streams around Ketchum. In July of 1996 she was a panelist at a Hemingway conference at Sun Valley sponsored by the Hemingway Society and the University of Idaho. She was one of the speakers at a panel entitled “Remembering Hemingway,” where she contradicted her fellow panelists who said Ernest Hemingway was at heart a shy man. “I’m afraid I disagree with the other authorities,” she said. “He had a great sense of personal dignity. He was not shy.”[17] She also shared her recollections in “Hemingway in the Autumn,” a documentary produced by a Boise television station about his life in Idaho, and in the A&E Biography, “Ernest Hemingway: Wrestling with Life.” Clara Spiegel died at the Wood River Medical Center in Ketchum on October 20, 1997, at the age of 92, just a few months after the death of her younger son William. “She was unbelievable,” remarked her son Andrew to the Chicago Tribune. “Two weeks ago she caught a 23-inch trout while sitting in her wheelchair. Her partners and friends had included Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper. She somehow was able to draw a lot of people to her.”[18] She was survived by her son, five granddaughters, and three great grandchildren. -- Alan Virta, 2008 Principal autobiographical works by Clara Spiegel:
Clara Spiegel’s papers, filling more than 50 boxes, date from 1924 to 1997 and are divided into four main series: Clara Spiegel literary papers, and Also included with the collection are photos and printed matter. The great strength of the collection is in Clara Spiegel’s writings in published, draft, and journal form. Her voluminous handwritten journals (Boxes 38-45) contain autobiographical reflections, literary passages she later incorporated into stories and novels, and, particularly from the late 1950s onward, detailed chronicles of her travels around the world, including her African safaris. The collection also contains typescripts of published and unpublished works, both those written with Jane Mayer (Series II) and those she wrote herself (Series III), as well as published versions of many of them. Spiegel compiled scrapbooks of reviews and publicity relating to the novels she wrote with Jane Mayer; they document well the widespread popularity the novels achieved. Clara Spiegel’s personal papers (Series I) include more autobiographical writings (in draft form), several magazine and journal articles about her, typescripts of speeches, study notes, personal scrapbooks, hostess and guest books from Ketchum, memorabilia from her life and philanthropic activities in Idaho, and clippings relating to friends. Clara Spiegel’s speeches, dating mainly from the 1940s and 50s, usually address the history of her literary collaboration with Jane Mayer. Her personal scrapbooks, covering the decade 1974-1984, contain snapshots, event programs, and greeting cards, documenting her social life and many personal connections in Ketchum and elsewhere when she was in her 70s. There is not a lot of correspondence in the collection; the major body of correspondence being the travel letters she wrote home in 1928, 1934, 1935, and 1935 from Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean (Box 37). A few letters relating to specific writing projects are scattered among her literary papers, but aside from them, the only other correspondence files in the collection are some miscellaneous letters in Box 1, the cards Clara Spiegel received during the last few years of her life (Box 5), cards affixed in her scrapbooks (Boxes 11-21), and letters she wrote arranging her 1969 African safari (Box 46, Folders 7 and 8). Information about Clara Spiegel’s friendship with Ernest Hemingway is fairly sparse; it is mainly in the form of a few scattered recollections she offered in magazine and newspaper articles. There are three exceptions. Her hostess books (Boxes 7 and 8) contain a record of Hemingway’s visits to her home in the 1950s and early 60s; a long letter of editorial advice to a friend (Box 32, Folder 2) recounts some advice Hemingway once gave her; and a Life magazine article by Mary Hemingway tells the story of the African safari she took with Clara Spiegel a year after Ernest Hemingway’s death (Box 2, Folder 29). There is also one folder of letters and publicity relating to Clara Spiegel’s participation in the Hemingway Society’s 1996 conference at Sun Valley, for which she was a panelist (Box 2, Folder 13). The Clara Spiegel papers were donated to Boise State University by her son, Andrew Spiegel, in 1999. One folder of archivist’s research materials on the Gatzert family has been appended to the collection (Box 1, Folder 0).
Series I: Personal Papers The short file of correspondence (in Box 1), together with the cards and letters she received during the last few years of her life (Box 5) document Clara Spiegel’s wide-ranging social connections. Among the prominent names represented are Jack, Gregory, and Patrick Hemingway, Pamela and Averill Harriman, Jimmy Stewart, musician Peter Duchin, writers Ridley Pearson and Barnaby Conrad, and Teresa Heinz and John Kerry (owners of a vacation home in Ketchum). Spiegel also kept in contact with early Sun Valley ski instructors Leif Odmark and Konrad Staudinger as well as her 1969 safari guide, Count F. Meran. Her correspondence with outfitter Denis Zaphiro reveals that even at age 86, she was considering another safari to Africa (Box 1, Folder 31). Clara Spiegel’s autobiographical writings in Box 1 are supplemented by reminiscences of her childhood and young adulthood found in chapter 1 of her unpublished manuscript entitled “One Woman Safari” (Box 34, Folder 1), occasional autobiographical reflections scattered throughout her journals (Series IV, Boxes 38-45), and by biographical detail in the articles written about her and the talks she gave to women’s clubs and writers’ forums (Box 1). Many of the letters of condolence sent to her family at her death (Box 4) contain recollections and tributes to her. Her personal scrapbooks, bulging with captioned snapshots, event programs, and other memorabilia for the years 1974-1984 (Boxes 11-21) reveal in great detail the social life of Spiegel and her set in Ketchum during those years. Earlier scrapbooks have been retained by the family. From the time she moved to Idaho in the early 1950s, Clara Spiegel kept meticulous records of her many dinner parties, more than one a week during her heyday. In her hostess books (Boxes 7-9) she recorded the names of her guests, the seating arrangement at the dinner table, and the menu. Shortly after Ernest and Mary Hemingway arrived in Ketchum in October 1958, she hosted a dinner party in their honor. The menu that evening included green turtle soup, steak, broccoli polonaise, a lettuce salad, meringue with frozen strawberries, and wine (October 9, 1958). Ernest Hemingway sat at the head of the table, with Clara at his left. The other dinner guests were Hemingway’s old Ketchum pals Don Anderson, Lloyd and Tillie Arnold, Forest MacMullan, and Taylor Williams, and the Hemingways’ cross-country travel companions, Betty and Otto Bruce. Clara Spiegel appended this remark to the record of the dinner: “Ernest does not eat any meat fats or dairy products nor egg yolks, or vinegar.” Folder 0 Archivist’s research: Gatzert,
Florsheim, Spiegel families Folder 15 Speeches: 194?: [with Jane Mayer] Folder 24 Correspondence: Clara Spiegel cards and
stationery Folder 33 Collected humor Box 2: Memorabilia Folder 1 Chicago: Lyric Theatre, 1955 Folder 6 Ketchum / Sun Valley: Property,
Purchase of, 1952-1953 Folder 18 Persons: Fanny Butcher, 1987
Folder 1 Art History
Book Condolence book: October 23-24, 1997
Folder 1 Card and gift lists Folder 7 Cecil Andrus Folder 45 Last names A Folder 61 First name only A
1968-1975 1982-1983, 1987, 1990-1991 1975-1979 1984-1987 1979-1982 1987-1990
Box 7: Guest books 1991-1995 Appointment calendar, 1996 (“Social capers”) 1996-1997
Box 7 (Continued): Hostess books 1953-1957 1957-1960 1955-1956 Chicago 1959-1970 1956-1957
1960-1962 1967-1968 1962-1965 1968-1970 1965-1967 1970-1971
1971-1972 1977-1979 1972-1974 1979-1980 1974-1975 1980-1982 1975-1977
1982-1984 1990-1992 1984-1986 1992-1994 1986-1988 1994-1996 1988-1990
Box 11: 1974-1975 Box 17:
1982-1983 Series II: Clare Jaynes Literary Papers
Folder 1 Lists of characters in Clare Jaynes
novels and stories; work list Folder 3 Review of I, My Ancestor, 1950 Folder 8 A Brief Thank You Note [to Random
House], 1947
Folder 1 Back to Earth (Liberty, October
10, 1942) Folder 13 Review of Cousin From Fiji (Chicago
Sun, April 7, 1944)
Folder 18 Business papers: Partnership agreement,
Mayer and Siegel, 1949-1986
Folder 1 Craig Huston (Plot outline and character
development; unpublished)
Folder 1 Instruct My Sorrows: Typescript for
printer, front matter and pp. 1-150
Folder 1 These Are the Times: Typescript, Version
A, pp. 1-100
Instruct My Sorrows / My Reputation 1942-1944 My Reputation 1944-1946
These Are the Times 1946 These Are the Times: Uncorrected proof (galleys) (2nd copy)
This Eager Heart, 1952 Series III: Clara Spiegel Literary Papers
This series includes stories and articles, in typescript and published form, written by Clara Spiegel; typescripts of two unpublished nonfiction works, an African safari memoir (One Woman Safari, or One Woman’s Meat) and a cookbook (The Indolent Gourmet); and drafts and synopses of movie proposals and unpublished novels (some written with Fred Iselin), most of which were set in resort locations. With the exception of some writings inspired by her Red Cross work (Box 30, Folder 22) and skits written (collaboratively) for the Lake Shore Country Club in the 1920s (Box 32, Folders 5 and 6), most of these writings date from the 1950s onward. In her long letter of editorial advice to Barney ---- , evidently prepared after reading a manuscript of his World War II memoirs (Box 32, Folder 2), she recounts Hemingway’s writing advice to her (“Make it, don’t say it”). Many of her stories and articles (Box 30) relate to her African hunting trips. One (The Most Exclusive Club in the World, in Box 30, Folder 15) tells the story of a rafting trip down the Salmon River in Idaho. Chapter one of One Woman Safari contains several pages of reminiscences of her childhood and young adulthood (Box 34, Folder 1).
Folder 1 The Agent
Folder 1 Bangkok Boxing (Chicago Sun-Times,
September 8, 1963)
Folder 1 Book proposal: Foreign phrases for
European travel, 1956 Folder 8 Poems / Songs: Birthday songs Folder 12 Fragments, Notes
Folder 1 Playground, pp. 1-150
Folder 1 One Woman Safari (chapters 1-7)
Folder 1 With Fred Iselin: Partnership agreement,
1954 Folder 7 With Max Barsis: Correspondence,
1942-1946
Clara Spiegel and her husband took several trans-Atlantic cruises to the Mediterranean in the 1920s and 30s. The scrapbooks she compiled for each of them are nostalgic reminders of a mode of grand travel that has almost passed from the scene. The scrapbooks contain photos of the ships, fellow passengers, and sights they saw; programs, tickets, and other tourist souvenirs; and detailed letters Spiegel wrote home chronicling her experiences. The letters offer the earliest descriptive narrative in the collection, as well as occasional commentary on her shipmates. All of the letters from the scrapbooks have been photocopied and are assembled in a chronological sequence in Box 37. Spiegel’s numbered journals begin in 1936. Until the 1950s, she used the journals (which she numbered herself) to record autobiographical reflections, musings on life and society, passages for novels and stories, and occasional travel notes. From the 1950s onward, they are more and more travel-oriented, and by the 1970s they are almost exclusively so. Spiegel had typewritten transcripts prepared for the journals of her 1969 African safari and her 1981 South Pacific tour. She inserted photos at the appropriate places and placed the transcripts in notebooks (Boxes 47 to 49). Appended toward the end of this series is a box of associated travel papers, mostly business and logistical in nature (Box 46), though the folders for her 1969 African trip contain several detailed letters to her safari guide, Count F. Meran, outlining her hopes and expectations for the trip. “I have a great lion which I shot with Patrick [Hemingway] in 1962, so I don’t want another one,” she wrote, but she did ask for herring, sardines, sausage, and powdered soups for their lunches, dry white wines to accompany their dinners, and above all a chemical toilet. “My guns will come with me as I like to practice with them until the last moment…” (August 10, 1968). As the trip drew nigh she also supplied an extensive liquor list (March 19, 1969), adding she did not drink juices for breakfast “but like enough tomato juice for Bloody Marys, if I want them in the evening” (March 19, 1969). Also present are instructions for the taxidermists for preparation of her trophies (Box 46, Folder 7).
Box 36: Travel letters and Scrapbooks Book 1: 1928: Vigo, Casablanca, Gibraltar, Algiers, Rome, Hill towns, Florence, Venice, Milan, St. Moritz, Cannes, Paris; S.S. France and S.S. Ile de France Book 2: 1934: Gibraltar, Naples, Herculaneum, Alexandria, Cairo, Luxor, Thebes, Paris, London; S.S. Rex, S.S. Ansonia, S.S. Gange Book 3: 1935: Madeira, Seville, Granada, Malaga, Algiers, Mallorca, Malta, Egypt, Jerusalem, Damascus, Rhodes, Istanbul, Athens, Korfu, Dubrovnik, Paris, Chartres, England; S.S Statendam Book 4: 1936 Marrakech, Atlas Mountains, Fez, Sefron, Tangier, Madrid, Toledo, Paris, London; S.S. Conte di Savoia, S.S.Berengaria
Photocopies of letters from Travel Scrapbooks 1-4 (Box 36)
1. 1936 August – 1937 April 9. 1938 September – 1938 October 2. 1937 April – 1937 October 10. 1938 October – 1938 November 3. 1938 April – 1938 May 11. 1938 November 4. 1938 May – 1938 June 12. 1938 November – 1938 Dec. 5. 1938 June 13. 1938 December- 1939 January 6. 1938 June – 1938 July 14. 1939 January – 1939 February 7. 1938 July – 1938 September 15. 1939 February – 1939 March 8. 1938 September 16. 1939 March – 1939 April
Box 39: Journals 17. 1939 April – 1939 May 18. 1939 May – 1939 June 19. 1939 June 20. [?] October 21. 1941 22. 1944 August – 1944 September 23. 1944 August – 1944 September 24. 1946 January; 1950 April 25. 1947 May – 1947 September 26. 1948 January – 1948 February 27. Undated; blue composition book 28. 1953 September – May 1954 29. 1954 May – 1956 July 29a 1957 September (Portugal; Africa) 29b 1957 October (Africa) 30. 1960 April – 1960 September (Africa) 31. 1959 June 32. 1959 November 33. 1959 November – 1960 April 34. 1960 September (Africa) 35. 1960 September (Africa)
36. 1960 September (Safari 1 ; Africa) 37. 1960 September – 1960 October (Safari 2; Africa, India, Nepal) 38. 1960 October (India, Thailand) 39. 1962 April – 1962 May (Paris, Israel) 40. 1962 May (Greece) 41. 1962 May – 1962 June (Greece, Africa 1) 42. 1962 June (Africa 2) 43. 1962 June (Africa 3) 44. 1962 July (Africa 4, Italy) 45. 1962 Game record
46. 1964 April 47. 1964 May 48. 1964 May 49. 1964 September (Africa) 50. 1964 September (Africa) 51. 1964 September – 1964 October (Africa) 52. 1964 October (Africa) 53. 1965 January 54. 1965 April 55. 1965 May (Sicily, Sorrento) 56. 1965 May – 1965 June (Italy, Sardinia, Corsica, Austria) 57. 1965 August
58. 1966 April (Spain) 59. 1967 Ireland 60. 1968 May, 1969 January 61. 1969 September (Africa) [typed transcript in Box 43] 62a 1969 July – 1969 September (Africa) [typed transcript in Box 43] 62b 1970 May – 1970 June (England, Austria) [typed transcript in Box 43] 63. 1972 – 1973 64. 1973 August – 1973 September (includes Portugal, Germany) 65. 1973 September – 1973 October (Germany, Austria) 100. 1976 October – 1976 November (Pacific Islands, Hawaii) 101. 1977 May – 1977 June (Spain, Austria)
62a. 1969 July – September (Africa) [Transcript, photocopy] [Original scrapbook / transcript with photos is in Box 47] 61. 1969 September (Africa) [Transcript, photocopy] [Original scrapbook / transcript with photos is in Box 47] 62b. 1970 May – June (England, Austria) [Typed transcript] 102. 1978 May (Chicago, Peru) 103a 1981 January – February (New Zealand, Australia) 103b 1981 February - March (Australia, Bali, Taiwan) 103a 1981 February – March [Transcript, photocopy] [Original scrapbook / transcript with photos is in Box 48] 103b 1981 February – March [Transcript, photocopy] [Original scrapbook / transcript with photos is in Box 49] (none) 1982 February – April (New Zealand) 104a 1983 February – April (New Zealand) 104b 1983 April – May (New Zealand)
105. 1983 September – October (France, Austria) 106. 1983 October – November (Austria, England, East Coast, Chicago) 107. 1984 February- March (New Zealand) 108. 1984 March – May (New Zealand, Beverly Hills, Santa Barbara) (none) 1984 September (Yellowstone) 109. 1985 February (Santa Barbara, New Zealand) 110. 1985 February – March (New Zealand) 111. 1985 March – April (New Zealand) 112a 1986 March – April (New Zealand) 112b 1986 April – May (Hong Kong, China)
113. 1987 January (New Zealand) 114. 1988 January – February (New Zealand) (none) 1988 August (Vancouver, southeast Alaska cruise) 115. 1988 October (North Carolina, Virginia, Wilmington, Bucks County) 116. 1989 January - February (New Zealand) and 1989 June (London) (none) 1996 January (New Zealand) 6 pages only
Record book 1989 Record book 1996 Record book 1990
Folder 1 South Africa, 1957
(cf. Journals 29a, 29b)
“Transcript with pictures of Clara Spiegel’s journal of the trip she and Raimund Wurzenrainer took to Kenya, Tanzania, and Kenya [sic] in August and September 1969” [Refer first to photocopy in Box 43, journals 62a and 61]
Transcript with photos of trip to New Zealand, Australia, Bali, and Taiwan,1981 [Refer first to photocopy in Box 43, journals 103a and 103b) Series V: Photographs
Until the early 1980s, Clara Spiegel documented her travels and social life by assembling scrapbooks in which she placed hundreds of captioned snapshots. Those scrapbooks are located in Series I. With very few exceptions (notably the Africa photos), the photos in this series are loose snapshots that date from the mid 1980s to 1997, the last dozen years of Clara Spiegel’s life, after she stopped assembling those scrapbooks. They reveal that she was an active traveler and angler to the end. Some of these snapshots are grouped by trip and destination; others are in no order at all. Many have captions on the back; many do not. The photos in Box 50 have been numbered; some are portrait-like snapshots of Spiegel and family members; a few others (Photos 1001-1010) are professionally-photographed 8x10 prints. Box 50 Photos 001-011 Clara Spiegel,
portrait-like snapshots |
