Editor's note: Students working for the USC Libraries' Special Collections routinely come into close contact with amazing archival materials. Here on the libraries' website, we're sharing occasional dispatches from these students about the collections they work with. Zoe Kemp, a USC PhD student in comparative studies in literature and culture, processed the Hermine Speier papers over the summer of 2015.
Umberto Nobile’s (1885-1978) letters to Hermine Speier (1898-1989) were as fretful as they were frequent during his professorship in Illinois in the early 1940s. When her lover’s many letters arrived at her home on Salita Sant’Onofrio in Rome, Speier faithfully tucked them away into a leather suitcase, along with a number of portraits of Nobile and his beloved canine friends (who seem to have rarely missed a photo op over the years.) When I was handed this suitcase earlier this summer and asked to process its contents, I anticipated that I would gain a great deal of insight into the woman who culled them; Speier, a German Jewish archaeologist who became the first woman employed by the Vatican and worked there under church protection during World War II, was indeed a fascinating figure. I was surprised to find, however, that the time I spent with the Hermine Speier papers afforded me scant insight into her experience of the Second World War; the few letter fragments and drafts that she herself wrote and saved offered me little more than, at best, a splintered notion of her voice.
No, the picture painted by the collection was a different one altogether: Nobile’s letters meticulously map out the quotidian reality of an Italian in wartime America. General Umberto Nobile, Italian airship designer and navigator, resigned from the Italian air force in 1929, following controversy surrounding the fatal crash of the polar airship Italia, which he designed and piloted. After his career in the air force he transitioned into the world of academia, teaching aeronautics first at the University of Naples and later at Lewis University in Illinois. It was during his tenure at the latter that he wrote the bulk of the letters that comprise this collection. In reading them, I noticed a number of topics recurring with an almost tedious frequency. Some such motifs—his frustrations with hotel living during his lengthy sojourn in America, discussions of the books that he and Speier attempted to read simultaneously (a transatlantic lovers’ book club, of sorts), anthropomorphizing anecdotes about his dogs, anxious inquiry regarding Speier’s health—came up in almost every letter but failed, in my opinion, to transcend the realm of the trivial. Others, by contrast, served to shed fascinating light on life in prewar and wartime America, as seen through the eyes of a foreigner. For instance:
- An inundation of offers to join university colleagues, clergymen, and members of the Italian American Society on social outings distracted Nobile from the overwhelming solitude he complained of during his early days in America. Nobile soon found himself constantly fielding invitations to be the speaker or guest of honor at various functions, and he was frequently nudged into social contact with fellow Italians living in the States. Interestingly, however, Nobile shared with Speier on numerous occasions that the tolerable Italians in his area were the simple, working-class ones, while the wealthier ones struck him as generally haughty and money-obsessed. As he caustically explained it to Speier, they had no interest in retaining their Italian language and heritage, and yet they had somehow managed to retain certain lamentable Italian archaisms that even Italians had happily abandoned. He made it apparent in his letters to Speier that forming substantial friendships with Americans was nearly impossible, and that it was wise to steer clear of the coarse, uncultured Italian-Americans who retained woefully little allegiance to their mother country. As such, his solitude during his time in America remained relatively unmitigated.
- Having designed and piloted arguably the first aircraft to reach the North Pole and, subsequently, having led the fatal Italia expedition, Nobile’s name retained some degree of fame (and infamy) by the time he settled into his position at Lewis University. That being said, he attracted a great deal of media attention, which he found to be enormously invasive. He regularly lamented the publicity-obsessed American culture that caused him to be bombarded by a constant stream of interviewers and photographers, and he often included with his letters to Speier newspaper articles that had been written about him. Not infrequently did he express his yearning for the pristine Italian countryside, unmarred by the billboards and advertisements that he viewed to litter the consumer-driven United States.
- Though he was doggedly careful not to allow his letters to devolve into political musings—he and Speier almost exclusively stuck to discussing personal matters (cose nostre, as it were)—it is clear that by the summer of 1939 Nobile had begun to feel the effects of the war. Mail ceased to reach Nobile’s town of Joliet, Illinois, with regularity, and it is evident from Nobile’s letters that such postal lapses caused him periods of great distress. His body was in Illinois, but his heart was in Italy; he passed the hours anxiously waiting for news via radio and newspapers, desperately hoping to learn of wartime developments at home. At times, he expressed having difficulty talking about the particularities of his everyday life when there were such grander issues at stake on the international stage. Postal efficiency continued to deteriorate as the war dragged on, and censorship of letters went from an occasional delay to a certain one. By the spring of 1940, Nobile had begun to share with Speier in no uncertain terms the precariousness of being a foreigner in the States at a time when suspicions of propaganda and espionage were at an all time high—particularly when it came to Italians and Germans. By 1941, the frequency of his letters had declined considerably; it is clear that the post had become so backed up by censorship that letter writing was no longer a viable means of communication.
At one point, Nobile told Speier that, were it not for their epistolary correspondence, his life in America would be an embarrassment. Indeed, it seems that the letters that comprise the Hermine Speier collection were his lifeblood during his lonely, uneasy years in America. For that reason, I found them to be a fraught but fascinating read.