College Class Revives Sister Under the Skin

There were 13 young women in the Douglass College honors seminar last semester--14, if you include Clara.

And you had to include Clara, though she came from another time, when college women kept curfews, wore long white gloves to formals, and passed the time between classes in tearooms.

You had to include Clara, though she had been dead for a half-century.

For four months, as a class project, these sophomores and juniors studied Clara Kangler and a tragic life that ended long before they were born.

In the end, many considered her a friend.

This is a story about how very different young people are today from their forebears, and how very much the same. And it is a story about time travel, about how people from one time can reach back to those of another and almost--almost--come to know them.

*

She was aware, with almost a painful clarity, that life was a continual struggle . . . and she was aware that it held, as a whole, a chain of disappointments and personal failures for all.

--From Clara Kangler’s unfinished novel

*

When Clara’s sister, Elsie, died in 1996, she left a trove of papers and artifacts that found its way to Rutgers University.

Clara was an alum, though not a famous one like Paul Robeson or Calista Flockhart. She attended New Jersey College for Women, the forerunner of Douglass, Rutgers’ college for women.

Deirdre Kramer, head of the Douglass scholars program, had long been interested in “psychobiography”--telling the story of an interior life. So she issued a challenge to her students: Could they take these faded papers and reconstruct Clara Kangler?

She was born Aug. 14, 1917, to Alois and Johanna Kangler, Slovenian immigrants. (Elsie was four years older.) She graduated from high school with honors; even then, there were indications that she was depressed.

“Just another dull, uninteresting day,” she wrote in her diary. “Will this drudgery ever end? In my heart, I know it will.”

The students studied her scrapbooks from college, keepsakes from the 1938 senior class ball, the receipt for her $100 tuition, her yearbook entry (“Her ambition centers about magazine writing and extensive travel. Alone, Clare?”).

They interviewed her classmates. “She was a very pretty girl and seemed to be kind of always involved and rushing around,” says Alice Talbot Sofin, 82.

Clara graduated with distinction in English, and went on to get her master’s at Columbia; they read her thesis on feminist writer Sarah Grand.

After all that education, she took one secretarial job after another. “I can take dictation at 100 words per minute and am a rapid and accurate typist,” she wrote in one letter of application.

Then she suffered some sort of breakdown--apparently as a result of a love affair gone bad.

“Today is exactly one year to the day that I last saw Charles F.,” she wrote to Elsie in March 1947. “And . . . as of tomorrow I began that long series of trotting to doctors and going to pieces generally.”

By 1947 she had moved to Miami Beach, Fla.

Seemingly, she had recovered. She took on more secretarial work, but she intended to finish her novel. “The book is progressing as I expected. I’m really going to devote a lot of time to it from now on. . . . “

But she also wanted to snare a husband.

“I’ll be damned if I’m going to piddle around with small change and during the season I may be able to snag someone with a pile,” she wrote.

Clara and Elsie were both fine writers, and they come alive in 130 letters they exchanged in the seven months Clara was away.

Elsie is the conservative one. “Apparently, you just blab everything that comes to your mind,” she tells Clara. Her news is mundane--the radio in the kitchen has been repaired, Mother has put up a batch of sauerkraut.

Clara is the free spirit. “At 33, my dear, you should get over your inhibitions as far as sex is concerned,” she tells Elsie. She wants to give her brown hair a henna rinse; she complains about roommates and her period. She wards off a pass from a married man with whom she had had an affair.

“Little Clara is steering clear of any extramarital entanglements,” she writes.

In the last weeks of her stay, the letters become sparse and less effervescent. “Am still feeling pretty low, and am still undecided about what to do. . . . I’m afraid my fine fervor is wearing thin.”

Then the letters stop. Clara returned to New Jersey in June and took a job as a teacher at Drake’s Business College.

The last items in the collection are Mass cards, an obituary, a note from Elsie about Clara’s death on Sept. 17, 1947.

But the Douglass scholars did not stop there.

They went to the house in Dunellen where the Kangler family had lived. And they went into the basement and traced Elsie’s steps to the place where, 51 years before, she found her sister’s body hanging from the ceiling.

*

If you love me,

As I love you--

Nothing but Death

Can part us two.

--Clara to Elsie, May 9, 1930

*

Althea Miller knew all along that Clara killed herself. Still, when this 28-year-old archivist read through the letters and came to their sudden end, it took her breath away.

“Tears just came to my eyes,” she says.

Aubrey Garrison had embraced Clara--”I really feel that a part of her personality and of what she brought into the world is now part of me”--and she was horrified by the basement where Clara’s life ended.

“I went into the room, and I had to leave . . . ,” says Garrison, a 20-year-old English and exercise-science major. “It made Clara more real. It made it impossible to deny it.”

For Garrison and most of her classmates, this was an experience unlike any other. They shared their discoveries. “Guess what Clara did!” they would say. Gradually they shared intimate details of their own lives.

“The things that people seemed to find in Clara were things they found in themselves,” says Dana Bowling, 19.

Great aspirations. Feelings of inadequacy. Struggles with relationships. Passions. High spirits. Low spirits. All of these things they saw in Clara and they saw in themselves.

Caught in the grip of a life that ended at mid-century, they sometimes found it hard to understand those times.

They “took for granted opportunities available to them; they were struck by the limited number of opportunities for someone like Clara,” says Kramer, their professor.

For graduates of the 1930s, says Sofin, Clara’s classmate, “there was teaching, nursing, retailing and secretarial work, and that was it.”

Aubrey Garrison says Clara “just wasn’t fulfilled.” And for all her talk about writing, there is no indication that she accomplished anything. Just three pages of her book survive.

Did she kill herself because she was unable to find work that matched her abilities, and was unmarried at an age when most of her classmates had long since wed? Was she unhinged by a thyroid condition, for which she had been treated? Or was she merely a victim of depression?

After all of their research, the class had to admit defeat. Clara’s pain was palpable, but the reasons for it were unknowable.

Elsie might have been able to tell them more. But with Elsie’s death, all intimate memories of Clara Kangler disappeared from the world.

It was left to 13 young women, her spiritual heirs, to bring her back.