Why waste time hot airing?

In​ her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene was one of the best-paid women in New York City. As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, she criss-crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of rare manuscripts to add to his collection, outbidding and outsmarting rivals wherever she went. During the last decades of the 19th century, Morgan had overseen an enormous transfer of wealth from Europe to the US, and considered it his duty to ensure that cultural capital followed. He collected voraciously, taking advantage of tariff exemptions on books to buy up entire libraries en bloc: Gutenberg Bibles, Shakespeare folios, illuminated manuscripts in jewelled bindings. Greene was a trainee librarian at Princeton University when Morgan hired her to dust and pack his books in preparation for their move to a sumptuous new building, constructed by the architect Charles McKim, on 36th Street and Madison Avenue. Within a few years, Greene was all but in charge, not only of the library but of all Morgan’s acquisitions for it. ‘Miss Belle Greene can spend more money in an afternoon than any other young woman of 26,’ the New York Times reported in 1912, after her winning bid for a Caxton Morte d’Arthur caught the attention of the press. She ‘picks up a musty tome as gracefully as a butterfly alights on a dusty leaf’. Greene made good use of her handsome salary. ‘Just because I am a librarian,’ she reportedly said, ‘doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.’

Over four decades, Greene added tens of thousands of items to Morgan’s collection. Many of her prize acquisitions were recently displayed in Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy, an exhibition devoted to her life and career at the Morgan Library and Museum. (It coincided with the library’s centenary as a public institution – a transformation Greene oversaw after Morgan’s death.) Some of the objects are breathtaking: the magnificently illustrated 13th-century Crusader Bible, which belonged to both Louis IX and Abbas the Great; the 15th-century Gospel Book made for an Ethiopian princess, which Greene coveted for a decade before the owner agreed to part with it; the printer’s proof of Eugénie Grandet, its typed text surrounded by tiny handwritten revisions spilling over onto extra scraps of paper appended to the margins. For a largely self-taught young woman of that period, such a career was remarkable. As the exhibition’s curators note in the catalogue, it would have been near impossible for a Black woman. But Greene – whose ancestors, on both sides, included African Americans enslaved a few generations earlier – moved through the world as white.

Greene’s background was not widely known until Jean Strouse’s 1999 biography of Morgan, which revealed Greene’s birth name (Belle Marion Greener), her date of birth (1879 – she lopped a few years off her age) and identified her father as Richard T. Greener, a prominent civil rights activist who was also the first Black student to receive a bachelor’s degree from Harvard. (His waterlogged diploma, discovered in an attic in 2009, was displayed at the exhibition.) Heidi Ardizzone’s biography of Greene, An Illuminated Life (2007), filled out the portrait: a turbulent home, her parents bitterly divided over the question of how to live as a Black family in a country where racism was enshrined in law. Belle was four years old when the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had prohibited racial discrimination; she was sixteen in 1896 when Plessy v. Ferguson legitimated the segregation policies that were already common in the South, policed by the ‘one drop’ rule. By this point, Richard and Genevieve Greener had moved with their five children from Georgetown, Washington to New York, where Richard had taken – and then left – a job as secretary of an association raising funds to build a monument to Ulysses S. Grant. In Washington, he had been part of a large community of Black activists. But in New York, he found himself working alongside predominantly white colleagues, and was criticised in the Black press for having abandoned the causes he professed, on paper, to espouse. As he attempted to win back his reputation (at the 1895 Conference of Coloured Men in Detroit, he proclaimed ‘the opening of a militant period of our race in this country’), his marriage faltered. There were money troubles – Belle dropped out of school to help support the family – and at some point Genevieve took matters into her own hands. Exactly what happened before Richard Greener’s sudden departure on a consular appointment to Vladivostok in 1898 is unknown. But by 1900, Genevieve had dropped the final ‘r’ of her surname and taken on a new middle name, Van Vliet (evoking the old Dutch names of New York’s white upper classes), while Belle and her brother, who had darker complexions than their siblings, took on the additional surname da Costa, gesturing at a fictional Portuguese heritage. Within a few years, the family was listed on the census as white; for good measure, Genevieve marked her marital status as ‘widow’.

The Morgan exhibition included a letter from the philanthropist Grace Hoadley Dodge, who had met Greene while she was working at a teacher training college and been impressed by her. Writing to the founder of the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies, Dodge emphasised the ‘sad history’ of Greene’s family: her mother, she claimed, was ‘white with good ancestry’, and had left her husband, a man ‘with Spanish Cuban & Negro blood’, after ‘terrible experiences’. She was eager to make her clever daughter ‘a true noble woman’. Perhaps this is the story Genevieve devised as she set about creating a more advantageous life for her children. Greene never commented on her race, and the curators contextualised the sparse records of her family history with various contemporaneous materials exploring the phenomenon of passing. Harry Willson Watrous’s 1913 painting The Drop Sinister depicts worried parents contemplating their blonde, blue-eyed daughter; in the Crisis magazine, W.E.B. Du Bois described it as an indictment of a society which will ‘slam the door of opportunity in her face’ as soon as the child’s ancestry is discovered. The alternative, for thousands of light-skinned Black Americans in the early 20th century, was to ‘fade into the great white multitude’, as an editorial in Opportunity magazine put it. ‘It’s such a frightfully easy thing to do,’ a character in Nella Larsen’s Passing tells a sceptical friend. ‘If one’s the type, all that’s needed is a little nerve.’ Greene’s passing is framed here as a ‘survival strategy’. As the Morgan’s director, Colin B. Bailey, puts it in the catalogue, ‘the systemic racism … in the fabric of the United States put Greene in an impossible position.’ The show foregrounded, without expecting to resolve, the tension between celebrating Greene as a pioneering Black librarian and acknowledging that her success depended on her denying that identity.

After leaving Northfield, her studies funded by Dodge, she took part in a summer librarianship programme at Amherst College, before continuing her training at Princeton, where she met Morgan’s nephew, a fellow librarian. From the start, Greene had high ambitions for the collection she referred to, privately, as ‘her’ library. Her aim, she told Morgan, was ‘to make the library pre-eminent … I hope to be able to say some day that there is neither rival nor equal.’ A 1911 cartoon in World magazine showed her in a flamboyant feathered hat, striding towards an auctioneer and declaring: ‘Fifty thousand dollars for that book!’ By this point, she was screening items for potential purchase, opening Morgan’s mail (except when the handwriting ‘looks blonde’), organising his diary and developing her own relationships with dealers. When he needed to think over a problem, Morgan would sit in her office playing solitaire. After six years on the job, she could brag to a correspondent that ‘J.P. is so well trained now that he rarely ever buys a book or manuscript without consulting me.’

Greene at the Morgan Library (c.1948-50).

At the exhibition, faded photographs and a few personal items offered a fleeting glimpse into Greene’s life – these and the books she once handled, presented in spotlit glass cases. But luckily we have Greene’s private letters, which reveal another secret life she was careful to keep hidden. In January 1909 she was introduced to the art historian Bernard Berenson. By April he had sent her sixteen volumes of The Thousand and One Nights and she was marvelling at the ‘invasion which you have made of my life and heart’. Greene destroyed Berenson’s side of the correspondence before her death, to his chagrin, but the six hundred letters she sent to him in Italy survive in the archive at I Tatti (then his home, now the Harvard Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies) and have been digitised. They are full of library gossip, anecdotes, stock tips, wry character assassinations and romantic longing, and offer insights into Greene’s character, from her love of flirting to her scepticism about feminism to her hunger for knowledge in all its forms.

Responding to Berenson’s demand for a diary-like ledger of her daily activities, Greene promised that her letters would instead reveal ‘what is behind the curtain of my mind’. In Becoming Belle da Costa Greene, a study of the letters (which prints several of the juiciest in full), Deborah Parker suggests that in the letters to Berenson we come closest to an expression of her private life, though she was still careful to let him know that her confessions might be cloaked in a protective veneer: ‘My real life I live to myself – and within myself.’ She wrote to him from her desk at the library (with Morgan sometimes perched impatiently on a corner), from the apartment she shared with her mother, from Long Island house parties and overseas trips. It was clear from the start that this relationship would be conducted almost entirely in the imagination. Berenson was married (though both partners prized their freedom) and Greene was tied to her work at the library. Despite continually lamenting their separation, they both showed a certain ambivalence when it came to meeting in person: reunions were postponed at short notice, transatlantic trips delayed month after month until years had gone by. Instead, Greene becomes a kind of Manhattan Scheherazade, telling stories of nights with Sarah Bernhardt and dinners with her band of ‘octogenarian lovers’, fancy-dress balls and encounters with modern art at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, continually deferring the intimacy she liked to imagine in detail.

Their meetings – a handful, over the course of a forty-year correspondence – were intense and formative. In the autumn of 1910 they travelled through France, Germany and Italy, until the trip was abruptly cut short; her letters strongly imply that she had an abortion. Later Greene acknowledged that the relationship worked best on the page. ‘I, at least, am frank enough to admit that I would not cast aside my material life for you, and as I know you feel the same, why waste time hot airing about it?’ She also described her frustrations with Morgan, who was deeply possessive of his librarian. She was the only one capable of ‘handling and humouring him’, she told Berenson.

Some of the most candid moments in her letters – in which her usual tone is one of casual irony – contain trenchant expressions of disdain for the class dynamics which rendered her a ‘poverina’ among the ‘predatory rich’, welcomed into their midst as long as she remained ‘continually entertaining and at their disposal’. Greene was the chief breadwinner for her family, supporting her mother and siblings; she knew that Morgan had named her in his will and that her inheritance was contingent on his goodwill. Morgan was happy to exploit his power over Greene when it suited him: he would pointedly summon her back from weekends away to sit with him while he killed time before a dinner engagement. He threatened to fire her if she dared get married and – to her and Berenson’s shared frustration – would regularly refuse permission for her to travel abroad (she had to manage the library for the six months a year he was away, he reasoned, and during the other six months he needed her with him). Despite her loyalty to Morgan, the letters reveal a lingering discontent over her lack of freedom, chained to her desk while rich friends ‘run over’ to Europe every year, only to ‘take its wonders either indifferently or as a matter of course & remember nothing of what they have seen’. She refused to be celebrated as a pioneering professional woman and told Berenson – with only a degree of flippancy – that she felt career women should be considered ‘examples of miserable failures in life’. Without her job, she argued, she might have achieved ‘the only real & worthy vocation … marriage and a dozen children’. ‘Query,’ she added, ‘was it the kindness or the Revenge of the Gods?’

No one reading her letters could doubt the pleasure Greene took in her work, however. Parker argues that she defined herself not through her racial identity but through ‘the things she loved’. She bought for the thrill of beauty and the desire to share it. After seeing an exhibition of Islamic art in Munich with Berenson, she purchased an album of Persian and Mughal paintings and calligraphy, despite Morgan having expressed no interest in the subject. When his son Jack took over the collection after Morgan’s death in March 1913, she wrote to Berenson of her irritation that Jack ‘can’t endure’ Persian art (‘when I had just gotten my Mr Morgan awakened to it’) and her shock that he ‘has not the slightest objection to fakes & forgeries as long as the picture is pleasing’. Yet she made sure that her tastes would continue to shape the institution. Since Jack needed to sell part of the collection to cover inheritance tax, she set to scheming. First, she persuaded him to disperse the rest of his father’s collection – Chinese porcelains, Fragonard’s ‘Progress of Love’ panels, 18th-century French furniture – and keep the library intact; next, she ousted the dealers he had appointed to oversee the sale and managed the operation herself. In the end she netted him a profit of $3 million, but her real mission was personal. ‘I have definitely succeeded in tying Jack M. up to the Library,’ she told Berenson. ‘He is perfectly mad about it.’

Greene​ stayed on at the library for the rest of her career, working with Jack to transform his father’s collection into a public institution. In 1924, it was handed over to a board of trustees and officially became the Morgan Library and Museum; Greene was its first director. Parker notes a new, brisk authority to her letters after Morgan’s death, when she realised scholars and collectors now sought her advice and collaboration: ‘It is a sort of “equality” note,’ she wrote to Berenson, ‘as if I were now to be recognised for myself and no longer as an adjunct.’ Her letters are increasingly filled with her professional accomplishments: the construction of a new reading room and exhibition space; the progress of a thirty-year project, in collaboration with the Vatican, to restore a set of Coptic manuscripts discovered in a ruined monastery near Cairo; her efforts to identify a series of illuminated manuscripts as the work of a single modern painter she called the Spanish Forger. She opened the library to high-school visitors and was an early promoter of the use of photostat technology to create copies of materials for researchers who couldn’t visit in person. (When she bought the Morte d’Arthur in 1911, she told Berenson: ‘I don’t think J.P. has any right to buy a thing like that and lock it up here when it is so important to scholars.’)

Despite an ‘epidemic of gents’ asking for her hand, Greene never married. ‘As far as interest goes,’ she told a newspaper, ‘I have found nothing thus far to equal my position as librarian of the Morgan Library.’ It’s possible there was more to it than that. In 1925, a wealthy white man called Leonard Rhinelander applied to have his marriage to Alice Jones annulled, claiming that his wife had not disclosed her mixed-race ancestry. After a high-profile trial, the jury ruled that no deception had taken place (the characters in Passing discuss the case), but not before Jones’s appearance and family history had been scrutinised by the press. One section of the exhibition, expanded in Philip Palmer’s catalogue essay, was given over to an account of Greene’s nephew Bobbie. The son of her sister Teddy, he became Greene’s legal ward in 1921, at the age of five. He went on to enlist in the US Army Air Corps; in 1943, Greene was told he had been killed in action, but military records indicate he died by suicide. He had received a letter from his fiancée ending their relationship after discovering his ancestry, out of fear that living as an interracial couple would limit social opportunities for herself and future children. Among the barbs was a hateful comment about Bobbie’s aunt, citing nasty rumours circulating about her racial background.

Greene didn’t discuss race explicitly in her letters to Berenson, though she once told him – without elaborating – that she had decided not to go to a conference abroad because ‘I am so damned black that it is impossible for me to go anywhere … without being identified.’ She made occasional disparaging references to her ‘Southern blood’, her ‘dusky’ colouring, her jealousy of blonde women; she also enjoyed hinting at ‘former incarnations’ as an Egyptian, Persian, Arab or Abyssinian princess, as though raising the question of her ambiguous appearance in order to quell it. She doesn’t mention any Black friends, though, like many white bohemians, she drank in Harlem’s speakeasies as a voyeur. While she was engaged in various political causes (she was interested in the ‘white slave’ question and joined the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, a reform group concerned with STDs among sex workers), she never displayed interest in racial politics. The catalogue, like the exhibition, ends with the work of some of Greene’s contemporaries: pioneering Black librarians including Catherine Latimer and Arturo Schomburg, who set out to steward collections that would document Black histories and address the erasure of Black culture from the record. Librarianship, Rhonda Evans points out in her catalogue essay, was (and remains) a deeply political career in America: before the Civil War, enslaved people in southern states were forbidden from learning to read and at the turn of the 20th century more than half of America’s Black population was illiterate. Greene’s collecting instincts, shaped by her education and association with Morgan, drew her to Europe: the extraordinary library she created was the product of the privileged life she had obtained by distancing herself from the ancestry and culture that Schomburg and Latimer sought to honour. In the exhibition, the curators left it to viewers to draw the contrasts and to decide how to balance all Greene did with all she didn’t do.

Several of the catalogue essays argue that we should not judge Greene’s ‘disassociation from a Black racial identity’ as a failure on her part. Julia S. Charles-Linen makes the case that her passing was not a deception but a strategic performance – an act of resistance, a ‘deliberate and concerted effort to subvert the unjust race laws that restrict Black freedom’. Her passing certainly enabled her ascension into New York society; her freedom of movement in white spaces was a sort of victory over a society in which racism almost invariably won out over talent and endeavour. ‘I prize my present freedom above everything,’ Greene told Berenson. Only she could assess the pain of all she had left behind to win it, the toll of maintaining her self-image in the face of constant scrutiny. Did she reflect, at the end of her career, on the irony that the personal freedom she achieved didn’t extend to opening doors for future generations of Black librarians? The year before she retired, she made an anomalous purchase for the library: an 1881 letter by Frederick Douglass, discussing government appointments in President-Elect Garfield’s administration. ‘All that they have a right to ask of General Garfield,’ Douglass wrote, ‘is that they shall not be discriminated against on account of race or colour.’