Posted: Mon 23 Jul 2007 04:06 Post subject: Belle da Costa Greene - attack on a female Anatole Broyard
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July 22, 2007
Long Time Passing
By CAROLINE WEBER
AN ILLUMINATED LIFE
Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey From Prejudice to Privilege.
By Heidi Ardizzone.
Illustrated. 580 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $35.
In “Ragtime,” E. L. Doctorow’s novel of Jazz Age New York, a group of vigilantes occupies the Morgan Library, fills it with explosives and threatens to blow it sky-high in protest against the racial injustices to which its leader, the African-American pianist Coalhouse Walker, has been subjected. Walker’s gang targets this particular landmark, Doctorow writes, because “more than any mayor or governor,” J. Pierpont Morgan “represented in Coalhouse’s mind the power of the white world.” Yet unbeknownst to the fictional musician (and perhaps to his creator), the library, this symbol of white power, was in no small part the achievement of Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950), a woman of color.
This oversight is understandable, though, for Greene — as Heidi Ardizzone shows in her biography, “An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey From Prejudice to Privilege” — kept her racial identity under wraps. She was the child of “two African-American parents of mixed ancestry,” and her birth certificate identified her as “colored.” But this label did not square with her ambitions. From a young age, she had a “fascination with illuminated manuscripts” and dreamed of becoming a librarian. In 1906, a series of fortuitous circumstances catapulted Greene into her dream job: helping the financier J. Pierpont Morgan to organize his legendary collection of rare books and manuscripts. Executing her duties with talent and zeal, Greene became “arguably the most powerful woman in the New York art and book world.” Her professional stature in turn expanded her social horizons, granting her “access to the dinner tables and salons of the rich and famous” where African-Americans were rarely welcome.
Indeed, “Belle could not have achieved the social and professional prominence she did at the turn of the 20th century had she been completely open about her background.” Her name itself was a canny disguise: da Costa added to connote “a fictitious Portuguese ancestry,” and Greene a shortened version of her real surname, Greener. (“Greene,” Ardizzone explains in one of the book’s many tiresome formulations, “is very close to Greener.”) This modification was designed to distance Belle from her father, Richard Greener, renowned as “the first black graduate of Harvard College” and “the first colored librarian and professor at the University of South Carolina.” Although “Belle probably developed ... her fascination with rare books from her father,” she may have feared that his high racial profile would marginalize her at a time when black and white communities were becoming even more segregated and distinct than they had been at the start of his own career. Conveniently, Greener left the country in 1898 to assume a consular post in Vladivostok, Russia. After this move, which also effectively ended her parents’ marriage, Belle and her mother shortened their last name, “crossed the color line and began to live as white.”
As Morgan’s librarian, the putatively white Belle cultivated a reputation as “both society girl and serious scholar.” With her exotic complexion, exuberant personality and flamboyant fashion sense, she defied just about every stereotype associated with her job. “Just because I am a librarian,” she is said to have proclaimed, “doesn’t mean I have to dress like one!” — and her high-octane appeal won her countless admirers in the (largely male) environment in which she worked. She was notoriously promiscuous, but hard work and talent also played their part.
The formidable Morgan admired her so greatly that he made her his “primary adviser on manuscript matters,” and in 1911 she did him proud by defeating a slew of more experienced bidders in an auction for a rare edition of Thomas Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur.” In subsequent years, she added many more treasures to her boss’s collection. According to Ardizzone, who teaches American studies at the University of Notre Dame, Greene wanted above all to make “the rare books she prized so highly available to the public, not locked in the vaults of private collectors” — and eventually she met this goal. In 1924, when Morgan’s library became a public institution and Greene was named its first director, she celebrated by mounting a series of exhibitions, one of which drew “a record 170,000 people.”
Twenty-five years later, the library honored Greene by staging a show featuring “over 250 of the best items Belle had purchased.” Greene attended the exhibition in a wheelchair and died the following year, but her legacy, Ardizzone notes in the book’s closing paragraph, lives on. Glamorously renovated in 2006, the Morgan Library & Museum is still flourishing in “both its mission to serve scholars and its role as a public institution,” a testament to Greene’s singular vision.
The first book-length biography of Greene, “An Illuminated Life” aims to revive this fascinating woman for posterity. Greene destroyed most of her papers before she died, and the author consulted thousands of sources for “clues to Belle’s social life and experiences.” But despite the thoroughness of Ardizzone’s research, her repetitive prose often prevents her from telling Greene’s story in an engaging way.
She asserts twice in the space of nine pages that art criticism was, in Greene’s day, a developing field; twice in two pages that Isabella Stewart Gardner was a “socialite” and a “patron” (or “patroness”) of the arts; twice on one page that Belle had “lost her mother”; twice in two pages that Morgan’s Chinese porcelains were sold for $3 million; three times, at least, that, for Greene, the art critic Bernard Berenson was “the love of her life”; twice in eight pages that many mixed-race individuals were the offspring of black female slaves and their white male owners; three times in 23 pages that Russia, France and Britain were allies in World War I; and twice in three pages that Avignon is in France.
Ardizzone tells us on Page 35 that Richard Greener’s mixed ancestry “made him even more aware of and outraged at the illogic of racism and prejudice,” and on Page 39 that his “ability to operate as white ... made him particularly aware of the illogic and injustice of racism.” “She was falling in love” is reworded one paragraph later as “Belle was in love.” “Socializing was part and parcel of the art business world” is soon followed by “socializing was expected as part of her job.” “In fact, over that year, Belle sat for several artists for portraits and sketches” reappears on the next page as: “In fact, Belle sat for more than half a dozen photographers and artists over the next two years.”
Taken together, these redundancies provided some comic relief when I reached Ardizzone’s criticism of Belle’s letter-writing style: “She routinely repeated herself, forgetting that she had already described an event or person or conversation.” As a biographer myself, I know a little something about overidentification with one’s subject, but I wish Ardizzone had picked a more appealing quality to emulate.
Greene’s “energy and personality,” the author declares, “leap off the page” of her surviving letters, but Ardizzone’s writing lacks these qualities. And the result is that reading about Greene’s “seemingly endless whirl of work and fun” feels more like work than fun.
Caroline Weber, whose most recent book is “Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution,” is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
A. The short answer is "no;" the more accurate answer is "not that I know of. "
It is estimated that about one-quarter of white-identifying Americans have some black ancestry. While I have done a fair amount of research on my known ancestors and found no evidence to suggest any African American ancestry, history tells us that this information is not always recoverable given the patterns of interracial mixing in the United States. My southern Italian ancestry also complicates our understanding of black and white. Although scholars debate whether Italians identified and were identified as white when they first arrived in the United States, my own family's experience was that they were not considered fully white. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Italian immigration was at its peak, many native-born white Americans considered them a "mongrel" or "mulatto" group and therefore a danger to the nation's character. Although the fear of black ancestry is pure racism, they did have a point about Southern European ancestry. We are all African originally, and Italy, especially Sicily, is right across the way from North Africa. But I never questioned my whiteness growing up, and I live with the privileges of whiteness daily.
Q. How did you become interested in your topic?
A. This is a long story so I'll break it up into parts
a. How I became interested in the history of racial mixing and people of mixed ancestry:
I'll begin in college where I spent two years wandering through a lot of departments and classes, trying to figure out what to major in. (I ended up as an independent major in comparative religion.) One semester I took my first Women's Studies class and my first Africana Studies class and they both blew my mind. But, in 1986, neither one had anything to say about the other. A few courses with Gertrude Frazier and Margaret Washington introduced me to the work being done integrating the study of race and gender and I headed to grad school, following that path. I began reading histories of race which, by the early 1990s had almost nothing to say about gender. I was still trying to figure out how in the world Americans came up with the idea of race, and I was sure that gender played a role in it. Several professors (Crisca Bierwert and June Howard) introduced me to literature written by women of color that focused on interracial relationships and women of mixed ancestry. Nella Larsen, Charles Chesnutt, Mourning Dove, and Pauline Johnson. I quickly discovered there was a tremendous amount of scholarship on this literature, but very little historical work and I gradually developed a dissertation project on the history of American ideas about racial mixing and people of mixed ancestry under the guidance of Earl Lewis. A trip to visit a friend in Jamaica also gave me a new perspective on American racial categories.
b. How I became interested in the Rhinelander Case:
While I was doing preliminary research for my dissertation prospectus, Earl told me about an interracial marriage he remembered reading in the Norfolk Journal & Guide, a black-published newspaper he had used during his own dissertation research. He remembered enough information that I was able to track down coverage of the case in the Chicago Defender (this was long before it was digitalized) and in one short, lone article by Mark Madigan. By then my dissertation had taken another direction, but Earl and I decided to co-author an article, and then a book.
c. How I became interested in Belle da Costa Greene:
Just after Earl and I submitted the final manuscript for Love on Trial, our editor, Amy Cherry contacted me about writing a biography of Belle da Costa Greene and put me in touch with Jeff Kleinman, who is now my agent. I spent about a month reading everything I could about Belle, and decided that it was too important a project to pass up, even though I had planned to revise my dissertation for publication next. Although Belle Greene, like Alice Rhinelander, was a woman of mixed ancestry whose identity was ambiguous, I was looking for something different and challenging in a new project. I quickly found several. First, the sources. With Love on Trial we were limited to newspaper accounts and court documents which filtered the story of Alice's racial identity and her love affair and marriage with Leonard Rhinelander. Although Belle Greene had destroyed her own papers before her death in 1950, there were over six hundred personal, often very lengthy, letters written to a man who was first a lover and then a friend over a thirty year period. As an historian, my writing is limited by the available sources, and I was eager for a project that would offer much more direct insight into the personality, motivation, and daily life of my subject. Second, Belle's work at the Morgan Library and her association with artists, musicians, and writers brought her, and therefore me, into an entirely new realm of early-twentieth century New York society. Belle and Alice shared some experiences and a general geography, but they lived in entirely different social worlds. Finally, Belle's public presentation of her racial identity was quite different from Alice's. Alice's story suggested that a family could live quietly between the categories of black and white even in such a highly racialized period as the 1920s. But once public attention turned to the question of her identity, she became, for most Americans, black. Belle's story suggests that white Americans were willing, in limited circumstances, to overlook or pretend not to know that a colleague or friend had black ancestry, even if that person was famous for making pointed references to her dusky skin and black "blood." But also, we see that rumors and interest in Belle's known or suspected black ancestry continued throughout her life and after her death.
Q. How long does it take you to write a book?
A. First I should note that I am rarely just writing a book. I was still working on my dissertation when I began researching Love on Trial, and I was teaching full time for the last two years we were writing. All told, there were about four years between starting the book research and publication. An Illuminated Life took over six years.
Q. What is your next project?
A. For the past few months I've been taking advantage of not having a book to write and instead trying to finish up a lot of smaller writing projects that I had been putting off. But in the next months I plan to pick up my dissertation revisions again. This project has evolved significantly since I last focused on it and the final project will be substantially different from my thesis. The working title is Counting the Nation's Blood: The Significance of Racial Mixing in America.
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