JDC posted: " The Personal Librarian - Marie Benedict, Victoria Christoper MurrayBerkley, 2021 This must have been a challenging book to write for many reasons, one of them because of a decision made by the woman at the center of the book. Belle Marion Greener who "
This must have been a challenging book to write for many reasons, one of them because of a decision made by the woman at the center of the book. Belle Marion Greener who became Belle da Costa Greene, was a Black woman who 'passed' as white at a time when the equal rights gained after the Civil War were being rolled back by Southern states with segregationist laws and policies which infected the whole country, and a vital opportunity to get America on a different path was lost. Greene was a powerful, high-profile woman who didn't want to give racists any excuse to dismantle what she had worked so hard to build, so she destroyed all her personal papers. The novel's two authors had extensive documentation of Greene's professional life to work with, but had to fill in a lot of blank space in her personal life.
Medieval writer, poet, and scholar Christine de Pizan
The novel opens in December of 1905 when Belle is working as a librarian at the Princeton University Library and shares a fascination for medieval manuscripts and love for Virgil's work with one of the students and a benefactor of the library, Junius Morgan, nephew of John Pierpont. The young Morgan has recommended that Belle be interviewed by his uncle to be his personal librarian at the new library the financier is building next door to his Manhattan home. Apparently J.P. Morgan recognized in the young, petite, inexperienced, woman standing before him something of a kindred soul and she was hired over older more experienced candidates. And so begins the formidable duo of the physically imposing, volatile man of money and the tiny, ambitious, determined woman. Both are strong-minded, knowledgeable, and share a common purpose in creating a great collection for the Pierpont Morgan Library.
When I first heard whispers of this book before it was published I knew it was one I wanted to read because of who its subject is, and then later because of curiosity about how it was written and how that worked. Marie Benedict is a novelist who specializes in historical fiction, her book The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, has received much attention recently. Victoria Christopher Murray is an award-winning author who writes contemporary fiction. Benedict first heard of Greene from a Morgan Library docent many years ago, researched her life, and thought about writing a novel centered around her life. However, as a white woman she wanted to bring a deeper understanding to the life of a Black woman who had to live as white to realize her potential. Benedict read one of Murray's books (Stand Your Ground), and reached out to her to see if she'd be interested in co-authoring a book about Greene with her and the partnership was born.
Murray's insights as a Black woman into what Greene might have been feeling and the tightrope she was walking are what I found most interesting in this book. Greene was living a complicated life in a complicated time. One of five children of Genevieve Fleet Greener and Richard T. Greener, Belle grew up in Washington D.C. surrounded by the Fleet family in which expectations were high. All the women became teachers, the men engineers, Belle is the exception to that path. Richard was the first Black graduate of Harvard, a dean of Howard University's School of Law, diplomat, and campaigner for equal rights. In the novel he encourages her interest in art and books, and spends time with her at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The family moved from the District to NYC where at some point Genevieve and Richard separated though the reason is not known. In the book it's basically caused by a split between them over whether to identify as white or Black. What is known is that Genevieve and her children lived as white from that time, and the authors use this as a major theme running through the book in which they have Belle feeling very torn over the situation and constantly worried if she'd be 'outed' and lose her position and put the rest of her family in jeopardy. But earlier this year a researcher unearthed two letters that indicate there were whose who were fully aware of Greene's heritage. One of them was a close neighbor and member of J.P. Morgan's social circle, so it looks as though there's a real chance Morgan knew her secret after all and ignored it or valued Greene's expertise and abilities too much to care.
This was another interesting thread in the book - Greene's increasing expertise in acquiring manuscripts, books, and art for the library. She undoubtedly learned a great deal about negotiation from Morgan, but must have had the talent and drive to acquire the necessary skills to operate at the level she did. That included the required socializing in New York's top social circles. And she did pull off a number of impressive acquisition coups. One of the people she met on her travels through that world was the Renaissance art expert Bernard Berenson. They had an affair that went on for years and that relationship is a big part of the novel.
Meanwhile as Greene thrives in her work, the situation in the country is rapidly deteriorating. The Civil Rights Act that was signed into law by President Grant in 1875 is later struck down by the Supreme Court. In one of the worst decisions President Woodrow Wilson made, he authorized segregation within the federal government. Jim Crow laws multiply in the South as do lynchings. In other parts of the country discrimination runs rampant which will eventually harden into institutional racism. The novel is effective in making a reader feel sympathy for both Genevieve and Richard with their diametrically opposed views in whether or not to live as white, and understand how racism forced them into having to make that terrible choice.
It's marvelous to have a novel about Belle da Costa Greene and hopefully it will make many more people aware of Greene's life and what she had to do to have the life she did, but I do have some issues with this book. It's written in a prose that feels more like reportage and is even structured like a news report. Each chapter is headed with the date and place it happens in and the story runs in a straight line. And perhaps that's necessary to introduce Greene to a wider audience, but it felt a bit on the simplistic side, as if checkboxes were being ticked off. Granted, the authors did have a lot to pack into the story and some things are compacted, for instance Greene wasn't initially hired as Morgan's personal librarian, but as his nephew Junius's assistant, then later became Personal Librarian to both J.P. Morgans, father and after his death, son, then when the library became a public entity, its first Director.
What I really felt the lack of was the sense of Greene as the scholar she was and a real sense of the passion she must have felt for the manuscripts, books, and artwork she researched, handled, acquired, catalogued, and cared for during her forty-three years at the library. I'm also unconvinced by the emotional feelings the authors posit between Morgan and Greene.
There are many fascinating stories that remain to be told, Greene's role in the establishment of the Morgan as a public institution open to all, her impact on librarianship in America, her extensive mentorships of others; Richard T. Greener's story and the work he did as an educator, author, and advocate for equal rights working alongside men such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Fortunately thanks to books like Heidi Ardizzone's biography of Greene, An Illuminated Life, and this novel, along with the exhibition the Morgan is planning about their first Director mentioned in my previous post, no doubt more will become known about the real person who was such a vital part of making the library into the entity it became, and her life. Maybe someday the novel Greene deserves will let her story truly soar.
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