THE PERSONAL LIBRARIAN (2021)
By Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
Berkley/Random House, 324 pages.
★★★★
At most, race in America is a cultural construct. If you need further proof that we see what we wish to believe, read The Personal Librarian. Although this is a work of collaborative fiction between a white novelist and an African American writer, it is based upon the true story of Belle da Costa Greene, the assumed name of Belle Marion Greener (1879 or 1883-1950).
Even her birthdate is speculative but her accomplishments were not; she is the woman who built one of the most remarkable collections of manuscripts and incunabula (books published before 1500) anywhere in the world: the J. P. Morgan Library in New York City. As such, she was indeed his “personal librarian” and, some speculate, briefly one of the married Morgan’s many mistresses. The kicker is that she was born a black woman in Washington DC. She was sired by Richard Greener (1844-1922), the first African American graduate of Harvard, later dean of the Howard University School of Law and a prominent civil rights lawyer. Add egoist to that list; after fathering six children with his wife Genevieve, he went Russia on a diplomatic mission, lived in Vladivostok, and entered into a common law marriage to a Japanese women who bore him two more children. Eventually he returned to the United States, but by then Genevieve was done with him and had made a fateful decision: She and her light-skinned children would live as “white” at a time of legal segregation in the South and was customary in the North. In most places, interracial marriage was banned and, even in New York City, cross-race sexual relations invited sanctions and possible violent reprisal from self-appointed guardians of racial “purity.”
If you look at surviving pictures of Belle, she has African American physical features, so how to explain those away? The key lay in the assumed surname; Genevieve and her children invented a Portuguese ancestor to explain darker complexions and dropped the “r,” which might have connected them to Richard. Today, their identities would be easy to expose but not in 1905, when Morgan tapped Belle to develop his collection based upon her skill with incunabula at Princeton University. Morgan was in the habit of getting what he wanted and certain rare works from William Caxton were among them. It took Belle years to obtain them, by which time she had traveled to Europe on numerous occasions to build the Morgan Library, became a fixture in the art world, and learned how to become a society belle.
Heidi Ardizzone, subtitled her biography of da Costa “Journey from Prejudice to Privilege;” that pretty much nails it. Benedict and Murray invent dialogue and elide dates to make them work better as fiction, but the gist of what you read is true; from 1905-48, Belle was the Morgan Library, first for J.P. and then his son “Jack” (Junius Pierpont Jr.). She was even left $50,000 in Pierpont’s will when he died in 1923–an enormous sum for the day. Was she ever one of Pierpont’s conquests? That’s an unknown, but she was indeed courted and bedded by famed art historian and conniver Bernard Berenson. Did Belle blackmail Pierpont’s daughter Anne, who disliked Belle, by threatening to expose her as a lesbian if she gave away her relationship with Bernard or expressed her suspicion that Belle was African American? Possibly, though there’s little doubt that Belle became a powerful person. My only brief lies with imagined seduction scenes between Belle and Bernard in which she assumes a passive role out of keeping with the strong (even headstrong) character they created.
Benedict and Murray run with rumors and suspicions to create fictional tension, invented dialogue, and presented her as a woman torn between white and black identities. Most of these ring true, though we can’t be sure how historical they might be. Normally I’d say that fact is greater than fiction, but do we even know the facts within a life of subterfuge? Perhaps it scarcely matters if you are like I was and have never heard for da Costa. This is an utterly fascinating novel that you will rip through to discover if she was ever exposed. I’m not telling!
Rob Weir
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