by Jean Strouse
It took his family a long time to find a home in New York, but they finally settled at 29 West 99th in 1892. Greener was having professional and personal troubles. A New York social reformer described him to Booker T. Washington that summer as “a colored (nearly white) gentleman, a Harvard graduate and lawyer,” who “has a wife & family, and is hard pressed for a living. He has all the ability and education that ought to secure competence, but political influence being against him, has suffered severely.”
After some sort of breakdown, Greener himself reported to Mr. Washington in 1894: “I am devoting myself now to literary work, what I always should have done.” Although he had for a time “disappeared beneath the waters,” he was in excellent health and spirits “for real work, and there is much to be done. Neither the white nor the Black Problem will be settled in our day.” Washington was apparently looking to help Greener, for another observer reported to him that summer from the nation’s capital: “In regard to Professor Greener’s family I have ascertained that Mrs. Greener is a native of this city—being a Miss Fleet before marriage. She is colored and never passed for anything else while here. It is understood … however that she associates only with whites in New York. They are poor and in very straitened circumstances.”
In a photograph taken at about this time, Greener looks like a revolutionary or a poet: his hair has begun to recede, he wears scholarly wire-rimmed glasses, a wing collar turned up, a goatee and a wide mustache. He described himself in his Harvard Class Report for 1895 as engaged in reformist Republican politics, committed to the Irish Republican cause (he helped raise $150,000 for Parnell and Gladstone), and “devoted … entirely to literary work.” His elder children were attending school in New York, Belle Marion at Teachers College.
In 1898 Booker T. Washington helped secure Greener a consular appointment under President McKinley—the Republicans gave foreign jobs to a few prominent blacks as a means of attracting the Negro vote. The State Department sent Greener first to Bombay, which he found too hot, then to Vladivostok. He stayed in that remote Russian outpost until 1905, when the Roosevelt administration recalled him after getting reports that he had drifted into alcoholism and debt. Greener denied both charges, insisting that they were brought by an official who had never visited Vladivostok and confused him with someone else. He was exonerated, but never held another political job.
In the context of America’s turn-of-the-century racial politics, Greener’s posting to southeastern Russia looked to many of his contemporaries like exile, and seemed to mark the failure of his early promise. Convinced that a democratic society would open up to accommodate black achievements, Greener refused to define himself only as a Negro leader, championing Irish Catholics in their struggle against England, advocating women’s rights, and arguing for labor unions as instruments of worker independence. Years later he wrote: “I still believe and preach the doctrine that each man who raises himself, elevates the race.” He may have accepted his geographical and metaphorical consignment to Siberia in that spirit, but his long absence probably had to do with the dissolution of his marriage as well.
The New York City street directories until 1897 list Richard T. Greener, lawyer, with an office at 27 Chambers Street and home at 29 West 99th. For 1897–98, the directory places him at Chambers Street only, and has a separate entry for Genevieve I. Greener at 29 W. 99th. After his assignment overseas, the family disappears from the records for a few years, and when Mrs. Greener turns up again on West 99th Street in 1901–2, she has dropped the final r, calling herself “Genevieve Greene, teacher.” The following year, 1902–3, she appears as “Genevieve I. Greene, widow”—so much for Mr. Greener—and then vanishes from the listings. She probably moved to New Jersey when Belle began work at the Princeton Library. By the time Belle took the job with Morgan late in 1905, she was calling herself Belle da Costa Greene. Her mother does not appear in the New York directories again until 1908–9, at which point the transformation is complete: Genevieve V. V. [Van Vliet] Greene, widow, is listed at 403 West 115th Street with her son, Russel da Costa, a civil engineer. She had been associating “only with whites” in the early nineties, when she was still living with Greener. From about 1905 on, she and her children “passed.”
What happened within this family, and whether Greener had any contact with his wife and children after 1898, may never be known. In 1906 he attended a meeting of the pro–Du Bois Niagara Movement at Harpers Ferry as a spy for Booker T. Washington, then retired to Chicago, where he continued writing and lecturing to “advance the race.” He died in Chicago in 1922. Although he did not want to see himself only in terms of race, his Republican patrons probably saw little else. Bob Bacon at Roosevelt’s State Department, considering a consular service appointment for another black diplomat in 1907, asked a colleague, “Would he be better than some new coon?”
The light-complexioned “Greenes” expunged Richard Greener from the record, and with him all acknowledgment of their race. Belle may not have completed the course at Teachers College, as its alumni office has no record of her. She later said she had studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, founded in 1887, but Pratt’s student records do not go back that far. On her own initiative she moved into a rarefied, cosmopolitan world that excluded even the top tenth of the “talented tenth,” and with Morgan’s patronage created for herself an independent, heady, precarious life that few women of her time, black or white, could have imagined.
If “passing” freed her from the public burden of having to represent her race, it also brought her an even more complex self-consciousness than the double vision described by Du Bois. While her father had the “peculiar … sense of always looking at one’s [black, male] self through the eyes of [white] others,” Belle had the sense of looking at her black, female self through the eyes of people who thought she was white. Her hunger for learning and intellectual distinction seems directly derived from her father’s. In her case, however, it also had to do with claiming for a black (whom most people didn’t recognize) woman (whom they clearly did) a place in the universally exalted realms of literature and art—a share in what George Eliot called “the hard-won treasures of thought, which generations of painful toil have laid up for the race of men.”
If Morgan knew about Belle’s background he left no indication of it. Once she became indispensable at his library, he might not have cared. He entrusted her not only with his literary masterpieces but also with intimate secrets. She ghostwrote some of his letters, ran his private errands, helped him draw up guest lists, bought flowers and wedding presents on his behalf, saw to it (she claimed) that he was regularly shaved, manicured, and pedicured, opened his mail—except when the handwriting looked unmistakably “blonde”—and arranged the schedule of his female callers at the library so that one wouldn’t run into the next.
Many people suspected that she was his mistress—asked if they had had an affair, she reportedly replied, “We tried”—but all the evidence suggests not. He tended to get involved with women from his own social class, and somewhat closer to his own age (Belle was twenty-six and he sixty-eight when they met—Adelaide was fifty-two); and the chatty, intimate tone Belle took with her lovers is entirely different from the voice in which she addressed Morgan. She alternately worshiped and railed against her autocratic “Chief” to others, but treated him with fond, somewhat awed respect. He made her feel, as he made many women feel, that she was the only person who truly understood him, and partly in response to this seductive compliment she gave him her best work and fierce allegiance.
As flirts, they were in the same league. One night he asked her whether she would like him better “if he were thirty years younger,” she reported, “& I said no, I’d leave the library—he would be too dangerous—which seemed to please him & then he said he never wanted to be younger except when he was with me & thought of me. I don’t doubt he has said that to every woman he knows but I love him just the same.”
From behind the clos
ed doors of Morgan’s library, Belle Greene proved refreshingly indiscreet, writing to one of her own lovers at entertaining length between 1909 and 1913 about the collecting and amorous activities of her beloved “Boss.” (See Chapters 29 and 30.) The recipient of these confidences was Morgan’s resolute critic Bernard Berenson, who lived with his wife, Mary, on a handsome hillside estate outside Florence, the Villa I Tatti. Morgan invited the Berensons to see his library when they visited New York in December 1908. Afterward, “BB” described himself to Isabella Stewart Gardner as “duly impressed” with the illuminated manuscripts but divided about the objets—some “tremendously fine,” others “what they call in Venice ‘Musica.’ ”
Berenson was more than duly impressed with Belle Greene. They saw each other and exchanged notes several times over the next two months. She addressed him at first as “Dear Mr. Berenson,” but on March 9, 1909, began a letter “Dear thou of my heart,” and went on (he had gone to Boston): “I have been with you in thought every moment since you left me—have wished for you at dinners—at the theatre & opera, in the morning afternoon and night—My thoughts have been wrapped around you as I should have wished to be and my absorbing occupation has been to chop off, day by day, the long weary hours that lie between us. How I wish I might gather them all up in my hand and throw them over the edge of the world! How I wish that you might gather me up & take me to the wood beyond the World where we two might learn to know Life and each other.” Berenson was forty-three, and Belle thirty when they met (though she claimed to be twenty-five); she moved her birth date around like a potted plant. Before he returned to Europe in mid-March, he sent her a set of his favorite books, sixteen volumes of The Thousand and One Nights, in French. “I am so excited by possessing them,” she wrote: “I was all alone in my library when they arrived.” She canceled her evening plans and resolved to stay home (she lived with her mother on West 115th Street) in her “most comfortable peignoir & go off into les nuits enchantées – I shall take you with me & we won’t come back at all – never.” Above all she desired his knowledge: “How I should love to be with you in London – to see those wonderful things with your eyes. I am sure that I could amount to something with you to help me – but who is there here to teach one? Be sure dear and tell me every thing you do and all the wonderful things you see.…”
Berenson had had affairs outside his forgiving marriage before, but according to his biographer Ernest Samuels, this one “would stand apart from all others in depth and intensity.” Its transatlantic heat lasted several years, and its underlying friendship for decades. Berenson carefully preserved the hundreds of letters Belle sent him; she destroyed the hundreds he wrote to her.
Urbane, widely traveled, witty, charming, and one of the world’s leading experts on Italian art, Berenson was a Lithuanian Jew whose family had immigrated to Boston in 1875. He graduated from Harvard in 1887—two years before Jack Morgan—and made his way into the international art world through a combination of his own acute intelligence and the support of his patroness, Isabella Stewart Gardner. Belle probably knew about his background, but it apparently did not inspire her to let him in on her secret. He later reflected that her mysterious origins were “Malay.” Still, other people whispered about her bloodline.
Mrs. Gardner reported a “nasty” story to the Berensons at the end of 1909, having no idea that BB was wildly in love with its subject. Miss Greene had written to ask if she could see the collections at Fenway Court in Boston, and “of course I said yes. She came, stayed not quite an hour, was very exuberant.” A week later, at a dinner party in New York, Belle discussed the visit with a man who turned out to be a friend of Mrs. Gardner’s. She said (Mrs. G told the B’s) that “I had invited her to come, and had charged her $1 for coming, that she had spent the night here at Fenway Court and hoped to the Lord never to do such a disgusting thing again.” Under skeptical questioning from her dinner companion, who said he knew Mrs. Gardner well, Belle grew flustered but continued, saying that Fenway Court was full of forgeries, that its Maria Strozzi bust was a laughingstock in New York, and that Berenson didn’t trust his Boston patroness. Shocked, Mrs. Gardner asked the Berensons: “What do you think of it, and incidentally of her, as all her account of her visit here was a lie. She probably does not know either of you at all.… It turns out she is a half-breed, and I suppose can’t help lying. But let me know what you think.”
That offhand assumption—that other races “can’t help lying”—probably had a good deal to do with the “Greenes” ’ decision to lie about who they were. Not recognized as black, they no doubt heard countless remarks such as those Louisa made to Fanny about the “darkies” her father had hired in Newport.
Belle asked Berenson by mail to tell Mrs. Gardner “that I told you I loved her collections as some villain has told her to the contrary and she wrote me a rather bitterly plaintive letter.”
Berenson temporized, describing the tale to Mrs. Gardner as “incredible.” Miss Greene had impressed him at first as “a very competent young woman, absorbed by her job, and devoted to her employer,” and he had found no reason since to change his mind.
Unfortunately, the tale was not incredible, although it made no difference to Berenson. Belle took considerable liberties with the truth, in her reporting on Morgan as well as for dinner-party effect, and was as prone as BB to self-aggrandizing derision of other people’s art (Fenway Court was full of forgeries; Raphael had “barely looked at” the Colonna Madonna).
Whatever Belle did tell Berenson about her background, her letters to him made constant, deeply conflicted reference to blackness and her physical appearance—reflecting a painful consciousness of a world that defined beauty in features that were not her own. She alluded casually to her Portuguese descent, her mother’s “grand Southern blood,” her sister’s “stunning complexion and beautiful golden brown hair.” Joking about her own “dusky” coloring and jealousy of blondes, she anticipated a dinner party at which “I shall probably look like a huckleberry in a bowl of milk!” Sending Berenson photographs of herself, she told him to tear up the ones he didn’t like—“I am sure the ‘Esquimaux-nigger-Burmese’ one will appeal to you.” When her maid died in 1910, she mourned “that poor little black thing who had been more than a mother to me … almost the first person I saw when I opened my eyes to this world, and my faithful and adoring slave for 26 years.” (It was thirty-one years, and it would be surprising if the Greeners had servants when Belle was born; calling the maid her “slave” seems a pointed obfuscation.) She decided one winter not to attend a conference in Montreal because, she told BB, “I am so damned black that it is impossible for me to go anywhere … without being identified.”
Mary Berenson, who also wrote and lectured about art, showed a Blooms-buryian tolerance for her husband’s extramarital adventures, and had several of her own. She described Belle after their first meeting as “a most wild and woolly and EXTRAORDINARY young person.” A year later she wished her husband (in her Philadelphia Quaker prose) all happiness with his new companion: “I hope thee will make this into something lasting and agreeable … for I love her youth, her élan. I find her remarkably attractive, too.” When BB took Belle on an art tour of Europe in the summer of 1910—she had come to buy things for Morgan, who did not know about the liaison—he reported to Mary: “I am all in a whirl, for she is the most incredible combination of sheer childishness, hoydenishness,” mixed with “sincerity, cynicism and sentiment.” From Ravenna he described her as “incredibly and miraculously responsive and most of all to the things I really care most about.”
Mary urged him to “make the most of it,” but BB was as baffled as he was aroused. Belle seemed “much more cerebral than sensual,” he told his wife. “Of the erotic there is little in her and under the mask and manner and giggle there is something so genuine, so loyal, so vital, so full of heart … that … my impressions vary from minute to minute.” He closed this odd marital confidence: “Goodbye my darling. Even tho
ugh polygamous I am not the less yours.”
The equally polygamous Belle attached herself intellectually and often romantically to a series of distinguished scholar/experts, beginning, she told Berenson, with “a terrific crush” on Junius Morgan, “which I secretly gloated over as the tragedy of my young life.” She was more cerebral than sensual, and her promiscuity probably had to do with longing to absorb what these men knew, as well as with a need to see reflected in their eyes again and again that she was not only visible to the arbiters of high cultural authority, unlike many others of her race, but dazzling, desirable, unique.
Among the other men with whom she claimed to have had romantic liaisons were Sidney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the editor and Morgan art adviser William Laffan, and William M. Ivins, curator of prints at the Met. She regaled Berenson with tales of her flirtations—with John D. Rockefeller (“one of the very greatest men America has ever known”), “Benny” Altman, “my dear Charles Lanier,” Alfred Pollard, the Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum (who “quite loved my library”), Pollard’s British Museum colleague Charles Hercules Read (“it was only sheer will power—aided and strengthened by a lukewarmedness on his part [—] that prevented my falling desperately in love with him”), and many more.
Her wandering attentions made Berenson deeply unhappy, and Mary soon took alarm at the depth of her husband’s feeling. She told her sister Alys (Mrs. Bertrand Russell): “I really do not mind what seems his greatest folly [Belle] for there is always something big and fine when a person of character and feeling falls in love—the generosity of the impulse (he who is very selfish about his own things is giving some of his loveliest pictures etc. to her)— … but it is a dreadful blackness and bitterness of spirit that hangs around him.”
