A Librarian’s Life in Her Letters: Belle Greene and the Morgan Library

Humanities Watch: How did you, as a Renaissance scholar, become interested in Belle Greene, a 20th-C. librarian?

Deborah Parker: Two things: one is happenstance, the other my past work. While I was a Visiting Scholar at Villa I Tatti in Fall 2021, the Director asked me to film a video for a Masterclass. My subject was Berenson, Dante, and Botticelli. After I learned that there was a personal component to Berenson’s interest in Dante’s Vita Nuova—the work served as something like a book of love in the early stages of his romance with Belle da Costa Greene—I began investigating the subject. Once begun, I couldn’t stop! I had written a book on Michelangelo’s letters so I knew how to approach an epistolary corpus.

HW: What can readers learn about letter-writing – its cultural, social, psychological importance?

DP: The librarian’s letters to Berenson offer a fascinating look at how Greene projected and created a self. During the Victorian period various the rise of portrait photography and the proliferation of novels contributed to self-reflection and self-invention. Cheaper postage rates encouraged letter writing an activity which invariably prompts the creation of a self. These conditions, along with the rise of psychology as a science, inform Belle da Costa Greene’s and Bernard Berenson’s open sharing of their thoughts and activities.

HW: What have we lost in the age of email and social media; what can we regain?

DP: Nothing reveals Belle Greene’s voice more clearly than her letters to Berenson. They are spontaneous and meditative. Texting and social media encourages the spontaneous, or seemingly spontaneous creation of response, but not more meditative responses. We see the interplay spontaneity and reflection in Greene’s letters.

HW: How do you see technology shaping our efforts to understand the past in different ways?

DP: The Morgan Library & Museum and Villa I Tatti are involved in a collaborative digital project, The Belle Greene-Bernard Berenson Letters Project. My understanding is that it will be published sometime this October. This digital archive will include the nearly 600 letters Greene wrote to Berenson. This digital archive will allow visitors to explore Greene’s world in new ways. Up to this point those interested in this archive had to go to I Tatti to read the originals or read scans of the letters. The Letters Project will facilitate considerably searches of specific topics, and, I hope, generate new insights into Greene’s many worlds.

Heidi Ardizzone, Greene’s biographer, has noted that Greene’s letters “need interpretation.” The range of reference is extensive and the tone often insouciant. Hopefully, readers will find my book a helpful guide on how to read Greene’s letters.

HW: You see Greene being “transformed” by her visit to the Lincoln Memorial (46). How can public humanities today offer us that possibility?

DP: We might begin by asking why Greene’s visit to the Lincoln Memorial was so transformative. The monument triggers a change in her, but she stops short of elaborating the nature of this alteration. I visited the Lincoln Memorial recently and was struck by the awe it instills in visitors. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and inauguration speech for his second term are inscribed on the ways. As a Black woman passing for white, I can’t imagine how Greene could not have been struck by Lincoln’s stirring words. I look at this episode in the light of other comments Greene makes about racialized subjects.

We might also keep in mind that Belle was unusually responsive to books and works of art. Berenson found her “miraculously responsive.” How can the humanities stimulate transformative changes within the self? We might think about how to prompt or educate readers and viewing subjects to refine their responses to works of art and literature. In teaching the humanities, I’ve sought to identify ways of showing students how transformative looking, listening, and reading can be. I’ve done this when teaching Dante’s Inferno to freshmen in a six-week course. I strive to provide them with the strategies for reading a complex text quickly. Not quite zero to sixty in a few seconds, but they learn to read a complex work quickly. After I’ve introduced some basic interpretive strategies, I’ve seen how their reading experiences changes quickly. Mastering these skills can become transformative and offer a lifetime of aesthetic pleasure.

HW: Do you have any reflections on the way Asian culture can help us understand European culture, and vice-versa, similar to how they did for Greene?

DP: The exploration of Asian views of Western cultural phenomena can prompt us to rethink readings grounded in Western critical traditions. Recently I explored this phenomenon in in the Japanese manga, Cesare: Il creatore che ha distrutto. Written by mangaka, Fuyumi Soryo in collaboration with Motoaki Hara, a Japanese Dante scholar, this manga focuses on which focuses on the Renaissance mercenary, Cesare Borgia. One chapter features a Dante lesson which reveals differences between Japanese and Western notions of loyalty over the course of a debate on Inferno 33, the canto which recounts Ugolino’s treachery. I won’t go into details here, but will limit myself to saying that I only learned of the cultural differences in play in the reading of this famous canto after some exchanges with a Japanese historian friend, Morihisa Ishiguro, who happened to know Motoaki Hara. Our exchange—and the revelations which emerged from it—showed me that engaging Asian scholars when dealing with interpretive impasses occasioned by Asian readings is crucial. This observation, of course, pertains to examinations of other non-western cultural engagements with western cultural artefacts.

In Belle Greene’s case, her fascination with Chinese landscape painting reoriented her views of western art. She consulted Charles Freer and other authorities on Asian art to refine her own knowledge of ancient Chinese painting. She knew how to look, how to cultivate her responses, and how to communicate them vividly.

HW: How can we inspire business people to see the essential importance of the humanities, the way the Morgans and others did?

DP: Pierpont Morgan left no plans for the future of the library in his will and Pierpont Morgan Jr, commonly known as Jack, had little interest in the library after his father’s death.

Belle Greene created pathways for sharing her love of medieval culture with the public at large. Throughout her more than forty years working for Pierpont and Jack Morgan, Greene showed agility and opportunism: she seized upon situations and improved them. She is a model for someone working in a fluid and emerging workplace—she changed when the workspace changed and, in the process, transformed it.

HW: Finally, how can we, like Greene at the Library, transform our private studies into more public, outward-facing projects?

DP: Belle Greene was an early pioneer of showcasing rare books and illuminated manuscripts along with other Morgan rarities through lavish public displays, of providing in her words “caviar for the peepul” (she often employed a playful eye dialect in her spelling). Connecting museum displays through education and outreach to the public at large and enlisting investments from the business community are essential to realizing such goals.

For another review of her book, see here. 

H/t Rick Love