SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Reed Peggram was a translator who spoke many languages and helped give life to a lot of literature. A new book helps us learn about what may be the most extraordinary story, his own life. "The Remarkable Life Of Reed Peggram" is Ethelene Whitmire's new account of the life of a renowned Harvard scholar who went to Europe in the 1930s on a prestigious scholarship, posed for famed artists and found freedom and love there as a queer Black man. And so he stayed, even as World War II rolled in. Ethelene Whitmire, a historian and professor in the department of African American studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, joins us from Madison. Thanks so much for being with us.
ETHELENE WHITMIRE: Oh, thanks for having me.
SIMON: You were giving a talk in Copenhagen in 2016, and what happened?
WHITMIRE: Well, I invited several of my friends to come, and some of my students that I was teaching there on a Fulbright also were attending this talk. And one of the people I invited raised her hand at the end of my presentation about the experiences of African Americans in Denmark. And she said one of the most fascinating people that I talked about, Reed Peggram, was her great uncle. She came to my office at the University of Copenhagen later, and she told me that the family retained letters that he wrote from Paris, from Copenhagen and from Florence during World War II, and they ended up being over 200 letters.
SIMON: Reed Peggram, growing up in Cambridge, he got into the highly reputed Boston Latin School. He was a talented student, and he thrived there. But we cringe now, I think, to read the wording of the accolades that he received from the headmaster.
WHITMIRE: Yes, not just from the headmaster, but also letters of reference from professors at Harvard. They admired him for his intellect, and they talked about that, but they never failed to mention that he was a Black American. So there was always a caveat.
SIMON: Can I get you to tell us about his grandmother, Laura Reed? She's a real heroine in this story.
WHITMIRE: She is. I actually dedicated the book to her. I admired her so much. She married in Virginia and had a young daughter, and then her husband died, and she went up north to Boston on her own with her young child. This is before the Great Migration. This is in the late 1800s. And she worked as janitress, as it said on the census records, and she also cleaned homes for very prestigious people in Dorchester. Even though she only had a third-grade education, she pushed her grandson to go to these institutions. And one of the people who wrote a letter of recommendation to Harvard was one of the people that she cleaned for. So I think she was able to gain access for Reed to these prestigious institutions through the people that she worked for.
SIMON: Well, and she will come back into this story, but Reed Peggram's experience at Harvard, he had what amounts to a romantic misunderstanding with Leonard Bernstein.
WHITMIRE: Right. Leonard Bernstein, he's a little bit younger than Reed, but they interacted at Harvard. And the first hint that I knew that Reed was gay was in the love letters that he wrote to Leonard Bernstein - I must say unrequited love letters that he wrote to him - that are in the Library of Congress. He was quite infatuated with him, and he did not get a very positive response. But it just demonstrated just how passionate Reed was in terms of love, and that played out later, too, in his life.
SIMON: What drew Reed Peggram to Paris?
WHITMIRE: He was very fascinated with French culture, French literature, French music. His thesis at Harvard was sentimental education and "Madame Bovary." He compared those. He took lots of courses in French, and one of his professors said that he spoke French like a native. And he wanted to go there. And even though he arrived in 1938 - it was on the eve of World War II, and the United States Embassy was already telling people to return - he said he was going to stay until the bombs started falling. He was in a place where no one knew him, but he had all sorts of opportunities to become the man that he wanted to be. No one knew that he came from a humble background. And he could reinvent himself, live the life that he wanted to as a scholar and also going to opera and museums, listening to music. He was just so thrilled to be there.
SIMON: Of course, at the onset of a world conflict, why did Reed stay?
WHITMIRE: At the end of his stay in France, he was introduced to a young Danish artist Arne Hauptmann, and he was in love. He was so utterly taken with him, he visited him in Copenhagen, Denmark, and then World War II started. And though he had many opportunities - people offered to buy him a ticket home - he decided he would stay. He didn't want to abandon Arne, and they ended up going to Italy and staying there for five years during the war.
SIMON: And tell us about their lives there.
WHITMIRE: They were miserable. Once they got to Italy, they found it was almost impossible for Arne to get a visa to enter the United States, and so they were just waiting and hoping that someone can help them. They were in quite dire straits. Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, and so Arne's family could not send money to them from Italy, and he was being supported by a grandmother who was working as a janitor and then eventually retired, and so she sent what she could.
SIMON: This is the grandmother, Laura Reed, who enters our story again heroically.
WHITMIRE: Yes. And she sent many letters back and forth, but she also asked the state department to try to intervene, which they couldn't. But, yeah, they stayed, and they were in misery. Eventually, they were asked to leave Florence, and they were separated when authorities found out that there were two men living together in the same apartment and sharing one room and one bed. And then eventually they ended up in a concentration camp.
SIMON: Two years in that camp, right?
WHITMIRE: It's hard to tell, but there were several months that they were in there. And then after they eventually were able to leave, they were still wandering the countryside, and so they were in a lot of trouble. They ran into African American troops from the 92nd Infantry, who were in Italy, and they had reporters embedded with them. And the reporters recorded this story, took photographs. That's how I actually discovered the story, and that's where I started with Reed.
SIMON: Reed Peggram's life enters a very sad period then. He went to a sanitarium and received treatments. What was that like?
WHITMIRE: Yes. He spent four years at Medfield State Hospital. He underwent electroshock therapy and possibly a lobotomy. And then his life after that, the life that started with such promise, seemed to just go very downhill. He never was able to finish his thesis or work as a university professor, which he wanted to do.
SIMON: Professor Whitmire, how do we account this human life? A dazzling life and/or a life dimmed by bigotry and misunderstanding?
WHITMIRE: It started with a dazzling life. I think that's important to look at all the opportunities that he had and took advantage of. And then he was betrayed by not just race, but also homophobia. If he could've married Arne, he could've brought him to the United States, and they would not have had this whole odyssey.
SIMON: "The Remarkable Life Of Reed Peggram" is Ethelene Whitmire's new book. Thank you so much for being with us.
WHITMIRE: Thank you so much for having me.
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