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Peggy Guggenheim was born in 1898 into a New York family second only to the Rockefellers in wealth. She considered the family cursed, with some justification, because her father drowned on the Titanic, her older sister Benita died in childbirth after five miscarriages, her younger sister Hazel is said to have thrown her two sons from the roof of a 16-story building, and her daughter Pegeen committed suicide.
Peggy herself escaped every curse and set up influential galleries, first in London in the late 1930s and then in post-war Venice. She befriended many of the most important artists of the day, supported some and slept with others. Despite this, she was derided by her contemporaries as “Miss Moneybags” and dismissed by later commentators as a sex-starved dilettante.
In Peggyher second and, sadly, last novel, Canadian writer Rebecca Godfrey sets out to rehabilitate her, portraying Peggy as a free spirit seeking to break away from both her oppressive family and the vicious anti-Semitism of New York’s upper class. Peggy asks the latter, “And why do we want to be part of the Christian blonde world so much when they are all so frivolous and cruel?” Like her father before her, Peggy flees to Paris, where she marries Laurence Vail, the charismatic, moody “King of Bohemia” who is the father of her two children, while he subjects her to years of ridicule and abuse.
She eventually leaves him, loses custody of their son Sinbad, and lives with John Ferrar Holms, a writer who, like Vail, reneges on his promise. After Holms’ death, she begins her brief but intense affair with Samuel Beckett, who was at the time working as James Joyce’s secretary. Godfrey ends her main narrative in 1938, before Peggy’s escape from Hitler’s Europe and her second marriage to Max Ernst. Both events are alluded to in an epilogue set 20 years later in Venice, where Peggy continues to break convention by sunbathing naked in public and pursuing younger men, including the Beat poet Gregory Corso.
Given the lavish settings, famous characters (Cocteau, Man Ray, Brancusi, Hart Crane, Paul Bowles all make brief appearances) and family feuds, it’s a wonder Guggenheim’s life hasn’t yet been adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster or Netflix series. Godfrey does full justice to the eccentric story, but more importantly, she does justice to Peggy herself by giving her a voice—one that’s intimate, haunting and vivid, as when she writes of Benita, who was chained to a sofa during her final, fatal pregnancy “in a Park Avenue apartment that felt like a replica of a doll’s house, while she held her hand on her stomach, the only movement allowed being the beat of her heart.”
The novel’s authorship tells a story in itself. Godfrey had been working on it for 10 years before she died of cancer in 2022. The novel was completed by her friend and fellow novelist Leslie Jamison. She writes that the first two parts are almost entirely Godfrey’s own, while she pieced together the third part from surviving material and copious notes. Jamison has internalized Godfrey’s style so much that it’s impossible to see the seams, and if the third part is less engaging than the first two, it’s largely because Beckett, though an infinitely greater writer, is a less compelling figure than Vail or Holms.
With this act of literary homage, Jamison honored Godfrey just as Godfrey honored Peggy.
Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison John Murray 18,99 €, 384 pages
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