August 28, 2024

Peggy, by Rebecca Godfrey, with Leslie Jamison

The two stories behind Rebecca Godfrey’s novel Peggy are interesting, first the biography of Peggy Guggenheim herself, the iconic art collector from a famous American family, and then Godfrey’s own experience working to complete her novel about Guggenheim before her death from cancer in 2022 and how, when she was unable to do this, her friend Leslie Jamison stepped in to finish the book. But as a reader who knows almost nothing about Peggy Guggenheim and who hasn’t read Godfrey’s work widely (I think I read Under the Bridge a long time ago), neither back story seemed necessarily resonant or pressing to me. Would Peggy be a book I really needed to to pick up?

But then I did, and I couldn’t stop reading.

And I finally understood the weight of Jamison’s task, and what a loss it would have been if this novel had never seen the light of day, because it’s just wonderful, imbued with a kind of magic, rich and artful, the prose full of light and surprises, Peggy Guggenheim so entirely alive on the page. We meet her at the beginning of Chapter 1, “Striped and shot, the tiger lay flat, and I stretched my hungry body across him. He was part treasure, part prey. Though we had so much, I often ignored the chaises and satin chairs, instead gathering my book and lying upon this tattered dead animal.” And it pretty much goes on like that, both extraordinary and so matter-of-fact, Guggenheim’s remarkable experiences including her provenance (“I am the daughter of two dynasties”), that her father went down with the Titanic, her life in 1920s’ Paris, being photographed by May Ray, a love affair with Samuel Beckett, that she was a patron of artists including Djuna Barnes and Emma Goldman, and would build a modern art collection that would become famous throughout the world.

A tragic figure in some ways, Godfrey also shows that Peggy Guggenheim was full of life and spirit, that she would eventually come into her own power, but some losses would never be overcome, and that she was a marvellously imperfect person, beyond ordinary (which is what she so longed to be) but also so achingly human, and that vitality is this novel’s chief appeal, that fiction can seem so real . Even fiction that’s messy and sometimes strange, mistakes and inconsistencies popping up throughout, not overwhelmingly but you notice. At the beginning we learn that Peggy and her sisters were living at the Waldorf-Astoria, but it’s the St. Regis on the following page (and in actuality, according to my internet sleuthing), and initially I was thrown by this—Jamison opted to leave most of Godfrey’s manuscript untouched, to not presume to edit, which seems like a strange call until you come to the line where Peggy is using her eye and describing some Impressionist works to her father: “These paintings look unfinished, but they’re deliberately haphazard.” And then her father points to the paintings and tells her that “all [she] need[s] to know…is that this is life.”

Peggy Guggenheim made art her life, and her life was art, and so too is this strange, beautiful and heartrending novel. Peggy is such a remarkable literary achievement.