Imagining the life of Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and art collector
When Rebecca Godfrey died in 2022, she was working on a novel about art collector Peggy Guggenheim, a project that she left two-thirds finished. In a recent article for The New Yorker about completing the book for her late friend, Leslie Jamison said she stalled before she began writing. She immersed herself in background material, reading and taking notes on numerous biographies and Guggenheim's memoirs. “I was terrified to break ground. To start actually adding my words to Rebecca's,” she wrote.
The word “palimpsest” comes to mind: Jamison's writing, on top of Godfrey's writing, on top of Guggenheim's own account, as well as those of other contemporaries and writers ever since. And below it all, beyond the reach of living eyes, the unknowable truth of the woman herself. Debauched dilettante? Midwife to abstract expressionism? Tragic victim of a failed nose job?
As a novel, Peggy invites the reader to glimpse things partly visible, almost but not entirely obscured by layers of interpretation and implication. It is beautifully written, boldly imagined and full of holes — aspects of Guggenheim's life and persona that Godfrey and then Jamison decided to leave out or touch on only briefly.
Godfrey devotes her account to the first half of Guggenheim's life: her privileged but unhappy childhood, her relocation to Paris, the beginnings of her career as a gallerist, her difficult first marriage and other relationships, ending with a passionate affair she had with Samuel Beckett around the age of 40. An epilogue set at Peggy's Venice palazzo 20 years later adds important perspective about the woman and the cultural force she became.
At the opening of the book, the fictional Peggy, who narrates throughout, characterizes the story she's about to tell as a “tragedy.” As she describes a portrait of herself and her sisters Benita and Hazel, the complex voice and self-regard Godfrey developed for her protagonist emerge: “We appear lush and crisp. We're clouds; we're temporary; we're pure sweetness; the tipped flower of a wedding cake. We're the white of things that hover and tempt,” she says. “And so I am the daughter of a dynasty, but I became nothing more than a dilettante. My sister known as a murderess. Are you surprised? Perhaps you should be. Perhaps this is only what they've said about us.
“Only the beginning of what we became.”
As a writer, Godfrey, who was just 54 when she died of lung cancer, was drawn to stories from the dark side. Her first book, a 2001 novel called The Torn Skirt, focused on two weeks in the life of a bored, angry 16-year-old girl who leaves home and ends up among junkies, sex workers and others in the down-and-dirty
Red Zone of the author's hometown, Victoria, B.C. Her second book, Under the Bridge (2005), is non-fiction, the true-crime story of the murder of 14-yearold Reena Virk by eight of her small-town peers in 1997. A Hulu adaptation of the book starring Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone premièred in the spring.
Since Godfrey is not around to discuss her decisions about what's left in and what's left out, and didn't even get to write her own list of sources and acknowledgments (her husband reconstructed those as best he could), we can only look to Jamison, who writes that Godfrey had told her she envisioned a happy ending.
She said she wanted to give Peggy “some bliss and triumph.”