They were bastards!

Peggy Guggenheim​ had an ‘excessively unhappy’ childhood. ‘I have no pleasant memories of any kind,’ she wrote in her memoir, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1946). She was biting about the glamorous townhouse on East 72nd St where she and her sisters, Benita and Hazel, grew up:

In the centre of this floor was a reception room with a huge tapestry of Alexander the Great entering Rome in triumph. In front of it was a double-trayed tea table with a monstrous silver tea set. It was in this room that my mother gave a weekly tea party to the most boring ladies of the haute Jewish bourgeoisie, which I was forced reluctantly to attend.

Keeping the haute bourgeoisie happy was important because Peggy’s branch of the family was on shaky social footing. In 1911 her father, Benjamin, disappeared to Paris and lost a ‘staggering amount of money’ through bad investments and extravagance. The following April, he and his secretary went down with the Titanic; his young French mistress survived.

Peggy, Rebecca Godfrey’s final novel, is a retelling of the art collector’s life up to the opening of her first gallery in 1938. Godfrey became fascinated with Peggy’s story after stumbling on an old copy of the ‘scandalous’ Out of This Century in her grandmother’s closet. When she died from lung cancer in October 2022, at the age of 54, she had been researching and writing for a decade and had largely completed the first two sections of a novel. At the request of her widower, her friend, the essayist and novelist Leslie Jamison, undertook to finish it, drawing on dictated notes, sketched scenes and indications from Godfrey as to where she had wanted the final section to lead: Peggy’s return to Paris in the late 1930s and her affair with the young Samuel Beckett. ‘It was as if we were all together in bed: Peggy, Beckett, Rebecca, me,’ Jamison wrote in the New Yorker in 2023. ‘The porousness involved in the writing process began to feel like an extension of the porousness that had felt so exciting, almost illicit, in our friendship.’

Peggy begins in the year of the Titanic’s sinking. The family’s tapestries and fine jewellery have been sold off, but the old Guggenheim standards remain. In their white dresses and boaters, Peggy and her sisters are ‘pure sweetness’, ‘groomed for silliness and ease’ – ultimately, for a suitable marriage. Their mother, Florette, a Seligman family heiress, stuffs them into corsets so tight they mark the spine and has a vicious Dutch elocution specialist attack their consonants. They spend summers in France, imbibing ‘good taste’ through trips to the Louvre and the Loire chateaux. In New York, they are made to consort with an exclusive group of families: ‘My mother turned sentry … N.G., she would say of a name on the guest list. Not good. Strike of the pen.’ The goal of their upbringing, glittering in the distance, is the debutante ball, identified by Peggy’s schoolfriend Fay as ‘a farce’ (‘It’s really about offering us up as virgins for the tribe’). The men they are offered up to can’t stop talking about money. ‘Mr Warburg observed that the water in his glass was rather sulphurous. Sulphur, said his son, is an interesting proposition … As a matter of fact, we have found stockpiles of the stuff in our Athabasca mine.’ Anyone more interesting – such as the ‘N.G.’ Russian nobleman Count Litsky, with whom Benita has a fling – Florette quashes. ‘She told Benita then to cease her romance with the “Cossack”.’

The good behaviour and taste are critical because everyone knows where the Guggenheims came from. ‘Joseph and Meyer, these were my grandfathers, and both men were peddlers, peasants, despised,’ Peggy explains. As young men in Ohio and Pennsylvania they bought and sold what they could (‘shoehorns, spectacles’), eventually amassing enough capital to go underground: ‘all the silver mines in Alaska and Chile, all the copper mines in Mexico’. The richer they became, the less people liked it. Florette recalls Henry Hilton trying to ban ‘the Seligman Jews’ from his fine hotels in 1877. Their descendants know that New York society still associates the rough, uncouth origins of their wealth – ‘the dank dirt of mines, underground, filth’ – with their foreignness, their Jewishness. Peggy and her sisters are taught to be elegant and unshowy, to hide ‘under white sailor hats and gloves’ as a means of social ‘camouflage’. ‘It was understood that if we made too much noise or show, the world would come out as they did when my grandfather was shuffling about in Ohio. Jew, Sheeny, Christ-killer!’ The real point of the elocution and dance lessons is to undo history, ‘erase the gug, the heim, the lig, the mann’. At best, with all their millions, the Guggenheim girls are ‘still just guests’, as Benita, the eldest, puts it: required to perform at parties and balls, to train for small feats of bourgeois showmanship, as when Twinkle, their dog, triumphs at a Westchester show.

Benita, girly and beautiful, is born to do it, but Peggy, with her mussy hair and nose ‘elegant as a potato’, finds all the camouflaging and performing unbearable. As a teenager, she likes to tell people her name is Raskolnikov; she collects unused matches from the pavement, a habit her uncle Daniel considers evidence of illness, and is packed off to see a therapist. (‘I was clearly troubling, an obstacle.’) Her rebelliousness and obstinacy connect her to the anti-heroines of Godfrey’s two previous books, The Torn Skirt (2001) and Under the Bridge (2005): girls whose attraction to danger or desire to make their mark stem from not quite fitting in. The narrator of The Torn Skirt is a hard-edged 16-year-old, Sara, who disappears from school and ends up involved in a stabbing. In the aftermath, she pictures the cop who interviews her getting her all wrong: ‘Laughing at the thought of him banging down the bedroom door of a teenage girl. He imagines it pink and soft. He has no idea.’ In Under the Bridge – a non-fiction account of the murder in 1997 of a 14-year-old Canadian girl, Reena Virk, by a group of her female peers (now a Hulu miniseries starring Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone) – the suspected killers are obsessed with gang culture and ‘becoming legendary’. One character, Syreeta, feels ‘a little sorry’ for two of the girls involved, Kelly and Josephine. ‘It seemed to her that their mothers hadn’t taught them to be ladies … Their lipstick was dark and garish. Boys called Kelly “Grubnut” and she was rarely, if ever, called “hottie”.’

Peggy is full of women who rub the world up the wrong way. Some forge violent paths for themselves. Fay Lewisohn, Peggy’s heiress friend, spits at a police officer in a suffragette parade and later marries the brother of the mob boss Arnold Rothstein (‘she would … become inured to the scent of gunshot’). The anarchist Emma Goldman, whom Peggy funds to write her memoirs, doesn’t baulk at delivering cyanide capsules to her own brother. Others, less sure of themselves, fall through the cracks. Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s troubled daughter, given to ‘acting up, setting her hair on fire’, is packed off to Switzerland to be ‘stilled, in a straitjacket’. Hazel, Peggy’s younger sister (always late, forgetful, bewildered), ends up in a New York institution after her two young sons fall to their deaths from a penthouse roof. Sanatorium ‘rest cures’ threaten for the disobedient. ‘When my aunt came out of the white door,’ Peggy’s friend Helen says, ‘I couldn’t look at her – it was as if she’d been blanched.’

Peggy’s solution to the problem of not belonging is to embrace bohemianism. In an avant-garde bookshop downtown, a refuge for performative misfits (‘men in burgundy velvet capes reeking of a smell I thought was chestnut; an aristocratic woman wearing a dress made of newspapers’), she encounters Laurence Vail, an impoverished poet known as the ‘King of Bohemia’. Laurence wears clothes made of sailcloth and is the first man she has ever seen ‘without a hat’; he makes her dream of escaping to Paris and riding roughshod over the Guggenheim decorum:

When I saw Laurence in Paris, I wanted to be wearing weasel skins. Red lipstick in a shade called Eternal Wound. I wanted to enact every move and contortion I’d found in a book of illustrated frescoes from Pompeii. Legs on his shoulders, then intertwined, then a handstand. I would be the first of my kind. A daunting virgin.

Peggy and her new husband set up home on the boulevard Saint-Germain, hosting chic, spontaneous parties with mismatched plates. Florette, after storming to Paris to split them up, discovers that Laurence’s mother is a skiing friend of George V’s and changes her mind: ‘What a charming family.’ Bohemia is fun until it isn’t. The parties become wildly expensive, lawless and full of strangers (‘Who was the woman wearing a necklace that looked like a leash?’); one night, guests fuck in Peggy’s bedroom and leave a smell so pungent the rug has to be doused with bleach.

Money remains a problem. The artists and writers who form her new community are just as materialistic and grasping as the worst Guggenheim aunts, though less honest about it; they are penniless but prefer ‘Darjeeling tea from Harrods and black lace stockings from Madame Blanc’. Djuna Barnes, whom Peggy sets up in Paris with five hundred francs, dislikes her free hotel room: ‘It’s rather cold and small … It’s very hard to write when you are in a depressing atmosphere.’ Hart Crane serves Cuban rum to Peggy in a teacup in his wooden shack upstate, hoping for ‘just a little donation’. Laurence likes taking taxis and makes a scene in St Tropez when he can’t have an expensive Prussian clock: ‘You are so cheap, Peggy. It’s infuriating.’ She and her New York friends have no illusions about the dark, exploitative history of their grandfathers’ fortunes (‘They were bastards!’), but it’s somehow worse when Paris, too, proves to be greedy, corrupt, rotten to the core. Early on, a bribe has to be paid to get Laurence out of jail after he almost blinds a man with a bottle. In Godfrey’s description, the stench of corruption is perceptible in the dankness of the city, the way it emanates badness, as if from pores: ‘I was so often reeling from the rancid smells, the sewer water in grates, wine on Laurence’s breath, urine and horse manure in the concrete. The smell of rot when I sat by the stone walls of the cell on the night Laurence had been brought in … Pleading and rot.’

The violent tendencies of the man Peggy has married are an open secret. Florette, who compiles ‘dossiers’ on her daughters’ suitors before they’re allowed to proceed, must know at least part of the story. ‘Would she truly have forgiven him everything merely by learning that he’d met with King George in St Moritz?’ Laurence chucks bottles at men who ask his sister to dance; he manhandles his wife, pushes her down flights of stairs, drags her bodily when she refuses to move, holds her head underwater, steps on her stomach. When Benita is in the final months of a risky pregnancy, he develops a sudden fascination with Sing Sing prison and its electric chair: ‘I thought he might say something kind about my sister … But he began to shake my arms and legs, while making a hissing noise.’ John Holms, the writer Peggy starts sleeping with in the dying days of her marriage, protects her from her husband, but only through more of the same. ‘“I’ll kill him,” he said blithely, turning on his side and tapping my nose.’

The novel’s descriptions of male-on-female violence suggest Jamison’s influence. Outbursts of rage, she writes in Splinters, a memoir published earlier this year, have a ‘clarifying’ quality: they make ‘explicit’ what would otherwise be underground. Their traces can be read clearly on the female body: bruises, scars, weight loss. But there are also risks to looking at wounds this way – to seeing them as eloquent or lyrical, sites for the storytelling imagination. ‘What’s fertile in a wound?’ Jamison asks in her essay collection The Empathy Exams (2014). ‘Why dwell in one?’ In Peggy, what Laurence does to his wife when he loses his temper has no special grace or meaning. The ‘strawberry jam’ he smears into her hair is just jam, not a symbol of something else. In a French fishing village, when he shoves her into a fountain, then kicks her on the ground in front of a crowd, her body emerges from the ordeal a mess, a confusion rather than a revelation: ‘My skin was still wet, and I thought, Is this from the fountain or did he spit on me? I felt mangled; unruly.’ No one looks at her, they look at her husband. ‘When the police came, they rebuked him for burning money.’

As Laurence chooses to see it, hurling bottles at people isn’t just hurling bottles, it’s art. ‘His Surrealist friends believed in staging significant gestures … Violence, Laurence said, is a significant gesture.’ When he pushes Peggy into the street one night in Paris (she refuses to take a taxi to cover five blocks), she’s aware that he is grasping for control, trying to stage a moment of metamorphosis. ‘I was the bottle he hurled; I was the slim, rich bottle he wanted to see crash and splinter.’ The bohemian men of the novel are often frustrated in their abilities, creatively stuck. Laurence is a poet in name only; John Holms, widely believed to be a genius, is ‘always talking and rarely writing’; even Beckett, during their passionate, liberating affair, struggles to work, spending his days in bed and his nights drinking. The lesser talents, Laurence and John, make up for their missing art by moulding Peggy instead. John issues instructions during sex and conducts himself, in Djuna Barnes’s words, like ‘God come down for the weekend’. (Peggy’s way of dealing with him is to ‘run to the garden and read Tolstoy just to hear my own voice’.) Laurence gives her a primer on modernist poetry – ‘You’ll enjoy Hart, if you sit still and listen’ – and drills her on how to pose in Man Ray’s studio. The great photographer himself positions her this way and that, has her sit with her hands folded demurely in her lap, then turns the lens to the side and captures her shadow. A white blur in the image distorts the pattern of her dress around her stomach: ‘He took away my pregnancy.’

Being someone else’s idea of the modern image proves to be exhausting. So much of the real Peggy’s early life, Godfrey said in an interview with Jamison for the Paris Review in 2019, was spent ‘trying to find a way to be something other than a wife or friend to the famous’. The arc of the novel is her search for a style. Guggenheim Jeune, the gallery for Surrealist and abstract art she opens in Piccadilly, shows the future: ‘bold lines, molten bronze, paint splattered across canvas’. It embodies her curious gift – what she calls, early on, her ‘only talent’ – for sensing shifts in the air, changes in the weather imperceptible to other people. (Benita’s dull husband, Edwin, works ‘in futures’ for Goldman Sachs, very much not the same thing.)

The kind of work that Peggy loves opens people up to themselves as they look at it, ‘exteriorising’ their desires and fears. In its brashness, its ‘arrogant disorder’, it is the opposite of repressive Park Avenue corseting, the old Guggenheim family habit of being complaisant or invisible. At the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, there are snails and a shark head in a Dalí taxi, a telephone shaped like a lobster: ‘creaturely objects’ reminiscent of the wild amalgamations of dreams. Godfrey threads similar images through the novel: spiders crop up nightmarishly when bad things happen (Benita dying in childbirth, Hitler shrieking on the radio); the dead doves that thud onto the dinner table during a disastrous debutante ball reappear as emblems of self-actualisation. ‘Whenever I was truly happy,’ Peggy says, ‘I pictured black birds falling from the ceiling.’ The novel can seem in excess of itself – its attention span flickers, there are too many names and places and threads – but it’s also like being carried away by someone else’s prophecy.