Rebecca Godfrey died before she finished writing Peggy, an ambitious new novel based on the life of modern-art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Godfrey’s friend, the esteemed author Leslie Jamison, filled in the missing parts, supplementing the story Godfrey left behind.
In a sense, Godfrey had been doing the same thing for Peggy Guggenheim. The basics of Peggy’s story were known from biographies and memoirs: Peggy was a twentieth-century American Jewish heiress, a patron of impoverished artists like Emma Goldman and Djuna Barnes, and the creator and manager of one of the most important collections of modern art in the first half of the twentieth century. But Godfrey, using the tools of a novelist, wanted to fill in the rest of Peggy’s story. What was life really like for wealthy Jews in 1920s Manhattan? How did girls of that era channel their aspirations? Where did Peggy get her extraordinary gift for spotting talent?
Peggy is the result of this imaginative exploration. Godfrey draws a connection between Peggy’s later-in-life genius for spotting artistic talent and her early experiences of loss and longing, of which she has plenty. Her father dies on the Titanic; her mother is chilly and stern; her sisters are cripplingly ill; and her husband is a brute. The connection between the two exists because, throughout Peggy’s life, both tragedy and art leave her with a sort of primal “shiver,” an unsettling helplessness that creeps up whenever people, predicaments, or, ultimately, paintings feel “unknowable,” disquieting, or “chaotic and rude.” That tremor inside — the signal of raw life force — becomes Peggy’s north star, the answer to her longing. Throughout her life, it leads her to passion, humiliation, and pain, and, eventually, to discovering artists like Jean Cocteau, Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, and Jackson Pollock.
One might observe that — like Jamison filling in Godfrey’s story and Godfrey filling in Peggy’s — Peggy was trying to fill in the pieces of her own incomplete life. Unable to sustain truth or beauty in her personal experience, she used her wealth and talent to draw forth art by, and for, others.
Thanks to the story-supplementing talent of both Godfrey and Jamison, Peggy comes to us as a tumultuous spirit, a survivor, a pathbreaking seer of potential. Ultimately, Peggy stands for the proposition that if you stare down unknowability and chaos hard enough, you might just spot the beauty within.
E. Kinney Zalesne, a former Microsoft executive, is a strategy consultant in Washington, DC. She serves on the board of the National Library of Israel’s American affiliate, NLI USA; and was the collaborator on the bestselling book, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes (Twelve, 2007).
