Peggy: A Novel

by Rebecca Godfrey, Leslie Jamison (Editor)

Overview

A dazzling, richly imagined novel about Peggy Guggenheim—a story of art, family, love, and becoming oneself—by the award-winning author of Under the Bridge, now a Hulu limited series starring Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone

“Godfrey brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times.”—Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

“Magnificent . . . Readers will be won over by Godfrey’s incandescent portrait of a singular woman.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and now legendary art collector, sits in the sun at her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. She’s in a reflective mood, thinking back on her thrilling, tragic, nearly impossible journey from her sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to here: iconoclast and independent woman.

Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy is a blazingly fresh interpretation of a woman who defies every expectation to become an original. The daughter of two Jewish dynasties, Peggy finds her cloistered life turned upside down at fourteen, when her beloved father perishes on the Titanic. His death prompts Peggy to seek a life of passion and personal freedom and, above all, to believe in the transformative power of art. We follow Peggy as she makes her way through the glamorous but sexist and anti-Semitic art worlds of New York and Europe and meet the numerous men who love her (and her money) while underestimating her intellect, talent, and vision. Along the way, Peggy must balance her loyalty to her family with her need to break free from their narrow, snobbish ways and the unexpected restrictions that come with vast fortune.

Rebecca Godfrey’s final book—completed by her friend, the acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison, following Godfrey’s death in 2022—brings to life the woman who helped make the Guggenheim name synonymous with art and genius.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385538275
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/13/2024
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	834,123
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Rebecca Godfrey (1967–2022) was an award-winning novelist and journalist. Her books include The Torn Skirt, finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the award-winning true-crime story Under the Bridge, adapted as a Hulu limited series starring Riley Keough as Rebecca Godfrey. Godfrey earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and taught writing at Columbia University. She lived with her husband and daughter in upstate New York.

Leslie Jamison’s books include The Empathy Exams, The Recovering, the novel The Gin Closet, and the memoir Splinters. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

The Silver Prince

1912

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. Move, my mother would say, if she happened to be in the room. Peggy, move away from the beast! This request would send my sister, Benita, into fits of giggles. Move away from the beast, Benita would later imitate. The tongue had fallen out, at one point, replaced by a hapless plaster replica. As I read, I would dangle my fingers into the mouth, touching the jagged rise of ebony. Often the head would loll abruptly; the mouth red and raw and somehow alive below the still, crystal eyes.

Oh Peggy, my mother said, move away from the tiger and get off the floor. I would brush the tiger fur with my hand, and stare up at the ceiling, entranced. For a moment, everything in the elegant room felt savage, uneasy.


We were living at the Waldorf-Astoria. We moved there from our former house on 15 East 72nd, right across from the entrance to Central Park. My father was in Paris for business; this is what we were told and what we would dutifully repeat. After weeks of waiting for his expected return, my mother moved us to the hotel. Not to worry. Daniel, my father’s brother, lived there as well. The entire floor below ours was for his family; I imagine the Astors were mortified. The Googs are taking over the hotel. Like money and love, these sudden changes in residence were never spoken of in my family. I’m fourteen, but believe I’m possessed of a knowledge that eludes the rest of them. I know my father will not return.

The morning he left, I begged Victor, his valet, to let me brush my father’s mustache. We sang together, a sweet, secret song he’d invented for me. French and English. Oui, oui, Peggy. A whistle, a dun-la-dun, and I would twirl. Into his pocket, I sneaked the tiger’s tongue.

With him, my father took his secrets, and his shame, packed in one of his seventeen trunks. Silver to the end, he held us each in his arms while all around us the cherry trees of Fifth Avenue erupted into bloom. Clouds above us broke apart. We ran after him. Corseted, silk skirts to our ankles, we were hobbled. Our sailor hats fell off in the breeze, floating lightly over the wheels of his carriage.

Hazel’s sobs were heard all up and down Park Avenue. Adeline Havemeyer and Alma Harrington looked down from their windows. My father’s carriage continued toward the dark strands of river in a part of the city we’d never been. A business trip, my uncle Daniel informed my mother. “He seems to have got in his head to start his own company, the—I believe, it’s to be called the International Steam Company.” He looked appalled, for my grandfather had always told the brothers the story of Aesop, they should stick together like a bundle of sticks. “Florette, has he ever spoken to you of his business matters?”

“Do you think he has? Really, Daniel.”

“Has he ever mentioned—” He stopped, catching sight of me on the rug. “Peggy,” he said softly. “I did not realize you were there.”

“She is having an unhealthy love affair with that beast,” my mother said. “I can’t imagine how their children will look.”

“I am sure they’ll be clever,” he said.

“Dangerous,” I countered, flailing backward with arched back and bared teeth.

The St. Regis was sumptuous and dull. The windows were covered with bars and dirty glass. The park was only a sliver of light through the window. I missed my father’s whims and treasures, however morbid and lavish.

My mother turned sentry. The fact that her own marriage, a merging of fiefdoms, was clearly in decline seemed to only raise her interest in marrying off her brother’s daughters. Weeks on weeks went by without my father’s return, yet she grew perversely more attuned to the possibility of romance. A dinner was held for Mr. Harry Loeb; a lunch for Mr. Roger Strauss. She sent battalions to Barrytown for strawberries; ermine arrived from a valley in Russia. She wore bustles and blouses buttoned to her neck. N.G., she would say of a name on the guest list. Not good. Strike of the pen. The poorer erased.

Why would my father not wish to stay in Paris when this was the woman in his home? I began to despise her.

In Paris, my father must have been elated never to attend another ball, another stuffy Fifth Avenue party. The more my mother neglected us, the more I grew certain that my father would stay in another city with other women who were slim and joyful. I imagined them with such beauty, I almost fell in love with these creatures myself. Peacock feathers in ringlets; the white dive of breasts.

He’s freed himself from all of us, I told Benita. His silly daughters, his greedy brothers, his snobbish wife. Don’t you see it? He’s freed himself from the Havemeyers and the Harringtons and the Loebs and the Strausses and the perfectly lovely Rockefellers.

She always answered me; we spoke sometimes like a song. Our words entwined; giddy. It was a kind of language through a forbidden melody. But when I said this, she walked toward the piano. She played Wagner perfectly from memory. I decided not to mention it again, since she looked so wounded, banging the C sharp, staring into the sheet music for a song she wasn’t playing.

He wrote us letters. Benita and I read them to each other as we lay across our mother’s bed. We ransacked the notes from my mother’s jewelry box, where she kept them under ribbons and emeralds. In April, he wrote me. He’d been gone for nine months. I am glad to receive your kind letter and hope that you will frequently find time to write me. I have found—

Here I stopped reading. Found what? Benita asked. A nice gift for Hazel, I lied.

Oh Haze, she said, sighing.

Why didn’t I tell Benita then? I suppose the rest of the sentence set off such a fierce joy that I felt if shared, I might receive a reprimand. It’s just a promise; he’s always making those. I folded the letter seventeen times, until it was thin as a match. I slid it into my leather ankle boot while Benita stood, asking me to act like a boy and help her practice her curtsy.

In Paris, my father was building elevators that would climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower. This fact alone filled me with love. My father! Setting off to the clouds while all his old-fashioned brothers still sent men down into the infernal mines. It seemed to me that my father was unafraid of modern machines; he refused to return to the places his father sent him—the barren rock of northern Mexico, the choking furnaces of all-night smelters in an empty Colorado. My father believed in the unproven, in volition, in a closer view of the clouds.

One morning, soon after I received the hopeful letter from my father, I was stopped on Fifth by Mr. Rockefeller. He waved his cane and summoned me closer. I had not seen him since we’d moved from 15. He was older now; with white flecks in his eyes; a scent of lily and pines. I was always looking close at these men, trying to see what it was we were all trying so achingly to be. His voice was clipped and magnetic. The clever Miss Guggenheim, he said. He placed emphasis on the heim. Scratchy, German, a sound as if he were clearing his throat.

I started a curtsy, then without completing it, exclaimed. “My father is in Paris,” I announced. “He’s building elevators for the Eiffel Tower!” I knew I sounded ludicrous and impolite, but I enjoyed the announcement.

“Is that right?” he said. He seemed to consider whether the idea was worth his considering. “Elevators?”

“The Eiffel Tower is the highest building in Paris,” I informed him.

He nodded. “Yes, the higher to fall.”

His amusement didn’t bother me. I imagined my father, straddling the immense scaffolding, suspended. Below him the arches of Notre Dame, the Louvre.

I began to speak again, but the governess Cora squeezed my hand. The high sun brushed her face; she lifted her parasol off the ground. “Peggy,” she said. “Do you not know? Has Hazel not told you?”

She was not allowed to embrace me, but it seemed she wanted to lift me as her hands weaved near my chest. That was when she told me, my father had booked a return ticket for Hazel’s birthday. In three weeks, she said, your father will be home.

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/17/2024

This magnificent posthumous novel from Godfrey (Under the Bridge), completed after her death in 2022 by Jamison, concerns the life of heiress and arts patron Peggy Guggenheim. Following her father’s death on the Titanic (a loss compounded by the embarrassing public knowledge that he was accompanied on the voyage by his mistress), Peggy grows increasingly interested in modern art, a passion she shared with her father. She escapes the confines of New York society for Paris in 1920, an invitation from artist Laurence Vail having “put a face on my hope” for a new life. Godfrey covers Peggy’s notable acquisitions and rescue of important modern artworks on the eve of Nazi occupation, and she peppers in appearances from dozens of Peggy’s real-life friends, lovers, and colleagues, including Man Ray, Djuna Barnes, and Emma Goldman. The heart of the novel, though, lies in Godfrey’s depiction of her subject’s evolving mindset. In lively first-person narration, Godfrey captures Peggy’s constant wavering between boldness and self-doubt, between the pull of conventional motherhood and the longing to be free. Looking back on her life at 60, Peggy proudly claims her role in art history: “I could see the start of a new world.... I didn’t make that world. But I helped it survive.” Readers will be won over by Godfrey’s incandescent portrait of a singular woman. Agent: Christy Fletcher, UTA. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Peggy had often been misunderstood and disrespected, seen as a slutty dilettante who threw her money around. But Rebecca [Godfrey] took Peggy seriously, as a woman full of wit, savvy, and passion, hungry for experience and purpose and with an eye for art, and for people, that others couldn’t yet appreciate.”—Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker

“A celebration of love . . . her prose on those pages that she pored over the longest positively gleams with an electric brio.”—The Boston Globe

“A smart, exciting, and big-hearted book that not only thinks about what a life can be but also how it becomes legendary.”—Town & Country
 
“Empathetic . . . Peggy follows the titular late heiress from the ages of 14 to 60 as she discovers her love of fine art, finds her place in a sexist and anti-Semitic world, and makes a name for herself.”—Time

“A lush novel infused with torment, determination, and wit. With keenly drawn characters based on real-life figures and a vivid and illuminating historical context, Peggy . . . is enthralling, revealing, and resonant.”—Booklist

“A devoted, creative version of the life, often in romantic thrall to the mercurial, impulsive, insulated figure at its center . . . A vivid, indulgent imagining of the legendary collector.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Magnificent . . . In lively first-person narration, Godfrey captures Peggy’s constant wavering between boldness and self-doubt, between the pull of conventional motherhood and the longing to be free. . .  . Readers will be won over by Godfrey’s incandescent portrait of a singular woman.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The novel follows Guggenheim’s whirlwind life through the art worlds of America and Europe, and the interesting, high-brow, and often sexist circles she traveled in. Godfrey, whose 2005 true crime book Under the Bridge was adapted into a Hulu series starring Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone this year, had a knack for mining real-life details for fictional gold.”—W magazine

“A story about the daughter and heiress to the Guggenheim fortune and her artistic and romantic exploits, and her quest to find her own direction and vision despite the pull and sway of her family name.”—Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2024

“A beautifully imagined and superbly written novel about the tenuous line between life and art. Godfrey brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times.”—Jenny Offill

“A tremendous work of the imagination . . . Peggy Guggenheim embodied the twentieth century, but attempts to capture her vitality and uniqueness have tended to fall flat. No more! Rebecca Godfrey’s prose is as stylish as her protagonist and every bit as deep, sensuous, and thoughtful. . . . An unparalleled life presented as a page-turner.”—Gary Shteyngart

From the Publisher

2024-07-04
Rich, restless, driven by “grand dreams” and fears of a family curse, Peggy Guggenheim sets out to find the bohemian life for which she yearns.

Godfrey worked on this book for 10 years before dying of cancer in 2022; using the manuscript and notes she left behind, Jamison finished the book, immersing the reader in Godfrey’s vision of the intense and willful Guggenheim as she progresses from adolescence to womanhood: “I wanted a future of gangsters or poets; I wanted violence and beauty…” At 14, after her father—traveling with his mistress—dies on board theTitanic, Peggy, her mother, and two sisters must downsize, but they are still wealthy members of New York society, living under Mrs. Guggenheim’s expectations of conformity. Peggy, meanwhile, even in her teens is testing the limits of her position, deceiving her mother about what she’s studying in school, flirting with both sexes, questing constantly “for another kind of life…A life among artists.” A job in an avant-garde bookshop introduces her to some of those creative people, including Laurence Vail, a sculptor known as the King of Bohemia. Moving to Paris, marrying Vail, and having two children with him, Guggenheim begins to claim her chosen identity. More appealing in its earlier, questing, formative half, the novel turns more glamorous and sensational in its later chapters. Guggenheim’s friends and many lovers come to the fore, while famous names pervade the text—Man Ray, Hart Crane, Emma Goldman, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett (one of those lovers). Issues of class, antisemitism, modernism, sexuality, women’s rights, and politics are discussed, and there’s plenty of drama. Peggy’s marriage turns abusive; her older sister dies in childbirth, and her younger is accused of killing her two sons after they fall to their deaths. The story concludes as Peggy reaches 40, but a coda set in Venice 20 years later crams in the art purchases for which she is mainly remembered. It’s a devoted, creative version of the life, often in romantic thrall to the mercurial, impulsive, insulated figure at its center.

A vivid, indulgent imagining of the legendary collector.

Kirkus Reviews