How Leslie Jamison helped realize her friend's final dream — and brought the story of Peggy Guggenheim to life
The American author discussed Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey on Bookends with Mattea Roach
When the late writer Rebecca Godfrey was working on the novel, Peggy, she knew that whatever happened to her, she wanted it to be finished.
Godfrey, an author and a professor at Columbia University in New York, had been writing a fictional exploration of the life of American art collector and socialite Peggy Guggenheim for 10 years before she died of lung cancer at 54.
"She wanted this to be a beautifully whole work of art rather than an artifact or a curio that you're looking at in a museum cabinet," said her friend Leslie Jamison — and the writer who eventually completed it — on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
Godfrey, who was born in Toronto and grew up in Victoria, left pages of notes and dictated instructions for the completion of Peggy. After she died, her literary executor and agent, Christy Fletcher, and her husband, asked Jamison to be the one to finish it.
"What was going through my head when they asked me was, 'Yes, this is an honour. This is incredibly daunting. I've never done anything like this before,'" said Jamison.
For her, one of the hardest things about shepherding the novel to publication was not knowing whether Godfrey would have liked her choices and what she had written.
"You just have to sort of enter into the fray of that unknowing and that uncertainty. And knowing that she did want it finished and that we were all really collectively doing the best we could to honour those wishes that just felt like the north star, to know what those wishes had been."
A posthumous collaboration
Peggy, told in three parts, starts with Guggenheim's childhood in New York City as the daughter of two Jewish dynasties and her search for something different than the world of social expectation she grew up with. The second section takes her to Paris, where she has her "artistic coming of age," meets many notable creatives, experiences the let downs of her marriage and lives a bohemian lifestyle. Those parts, said Jamison, were largely completed by Godfrey before she died.
The final part, which explores Guggenheim's first gallery opening in London and her short love affair with the writer Samuel Beckett, was in a "more inchoate form" and was where Jamison did most of her work. That section, and the final coda, with Guggenheim on her palazzo in Venice, entertaining great artists, were pieced together from manuscripts, documents, notes and files from Godfrey's writings and research.
"It really felt like this jigsaw puzzle where Rebecca was no longer around to tell us what to do, but she had left all of these clues and all of these sort of beautiful fragments of her vision in various people who had loved her and had been talking quite a bit with her about the book."
However, at a certain point in the process, Jamison realized that the research, while necessary, was becoming a way to put off starting to write.
"I was going to break into this thing that Rebecca had made and I didn't want to harm it," said Jamison. "I didn't want to degrade it. I didn't want to dishonour it. I didn't want to pollute it."
After realizing she had to just take the leap and dive in, Jamison, who had some research funds, decided to go to Venice.
"It felt like a Rebecca thing to do. And it also felt like maybe, to work on this book that was not in my voice, and it was in this complicated triangle with two other women, both of whom were ghosts, I had to leave my life behind a little bit."
Taking Peggy seriously
Before Peggy, Godfrey had published the novel The Torn Skirt and the nonfiction title Under the Bridge and was fascinated by the lives of complicated women who pushed boundaries and didn't live the way society expected them to.
In fact, Godfrey taught a seminar about anti-heroines in the Columbia graduate writing program.
"These are women who were disruptors, who sometimes cared more about their work than their children, these cardinal sins," said Jamison, who also teaches at Columbia and met Godfrey there.
"I knew many students who had gone through this anti-heroine seminar, loved it, had felt like it really gave them permission to write the kind of female characters they wanted to write who were not necessarily likable, who weren't doing what they were supposed to do, who weren't sort of pandering to traditional or even palatable notions of like what a woman should be."
Jamison said Godfrey likely considered Guggenheim part of this lineage of anti-heroines and wanted to write her fictionalized story in a way that takes Guggenheim seriously, even though she's previously been seen as a dilettante.
"She takes Peggy seriously as somebody who left this lasting impact on the history of art and within the landscape of fiction, Rebecca [Godfrey] is able to take a very strong point of view."
In conversation with ghosts
Deep discussions about their writing, the love that shaped them and the relationship between making art and raising their daughters were a staple of Godfrey and Jamison's bond.
They met in 2019, only three years before Godfrey died, which "perhaps accelerated or deepened" their friendship, said Jamison.
"We were two people who like to jump right into the deep end of the swimming pool. We wanted to talk about the things that mattered."
Their bond makes the experience of releasing Peggy into the world so bittersweet for Jamison.
"Working on the book itself was not particularly emotionally difficult for me, and people often think that it must have been, but it just felt so exciting and vital and dynamic to spend time with. Rebecca's prose," she said.
"In a way, Rebecca and I got to keep talking, even after she was gone through the process of working on the book."
In a way, Rebecca and I got to keep talking, even after she was gone through the process of working on the book.- Leslie Jamison
But, when she finished Peggy, it was as if the conversation had ended.
"Rebecca's death was an ending, was a threshold in a way that completing the manuscript was not, but there was another ending there, and I hadn't quite anticipated the ferocity of that ending," said Jamison.
Seeing the book out in the world, its different covers, being interviewed about it and seeing how critics interpret it, Jamison is torn.
"I'm glad we can bring this work to readers. I'm glad Rebecca's voice and her work gets to live on. But of course, Rebecca is the one who should be here to see this. Rebecca is the one who should be here to see this cover. Rebecca is the one who should be here to read this review. In each one of those moments, there's that kind of stab, it just feels like an injustice."
This interview was produced by Lisa Mathews.
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