Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Peggy Guggenheim was born in 1898 to a New York family second only in wealth to the Rockefellers. It was one which, with some justification, she regarded as cursed, given that her father drowned on the Titanic; her older sister Benita died in childbirth after five miscarriages; her younger sister Hazel was widely believed to have thrown her two sons from the top of a 16-storey building; and her daughter Pegeen died by suicide. Peggy herself escaped any curse, founding influential galleries, first in London in the late 1930s and then in postwar Venice, befriending many of the most eminent artists of the day, supporting some and bedding others. Nevertheless, she was mocked by her contemporaries as “Miss Moneybags” and dismissed by later commentators as a sex-starved dilettante.In Peggy, her second and, sadly, final novel, the Canadian writer Rebecca Godfrey sets out to rehabilitate her. She portrays Peggy as a free spirit, eager to break away from both her oppressive family and the pernicious antisemitism of upper-crust New York. Peggy asks of the latter, “And why do we so want to be inside the Christian blond world when they’re all so frivolous and cruel?” Like her father before her, Peggy escapes to Paris, where she marries Laurence Vail, the charismatic, mercurial “King of Bohemia”, who fathers her two children, while subjecting her to years of derision and abuse.With its luxurious settings, celebrated characters and family feuds, it is a wonder her life has so far escaped adaptation into a Hollywood blockbusterShe finally leaves him, losing custody of her son Sindbad, to live with John Ferrar Holms, a writer who, like Vail, fails to fulfil his promise. It is after Holms’s death that she embarks on her brief but intense affair with Samuel Beckett, who was at that time working as James Joyce’s secretary. Godfrey ends her main narrative in 1938, before Peggy’s flight from Hitler’s Europe and second marriage to Max Ernst. Both of these events are alluded to in an epilogue set 20 years later in Venice, where Peggy continues to flout convention by sunbathing naked in public and pursuing younger men, including the Beat poet Gregory Corso.With its luxurious settings, celebrated characters (Cocteau, Man Ray, Brancusi, Hart Crane, Paul Bowles, all make brief appearances) and family feuds, it is a wonder that Guggenheim’s life has so far escaped adaptation into a Hollywood blockbuster or Netflix series. Godfrey does full justice to the rich eccentricity of the story but, more important, she does justice to Peggy herself by giving her a voice — one that is intimate, urgent, imagistic, as when she writes of Benita confined to a sofa during her final, fatal pregnancy “in a Park Avenue apartment that felt like an imitation of a dollhouse, holding her hand on her stomach, the only motion allowed, the heartbeat”.The authorship of the novel tells a story in itself. Godfrey had worked on it for 10 years before her death from cancer in 2022, and it has been completed by her friend and fellow novelist Leslie Jamison, who writes that, while the first two parts are almost entirely Godfrey’s own, she has constructed the third part from surviving material and copious notes. Jamison has so absorbed Godfrey’s style that it’s impossible to discern the seams and, if the third part is less engaging than the first two, it is largely because Beckett, while an infinitely greater writer, is a less compelling character than either Vail or Holms. In this act of literary homage, Jamison has honoured Godfrey just as Godfrey has honoured Peggy. Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison John Murray £18.99, 384 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
