How Leslie Jamison helped realize her friend’s final dream – and brought Peggy Guggenheim’s story to life

When the late writer Rebecca Godfrey was working on the novel, PeggyShe knew that whatever happened to her, she wanted it finished.

Godfrey, an author and 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 a decade before she died of lung cancer at age 54.

“She wanted this to be a beautiful whole work of art, rather than an artifact or a curio that you look at in a museum cabinet,” said her friend Leslie Jamison – and the writer who ultimately completed it – on Bookends with Mattea Roach.

Born in Toronto and raised in Victoria, Godfrey left pages of notes and dictated instructions for the completion of Peggy. After her death, her literary executor and agent, Christy Fletcher, and her husband Jamison asked to complete it.

“What went through my mind when they asked me was, ‘Yes, this is an honor. This is incredibly intimidating. I’ve never done anything like this before,'” Jamison said.

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 participate a little in the battle of ignorance and uncertainty. And knowing that she did want it done and that we were all really making a collective effort to honor those wishes that just felt like the North Star, to know what those wishes had been.”

A posthumous collaboration

PeggyTold in three parts, it begins with Guggenheim’s childhood in New York City as the daughter of two Jewish dynasties and her search for something other than the world of social expectations she grew up with. The second part takes her to Paris, where she experiences her ‘artistic maturity’, meets many notable creatives, experiences the disappointments of her marriage and lives a bohemian lifestyle. Those parts, Jamison said, were largely completed by Godfrey before she died.

The final section, which explores the Guggenheim’s first gallery opening in London and her brief 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, featuring Guggenheim in her palazzo in Venice, where great artists were entertained, were compiled from manuscripts, documents, notes and files from Godfrey’s writings and research.

“It really felt like a jigsaw puzzle where Rebecca was no longer there to tell us what to do, but she had left all these clues and all these kind of beautiful fragments of her vision with different people who had loved her and had been there. a lot of talking to her about the book.”

At some point in the process, however, Jamison realized that the research, while necessary, was becoming a way to delay starting to write.

“I wanted to break into that thing Rebecca made and I didn’t want to hurt it,” Jamison said. “I didn’t want to degrade it. I didn’t want to dishonor it. I didn’t want to pollute it.”

After realizing she just had to take the plunge and dive in, Jamison, who had some research funding, 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 wasn’t in my voice, and it was in this complicated triangle with two other women, both of whom were ghosts, I had to put my life behind me a little.”

Taking Peggy seriously

For PeggyGodfrey had the novel published The torn skirt and the non-fiction title Under the bridge and was fascinated by the lives of complicated women who pushed boundaries and did not live the way society expected them to.

Godfrey even taught a seminar on antiheroines in the Columbia graduate writing program.

“These are women who were disruptive, who sometimes cared more about their work than their children, these deadly sins,” says Jamison, who also teaches at Columbia and met Godfrey there.

“I knew that a lot of students who had taken this anti-heroin seminar loved it, felt like it really gave them permission to write the kinds of female characters that they wanted to write, who weren’t necessarily sympathetic, who didn’t what they wanted to do, who did not give in to traditional or even palatable ideas of what a woman should be.”

Jamison said that Godfrey probably viewed Guggenheim as part of this lineage of anti-heroines and wanted to write her fictional story in a way that takes Guggenheim seriously, even though she had previously been seen as a dilettante.

“She takes Peggy seriously as someone who left this lasting impact on art history, and within the landscape of fiction, Rebecca (Godfrey) can make a very strong stand.”

Conversing with ghosts

Deep discussions about their writing, the love that shaped them, and the relationship between making art and raising their daughters were an important part of Godfrey and Jamison’s bond.

They met in 2019, just three years before Godfrey died, which “perhaps accelerated or deepened” their friendship, Jamison said.

“We were two people who liked to jump into the deep end of the pool. We wanted to talk about the things that mattered.”

Their bond makes the experience of letting go Peggy in the world that is so bittersweet for Jamison.

‘Working on the book itself wasn’t particularly emotionally difficult for me, and people often think it must have been, but it just felt so exciting, vital and dynamic to spend time with. Rebecca’s prose,” she said.

“In a way, even after she went through the process of working on the book, Rebecca and I continued to talk.”

In a sense, Rebecca and I continued to talk even after she went through the process of working on the book.-Leslie Jamison

But when she was done Peggyit was as if the conversation had ended.

“Rebecca’s death was an ending, a threshold in a way that completing the manuscript was not, but there was another ending, and I didn’t quite expect the brutality of that ending,” Jamison said.

Jamison is torn as he sees the book released into the world, with its different covers, being interviewed about it and seeing how critics interpret it.

“I’m glad we can bring this work to readers. I’m glad Rebecca’s voice and her work lives on. But of course, Rebecca is the one who should be here to see this. Rebecca is the one who should be.” Rebecca is the one who should be here to read this review. In each of those moments there’s that kind of sting, it just feels like an injustice.

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This interview was produced by Lisa Mathews.