Author Rebecca Godfrey left behind an unfinished manuscript and notes toward its completion when she died of cancer in 2022. The new novel, Peggy, is the result of the collaborations, interventions and imaginings necessary to bring the inherited work to print.Brigitte Lacombe
Few are so lucky as to die with all their affairs in order, all business finished, their proverbial “t”s crossed and “i”s meticulously dotted. More commonly, the final full stop arrives while important sentences remain unuttered; in the life of a writer, entire books may go unwritten.
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Such was not quite the case for Rebecca Godfrey, the author celebrated for her gutsy investigative journalism in Under the Bridge and her equally daring novel, The Torn Skirt. Godfrey spent many of her last conversations on Earth describing her ambition for her work-in-progress, a novel based on the early life of one the 20th century’s icons, the ribald, taste-making heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim.
When Godfrey died of cancer in 2022, she left behind an unfinished manuscript and notes toward its completion. Her husband, Herbert Wilson, spent some of their last moments together taking dictation on her novel. She’d discussed the final chapters with her agent, Christy Fletcher, and other visitors, including her friend and colleague, the essayist Leslie Jamison.
Leslie Jamison, pictured in 2017.Beowulf Sheehan/The Globe and Mail
After Godfrey’s death, Wilson and Fletcher invited Jamison into the manuscript, asking her to finish Godfrey’s book. Peggy, the result of the collaborations, interventions, and imaginings necessary to bringing to print the inherited work, will be published this month.
“The biggest reason that I said yes is that Rebecca made it very clear to some of the most important people in her life, including Christy, her agent and literary executor, that if she died before she finished the book, she didn’t want it published in an incomplete form,” Jamison says over Zoom.
“She wanted it finished somehow. Even though she didn’t, you know, name a name. I was grateful to her, posthumously grateful, for being so clear about her desires on that front. Because I think if she hadn’t been so clear, there would’ve been for me at least more of a torn feeling about saying yes.”
Taking over the manuscript was an intimate act for Jamison. “I wanted to come to this project as a cipher, a delivery mechanism for Rebecca’s voice,” she says. “There was a kind of humility and tentativeness that felt appropriate to bring to the project as I was entering into it.” As such, Jamison worked with a very light hand on the existing material, though the final section of the novel more directly reveals her fingerprints on the work.
“I think it’s important to really honour how much of the book, how the vast bulk and majority of the book, is hers. She had left behind a finished version of part one, Peggy’s childhood through her adolescence. Of course, it’s impossible to say – Rebecca was such a rigorous editor of her own work that no doubt she would’ve had more she wanted to change or revise in that first part. But because it already worked so beautifully, and I know she was pretty happy with it, that was basically left untouched.”
The second section, spanning the period of time between 1922, when Peggy moved to Paris and married the violent, bohemian writer Laurence Vail, and 1928, when they divorce, “was a little bit rougher,” Jamison says. “There were certain scenes that she had multiple versions of – scenes that were more sketched out, especially near the end. So there was more active editorial work, but even that was collaborative. I was definitely the one getting in there with the manuscript, making choices about how scenes were working, but I was working with a big hard drive of material, earlier drafts, additional notes.”
Godfrey had left behind 30 pages of material for the third section, which covers the period just before the Second World War, where Peggy prepares to open her first art gallery and engages in a brief but transformative love affair with a young Samuel Beckett.
“That was the section where I was operating more on my own conversations with Rebecca, especially in the last couple months of her life. I would visit her in the hospital and that third section was one of the things that we talked about. So I feel like I had her voice in my head, helping return me always to the driving emotional force of that third part.”
As you might expect, Jamison has her own voice, and her own writerly preoccupations. The prose of the novel’s third section reads differently from the rest; where the first two sections feature long sentences and detailed descriptions of clothing, interiors and people, the final chapters have a distinctly Jamisonian rhythm, with truncated paragraphs and sentence fragments employed as a means of condensing descriptions of the external environment.
When asked about the third section’s tonal departure, Jamison says that “the book, of course, is not what Rebecca would’ve written if she’d been able to write the whole thing.” The material that Godfrey had planned for that section is, Jamison says, perhaps evidence that her interiority-focused technique are “within the framework of how Rebecca imagined Peggy as a character.”
The novel’s myriad inaccuracies and plotting errors, however, are harder to imagine as something Godfrey would have wanted within her narrative framework, even if they appear in sections Jamison says were essentially exactly as Godfrey had drafted them.
Editorial inconsistencies appear with some frequency, such as the occasional use and subsequent abandonment of quotation marks to indicate dialogue, or the moments where the narrator will say, for example, “I’d lost touch with Helen and Fay and the other girls from Jacobi,” only to remark five pages later that “I cleaned my nails with the knife Helen had given me. She was spending the summer in Cambridge and sent me letters now and then, filled with poetry.” These and other errors create a sense that the book, despite Godfrey’s wishes, is not quite finished, even as it hits the shelves.
When asked about the inaccuracies, Jamison maintains she did not want to change things in the first section, because “the extant version we had from Rebecca felt kind of self-possessed and was something that I knew she and her first editor had been very happy with. Fiction takes its prerogatives and diverges from reality.” She was focused more intently on the pieces she was responsible for writing.
The author of a posthumously published novel does not get the final say, nor do they get to declare a book finished. Godfrey died too soon to see Peggy come to print, and we’ll never know if the editorial interventions (or lack thereof) made to the final book would have adhered to her vision or her talent.
We know only that she looked at the life of one of the 20th century’s icons and saw material for creating something of her own. “Perhaps the image is as important as the action,” she wrote in Peggy. “Isn’t that what art is? An idea, an image as important as an action?”