Peggy Guggenheim by Francine Prose

Author:Francine Prose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

Paris Before the War

WHEN PEGGY and Nellie arrived in France, Peggy was in a fragile state, and seemed to have lost some of the confidence and resilience she’d developed as director of Guggenheim Jeune. Tanguy had found another mistress, the American artist Kay Sage, and Peggy experienced his defection as a painful rejection. Her health was weak, perhaps as a lingering consequence of an abortion she had undergone in early 1939. Peggy and Nellie visited Megève, where they turned Sindbad over to his father and stepmother, and where Kay Boyle’s hatred for Peggy appeared to be outliving her passion for Peggy’s former husband. From Megève, Peggy and Nellie continued on to the south of France.

The signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact had dramatically increased the uncertainty and tension throughout Europe. Peggy briefly considered taking the children to London. But Laurence persuaded her to remain in France until they had a clearer sense of what was going to happen.

Peggy and Nellie decided to establish a refuge where artists could wait out the war; perhaps Peggy was envisioning a large communal household on the model of Hayford Hall. But her plans came to nothing. “Had I known more about artists at that time I would never have dreamt of anything so mad as trying to live with them in any kind of harmony or peace. . . . As soon as I got back to Paris and met a few of the people we had thought of inviting, I realized what a hell life would have been. They not only could not have lived together, but did not even want to come to dinner with each other.”

Back in Paris, her energies restored, Peggy addressed the problem of what to do about Djuna Barnes. By now her friendship with Djuna (and Djuna’s physical and mental condition) had so deteriorated that Peggy threatened to withdraw her support unless Barnes curbed her drinking. Enraged by the idea that Peggy was entertaining the idea of starting a museum while she was starving, Djuna wrote to Emily Coleman (who had moved to Arizona) that Peggy had gone mad like her forbears, and would surely have been locked up in an asylum were she not so wealthy. Eventually, Peggy arranged for Djuna Barnes and Yves Tanguy to sail on the same boat for the United States.

Peggy stayed first at Mary Reynolds’s apartment, where she had spent her idyll with Beckett, who appeared in Peggy’s life yet again—just in time to watch her fall down a flight of stairs and dislocate her knee, an injury that required a stay at the American Hospital. After her discharge, Peggy moved into Kay Sage’s former apartment on the Île Saint-Louis.

Paris seemed safe for the moment, and Peggy took pleasure in the beauty of her home, in its proximity to the Seine, and in the fact that she could lie in bed and watch the play of the light on the river reflected on her ceiling. It was, Peggy writes, one of the happiest times in her life.

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