Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict. Anton Gill
Review, perhaps prompted by Kohn, approached her for money and an introduction to one of her moneyed uncles. Peggy didn’t help with cash, but sent Anderson off to Jefferson Seligman, in the hope that even if she didn’t get the $500 she sought, she might at least get a coat out of the uncle.
The Little Review was one of the most important and long-lived of the literary and arts magazines that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, before most of them were superseded by television. It moved home in the course of its fifteen-year life from Chicago to San Francisco, thence to New York, and finally to Paris, publishing many of the great names of contemporary literature, including T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford and Amy Lowell. Ezra Pound was its foreign editor from 1917 to 1919, and its major claim to fame was its serialisation, beginning in 1918, of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It may seem odd that Peggy was not keener to associate herself with a review which was concerned with so many of the people and ideas she was soon to embrace; but it wasn’t long before she became involved, albeit tangentially, with the literary world.
Needing above all to work, and to meet people outside her immediate social circle, Peggy took a job with her own dentist as a temporary nurse-cum-receptionist, filling in for the regular girl who was off sick. The work came to an end when the proper nurse returned, much to Florette’s relief; she hadn’t liked the idea of her friends and acquaintances discovering that one of her daughters was working as a dental nurse. Florette’s relief was, however, short-lived. Peggy now took a much more significant, though unpaid, job, as a clerk in an avant-garde bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, not far from home, in the Yale Club Building on 44th Street. The bookshop was run by Madge Jenison and Mary Mowbray Clarke. Clarke was the dominant partner, and ran the store as a kind of club. She only sold books she believed in, and literati and artists were constantly dropping in and staying to talk. Peggy quickly found that here was a society to which she wanted to belong.
She’d got the job through her cousin Harold Loeb, seven years her senior, who had injected $5000 into the Sunwise Turn when it ran into financial difficulties, and was now a partner in the enterprise. Harold was the son of Peggy’s aunt Rose Guggenheim and her first husband, Albert Loeb, whose brother James was the founder of the Loeb Classical Library.
Harold inherited a strong literary inclination. He joined the great exodus of young Americans to Europe in the early 1920s, published three novels and an autobiography, and founded and ran, first from Rome and then from Berlin, a short-lived but immensely important arts and literature magazine called Broom, which published, inter alia, the works of Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, John Dos Passos and Gertrude Stein. Aimed at an American readership, Broom also ran reproductions of works by such artists as Grosz, Kandinsky, Klee, Matisse and Picasso, all then little-known in the New World, and many of whom were still struggling for recognition in the Old. It was always a struggle to keep Broom afloat, and at the outset Harold appealed to his uncle Simon for funds. This may not have been tactful. Harold belonged to another ‘poor’ Guggenheim branch – his mother had been left only $500,000 by her father. Uncle Simon had given him a well-paid job with the family concern as soon as he graduated from Princeton, but a life in business had not suited Harold at all and he had left to become, to all intents and purposes, a bohemian. His request was frostily rejected: ‘I have since discussed with all your uncles the question of the endowment you wished for Broom, and I am reluctantly obliged to inform you we decided we would not care to make you any advances whatsoever. Our feeling is that Broom is essentially a magazine for a rich man with a hobby … I am sorry that you are not in an enterprise that would show a profit at an earlier date.’
Harold had already left for Europe, where his uncle’s letter reached him. He replied sharply: ‘From what little I know of your early career, it seems to me that you have more than once chosen the daring and visionary to the safety-first alternative …’ He did not get a reply.
The biographer Matthew Josephson was an associate editor of Broom as a young man, and a recollection in his memoirs provides an interesting footnote to this contretemps:
The curious thing about this episode is that a while later those same hard-boiled Guggenheim uncles of his wound up by imitating their poor relation Harold Loeb, and becoming patrons of the arts on a gigantic scale. Beginning in 1924, Uncle Simon donated some $18 million to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation [named for one of his sons who had died of pneumonia in 1922 aged seventeen] which provided fellowships for hundreds of artists and writers, including quite a number of contributors to Broom whom Simon Guggenheim had formerly been unable to understand.
Broom ceased publication in 1924, and it was then that Harold went to Paris to work on his first novel. There he met the young Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had had a few stories and poems published, but was still feeling his way as a writer. He was ambitious and insecure. What started as a friendship developed into rivalry and ended in unpleasant schism.
The bottom line is that Hemingway was envious of Loeb, who was both better educated and richer than he was. Loeb could and did outbox the boastful Hemingway, and he was a better tennis player. He also had more success with women, and at the time it looked as if he would outstrip Hemingway as a writer. When a party was made up to go to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, which Hemingway had attended before, and on which he held himself to be an expert, Loeb actually grappled a bull, was lifted aloft as he gripped the animal’s horns, then managed to disengage successfully, landing on his feet, eyeglasses still securely on his nose. The crowd roared their approval.
Hemingway, whose association with bulls was limited to talking about them and watching them die (something Loeb found distasteful), couldn’t forgive the perceived humiliation – the more so since Harold was making headway with Lady Duff Twysden, whom Hemingway had also hoped to impress.
Loeb did not set out to needle Hemingway, but the younger man’s resentment ran deep, and spilled out in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), in which a number of those present on the Pamplona trip in the summer of 1925 are cruelly portrayed; but none more so than Loeb, who appears in the book as Robert Cohn. Written in hot blood – Hemingway finished the novel in late September 1925 – The Sun Also Rises appears today so anti-Semitic (even when one allows for a period when anti-Semitism was, in certain circles, semi-acceptable) as to beggar belief. The real focus for Hemingway’s hatred of Cohn lies in the fact that he was in all ways bested by Loeb. Loeb rose above it, but never in his long life (he died in 1974) got over the betrayal.
The extent to which Hemingway caused offence is best described by Matthew Josephson:
After The Sun Also Rises came out, Harold said no more about Hemingway. Their friendship was ruptured. It seemed that in completing his story of the so-called ‘Lost Generation’, the young novelist had painted his circle of friends in Paris from life … there were at least six of [the novel’s] characters who recognised themselves in its pages and set off in search of the author in order to settle accounts with him, according to the reminiscences of James Charters [Jimmie the Barman], a retired English pugilist who was Hemingway’s favorite barman in Paris …
I had paused for a moment at the bar of the Dôme for an apéritif, and stood beside a tall slender woman who was also having something and who engaged me in conversation, at once informed and reserved. She had a rather long face, auburn hair, and wore an old green felt hat that came down over her eyes; moreover, she was dressed in tweeds and talked with an English accent. We were soon joined by a handsome but tired-looking Englishman whom she called ‘Mike’, evidently her companion. They drank steadily, chatted with me, and then asked me to go along with them to Jimmy’s Bar near the Place de l’Odéon, a place that had acquired some fame during my absence from France. In a relaxed way we carried on a light conversation, having three or four drinks and feeling ourselves all the more charming for that. Then Laurence Vail came into the bar and hailed the lady as ‘Duff’. At this, I began to recall having heard about certain people in Paris who were supposed to be the models of Hemingway’s ‘lost ones’; the very accent of their speech, the way they downed a drink (‘Drink-up-cheerio’), and the bantering manner with its undertone of depression. It was all there.
Suddenly Harold Loeb himself