Laurence Vail was one of the people Peggy met and was fascinated by during the time she worked at the Sunwise Turn, and he was the one destined to have the most profound effect on her life; but at the time there were plenty of others: the poets Alfred Kreymborg and Lola Ridge were frequently there, as were the painters Marsden Hartley and Charles Burchfield, and, among the writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Peggy idolised Mary Mowbray Clarke, who became a role model for her as a liberated woman and a friend of artists.
Peggy, though she had no idea of how to mix with these new and intriguing people, and though she came to work swathed in scent, wearing pearls and ‘a magnificent taupe coat’, still had to work. And it wasn’t always fun. Her mother was suspicious of the bookshop and constantly popped in to check up on her daughter, embarrassing her by bringing her a raincoat if the weather turned bad, and irritating her with her questions. Equally embarrassing, though welcome to the bookshop (which throws a sidelight on Clarke), was a succession of Guggenheim and Seligman aunts who ordered books by the yard to fill up the shelves of their apartments and houses. These books were never intended to be read: they were a kind of wallpaper.
The work itself was mainly dull, routine filing, but Peggy did it willingly, for the joy of being in such a place more than compensated for the grind. One thing she did resent, however, was that she was only allowed down into the shop itself, from the gallery where her desk was, at lunchtimes, and even then she was only allowed to sell books if no one else was on hand. Whether Clarke considered her too much of a greenhorn or too much of a liability if let loose on the floor of the shop is unclear.
However, Peggy did gradually get to meet the people she wanted to meet, and she softened any reservations Clarke had by being not only a good employee but a good customer. In lieu of a wage, she was allowed a 10 per cent discount on any book she bought. To give herself the impression of getting a good salary, she bought modern literature in stacks and read it all with her usual voraciousness.
Among the other luminaries who frequented the Sunwise Turn were Leon and Helen Fleischman. Leon was a director of the publishers Boni and Liveright, and Helen, who like Peggy came from a leading New York Jewish family, had embraced the bohemian life. Following one of the fashions which succeeded the social upheaval marked by the end of the First World War, Leon and Helen played at having an open marriage. Peggy, who latched on to them as substitutes for Benita, whom she still missed bitterly, promptly fell for Leon. In a passage omitted from the bowdlerised 1960 edition of her autobiography, she tells us: ‘I fell in love with Leon, who to me looked like a Greek God, but Helen didn’t mind. They were so free.’ We do not learn whether or not the crush led to any kind of affair. Peggy then was more interested in settling into and being accepted by an artistic milieu.
The Fleischmans introduced Peggy to Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz, then in his mid-fifties, was a pioneer of photography and the founder of the avant-garde Photo-Secession group. Leon and Helen took Peggy to meet him at 291, his tiny gallery on 5th Avenue. How formative the meeting was at the time for Peggy we do not know, but Stieglitz, whose interests were not confined to photography, was the first to show Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse in the United States, and at the time of their meeting was increasingly interested in modern abstract art. The 291 Gallery became an important centre for avant-garde painting and sculpture, and on this occasion Peggy had her first experience of it. She was shown a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, later Stieglitz’s wife. We are not told what the picture was, but it was clearly an abstract, because Peggy ‘turned it around four times before I decided which way to look at it’. Her response must have been positive, because the reaction of her friends and of Stieglitz was one of delight. Peggy further tells us that although didn’t see Stieglitz again for another twenty-five years, ‘when I talked to him I felt as if there had been no interval. We took up where we left off.’ By then, of course, Peggy had become a doyenne of modern art herself. But was seeing the O’Keeffe her epiphany? Or did abstract painting simply provide a focus for her rebellious spirit, symbolising as it did the unconventional and questioning psyche of her new friends, with whom she was beginning to feel more and more at home? It would still be a long time before her own association with modern art began, and as she was never a reflective person, it’s possible that epiphanies, whether conscious or unconscious, were not in her line.
What she wanted was to belong. What got in the way was her own inability to give.
Laurence Vail was also a friend of the Fleischmans. He was the son of an American mother and a Franco-American father, and although he was an American citizen, he had been brought up in France and educated at Oxford, where he read modern languages. Fluent in English, French and Italian – he served as a liaison officer in the US Army with the heavy artillery during the war – European in manner, speaking with an Anglo-French accent, he could be charming and debonair. He turned twenty-nine in 1920, but still had not found his way into any particular artistic field, though there was no doubt that it was in the arts that his talents lay, being both a passable painter and, which seemed to be his forte, a writer. Based in Paris, he was in New York because a short play of his, What D’You Want? was to be produced by the Provincetown Players, an innovative group with their roots in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but who by now were producing work at the Playwrights’ Theatre in Greenwich Village and at the Greenwich Village Theatre. Vail’s one-acter was to be performed as a curtain-raiser to a Eugene O’Neill play. In Vail’s cast was a woman who would later play a significant part in Peggy’s life, Mina Loy. Vail also had a bit-part in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, already a Provincetown success, now playing in New York.
Greenwich Village had begun to fill with artistic life. Rents were low, and word spread. Perhaps the most striking single symbol of the new order in New York, though far from the most important, was a German, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She had drifted from an unhappy and poor home into prostitution, but later managed to enrol as an art student in Munich, whence she moved via a wretched marriage into German literary circles. A colourful lover brought her to America as he sought to escape the clutches of the police at home, but he abandoned her in Kentucky in 1909. The thirty-five-year-old Elsa made her way to New York, where she married the impoverished exiled German baron from whom she got her title. He left her at the outbreak of war and killed himself in Switzerland at its end. Remaining in New York, she drifted into modelling for artists, lived hand-to-mouth, was adopted as an occasional contributor and cause célèbre by the Little Review, and turned herself into the living embodiment of the age. To visit the French consul she wore an icing-sugar-coated birthday cake on her head, complete with fifty lit candles, with matchboxes or sugarplums for earrings. Her face was stuck with stamps as ‘beauty-spots’ and she had painted her face emerald green. Her eyelashes were gilded porcupine quills and she wore a necklace of dried figs. On another occasion she adopted yellow face-powder and black lipstick, setting the effect off with a coal-scuttle worn as a hat, and on yet another – and this was in 1917 – she met the writer and painter George Biddle dressed in a scarlet raincoat, which she swept open ‘with a royal gesture’ to reveal that she was all but naked underneath:
Over the nipples of her breasts were two tin tomato cans, fastened with a green string about her back. Between the tomato cans hung a very small birdcage and within it a crestfallen canary. One arm was covered from wrist to shoulder with celluloid curtain rings, which she later admitted to have pilfered from a furniture display in Wanamaker’s. She removed her hat, which had been tastefully but inconspicuously trimmed with gilded carrots, beets and other vegetables. Her hair was close cropped and dyed vermilion.
This true original could not last. Living as she did in squalor, and always in trouble with the police, her popularity faded with her looks, and her mind gradually crumbled. Abandoned by all but a few, one of them being the novelist Djuna Barnes, she made her way back to Europe, where she ended up in dire poverty in Potsdam. Her body was found shortly before Christmas 1927, her head resting in a gas oven. Peggy never knew her; but she heard of her, and was fascinated and scared of such a complete