Lyndall Gordon’s Shared Lives: Growing up in 50s Cape Town seeps with the elusive scent of what it was like to be young, female and cultivated for the marriage market as first prize in the race of life.
Gordon’s growing-up years in Cape Town’s Jewish community is a thin slice of time and place, yet her extraordinary biographical skills have been well utilised in this true story of youthful friendship and tragedy, a tale that speaks deeply into the universality of friendship and loss.
In the 1950s, career women were considered just spinsters who “couldn’t get a man”.
In her Sea Point beachfront flat with its gorgeous view, Gordon speaks of “the omnipresence of the marriage market. At 17, turning 18, my friends were already getting married. You were sent to university to keep your eyes open (for a husband): sitting on the steps at the students’ union, looking for BA Marriage”.
Today, she is Senior Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and the distinguished biographer of TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and, most recently, the acclaimed poet Emily Dickinson.
Her life has taken a very different shape from the expectations of her era – that she would marry (which she did) as well as possible and devote the rest of her life to her family.
But none of her success came easily, or immediately.
This sense of a closeted domestic destiny carved in stone is what lies at the heart of Shared Lives, the real story of four friends, including Gordon, who grew up in Cape Town during the era of stiff petticoats and carefully controlled dances in which you were supposed to check out possible husband material.
Three of the four friends died young. And it is their very ordinariness which reveals what insight and value may lie in otherwise obscure lives. Virginia Woolf herself asked if only the lives of great men should be recorded, answered: “What is greatness? And what is smallness?”
The three friends of Gordon who transform into young women are Romy, rebellious daughter of Jewish immigrants, who struggles to live life on her own terms but pays a terrible price in her physical and mental health; Ellie, who became a psychologist, and Rose, who “vanished” into career motherhood.
It is not what they did, but why and for whom, which makes this book so striking, so memorable.
Much of its success is the result of the considerable biographical skills used by Gordon in her frank and sometimes brutal assessment of what happened.
And it is Romy’s story, above all, which cuts to the quick.
“She did inspire, made me feel what was possible. She had the imagination to see what you could do. I failed her,” she admits openly.
Like most inexperienced young people, coping with families and jobs, Gordon was one of many who did not take the ominous signs seriously enough. Regret there is bound to be, but because of this book Romy is no longer an invisible casualty of the past.
“I do accept the subjective element of biography,” says Gordon, who points out that it is “back in fashion”, even in the halls of Oxford, where she teaches, that “there’s factual truth and imaginative truth, and the last is a different sort of truth”.
In order to mine these truths, Gordon must make use of what is available: publications, letters, interviews, oral history, memories, to piece together a large canvas on which she must produce a recognisable and sustainable sketch of those involved.
This she has done in her latest biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns, of Emily Dickinson who, she feels, has been misrepresented as a fragile and frustrated spinster who “missed out” on life, despite her prodigious talent.
“I wanted to write an antidote to the pathetic little woman in seclusion, which is the perception we have been left with,” she says, though it was Dickinson who laid down the blueprint for her own legend.
But, says Gordon, the poet could be explosive and very witty.
“It was she who didn’t allow people to get to her – literally – and she was quite fearless about her passions. She also had quick intuition. Despite being virtually housebound, she foresaw her brother’s mistress.
“And her father, who could be terrifying, was indulgent towards her as no one else.”
There is one biography that Gordon has not yet tackled: a memoir of her mother.
There are echoes of this complex relationship between the two of them in Shared Lives. It is a biography worth anticipating
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l A paperback edition of Gordon’s Life like Loaded Guns, her biography of Emily Dickinson, is now available.