It was in Desai’s office, in 1955, that Rive again met artist Peter Clarke, and for the first time got to know photographer Lionel Oostendorp and writer James Matthews, all of whom were to become his very good friends. Clarke, writing to Langston Hughes in 1955, recalls a gathering of these friends, capturing the cultural earnestness and hunger for ideas of the young men at the time, as well as their love of a good party:
I saw Richard on Saturday, in fact I spent the afternoon at his home. He was having a party for a small group of us which included another writer friend James Matthews and photographer Lionel Oostendorp and one other friend (DRUM was responsible for our getting to know each other). It was quite a happy little affair and we spent the time eating and drinking and being merry while talking books and stories, art, poetry, music and that great old one and only subject, W-O-M-E-N … We listened to Beethoven as rendered by Malcuzynski, we listened to Borodin’s ‘Prince Igor’, Prokofiev, Smetana, excerpts from ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth’ and John Gielgud reading T.S. Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ … There was Chopin and Delibes. Richard has a fine collection of records which make truly enjoyable listening.72
Despite both growing up in a slum, Rive and Matthews had very different dispositions and asserted very different social class allegiances, and also had very different ideas about writing and intended audiences. Rive describes the bond and the differences that marked their friendship from the very start and all the way through their long and often affectionately acrimonious association. The differences between them were already apparent in their first encounter in the office of the Golden City Post in Corporation Street, District Six:
So here was James Matthews, whose stories I had read in the Weekend Argus; the telephone operator who wrote fiction in his spare time. I knew … that he came from a slum area above Bree Street, as beaten up as District Six, and that he had the merest rudiments of a secondary education. I had also heard he was a member of a powerful gang. I realised immediately that he saw in me everything he despised. I was not only Coloured middle class, but I spoke Coloured middle class and behaved Coloured middle class.73
Matthews, in a tribute to Rive in 1989, makes a similar remark about the differences that marked the two men as writers and friends: ‘At times we were the opposite sides of a coin. My habitat the shebeens. Yours the drawing room of academia, our writing the strong bond.’74
Rive embodied a not atypical paradox that was characteristic of the divided subjectivity of black intellectuals in the colonised world during the anti-colonial struggles for independence – being a part of, yet apart from; being black and engaged in struggle, iconic of and giving voice to the oppressed mass, yet being an educated, well-travelled writer and academic, living in fairly comfortable, middle-class conditions. Throughout his life Rive experienced the tension of such straddling of worlds; Matthews was far less wracked by the division, always living in a working-class area, spurning the comforts of suburbia.
It was not only writing that was the strong bond between Matthews and Rive, but also a shared conviction and the courage to speak out against ever-encroaching dictates of white minority rule. A fomenting spirit of defiance and cultural assertiveness marked the early to mid-1950s in South Africa. Th rough short stories, reportage and photography, Rive, Matthews and the writers associated with Drum asserted their humanity and cosmopolitanism in a fusion of African and American themes and styles as a retort to ruling-class attempts to dehumanise and tribalise. Drum, Michael Chapman says, ‘was part of the socialising process of the fifties: it helped to record and create the voices, images and values of a black urban culture at the precise moment that the Minister of Native Affairs, [Hendrik] Verwoerd, was setting out to render untenable any permanent African presence in the so-called “white” cities’.75
One of Rive’s first short stories, ‘The Return’, written in 1953 or possibly even before, was entered for a Drum short story competition which was judged by, amongst others, Langston Hughes. He was asked to be a judge by the assistant editor of Drum, Henry Nxumalo. Hughes not only agreed but also offered to do a column about Drum in the Chicago Defender. Nxumalo sent Hughes the eight stories entered into the competition in December 1953. Rive’s story got second prize.76 Hughes was very impressed with the stories and his exposure to young writers in South Africa gave birth to his idea for the publication of an anthology of African short stories. He began writing to various African writers about his idea, first testing it on Peter Abrahams in London, who promised to contribute stories. He also wrote to the young Rive very soon thereafter:
As one of the judges of Drum’s recent Short Story Contest it was my privilege to read your very beautiful short story, ‘The Return’. I am wondering if you have any more such stories or sketches that you could send me?
There is great interest at the moment in America in Africa, particularly South Africa, it being so much in the news these days. And the books of Alan Patton [sic] and Nadine Gordimer, among others, have been well received here. So, I have talked recently with one of the best American publishers about the possibility of an anthology of short stories by African writers, and he was most favorable to the idea, asking me to assemble such a collection, and promising to give it very careful consideration when gotten together. If accepted for publication, there would be the usual pro rata payment to each writer for his work used therein.
Should you have a half dozen or so more stories concerning the problems, inter-group relations, or folk life of the people, I would be most happy to see them as soon as you can conveniently send them to me for consideration in such an anthology. I liked the story of yours which I have very much and would want to include your work in the book. Peter Abrahams has promised to send me some of his stories from London, and we both feel that a very interesting volume can be assembled. I hope to hear from you soon.
With all good wishes to you for continued good writing,
Sincerely yours,
Langston Hughes77
This letter from the great American poet and storyteller must have made a huge impact on the young South African writer. It marks the start of Rive’s writing career and reputation nationally and internationally. The letter is remarkably similar in formulation to one sent to Peter Clarke (who was using the pseudonym Peter Kumalo at the time for his short stories) as well as to several other African writers, such as Can Themba and Amos Tutuola. Clearly Hughes was not only spurring on African writers but was also driven by his vision for a pan-African anthology of writings. It was the start of an often very detailed and fascinating correspondence between Hughes and Rive that lasted thirteen years, until Hughes’s death on 22 May 1967. Hughes wrote to Peter Clarke, ‘Richard Rive … writes wonderful letters.’78 The correspondence is particularly intense until around mid-1955, after which there is an unexplained gap until it is resumed in 1960. Interestingly, there is a similar gap of about three or four years in the correspondence between Hughes and Mphahlele and between Hughes and Clarke. Timothy Young, curator of the Hughes collection, cannot account for this gap.
Rive, replying to Hughes, is clearly inspired to respond to the hugely encouraging words but does so in a rather polite and formal tone:
I have received your very interesting and encouraging letter. I am afraid I do not conform to the pattern of starving-in-the-attic