Exploring issues of homosexuality raises ethical considerations about making public the private, particularly because of the absence of any direct link between Rive’s homosexuality and his creative output, and also because of his own very evident silence about his homosexuality throughout his life. Alf Wannenburgh remarks in his memoir of Rive that ‘there were large areas of his own inner life that he was not prepared to disclose, even to those who knew him well’.12 Rive’s friends and associates had widely differing opinions about addressing the topic of his homosexuality, from ‘tell everything’, as advocated by Stephen Gray, to Es’kia Mphahlele, who ‘had no idea’ about Rive’s being gay, implying, it seems, as many did in interviews, that his sexual preference was never known to them or, by implication, of no consequence as far as they were concerned.13 Yet others refuse to talk about it and one senses the extent to which for many, even in our own time, homosexuality remains a taboo subject or ‘irrelevant’ – an invasion, it is felt, of the person’s right to privacy. Yet, as William McFeely insists, ‘as either the writer or the reader engages in a biography or autobiography, there is a conjunction of the private and the public’.14
We all draw the line between the private and the public but at different points. How far do you go? And why go there? A tension of competing interests marks where the border should be, as recognised by Gray when he says that ‘all literary biography is a tug-of-wishes between the private being’s will to reticence and the publicist’s to disclosure’.15 As a biographer, I am convinced by the idea that the personal and historical are inextricably linked. I nod at Robert M Young when he says that ‘one of the things I most like about biography is that it celebrates … the history of ideas, narrative, will, character and the validity of the subject’s subjectivity’.16 I am curious about the connection or apparent absence of connection between the private and the public, the subjective and the social, in particular with regard to questions of desire and sexuality. This biography does not ‘out’ Rive – his being gay was widely suspected, whispered about or guessed at and even known about, especially in his adult years, and his murder and the subsequent widely reported trial of the two young men accused of killing him finally established his homosexuality as public fact. Unlike the dominant notion of ‘being homosexual’ that pervades Western ideas of identity, Rive’s precarious simultaneous state of being and not being gay is far more dynamic, all the more fraught, a space of sexual being that prevails widely, especially in postcolonial contexts where fixed categorisation is often resisted and alien to lived experience.
In writing this book, I have attempted to walk a line between empathy for Rive’s own desire for privacy and my own curiosity about silences, queer literary encodings or readings and sexuality. A constant image throughout the project has been an awareness of Rive looking over my shoulder as I write his life; not infrequently I have had to remind him this is my version of his story, not his. Rive’s sexual life comes into focus to explore possible meanings of these tense, visible or veiled intersections, rather than appearing for their own sake or merely for reader titillation.17 What level of detail is used and to what end? The exploration of sexuality is carried out, it is hoped, with contextual and ethical considerations constantly in mind. As I explored aspects of Rive’s public and private life over the years, I realised how partial I had become to his ideas, his convictions and the way he navigated the trauma, doubt and dilemmas in his work and life. The nature of Rive’s strained relationship with his family, his unspoken homosexuality and proclivity for young men and the violent and mysterious circumstances of his death were matters some interviewees found sensitive and chose to avoid, explain away or refuse to talk about altogether. While responses to these questions were formulated and refined and redefined during the process of transcription and writing, I kept falling back on the response that, while attempting to maintain empathy with Rive and his assumed sensibilities, I needed to make the narrative my own, pursuing lines of inquiry I could justify as valid, useful, informed and considered. This work attempts a historically accurate account of Rive’s life as far as possible, but combines this with the particular lenses I chose in order to refract his life. I had hoped to unearth some of the fascinating enmeshing of the intensely personal and private on the one hand and the macro socio-economic on the other, but, for the most part, the nature of such entanglements continues to baffle.
Lastly, I read Rive’s life and fiction as distorting echo chambers of each other. Reading real authorial life from clues in the fiction – reading the fiction as symptomatic of authorial consciousness and life facts – and inversely reading fiction in the light of that life, risks downplaying the mysterious interconnectedness and often autonomous existence of these two realms. Placing them side by side to compose a fuller portrait of Rive’s life is helped by his own insistence that his life and fiction were closely linked; on many occasions he insisted that his stories and novels were ‘faction’. Biographer Michael Holroyd believes that the main business of the literary biographer is to ‘chart illuminating connections between past and present, life and work’, typifying the strong and very productive empiricist tradition of anglophone biography.18 Such attempts at mapping between life and work are not simple one-to-one matches but are instead intricately threaded conjoining and disjunctures, in constant tension and often contradictory, mediated by the dynamics within and between such diverse domains as individual imagination and macro socio-economic contexts.
This biography proceeds chronologically from shortly before Rive’s birth in 1930 to his death in 1989 and slightly into the posthumous period. I give greater prominence to momentary images – large photographs that mark parts of Rive’s life on which I reflect closely in an attempt to cohere the narrative around the specific image. I place the photographs in positions where they talk to a segment of the text, rather than, as is more conventional in many biographies, interspersing the photographs, chronologically ordered, in a few compressed folders which form an impressionistic visual narrative illustrative of the story in the text. I do close readings of the images to echo, contribute to or interrogate the main narrative in the text. I use nine images, all but four by George Hallett, a world-renowned photographer who was a pupil and lifelong friend of Rive’s, and who believes it was Rive who opened him up to the idea of becoming an artist. These particular photographs also suggest their own mute narrative that Hallett imparts to us about Rive. Only very particular, fleeting moments and gestures become visible, but all other times of Rive’s life remain visually unseen.
The cover photograph was taken by George Hallett in 1966 or 1967, when Rive was in his late thirties, just before he left for Oxford to do his doctorate and Hallett himself went into exile. Taken in Rive’s flat in Selous Court, Claremont, Cape Town, the image, with the backdrop of books ordered on bookshelves and framed artwork on the walls, features in the foreground the comfortable, confident, even cocky man in a typical gesture of his, arm over the head as if to frame himself as he is framing his words, fingers containing the temple in a gesture associated with thought. He is seated and, with his eyes overlined by those distinctive fulsome eyebrows, he stares directly at the photographer, his protégé, and beyond at us, not smiling but holding forth, claiming a point, loud, yet, as is the way of a photograph, silent and therefore forever ambiguous. He talks to us but he is mute.
Late twentieth century and early twenty-first century work on biography (Paula Backscheider, Michael Holroyd, Hermoine Lee and, in a South African context, Mark Gevisser, John Hyslop and Roger Field, among others) reveals a much greater degree of self-consciousness about its project than earlier work from the late nineteenth century onwards, which reflected more confident, unquestioned assumptions about epistemology and objectivity. What film-maker and photographer Errol Morris says of photography is equally true of biography – photographs (biographies) edit reality; they ‘reveal and they conceal’ and tell us something of the real but never the whole story; they can document, but they also skew; they can tell us something, a partial truth, but simultaneously remain a mystery.19
I have used archival documentation, Rive’s own work, writings on Rive, personal