Richard Rive. Shaun Viljoen

that Georgina would have been horrified had she known he was gay. She never did realise he was gay or, like many of her generation, possibly refused to recognise something that was beyond her comprehension or moral universe. Josias also says that Rive became especially estranged from his sister Lucy because her husband was hostile to him – perhaps, Josias speculates, because they were jealous of his achievements or perhaps his homosexuality became evident at a later stage and so the hostility increased. Rive must have sensed even at a very early age this fairly widespread socially encrypted disgust for homosexual men and this increased the distance between him and his family. At what age he realised he was gay, or what the terms he used to think about his own sexuality were, remain unknown.

      One of Rive’s enduring friends was the artist Albert Adams. They met as fellow students at Hewat College, where Adams was a year ahead of Rive. Adams was much more comfortable with being a gay man at that stage than Rive was and accounted for the difference in the following terms:

       I think even in ’53 I knew Richard was gay … Dennis Bullough was a gay chap who lived in Bree Street and he had a partner, John Dronsfield, who was an artist, and Bullough and Dronsfield kept a kind of open house for artists and the like. And Bill Currie was a close friend of Dennis Bullough, and if you knew Bill [as Richard did] you were invited to Bree Street … it was a group of gay people and, you know, if you were … there, you were gay … Already then I knew that Richard was gay; we all knew that he was gay. Although our gayness, I think, was a little bit more open than Richard’s. Richard had this macho-image of course, he was also a sportsman … So he was involved with sports and young people, and I suppose … I don’t know to what degree that also [kept] a halter on him to keep his gayness under cover … It would really not have, not have been accepted had he worked with young men, you know, on the sports field … it was also simply part of Richard’s insecurity. I’m thinking … underneath all this kind of bravado, and this really extrovert, public image that he gave, I think there was a, a real sense of … insecurity on Richard’s part. I’m … almost sure about that.³⁵

      Adams was one of the very few friends with whom Richard was open about his gayness, but even with Adams he was reticent about revealing any details of his private sexual affairs.

      Rive decided, it seems, not only to keep his sexuality an intensely private matter, but to deflect it by recreating heterosexual stances that could be perceived as indicating his ‘normality’. Writer Es’kia Mphahlele, who first met Rive in 1955 and became a lifelong friend and mentor, was bothered by Rive’s lack of family attachments and also wondered whether his father was from Madagascar because the name ‘Rive’ is so close to ‘Rivo’ or ‘Rivero’. Mphahlele also remembers that Rive did not relate to his brothers because they were not from his father. There was clearly a distance between him and his family, Mphahlele says, and Rive seemed to have cut all family ties, claiming he would leave his house to his nephew instead.³⁶ Rive left his house to Ian Rutgers, who was not a relative but the man to whom Rive was extremely close for a long, long time. Ian lived in a room in Rive’s flat and then house for many years. He was the brother of Andrew Rutgers, whom Rive had befriended when Andrew was a young student of his. Rive became very friendly with the Rutgers family. Ian regarded Rive as a mentor and even father figure and did not or could not reciprocate the physical attraction Rive felt for him. ‘Nephew’, unbeknown to Mphahlele, was not indicative of a blood relative but was, instead, often a code word used by Rive for a young man he felt close to, and to whom he might have been sexually attracted or involved with, and whose presence he had to explain away, ironically by invoking conventional familial relations.

      Those of us who worked with Rive during his years as a lecturer at Hewat College remember being introduced, during suppers at his home in Windsor Park or on the sports field, to a number of his ‘nephews’ and many of us knew what that meant. In a short story that partially fictionalises my attempts to create a biography of Rive, I focus on the attempts of the character called Richard to disguise the boys he surrounds himself with, and to whom he is attracted, as ‘nephews’.³⁷ The story questions Rive’s silence and secrecy about his sexual life and his need to disguise real relations with fictitious familial ones.³⁸

      While Rive did on occasion consciously enact what Judith Butler calls ‘parodic replays’ of heterosexual convention, at other times he used these conventions to disguise his secret life as a homosexual man.³⁹ These heteronormative peformances can be read as symptomatic of his deep yearning to be ‘normal’ – part of conventional, mainstream social existence and, as a sporty man, to assert what Adams calls the ‘macho image’. Yet at the same time these performances by Rive can be read as poking fun at these very conventions and their language.

      Rive had numerous friendships with young men, often stemming from his keen desire to help the youth, especially those who came from poor backgrounds like he did, to realise their academic or sporting talent. A number of these friendships must have been sexually charged but remained clandestine and silent; perhaps these unspoken relationships were unintentionally encoded in Writing Black where he fleetingly describes these moments of taboo friendship with ‘the local guttersnipes’ in the poetic line which is also prophetic of the despair that marked his love life: ‘We used to sit in darkened doorways, and our silence was full of the hopelessness of our lives.’⁴⁰ While Rive here also notes that ‘discovery by my socially insecure family was fraught with danger’, he does not acknowledge, even in the most subtle or euphemistic way, that there might have been taboos other than crossing class lines that were implicated in his attraction to boys marginalised by conventional society.

      Despite the dominant thread of deep disaffection with family, Rive certainly had moments of intimacy with certain members of his family, which he hardly mentioned and rarely wrote about in his autobiographical writings. He seemed particularly close at times to his mother, as can be gauged from the rare references to her in his work and from the accounts of close friends. Georgina was the sister with whom Richard had most contact; the character of Miriam in his novel Emergency has shades of Georgina – the sympathetic, supportive and, significantly, ‘dark’ sister who never quite gives up on Andrew, in contrast to the hostile, fair-skinned sister, Annette: ‘Miriam was easier to get on with than Annette. She was almost as dark as himself, quiet and detached. He had never really known her. She had married a bus driver when Andrew was eight and had gone to stay in Walmer Estate, seldom visiting District Six.’⁴¹ In later years, Rive visited Georgina and her husband at least once a year, and they in turn visited his Selous Court flat in Claremont where he lived for a long time. Rive wrote to Georgina on a regular basis when he travelled and Josias remembers her receiving letters from Rive when he was visiting Japan in the mid- 1980s.

      One of the nieces whom Rive had time for was Georgina Retief, the daughter of the eldest of the Rive children, Joseph Rive. Retief says she was named after one of Richard’s sisters – ‘his favourite, Georgina Rive’.⁴² She has fond memories of her Uncle Richard, who brought her to St Mark’s Primary School in District Six and insisted she went into an English-medium class even though she was Afrikaans-speaking. He was also a student-teacher at her school, a fact she was very proud of as a young pupil. Retief also mentions that Rive stayed with Georgina and Freddie for a short while. She confirms that most of the family distanced themselves from Rive because of his homosexuality and he in turn had very little to do with them. Retief does not make any reference to colour prejudice within the family, but it is probably easier for families, in post-1994 South Africa, to admit to homophobia than to internalised racism in order to account for intra-familial hostility. The opposite seems true of Rive’s early years – it was ‘easier’ to blame the distance in his family on his ‘darkness’, rather than on his mother’s shaming affair or his homosexual ‘difference’ – both things that were much more taboo in those days than race.

      As a top-performing pupil at Trafalgar Junior School, Rive was awarded a municipal scholarship at the age of twelve to fund his studies at the prestigious Trafalgar High School in the District, where he studied ‘subjects with a ring about them’ – Latin, Mathematics and Physical Science.⁴³ Richard Dudley, a leading intellectual, educationist and member of the Teachers’ League of South Africa, remembers encountering the teenager at Trafalgar. Dudley was doing research at