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Overview
An empathetic biography of the apartheid author, Richard Rive.
Richard Moore Rive (1930-1989) was a writer, scholar, literary critic and college teacher in Cape Town, South Africa. He is best known for his short stories written in the late 1950s and for his second novel, 'Buckingham Palace', District Six, in which he depicted the well-known cosmopolitan area of District Six, where he grew up. In this biography Shaun Viljoen, a former colleague of Rive's, creates the composite qualities of a man who was committed to the struggle against racial oppression and to the ideals of non-racialism but was also variously described as irascible, pompous and arrogant, with a 'cultivated urbanity'. Beneath these public personae lurked a constant and troubled awareness of his dark skin colour and guardedness about his homosexuality. Using his own and others' memories, and drawing on Rive's fiction, Viljoen brings the author to life with sensitivity and empathy. The biography follows Rive from his early years in the 1950s, writing for Drum magazine and spending time in the company of great anti-establishment writers such as Jack Cope, Ingrid Jonker, Jan Rabie, Marjorie Wallace, Es'kia Mphahlele and Nadine Gordimer, to his acceptance at Magdalene College, Oxford, where he completed his doctorate on Olive Schreiner, before returning to South Africa to resume his position as senior lecturer at Hewat College of Education. This biography will resurface Richard Rive the man and the writer, and invite us to think anew about how we read writers who lived and worked during the years of apartheid.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781868148240 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wits University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Rive Richard
A Partial Biography
By Shaun Viljoen, Alison Lockhart
Wits University Press
Copyright © 2013 Shaun ViljoenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86814-824-0
CHAPTER 1
Part I:1930 – 1960
The great influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919, 'the Spanish flu' as it was called, is thought to have started in military camps in Kansas, in the United States. From there, it rapidly spread to the rest of the world killing, it is estimated, between 20 and 40 million people, more than had died in the five years of the First World War. The plague reached South Africa within months. In Cape Town, a vital stopover on the route of humans and goods between East and West, a young, married, working-class couple, Nancy and Joseph Rive, 'coloured' in the racialising language of the time, had started a modest home in the area of District Six, abutting the centre of the burgeoning port town at the base of the monumental Table Mountain. The area was created as Cape Town's sixth municipal district in 1867 and by the time Nancy and Joseph moved there, it was less of the edgy area once known for its crime and prostitution and was developing into a vibrant, cosmopolitan and mainly working-class residential area. District Six was, however, like all land in the newly formed Union of South Africa, a contested space where white supremacy and resistance to racial oppression did battle. The ANC had been formed a few years earlier, in 1912, by African intellectuals, 'bitter and betrayed' by their exclusion from the common voters' roll, while the white leadership of the new union divided the country into wealthier white and impoverished black areas with their 1913 Natives Land Act.
It was the District, as it was commonly known to locals, that was to become home to the young Richard Rive in the 1930s and early 1940s, but from which he quickly fled as a teenager to escape the constraints of his family circumstances and to make something of himself. It was the District, however, which would prove to be a perennial preoccupation of his imagination and would be intimately associated with his best work.
In 1918 Nancy Rive gave birth to her seventh child, a little girl she called Georgina, most likely after the British monarch at the time, King George V. Like vast numbers of residents of the District, the Rives were great admirers of British royalty, whose portraits were displayed in their homes. The other six Rive children were Joseph, the eldest boy, and then came David (known also as Davey), Arthur, Harold, Douglas and another girl, Lucy. Soon after Georgina's birth, tragedy struck the family and Joseph Rive (senior) died, a victim of the Spanish flu that, quite strangely for influenza, afflicted mainly younger people in their twenties and thirties. In the wake of her husband's death, in a world ravaged by war and a country ruled by white supremacists, and with seven mouths to feed, the young widow was in for a long and hard time.
Twelve years after Joseph's death, in 1930, when Nancy was thirty-eight-years-old and Georgina almost a teenager, the single mother gave birth to a laatlammetjie (Afrikaans, a child born many years after its siblings). Richard Rive's birth, on the first of March that year, was shrouded in controversy and secrecy, and marked him as exceptional from the beginning. Interestingly, in Writing Black, Rive gives his date of birth as 1931. However, his birth certificate states clearly 1 March 1930. There is wide discrepancy in published texts – 1930, 1931, 1932 and 1933 are all given as dates of birth. At Hewat College, where Rive worked, it was rumoured that he gave a false (later) date to make himself appear slightly younger. It is strange that, for someone as fastidious about detail as Rive, so many dates of birth prevailed even while he lived. He often got dates wrong, for no apparent reason.
The sizeable age gap between Richard and his siblings was to contribute to the young boy's acute sense of alienation from the family as he grew up. He was very much a part of the family yet also very apart from it. The United States was the source of the tragedy that had robbed Nancy of her husband; it was also the place of origin of the man with whom she had had a fleeting affair, who was to father her eighth and last child. His father was a ship's hand called Richardson Moore, who abandoned him and his mother when Rive was just three months, and was not seen again by either. As an adult, Rive tried on a number of occasions to track down his father in the United States. The only trace of his father was in Richard's name, for his mother had given the name 'Richard Moore Rive' on his birth certificate. In his memoir Writing Black, published when he was fifty-one years old, Rive says of his father: 'About my father and his family I know almost nothing. He died soon after I was born and was seldom mentioned in family circles. Perhaps a dark secret lurks somewhere.' Is Rive using 'died' here metaphorically to account for the absent father? For, as is clear from Rive's correspondence with writer Langston Hughes in the late 1950s, the father had not in fact died but rather disappeared leaving no trace whatsoever. Hughes (1902–1967), the iconic black American intellectual, poet, fiction writer and dramatist, and a leading figure of the black American literary explosion of the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance, was to play a seminal role in Rive's writing life.
In Writing Black Rive, for some reason, cannot say directly that his father was a black American but instead suggests this circuitously by recounting an incident at an athletics meeting at which he had performed particularly well, and where a black American woman, an intimate friend of his mother's, commented affectionately to him: '"They can't beat an American boy, can they?" ... So possibly the Black strain came from my father and came from far over the Atlantic.' Rive was clearly tentative, even reluctant, about revealing this aspect of his life, revealing only certain details to particular audiences. He was restrained not only about his father it seems; in his adult life he rarely spoke about his mother, even to close friends.
By the time the older Rive comes to write this account of his life, he undoubtedly knows more about his father than he lets on, choosing to embed even these spare facts in circumspect and suggestive narrative in his memoir. However, in a letter to Hughes in 1962, almost twenty years before the publication of Writing Black, he is much more candid about the silence that attended the question of his paternity in his District Six home, a silence clearly stemming from his mother's deep sense of shame at the affair – a shame compounded by Rive's dark skin:
A very interesting feature of my life is that my father is an American Negro, but he left home when I was a mere 3 months old. I never saw him. I believe that he might still be frequenting the New York waterfront. He was apparently a ships [sic] cook. Name Richardson Moore. Interesting if we should ever meet again. My mother is from an upper class family, and the subject of my father is never brought up.
The question of Rive's paternity, with all its unarticulated proscriptions, shame and even disgust within the family (perhaps even within himself), was the first instance in his life where the equation between shame and silence was a mark on the psyche of the young boy. He is clearly reluctant to reveal the full extent of this 'dark secret' in his memoir. Was it just too shameful? Was it too private? Was it of no import in a memoir that, like his fiction, was primarily concerned with exposing the injustices of racial oppression? In the very first line of Writing Black, Rive insists on the selective nature of his autobiography: 'Some [incidents] are locked away in that private part of my world which belongs only to myself and perhaps one or two intimates.' Perhaps the deliberate silence Rive acknowledges, as 'locking away' particular incidents and emotions, is not simply a choice to edit out certain details but a multiple, more complex silence – silence about both the world of his family and, later, the very private and closed world of his sexuality.
The young Richard grew up in a 'huge, dirty-grey, forbidding, double-storied' tenement building in Caledon Street, at number 201. Rive's detailed, filmic description of the place is reminiscent of Dickens's descriptions of inner-city settings:
[It] housed over twelve family units ... with a rickety wooden balcony that ran its entire length. There were three main entrances, numbered 201, 203 and 205. All faced Caledon Street. Behind it and much lower, running alongside, was a concrete enclosed area called The Big Yard into which all occupants of the tenement threw their slops, refuse and dirty water.
The photograph by Clarence Coulson is of this double-storey tenement building in Caledon Street, taken from William Street across the square. Aspects of the photograph were explained to me by Noor Ebrahim and Joe Schaffers in June 2012. Both Ebrahim and Schaffers grew up in the District and knew the young Rive well. Each window represents the living quarters of a separate family and the Rives rented the first dwelling on the left on the top floor, with only a bedroom and a small kitchen, according to Ebrahim and Schaffers who visited the Rive house. The square served as a playground for the pupils from the nearby St Mark's Primary School during the week. On the left is the community hall, which was also used by the school. The image here is of a Sunday morning, in the early or mid-1960s according to Ebrahim, with the uniformed lads from the St Mark's Church brigade preparing for their march, which would begin with the tolling of the church bell. An intensely curious audience of dozens of children and adults can't wait for the show to begin. The evident physical density and dilapidation of the space is overwhelmed by the sense of bustle and expectation, of adults and children living the rituals of a special time and day, a Sunday morning in the District.
This row of dwellings was, fifty years later, transformed by Rive's memory and imagination into the row of five conjoined, bustling homes called 'Buckingham Place', the locus of communal life portrayed in his novel 'Buckingham Palace', District Six. A more realistic and possibly more accurate picture of the domestic life of the family in their home is suggested by Andrew Dreyer, the protagonist in Rive's first novel Emergency (first published in 1964). The description of Andrew's home reflects the cramped, overcrowded, Victorian conditions in which Rive's own working-class family lived in the District:
They occupied three dingy rooms on the first floor of a double-storied tenement flat at 302 ... One first entered a landing which smelt damp and musty and echoed eerily when the wind blew through it ... Then up a pitch-dark staircase till one fumbled at the knob at No. 3 and entered a shabby bed-sitting room grandiloquently called the dining-room. This was dominated by a huge four-poster bed with brass railings, an old-fashioned couch with chairs to match, and a side-board cluttered with Victorian bric-à-brac. A cheap but highly polished table was squeezed between the bed and the sideboard. A bedroom led off this, occupied by James and Peter-boy. Here another fourposter bed was situated in the centre, with an ancient tallboy leaning against the wall, adorned with a pink and white basin and picture. Two broken French doors led to an unsafe, wooden balcony. One had to go back to the upstairs landing to reach the Boys' Room which Andrew, Danny and Philip occupied. It contained two beds and a chest of drawers and had the musty smell of stale air and perspiration.
Growing up in such conditions, confining and dilapidated yet with a sense of respectability and even grandeur, with Nancy's ambiguous love and care, and an intimacy with only some of his siblings, Rive undoubtedly, like many other youngsters with talent entrapped by circumstance, often retreated into the world of the mind – to books. He also found refuge in the friendship of neighbourhood boys who accepted, admired and were intrigued by his way with words and his wit.
Rive's brother-in-law Freddie Josias, husband to Georgina, the sibling to whom Rive felt the closest (possibly because they were the two youngest), describes Rive's family as existing in circumstances that forced them 'to live from hand to mouth'. A schoolmate of Rive's, Gilbert Reines, says Rive did not have shoes at one time (like many of the children in the Coulson photograph) and that he came from 'a really poor family'. Rive himself talks of their living 'in an atmosphere of shabby respectability', playing down somewhat the level of poverty but putting his finger on the quest for middle-class respectability and a 'decent' life. As a single mother, Nancy struggled to make ends meet, but the cost of keeping the household going by the time Richard was growing up and going to school was supplemented from the wages of older siblings like Georgina, who worked at a city printing firm, Herzberg and Mulne, and the second-eldest brother, Davey, who worked at Flack's furniture store in the city.
As a respectable churchgoing Anglican, Nancy Rive had her baby boy baptised and later, in his early teens, confirmed at St Mark's Church on Clifton Hill in the District, just a short walk from their Caledon Street home. One of the few fleeting references to his mother comes in Rive's memoir and is prompted by his visit, in 1963 while on an extended tour of Africa and Europe, to the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Th ere, he recalls accompanying his mother to present the family Bible to the church and remembers St Mark's in terms that suggest the church was a refuge from the hostilities of the outside world for the young boy: 'And the cosily lit warm interior on a Sunday evening when the south-easter howled outside ... I was a boy in St Mark's on the Hill, comfortably dozing through the warm monotony of Evensong.'
While St Mark's Church was to feature prominently as a site of communal ritual and resistance in Rive's work, as it did in the history of resistance to forced removals in the District, he turned his back on religion in his adult life, becoming an atheist – as were many of his left-wing mentors and friends who defended their atheism by, for example, quoting Karl Marx's dictum about religion being the opium of the people and circulating Bertrand Russell's polemical essay 'Why I Am Not a Christian', which attacked Christian hypocrisy and mystification. The fact that the policies of segregation pre-1948 and those of apartheid after that were rationalised using Christian doctrine increased the alienation of many intellectuals of the time from Christianity (in particular) and religion in general. Many others, though, were drawn to religion and the church as part of their lives; some of Rive's close friends in his youth – Albert Adams and John Ramsdale – were active churchgoers. One of Rive's early short stories, 'No Room at Solitaire' (1963), exposes the hypocrisy of the Afrikaner characters who profess to be Christian but rudely turn away a sick and pregnant black woman and her husband from their inn. Although a jarringly obvious allegory on the plight of Mary and Joseph on Christmas Eve, the story ends with the racist Afrikaner men having an epiphany of the import of their inhumane act – an ending that reflects Rive's persistent belief in the possibility for good in everyone, a quality present in all his creative work. Unlike his contemporaries Alex La Guma and Dennis Brutus, Rive was impelled not by a strong sense of anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist ideology, but rather by more liberal convictions about individual and human rights. In this sense, Rive shared more common ground as a writer with his friends and fellow writers Es'kia Mphahlele and James Matthews.
Surrounded by 'dirty, narrow streets in a beaten-up neighbourhood', his family, Rive claims, was marked by an obsessive hankering after respectability: 'We always felt we were intended for better things.' The gently parodic tone in which this is said in his memoir, written forty years after this period of childhood, indicates a measure of distancing from these familial aspirations. As a young man in his twenties, though, Rive still identified with them, needing to be 'respectable' and 'civilised', able to transcend the 'decrepit' place he inhabited. He would, in his second letter to Langston Hughes in 1954, excitedly and assertively introduce himself: 'Age 23 years. I was born in District Six (one of the most terrible slums in Cape Town, although I come from a cultured family).' The early letters to Hughes are clearly trying to impress the older, internationally acclaimed figure with the young writer's knowledge of place and his sense of being 'cultured'. In this description of himself and his origins, Rive interestingly distances himself from District Six, calling his birthplace a 'terrible slum', unlike the affirmative and often nostalgic portrayal in the later novel 'Buckingham Palace', District Six. In this description to Hughes of the District and of himself, it is interesting that the qualifier 'although' is used to separate the District from the notion of being 'cultured'. 'Culture' was elsewhere and, like his sister Lucy and his brother Joseph, Rive 'fled the District as soon as possible'. Thirty years later, however, when the resistance to forced removals had reached a pitch in the struggles of the oppressed, District Six, like numerous other residential areas (for example, Sophiatown in Johannesburg and South End in Port Elizabeth), became, for him, the country and the world, an iconic space of unjust displacement and of justified reclamation; a place of reinvented and celebrated pasts textured as both real and imagined.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rive Richard by Shaun Viljoen, Alison Lockhart. Copyright © 2013 Shaun Viljoen. Excerpted by permission of Wits University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,List of Photographs,
Preface,
Part I: 1930–1960,
Part II: 1960–1970,
Part III: 1970–1980,
Part IV: 1980–1990,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Select Bibliography,
Index,