In a commemorative article on Richard Rive in the Mail & Guardian Review on 7 February 1991, a year and a half after he was brutally murdered, Nadine Gordimer begins: ‘When someone of marked individuality dies and those who knew him give their impressions of him, a composite personality appears that did not exist simultaneously in life.’ This biography attempts to depict Rive as ‘a composite personality’ but from partial and selective vantage points. My account of Rive's life assembles a multitude of voices and perspectives to compose a man who lived many lives simultaneously and who was a larger-than-life presence, an exceptional teller of stories who engendered not merely memories of encounters with him, but memories recast almost always as exceptional and entertaining stories.

This biography is primarily concerned with the way Rive embodied a vision of non-racialism in his oft en angry protest fiction, his literary scholarship, his interventions in education, sport and civil society, as well as in an inner life that battled contradiction between vocal assertiveness and tense silences. It tries to identify and delve into some of these strange but not atypical contradictions that pervaded his public and private personae, especially those related to colour and sexuality that have marked or masked his sense of self. Even while facets of this biography will be familiar to many readers, it is a portrait that I suspect not even the few who knew him well will recognise in all its aspects. Our experience of others is always only partial. ‘His cultivated urbanity,’ Gordimer continues in her tribute, ‘glossed over but couldn't put out a flowing centre of warmth and kindness within’. Others could find at his centre only arrogance, self-centredness and abusiveness. Milton van Wyk, an admirer and younger friend of Rive's, highlighted these contraries when he described how many responded to Rive: ‘Richard was a generous man if he liked you, scathing and arrogant if he didn't. He enjoyed belittling people and loved attention, but there was a side to Richard very few people saw and that was of a man wallowing in loneliness.’