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a literary life

 

a literary life

08/08/22 08:01

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My friend David Beaty died yesterday in Miami. David was born in Brazil, grew up in Coconut Grove, and set state swimming records at Ransom Everglades. He headed off to The Lawrenceville School, and Columbia University, where he joined the swim team, studied English, and, one evening with friends, attended a party at the home of James Baldwin. After graduation he moved to the island of Patmos to become a writer; on a visit to Athens he entered a café and met the poet James Merrill. The mid ’70s found him in London working odd jobs, including one in the library of Time magazine. Years later he workshopped a story about this period, titled “The Man from Time,” in a class with Phillip Lopate, who handed it back to him untouched, saying it was “a little miracle of a piece.” (I was in the room when this happened.) It described, among other things, David bodily running into Graham Greene on the street and the author immediately checking his pockets. He briefly dated one of Evelyn Waugh’s daughters, who took him to a dinner at Kingsley Amis’s house. He also, for Time, interviewed Patrick Leigh Fermor, who not only signed his copy of A Time of Gifts but adorned it with a charming illustration. Back home, David bought a house in Coral Gables that quickly filled with books – piles of them rising on the living room floor – and Brazilian art. He swam laps in the pool of the nearby Biltmore Hotel and studied writing with Isaac Bashevis Singer at the University of Miami. One evening in the early 2000s he went to the Brazilian consul’s residence in Coconut Grove to attend a reception for Gilberto Gil that was all the more interesting because the consul was living in the house David had grown up in. At the age of 60, he walked the pilgrimage to Santiago in Spain – to express his gratitude for having lived that long – and sent dispatches home that I published on the Sun-Sentinel’s Travel blog. He worked for a while at Books & Books, where his gentle manner, vast reading, and colorful stories made him popular with his coworkers. His travels in his later years centered around writing seminars, first in St. Petersburg, Russia, then in Lisbon. He loved fiction (he was working on a series of short stories set in Greece) and had a special talent for noir (his story “Ghosts” appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2000) but I always thought he should write more memoir. Now a sweet man and an unfinished writer are gone.   

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