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.
Dervla Murphy died this week at the age of 90. She was part of a distinguished group of travel writers – Wilfred Thesiger, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman Lewis, Jan Morris – who became nonagenarians. It's as if their intense curiosity about the world made it hard for them to leave it.
I heard P.J. O’Rourke speak at Brown University in 1988. He had recently published Holidays in Hell, a collection of dispatches from the world's trouble spots. I had picked it up in a bookstore one day and turned doubtfully to the chapter on Poland. Then I stood in the aisle, awed and humbled, for the next thirty minutes. O’Rourke had dropped into Poland, without a word of Polish, and perfectly captured the spirit of the place, at least as a recalcitrant socialist state. He described things that for me, after two and a half years, had become commonplace but now, presented through his undulled eyes, appeared afresh in all their absurdity. He was funny of course, but with jokes that revealed truths while also provoking laughter. Which are the best kind.
The audience at Brown was made up partly of students who had found sections of the book insensitive and come to demonstrate their disapproval. They took up whole rows, many of them with white T-shirts over their blouses and long-sleeved shirts; a few carried signs.
O’Rourke walked onto the stage and, standing at the lectern, began his talk. He paid no attention to the protestors, who were impossible to miss, with their signs now raised. Not wanting to infringe on his right to speak, they didn’t heckle or harangue; they just sat quietly in pockets of shared hurt. Then, after about 15 minutes, they stood up, held hands, and, row by row, silently vacated the hall. When their exodus was about two-thirds complete, O’Rourke halted his presentation for the first time.
“They’re cute,” he said, looking out over the last of the retreating minions. “No, really, they are. In my day we would have burned the building down.”
Sunday we went down to Art Miami and saw, among other works, those of the 10-year-old boy who became something of a star last week. His paintings were interesting and looked not at all out of place, yet I kept thinking of a story I'd read about James Thurber. After his drawings began appearing in The New Yorker, mothers started submitting their children's work. Thurber sent them a standard reply: "Your son can certainly draw as well as I can. The only trouble is he hasn't been through as much."
In the New Yorker profile of Colm Tóibín, which I just read, this being the time of year when I try to get through old issues, the author D.T. Max tells the story that after The Blackwater Lightship was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the author returned to Dublin and, finding the fridge in his house empty, went out to by some groceries. As he headed down the street, he was serenaded by the honking of car horns and the flashing of headlights – a public acknowledgment of his literary achievement.
Yesterday at Bookwise, the excellent secondhand bookstore in Boca Raton, I bought a copy of Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer. I had not gotten it when it came out in 2004 because I had a lot of Liebling already, but reading it in bed last night I realized that there is no such thing as too much Liebling.