A writer who went against type

I don’t usually hang out with other writers. I find them too dark, too driven and too self-possessed. David Westheimer was different.

Here was a guy so upbeat that it felt like he might bounce right out of his chair when we’d get into any kind of compelling conversation. Even after a stroke partially paralyzed him, he could still get worked up over the latest book, the latest war or the latest dumb politician.

We’d meet at the Casablanca in Venice, his favorite Mexican restaurant, and he’d usually want to know what I was doing rather than telling me what he’d been doing, which was usually a lot. I had to pry his accomplishments out of him, and it wasn’t always easy.

When his wife, his beloved Dody, called the other day to say David had died, I experienced a moment of doubt. He was 88 years old and I should have realized he had to let go at some point, but he was still so full of life that to think of him as gone just didn’t fit the story.

It was like that moment in Joan Didion’s book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” when her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, died. She found herself not being able to give away his shoes because he’d need them when he returned. It’s hard to let go.

I had David fixed in memory as he was, leaning toward me, making his point not like one of those table-pounding true believers, but in a slight Texas drawl so soft I had to lean forward to hear him. And he always had something to say worth hearing.

If you read his obit Saturday you already know that David was an accomplished writer. The novels “Von Ryan’s Express” and “My Sweet Charlie” were his giant efforts, but there were a lot more, including “Delay En Route,” published just three years ago.

He was writing poetry and essays almost right up until he died, in between sessions at the gym and e-mailing friends all over the globe. He also wrote scripts and columns, and would probably have written psalms if he’d had the time.

Going to reunions at Rice University, where he’d graduated in 1939, was a special treat for him. He told me once that he went just to see former classmates who were in worse shape than he was. He had an impish sense of humor and would delight in telling those who didn’t know him that his agent gave him the new sport coat he was wearing. His agent was his son, Fred, with William Morris at the time.

I met David 35 years ago when he was in the Bay Area hustling “Death Is Lighter Than a Feather,” a fictional account of the Allied invasion of Japan in World War II. It was a masterful effort, combining an antiwar message with a close look at the humanity of the enemy we were fighting. The title emerged from a Japanese edict to its fighting forces, “Duty is heavier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.”

I referred to him in a column as an “owlish little Texan,” a description he never let me forget. He lived in L.A., and when my byline began appearing in The Times he called and reminded me he was the “OLT” I’d written about a few years earlier.

David was an Air Force captain in the war, the navigator of a B-24 that was shot down over the Mediterranean. He spent 28 months in Italian and German prison camps, the subject of his first novel, “Summer on the Water.” I wasn’t aware until years later that his output included “My Sweet Charlie,” a story that spun on a bond between a black civil rights worker and an unmarried, white, pregnant teenager. The book came up in a conversation one day and he mentioned in passing that he’d written it, and it bowled me over. It had always been a favorite, a lesson in how to tell a good story. David had a journalist’s habit of moving from one subject to the next without lingering too long on any of them, and I had to stop him occasionally just to get him to talk about himself.

He began writing for the Houston Post two years after graduating from Rice, and while he gave it up to write books, he continued to write a column for the Post through the 1980s, often about his wife or an oversized cat named Grizzolo. His novels, like those of Hemingway, often reflected the terse style of a journalist, combined with the eloquence of a good novelist.

Obituaries, no matter how grand, rarely reach the core of the person they’re about. You had to have been in the presence of David while he was alive in order to properly celebrate him in death. I knew him beyond his stature as a writer. He was a friend who was always encouraging, always mindful of my own bad moments, a sweet man in every sense of the word.

When I telephoned his wife after he died, she was out, and the message to call later was David’s voice, the soft Texas drawl that I realized with deep sadness I would never hear again. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to see him in his last days. This has to suffice as the goodbye I never had a chance to say.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@ latimes.com.