In 1961, a young LBJ aide wrote the greatest political novel you've never heard of—and then vanished into drug-fueled obscurity. A new biography tells his story.
It is, to my mind, one of the great opening paragraphs in American literature, though few Americans who are not also Texans will be familiar with it:
"The country is most barbarously large and final. It is too much country — boondock country — alternately drab and dazzling, spectral and remote. It is so wrongfully muddled and various that it is difficult to conceive of it as all of a piece. Though it begins simply enough, as a part of the other."
After kicking off with this aerial view of a vast western landscape, Billy Lee Brammer—in his only published novel, The Gay Place—floats us in toward an unnamed state capital where the first stir of life in the city's quiet streets is “an old truck carrying migratory cotton pickers.” Its clattering wakes two key characters from the novel's first section, both politicians:
"The younger . . . was named Roy Sherwood, and he lay twisted sideways in the front seat of an automobile that was parked out front of an all-night supermarket. Arthur Fenstemaker, the other one, the older one, floundered in his bedcovers a few blocks distant in the Governor's mansion."
“Arthur Goddam Fenstemaker,” as he calls himself, is modeled on Lyndon B. Johnson, whom Brammer served as a speechwriter when Johnson was Senate Majority Leader. Fenstemaker dominates the three novellas that compose The Gay Place, even though he's only sporadically in the foreground action. Instead, the immediate focus is on a small circle of liberal Southern Democrats whose best intentions are in constant collision with their decadent personal excesses.
In “The Flea Circus,” the frequently hungover Roy provides our primary view of what's going on behind the scenes in the state capital as Fenstemaker cajoles him into sponsoring legislation close to his heart, and seeks his advice on what to do about a lobbyist intent on bribery. Not that Roy is necessarily up to the job.
“He's pretty damned independent,” we're told. “And lazy. That's a bad combination.”
In “Room Enough to Caper,” Senator Neil Christiansen, a gubernatorial appointee to the Senate for 10 months, is pressured by Fenstemaker to run for a full Senate term against a local Red-baiting demagogue whose role model seems to be Joe McCarthy. But Neil has trouble buying into his own campaign-trail act. Examining himself in the mirror, he tries “to affect the look of a winner, but the image that gaped back at him merely exuded a kind of vast, benign self-deprecation.”
“Country Pleasures,” the book's final section, follows Fenstemaker and his entourage out to a film set where a movie (clearly based on Giant) is being shot. There they plan a photo-op with the film's star, Vicki McGown, who happens to be the ex-wife of Fenstemaker's assistant Jay McGown. Vicki, like Roy's lover in “The Flea Circus” and Neil's semi-estranged wife in “Room Enough to Caper,” follows wayward agendas of her own. Again and again, the women in The Gay Place aren't just playthings. They break the rules as adeptly as the men do.
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