Part I: Catching the first light

[I decided I wanted to spend a couple or three posts over some Wednesdays focusing on one of my favorite books, the man who wrote that book, and the characters and setting.The Gay Place is a novel made up of three smaller novellas. It’s mostly about politics and politicians, and most of the action occurs in 1950s Austin. I wanted to ruminate some on it here because it’s got a lot to offer anyone addicted to that ol’ political crack monkey and also because while it’s widely regarded as a masterwork, it’s still considered somewhat obscure. ]

p>Had he lasted till now instead of burning out three decades ago, Billy Lee Brammer would have been 80 years old yesterday. But Billy Lee didn’t make it.

He died of a drug overdose in February, 1978, something that didn’t seem to surprise anyone who knew him. The last few years of his life weren’t kind, he’d run out of health and money, hadn’t held a job since he’d lost a gig as a cook in theDriskill, and he’d lost that after adrug bust back in 1974:

So that was the beginning of the down-and-out end of Billy Lee Brammer, a man who’d once been the epitome of an insider’s insider. He’d been a confidant so close to theMaster of the Senate and future president that he even ghost-wrote LBJ’s letters home to LadyBird and the girls. An intellectual who rubbed shoulders with everyone from Ann Richards to Eliot Janeway to Ken Kesey, Brammer also served as mentor and influence to a seemingly endless list of authors, journalists, editors, even musicians and actors.

Billy Lee Brammer was a short soft-spoken Texan who once, just once, wrote a book, The Gay Place.

That’s right, just the one, and it wasn’t just a good book, but a great one. No less than Gore Vidal called it “an American classic,” Willie Morris
said it was “the best novel about American Politics in our time.”

Glowing as Halberstam’s review may be, I’d argue that the book was not inspired by Lyndon Johnson, at least not originally. Those who are still invested in perceiving LBJ in only one dimension, the people who won’t even deign to read the amazingRobert CaroPath to Power series, will likely also not care to readThe Gay Place. In both instances, it’s their loss if they really are interested in American political history, about how politics really works. Neither Caro’s books orThe Gay Place are truly “about” or inspired by the real or fictionalized LBJ. They’re about power, about how someone with that much power thinks and operates and achieves or fails.

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In his 2005 essayWhy Americans can’t write political fiction. Chris Lehmann calledThe Gay Place “the one truly great modern American political novel.”

Unlike most novelistic chroniclers of our politics, who got their first close-up views of politics as either journalists (Klein), political confidants (Adams, Twain, and Warren), or mere consumers of news (Beinhart), Brammer wrote of the political from a true insider’s vantage. He had been a press flack and speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson during his illustrious arm-twisting, back-slapping, and deal-making career as Senate majority leader. As such, Brammer described himself as unapologetically “pro-politician”–the sort of literary disclaimer that only seems to be necessary in American letters.

Brammer’s inside view helped him, first of all, to bring off a deceptively simple inversion: For him, politicians are not the tempters in the garden of American innocence. They are moral protagonists. As political animals, they’re accustomed to honoring few clear distinctions between their messy, conflicted, adulterous, and boozy lives and their obligations to the public weal, and so they are not in the business of sacrificing one for the sake of the other. This means, among other things, that they have few two-dimensional virtues to jeopardize and no melodramatic Victorian corridors of power in which to sully themselves. Brammer’s protagonists are all sublimely self-aware adults: They bed each other’s spouses and broker parliamentary support with the same bleary-eyed aplomb, and reflect openly about the shabby compromises and disappointments they spring on themselves as they imagine they are doing good.

Oh, and then there’s Joe Klein. SincePrimary Colors often gets compared to the greats of the genre, I guess Klein used to get asked aboutThe Gay Place pretty often. First, a little damning with faint praise: