Billy Lee
In his novel, The Gay Place, Billy Lee Brammer captured the earthiness of LBJ as no other writer has, but the book’s honesty destroyed the two men’s friendship.
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Called “The Heavy Honeyed Air,” it was still a very immature book. All the characters were his Austin cronies in thin disguises, glib talkers sauntering from episode to episode, headed nowhere skeptically, existential as all get-out. It was skillfully written but it had no focus on any level. Billy was just another clever writer who wished to be an author but had nothing particular to say. Random House rejected it, and the senior editor at the Holt Company wrote to Billy’s agent in late 1957: “Brammer has more wit and facility and sophistication, and larger concerns, than any young writer I’ve seen in some time; I’d like to work with him; but I cannot pretend that ‘The Heavy Honeyed Air’ is not a rough, spotty, half-formulated novel that needs a lot of work.”
For three years he had worked on it, endlessly revising and amending, trying to charge his languid hipsters with a little passion. Like the author himself, they had no sense of purpose or direction except transient desire; all Billy’s wit and facility couldn’t begin to get them involved in one another’s fortunes. So it was probably in desperation that, sometime in early 1958, he abruptly landed Lyndon Johnson in their midst—whooping, gesticulating, waving a big white Stetson, and grinning broadly.
Governor Arthur Fenstemaker, as Billy named him—or, as he prefers to introduce himself, Arthur “Goddam” Fenstemaker (“windowmaker” in Hill Country German, an illusionist and visionary—is the protean manipulator of a large Southwestern state that resembles Texas but remains anonymous. Fenstemaker is an old-school politician, “a compound of biblical wisdom and Hill Country homily,” equal parts Solomon and Judge Roy Bean with perhaps a touch of sly old Sam Rayburn.
Billy was writing for the first time from his heart instead of from his head, feeling his awkward way toward a character he loved and idolized long before he came to mind. The new work, a hundred-page novella titled “Country Pleasures” has less wit and facility than his earlier rejected manuscript, but greater intensity. Fenstemaker emerges as a forceful figure, making up in vitality what he lacks in subtlety, beguiling the reader into following him along with all the others.
In the fall of 1958, “Country Pleasures” was readily optioned by Houghton Mifflin for publication as soon as Billy completed what everyone agreed should be a trilogy of Fenstemaker novels. The sale itself was terrifically liberating for Billy—it was his official discharge from the army of dreamy pretenders. For the only time in his life his confidence was bigger than his talent, made demands upon it, challenged it. With his heart and mind in harmony as they never were again, he set out to capture the enigmatic spirit of Lyndon Johnson.
For not quite three years Billy had been Johnson’s devoted wordsmith, sidekick, straight man. When he finally turned the lens of his intellect upon Johnson, he did so, too, with devotion, but also with keen and vigorous perception. In the years to come, many writers of stature or presumption would turn their attention to Lyndon Johnson. They would narrate his awesome blunders and achievements, describe his earthy manner and appearance, attempt to measure his dimensions. Yet no less objective a critic than David Halberstam—Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of The Best and the Brightest, and astute observer of American politics—still credits Billy with “the best book yet written about Lyndon Johnson.”
In “Room Enough to Caper,” his second novella—half again as long as the first, immensely better—Billy went back and rescued a few favorite characters from his ill-fated Austin novel. They’re all still witty, intellectual, idealistic, same as before, except now they have to reckon with the rude juggernaut of Arthur Goddam Fenstemaker. The governor even appoints one bright, young idealist to the U.S. Senate, but the senator’s frisky and spirited young wife is swiftly bored with Washington, packs up the couple’s two daughters, and returns home to enjoy herself. And here again Billy was writing from close to his heart.
“I’d just got so awful bored with Washington,” groans Nadine. “Bored with typing the same letters every day. Bored with listening to those men all talk about themselves all the time. Just plain bored.” So she quit her job, took their girls, and returned to Austin where she reenrolled in college. “I wanted to be young for a while longer, or live like it anyway. I wanted to find some new friends. I suppose there was probably a lot of torment he channeled into his writing around then. I was bored with his book, too. He’d been working on it for years and I just didn’t want to hear about it anymore. If he wanted to come and have fun he could, but I was tired of wasting my life up there.”
The forlorn senator, who resembles the author in more ways than similar domestic trials, is deeply wounded and demoralized. He questions the value of seeking reelection, then of everything else, and is given to long interior monologues of remorseful self-appraisal. With remarkable sympathy and candor, the two of them—the senator and his author—explore that tender margin between “the ceaseless demands of public ambition and private loves.” Meanwhile, Fenstemaker strides through the background wheeling and dealing, arm twisting, ear bending, arranging the senator’s reelection, and fixing everyone’s destiny. In the end the senator, like the author, remains in Washington, seeming none too sure exactly why. And, because he is none too sure, his destinies are in the windowmaker’s hands:
He ought not be a politician, [the senator] told himself. Nice line of work but requiring a vision, a dedication, a certainty of belief in what one is doing… . I lost that vision, that monumental sustaining self-assurance. Just the illusion would be a comfort—perhaps that’s what old Arthur Fenstemaker’s got himself so high on. The real or the imagined, he’s got it, got hold of it good, they all have, all the great ones, pushed along by that vision, like artists.
At the heart of the mystery of Lyndon Johnson was some monumental private vision that, like a gene for self-fulfillment, mobilized the will to shape the public man. Johnson was a politician who never held an office that he didn’t find confining, smaller in some way than his image of himself, a man whose actual power always exceeded his constitutional authority, for the simple reason that it didn’t depend on constitutions any more than he did. His was an unfettered epic vision, one strong and sure and great enough to encompass the whole society of man without losing its self-centered focus, a bona fide Lone Star vision. And Billy Lee, the chicken-fried egghead, was stone in love with the very idea of it.
At the same time he was fully aware of Johnson’s reckless flaws and self-deceptions—his book proves that—but Billy understood himself too well to ever look down upon someone else’s shortcomings. Instead he loved what was truly best and special in the man: the passion with which he’d got hold of his vision (real or imagined), his shatterproof faith in the human spirit, the courage of his certainty—and this is also in the book.
It was the summer of 1959, Billy had lately turned thirty, and, as if to clarify his own vision, he was taking some distance on Johnson. He no longer traveled with him or visited his home or ranch, rarely even joked or argued with him. Besides Johnson had plans to run for president the next year and was busy manufacturing debtors. Billy did research projects, working businesslike hours in his Brooks Brothers suits. He was living alone, seldom socializing. He fell into a rhythm of going to the movies after work and then, late in the silent Capitol’s floodlit night, he’d pick up some Pepsis and peanut-butter crackers and go back to the Senate majority leader’s office, to the desk that had once been Vice President Alben Barkley’s, put on a Paul Desmond record, take some more Dexedrine, write till dawn. It was like living in a tunnel where the light at the end was the solitary vision of Lyndon B. Johnson.
The last novella, the longest and the best, is titled “The Flea Circus,” and once again Billy recruited a supporting cast from his old defunct manuscript. His characters, all still lost and inert, live in a place that isn’t actually named but sure sounds like Austin, and this pleasant city is the uneasy capital of a state that sure sounds like Texas. Billy had mastered a prose style as fluid and deliberate as Scott Fitzgerald’s, and he paints a setting of haunting depth. The opening chapter is as fine as any in American letters, a delicate sleight of mind that claims the reader on a deeper level than words alone can purchase. It is the work of a writer who is very, very sure of himself.
As a result he was finally able to shape a protagonist who is sure of himself: “Roy Sherwood is a young state legislator with no special goals or convictions, a clever but dissolute small-town lawyer who entered politics because it seemed easier than working. A “hipster pol” he calls himself, dryly self-mocking. Like Billy’s previous protagonists, he’s tall and introspective and prodded into action by that tireless agitator, Fenstemaker, but Sherwood is the first to hold his ground with him. Sherwood is so believable, so richly nuanced and suggestive, that over the years a half-dozen Texas legislators have confessed to having been the model for him (each with Billy’s amused encouragement, naturally). In nearly two years of writing, Billy rifled his entire closetful of stunted desires, lamentable tendencies, and personal uncertainties, but he still couldn’t see himself except in the shadow of his hero’s immensely greater, vastly more powerful vision, real or imagined. He tried to overcome this disability by unloading it onto Roy Sherwood, who remarks at one point:
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