The public life? It was a joke. There seemed no life less public than the politician's. What they had was a fantasy world, populated with kings and priests and brigands and court jesters and camp followers. There was no getting round or out of it. The thing to do was to accept, embrace, believe. Who could be certain whether Miss Alice abandoned reality when she went off down the rabbit hole?
A young state rep from a rural part of Texas is enlisted to help usher in a piece of liberal legislation; a recently appointed U.S. senator must decide whether to run for the seat; the governor's press secretary shepherds him through a weekend on a film shoot as a scandal brews in the capital. All three, protagonists in the novellas that make up Billy Lee Brammer's 1961 political novel The Gay Place, are minor planets orbiting the charismatic governor Arthur Fenstemaker, who was modeled on Brammer's own boss, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Apparently famously, Brammer's depiction of LBJ as Fenstemaker got him exiled from the governor's good graces. It's difficult, perhaps, in hindsight to see why; many of Fenstemaker's traits cast a kindly light on Johnson. He's both a liberal and a pragmatist, canny and shrewd about what he can and can't accomplish, and uses his know-how and talent to get the most progressive legislation possible in a conservative state. Of course, LBJ was never governor of Texas--when The Gay Place was written, Johnson was still Senate majority leader, and he never held statewide office--but the novel captures some of the capable wheeling and dealing that made him such a powerful politician. In retrospect, one might even say that, in Fenstemaker, LBJ's more vulgarian edges have been sanded down; the Governor never, for example, tries to intimidate anyone by pulling out his enormous penis. But perhaps those elements that do remain in the novel, even admiringly--Fenstemaker's hard drinking, his dalliances with women other than his wife "Sweet Mama" (a stand-in for Lady Bird), his cussing and carousing--might have been too far for a mwn with designs on the White House.
The three novella protagonists struck me as so similar, they might as well be the same person. Neil Christiansen, the senator of "Room Enough to Caper," might be a slightly older version of Roy Sherwood, the rural back-bencher of "The Flea Circus." All three, including the press secretary Jay McGown in "Country Pleasures," are relative nobodies who have been personally plucked out of obscurity by Fenstemaker, who spends much of his time convincing them they possess the value and skill he sees in them. Sometimes they are the objects of his political manipulation, openly or in secret; in "Room Enough to Caper," Fenstemaker leaks the Communist associations of Christiansen's wife and now-dead friend to his possible election opponent, trying to push his chosen candidate into the race. Christianesen, like Sherwood and McGown, is deeply ambivalent about his political ambitions, and suffers from what he feels is a lack of vision. Do politics require vision? Is "vision" what Fenstemaker has, or is it something more earthly and practical? Another thing that binds the three men together is their rocky relationship with women: Sherwood is having an affair with a colleague's wife; Christiansen is half-heartedly trying to rekindle a now-cold marriage; McGown ping-pongs between the sensual movie actress who is the mother of his daughter and the beautiful-but-needy aide he loves. These relationships, in fact, take up most of the men's minds--it's only "Goddamn" Fenstemaker whose prodding brings their attention back to the political life.
I expected The Gay Place to be a satire--perhaps only because LBJ seems like a figure that's ripe for satire. Or perhaps because satire remains the mode by which we typically engage with politics in literature. But The Gay Place, though sometimes funny, is not a satire. It may not even be political. To the extent that it's interested in politics, it offers a snapshot of state politics of a bygone era, in which the halls of power are occupied by the scions of wealthy rural families for whom politics is a hobby, a short-term exercise. They spend less time legislating than they do at the Dearly Beloved Beer Garden (Brammer's version of Austin's legendary Scholz Garden) and having affairs with each other. It's not a place for true believers; there are no true believers, in fact, only wayward souls. I expect that Texas politics, which are increasingly dominated by national news-grabbers and psychopaths like Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton, would be unrecognizable to Brammer. A hint of this future, perhaps, can be seen in "Country Pleasures," where Fenstemaker is happy to be recruited to play an old-time governor in the movie being filmed by McGown's actress wife--a glimpse, perhaps, in which the political life would become not merely a local stage but a national one. A flash of Reagan.
Ultimately, what was most powerful about The Gay Place was its least political aspects. It often reminded me of Walker Percy, with whom it shares a vision of men who are spiritually lost amidst the banal and chauvinist elements of a Southern culture. The title suggests an unfound Eden, the elusive place where true happiness can be found; politics may seem like a way of establishing such a place for all, but these dreams mean little to the men who battle estrangement, alienation, grief, ennui, in the midst of the strangeness of public life. The prose is much better than I expected; if it's not quite Percy, who is, but it captures a poignant disaffection and even makes fascinating use of stream-of-consciousness. If it's a great political novel--as many think--it's because it neither imagines politics as all=encompassing, or incidental. It's a novel that finds the common life between the bedroom and the senate floor, the governor's office and the barroom.
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