In Austin, in the summer of 1951, the heavy-honeyed air buzzed with flitting new life drifting lazily over hillocks and streams. Scorpions scurried along oak bark on the banks of the Colorado River. Muddy ravines bearded with hanging willows were thick with the scent of horsehair. Stale, mossy odors rose from sun-baked rocks. Bats lifted from the river in the late afternoon, slicing erratically through the sun’s low rays. The fading crimson light shattered into sapphires on the surface of the water, casting yellow triangles onto striated sandstone cliff walls and high into gnarled red cedar limbs. Along the Balcones Fault, the escarpment dividing the Edwards Plateau from the Coastal Plains, the city spread gently—wood and pink granite, glass and ridged metal—among sunflower thickets, chinaberries and sycamores, where the American South met the American West.
The Brammers had moved to Austin at Nadine’s insistence, abandoning the salty heat and crab smell of Corpus. They found an apartment on Harris Boulevard, in the center of the city. She hired on as a secretary to the director of the university’s architecture school, and he covered sports for the Austin American-Statesman. They both enrolled in courses at the University of Texas.
The city’s founder, Mirabeau B. Lamar, at one point the president of the Republic of Texas, was an “impulsive poet,” according to A. C. Greene: the place has never lost its distinctive air of having been “founded on beauty . . . alone among Texas cities.” Frederick Law Olmstead, traveling through the region in the 1850s, noted Austin’s “rolling and picturesque” character, its “agreeable views of distant hills,” but was quick to add, “There is a very remarkable number of drinking and gambling shops, but not one book store.” O. Henry, the city’s first notable scribe, wrote that the first settlers “killed off all the Indians between the [Texas State] lunatic asylum and the river, and laid out Austin. It has been laid out ever since.” In the 1890s, he said, the city consisted of “one soap factory, one electric light works, one cemetery, one dam, one racetrack, two beer gardens, one capitol, two city councils, [and] one cocaine factory.” In 1951, when the Brammers arrived, little had changed.
Mary Lasswell, a writer living in Austin in the early 1950s, and a fleeting acquaintance of Brammer’s, wrote, “Texas is an eternal synthesis of past and present, superimposed one upon the other.” Austin, she said, “produces a feeling of being in two places at once. Skyscrapers . . . in one block, and a few blocks away an ancient wooden store with a false front high above it bears the crudely lettered words RAW FURS BOUGHT. The frontier past and the urban present . . . are separated by a very short span of time.”
The moonlight towers, 150-foot-tall former arc lights converted to mercury vapor lamps, purchased from the city of Detroit during Austin’s 1890s electric boom, still illuminated many streets, giving certain neighborhoods an otherworldly feel of having materialized whole from an earlier century.
Kenneth Threadgill’s café on the Old Dallas Highway, still looking like a former Gulf filling station, was another monument to the enduring past. A former bootlegger and a yodeling enthusiast, Threadgill waited in line all night outside the downtown courthouse on December 6, 1933, to receive the first beer license in Travis County after the repeal of Prohibition. By the 1950s, he was hosting hootenannies and sing-alongs of what was beginning to be called folk music. Despite being primarily jazz buffs, the Brammers dropped by from time to time.
And then there was the Scholz Biergarten on San Jacinto Boulevard, sitting nearly in the shadow of the university’s football stadium (already a well-established religious shrine). In the nineteenth century, hundreds of families immigrated to Texas from an area of Germany in Saxony and Prussia to pursue religious and political freedom. One of these men, August Scholz, got caught up in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. After his service in the war, he purchased an old boardinghouse in Austin for $2,400 and built a bar and café on top of it. In 1893, following his death, his stepson sold the establishment to the Lemp Brewery, makers of Falstaff Beer; the place was sold again in 1908, this time to a German-language singing club, the Austin Saengerrunde, which ever since has leased the bar and beer garden to a succession of managers. The club built a private bowling alley behind the garden’s back wall. Every so often, a thunderous clatter echoed as if from nowhere, startling the outdoor drinkers: God calling the end of time.
Time blurred among the garden’s curling elm trees, in pale flakes kicked up from its caliche turf. Old World rituals mixed with modern work schedules. The slow, rural pace of the older patrons (hailing from small towns full of “more Baptists than people,” as Bill Moyers once said of his Texas birthplace) clashed with the urban trendsetters’ impatience. Eddie Wilson, underage at the time but a regular drinker in the garden nonetheless, said of the prevailing atmosphere of diversity, “We [were] arbiters of manners. See, an ol’ boy might call another one a chickenshit motherfuckin’ cocksucker or some such and the second ol’ boy will think that’s ill-mannered and break the other fellow’s jaw.”
Throughout the early to mid-1950s, Scholz’s became the Brammers’ favorite watering hole. In The Gay Place, Brammer christened it the Dearly Beloved Beer and Garden Party and wrote, “The beer garden was shielded on three sides by [a] low yellow frame structure, a U-shaped Gothicism, scalloped and jigsawed and wonderfully grotesque . . . Record music came from a speaker overhead, somewhere in the trees. The music was turned loud so it could be heard above the noise from a next-door bowling alley . . . The sounds from the bowling alley ruined only the ballads.”
State legislators, members of their staffs, newsmen, students and teachers from the university, all gathered in the evening at Scholz’s, beneath the nearby Capitol dome and the UT Tower. Outside, canopied by trees, self-proclaimed political liberals—a small bunch of outcasts—huddled at wooden tables over pitchers of beer and baskets of sausage and kraut to commiserate about their invisibility and apparent lack of effect on world affairs. “The soul of the place was found in conversation; something about [it] engendered leisurely discourse,” said Brammer’s pal Dave Richards, who arrived in Austin in 1954, and whose wife at the time, Ann, would one day become the governor of Texas. “Our politics were pure—we did not win much in the way of elections. Our enemies were gross and obvious . . . As a result, our job was fairly simple, as it required no great sophistication to oppose this old order.”
In the fifties, the Scholz regulars had plenty to shout about. “The Lyndon Johnson forces were attempting to wrest the power of the Democratic party from the Allan Shivers forces, the Shivers forces being the conservatives and the Lyndon Johnson forces being the liberals,” said Ann Richards. In 1951 and 1952, Shivers particularly incensed liberal Democrats by throwing his support to Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon instead of Adlai Stevenson. Ralph Yarborough, a young lawyer who rather feebly challenged Shivers for the governorship in 1952, said he could not understand the term “Eisenhower Democrat. That’s like saying you’re a Christian who believes in Mohammed.” In the years ahead, many Texas liberals would hook their hopes to Yarborough to beat back the conservative wing and—as Yarborough often promised in speeches—to “put the jam on the lower shelves so that the common people could get their share.” The trouble was, a lot of people couldn’t stand Yarborough personally. “He’s a drag,” Brammer said of him. He was arrogant and humorless, quick to blame others when things didn’t go his way. Jimmy Banks, a political columnist for the Dallas Morning News, wrote, “Most of his old friends, who felt his views had been on the moderate side, believe he was ‘pushed’ into the extreme liberal camp by his post-war political ambitions simply because it was the liberals who were looking for someone to carry their banner.”
And it was hard for many in the Scholz crowd to trust Lyndon Johnson. In 1952 he seemed especially bellicose and outlandish, announcing that if “anywhere in the world—by any means, open or concealed—communism trespasses upon the soil of the free world, we should unleash all the power at our command upon the vitals of the Soviet Union.”
Ronnie Dugger said LBJ sounded like a sheriff hoping “for a final shoot-out with Bonnie and Clyde.”
The Brammers eagerly joined these discussions in the garden, spending many pleasant evenings under the elms. “There was a real magic in Austin then,” Nadine said. “There was lots of excitement and energy, a lot of young people who wanted to try new things—new music, new politics, new ideas—new everything!” The garden became a libertine enclave in a narrow cultural wasteland.
“I thought they were the ideal married couple,” said Robert Benton, then a student at UT; he would go on to cowrite the screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde and to direct such films as Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart. He met the couple through a woman he was dating, a colleague of Brammer’s at the newspaper. “They were people you’d make a television series about—he the serious sportswriter, she the beautiful nutcase who always got into mischief. They were terrific. They were what I thought I would have in my life if I was lucky. I’d have the kind of life that Bill had, and I’d be married to the kind of woman Nadine was.
“They were very quick to take advantage of their friends,” he added. “They tested my loyalty early and unloaded a Siamese cat on me. We got along very well together.”
Benton believed Brammer “wasn’t confident in the Texas sense of ‘confident,’ but he was sure of himself as a writer. He knew he was good. He was active, curious, with a certain kind of real ambition to be taken seriously as a writer, not just as a sports reporter. Nadine wanted to be Zelda—not a bad thing to want to be, and if anybody could have pulled it off, it was Nadine. Bill was really in love with her. She was probably the stronger of the two: always the teenage beauty queen. A great life-spirit. Being with her was like being in a car with someone who’s driving twenty miles an hour too fast. It was always hard to get her to be serious. She’d pretend not to be. She’d put on her beauty queen mask.”
Men flirted with her—the husbands of her friends—while the pitchers emptied and the leaves drifted lazily onto the red-checked tablecloths. She liked the attention. She encouraged more of it. “This wonderful couple . . . maybe the world opened up for them too quickly and in a way they didn’t have the experiences or the resources to handle,” Benton said.
Celia Buchan—soon to be the wife of Willie Morris, who would edit Harper’s in the 1960s—came to know the Brammers in the mid-1950s at Scholz’s. Later, she would marry Bob Eckhardt, Nadine’s second husband, following Nadine’s divorce from him. “We used to joke about creating a wall chart of marriages and liaisons in order to better understand the interplay [of our group], but the task was too daunting,” Dave Richards said. “The Texas liberals of that era all seemed to know one another one way or the other.”
Celia Morris was one of the first of Brammer’s friends to appreciate how powerfully charismatic his steady and generous personality could be. She said, “He could be stiller than anybody I’d ever known, and I trusted him because I felt that he was genuinely curious about who I was. Where other men seemed out to prove something—to win an argument, perhaps, or score points, or feel their own sexual magnetism—Bill simply liked women, and they liked him . . . Although he did not seem personally driven by sex, he had an abiding sense of the havoc it wreaked with our best intentions, and perhaps he was the first person I really cared for who had something close to the tragic sense.”
While friends greeted one another (“How are you, you old horse fucker, you”), laughed about the latest jibes they had heard against conservatives on John Henry Faulk’s radio show, and shook their heads at Lyndon Johnson’s latest pronouncement—“Someday, somewhere, someway, there must be a clear-cut settlement between the forces of freedom and the forces of communism. It is foolish to talk of avoiding war”—they coyly courted one another’s spouses, often harmlessly but sometimes risking grave domestic danger. Brammer observed it all in silence, said Celia Morris. He seemed to know something that “I sensed was true but didn’t understand.” He “just seemed to sit back and watch us all muck up.”
Brammer’s first serious attempts to develop a literary arsenal took place in an introductory literature course at the university taught by Professor Truman Guy Steffan, a Byron scholar whose variorum edition of Don Juan, which he would publish in 1957, helped put the University of Texas on the national map in the humanities. The course that Brammer took from him in the fall of 1951 offered readings in short fiction, primarily, supplemented by critical analyses of the stories and creative responses to the readings. Brammer was challenged to think through structure and style while exploring techniques for bringing new life to the page. He kept a notebook full of highlights from class lectures and his own thoughts about fiction. In neat, precise handwriting he wrote of Anthony Cooper’s “Portrait of Henry Hastings,” “True fiction gives us a complete character analysis through action . . . character along with action plus change.” After reading O. Henry, Brammer noted, “A trick doesn’t make a good story.” He preferred Katherine Anne Porter’s “complexity.” Elsewhere, he mused, “Man craves an activity he can participate [in] as a whole man, not merely as a mind, or body—an activity in which body and mind participate harmoniously.”
Steffan asked his students to write two descriptive sketches, one of a person and one of a place. “The principle of suggestion or implication,” Brammer jotted in his notebook. “Beware of diction. Use active words. Dominant impression is conveyed by sensory details.”
He put these lessons into play in his own stories for the class. A piece entitled “Fight Team!” was indicative of his work level at the time. The story unfolds in a university football stadium on game day and is notable for revealing Brammer’s early interest in examining not one character at a time but rather a whole set of social relationships: a modern comedy of manners. The piece has a documentary feel, foregrounding reportage instead of fiction’s impulse to inhabit characters. It is clearly based on a sportswriter’s close observations. The opening contains strengths and weaknesses that would remain signatures of Brammer’s writing:
It is one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon during the fall, a typical Indian summer day and a little too hot for football. There is already a hum of activity around the stadium. Negro and Mexican boys are setting Coca-Cola boxes along the bottom row of the stands, and under the stadium, the concession stand owners are giving their employees last minute instructions before the crowd begins its invasion . . . Addington Blackstone . . . has his own special seat reserved in front of the press box. Addington is a prominent banker in the town, and he gave $20,000 to the University for the construction of a new statium [sic] last year.
Steffan circled the words “typical” and “hum of activity.” He said they were trite. In trying to establish a large sphere of action, a broad setting, Brammer could overlook significant details. He relied too much on exposition rather than letting information surface naturally in characters’ conversations. On the other hand, the boys’ “Coca-cola boxes” were well observed, the banker’s name was perfect, and social distinctions between the wealthiest and poorest members of the community were swiftly established.
Brammer wrote to his teacher: “I tried to show that the little Mexican boys”—who find a pack of cigarettes to share beneath the bleachers—“were probably the only happy people after the game.” He was not yet confident enough to set in motion a series of actions and follow their consequences; instead, he hoped thematic irony would carry the day. In his mature writing, Brammer would demonstrate a wickedly accurate ear for dialogue, but dialogue is the weakest element in “Fight Team!” He worked hard over the next few years to capture the essence and music of talk.
His concern with the “least of these” among his characters—the poor, the disaffected, the social outcasts—and the frustrations of powerful men would remain central to his vision. His note to Steffan is eloquent in laying out his view of human affairs: “The theme of this project was to show how people will plan on having a good time someplace, but only succeed in being confused, unhappy, and uncomfortable. Because many people come to football games, operas, etc., to see and be seen, and care very little about the event. The event is only a medium of social exchange.”
During the school term, he endeavored to sharpen details and shape natural plots springing from character. He wrote fables, historical set pieces, melodramatic monologues, parodies of public speeches. “Keep trying to get a unity of theme,” the professor urged him. In return, Brammer asked, “Was the description . . . all right?” or “Do you think it is too vulgar?” In one note to Steffan, he said, “I don’t know whether you approve of the style, but it felt pretty good . . . Do you find any social significance? I hope the hell you do. I threw in a little of everything.” Attached to another assignment, the complaint: “Well, here I am again with an idea for a story, but no plot. I just can’t seem to get a main line of action . . . I was happy as all hell to finish it. I’m just about spent for any more material.” To this, Steffan replied, “Just keep your eyes and heart open.”
“The city lies against and below two short spiny ribs of hill. One of the little rivers runs round and about, and from the hills it is possible to view the city overall and draw therefrom an impression of sweet curving streets and graceful sweeping lawns and the unequivocally happy sound of children always at play,” Brammer would write of an unnamed Austin in The Gay Place, giving it a Gatsby-like glow. As Larry McMurtry said later, the novel made life in the city in that era sound “more charming and less destructive than it really was.” “On brilliant mornings,” Brammer rhapsodized, “the white sandstone of the [college] tower and the Capitol’s granite dome are joined for an instant, all pink and cream, catching the first light.”
The Brammers’ ideal marriage, as Robert Benton saw it, was similarly a romantic projection, filled with genuine moments of passion, hope, and excitement, but also rife with restlessness, tensions over money and work. Nadine couldn’t abide her husband’s spending habits. “He knew every new product that came on the market; we had a Waring blender before anyone else on the block.” He would buy her an exquisite set of clothes, and they would spend the next several months trying to pay it off. “I knew we were doing something wrong—we could barely pay for necessities like food and gasoline—but it didn’t occur to me to assert myself and tell Bill to control his spending,” Nadine said. “Fifties women played passive roles. We looked to men for guidance and expected them to take care of us, and we often felt helpless.”
One night, she opened a can of food for the Siamese cat she would later give to Benton. The smell of it made her nauseous. She was listless for days. She suspected a gas leak in the apartment. Then a doctor told her, “There’s nothing wrong with a healthy girl like you. You’re pregnant.”
Brammer was ecstatic. “He always wanted children; I didn’t,” said Nadine. “My mother empathized with me—she knew I wasn’t ready for motherhood. She also knew that Bill was irresponsible.”
Shaky and scared, Nadine wanted to be near her mother, so she went to live temporarily with her parents in McAllen. Brammer wrote her weekly, almost daily, letters asking after the new life in her belly and groaning about his loneliness: “Rooter-Pooter [he called her]: Very no good here,” “Ate Del’s tamales for supper . . . I feel like you do in the mornings [sick] . . . Hope I can wake up to go to school this morn.” In fact, he all but stopped going to classes. He ate very little. His mother sent him pecans and fruitcakes. He didn’t know what to do with them. Nadine’s replies to him reflected her relief at her mother’s care as well as her ongoing worries: “I’m strangely bored and yet am enjoying myself at the same time . . . Sorry you’re lonesome. I am too—sorta. Wish I could talk to you about getting a job . . . I don’t know what our plans are—was just wondering how we’re going to pay the bills,” “Have you decided anything about the finances?” “All we need is money.”
He was still scrambling to make ends meet: “Yesterday I discovered that there was nothing between the tubes on our rear tires except a teeney bit of webbing . . . They wouldn’t have lasted another trip. Cost $50, but was able to pay five down and pay the rest at five a week. Guess we’ll survive.”
“I feel not so good about everything,” Nadine pressed him. She totted up their monthly expenses. “There will be days I will have to scrounge without good food and I don’t think that would be good for me—or YOU. There will be a few doctor bills along too. NO GOOD!!!! . . . There is nothing else. What am I to do? Will come back when my stomach can take the apartment.”
Brammer tried to placate her, but his favorite strategy—shopping for her—was the core of the problem. “Got you many kinds of prayzunts,” he wrote. “Started to get you a new doucheee bag, but didn’t think it would look nice when you unwrapped it.” He considered the possibility of moving to McAllen and writing for a local newspaper there. At first, Nadine liked the idea. The long separation began to soften her, and she told him how much she missed him. “Be good to your phallus and hurry [down here]!!!” she wrote. She signed her letters playfully: “Let’s do it, Your pregnant whore,” “Su ‘concubina,’” “Virgin Mary.” “My phallus yearns for your wombus,” he wrote.
Nadine realized that her time in Denton and Austin had distanced her, temperamentally and politically, from her family and old high school friends. She loved Daddy Noah, but she was appalled by his racist views, clearer than ever: “Went to town yesterday,” she wrote Brammer. “It was ghastly—‘All them spics spend more money than the white folks.’” Soon, the idea of living permanently in the borderlands no longer appealed to her. She remembered how trapped she had felt as a girl. “I’m glad we aren’t moving to this stinking valley,” she told her husband.
But just how she wanted to live remained an open question. Throughout the separation, particularly early on, Brammer worried about what she might do. “Be happy,” he wrote to her. “Don’t do nothing to yourself. If you don’t want what comes out, I’ll take it, and you can flee away.”
“In fact, at one point I tried to take some medicine that would make me abort,” Nadine said. “Bill called me when I was about to take it.”
“Love and nice things,” he signed one of his letters to her, “and don’t do nothing to yourself or I’ll leave you.”