Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Richard Barager, a nephrologist—kidney specialist—in private practice in San Diego who has twice received a San Diego County Medical Society Top Doctor award for distinguished care in his specialty. Dr. Barager is a champion of the healing power of literature who from time to time “prescribes” specific novels to patients to help them cope with their burden of illness. He has engaged the medical community at large in this endeavor via The Literary Doctor, a blog devoted to the use of literary fiction to help patients and physicians alike explore the meaning of human illness in a way scientific method cannot. He has long believed the two finest callings in life are doctor and writer, the one ministering to the human condition, the other illuminating it, both—when performed with compassion and knowledge—capable of transforming it. His new novel Altamont Augie is a dynamic, passionate, entertaining exploration of the 1960s from a wholly fresh perspective. David Horowitz has praised Altamont Augie in his blurb for the book: “”Richard Barager has written the novel of the Sixties–a passion-filled, pitch-perfect, roller coaster of a tale about the decade that divides us all.” Visit Richard Barager’s website at richardbarager.com.
FP: Richard Barager, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Tell us what inspired you to write Altamont Augie.
Barager: Thank you, Jamie. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to spend some time with Frontpage Magazine’s readers.
As is often the case, the subject matter chose me—seven years ago, during the Iraq war. The protests that flared up against the war reminded me of street protests I had witnessed in my youth against another war: Vietnam. Which got me thinking again about the 1960s, a decade that left an enormous cultural and psychological imprint on me. Yet I never really understood the Sixties, never knew what it all meant: the music and fashion, the war and protest, the racial strife and assassinations. Altamont Augie, then, is my humble exploration of the meaning and legacy of the 1960s.
FP: Why the title?
Barager: Altamont refers to something I had nearly forgotten about prior to researching the novel: The Altamont Speedway Concert, a rock festival held in the waning days of the 1960s. Altamont was a concert that went bad. Really bad. So bad, it is regarded by many as the metaphoric Death of the Sixties, the symbolic—and tragic—end of the utopian Age of Aquarius.
There were four deaths amidst the violence of Altamont, the most famous of which was the stabbing death of a black Berkeley teenager named Meredith Hunter by the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. But what intrigued me more than Hunter’s notorious slaying was a fatality nobody paid much attention to that day: that of a young man who, an hour into the show, inexplicably got up, walked over to the nearby California Aqueduct, plunged in and drowned. He would remain anonymous, unidentified, his body never claimed. Altamont Augie is this man’s imagined life story.
FP: Share the main essence and plot of your story with us—without giving away too much, of course.
Barager: Altamont Augie is the story of David Noble and Jackie Lundquist, a pair of ill-fated college lovers who clash over Vietnam when he joins the marines to fight a war she opposes. To Jackie, the grinding war in Vietnam is a failure of national conscience; to David, it is a failure of national honor. But neither her rise to fame as the antiwar movement’s alluring Radical Queen nor David’s counter-protest activities in support of the war can extinguish their passion for one another. Their love endures, even while fighting on opposite sides of the defining issue of their time, the New Left and New Right battling for a generation’s political soul—a battle that rages still, with Frontpage Magazine in the thick of things. Both their tumultuous affair and the Age of Aquarius itself tumble into the decade’s last great rock festival: Altamont, the metaphoric Death of the Sixties.
FP: Love endures between two people who take vehemently conflicting stances on the most divisive political issue of their time: Vietnam, a war that nearly tore America apart. Tell us why you chose this theme and what it means to you.
Barager: The theme you allude to is this: that it is possible to be in love with someone without being in love with their beliefs. It is crucial, I think, to have the hope that a relationship such as the one between David and Jackie can happen. Because if it can’t, we’re all in trouble. If we can’t have relationships with people who don’t share our belief systems, then society can’t function. Love for “the other” is a fundamentally American value enshrined in our founding documents and embedded in our Judeo-Christian heritage. Recognizing, however, that with “loving the other” comes risk. Sometimes considerable risk. As in this story.
FP: What distinguishes Altamont Augie from other novels about the Sixties?
Barager: The usual narrative of the Sixties has as its cornerstone the Generation Gap. But this was a passing, adolescent thing. Of more lasting consequence was a conflict within the Baby Boom generation itself, the seldom-told story of campus showdowns between Students for a Democratic Society and Young Americans for Freedom—student activists of the New Left and New Right. It is the dramatization of this latter conflict that makes Altamont Augie different from other novels about the era that have preceded it.
The great untold story of the Sixties—at least untold in the cannon of literary fiction—is of the ideological civil war that took place amongst the new youth culture of the day, the Port Huron Statement of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) squaring off against the Sharon Statement of YAF (Young Americans for Freedom), the New Left and New Right vying for a generation’s political soul.
FP: In the narrative, we see that Caleb Levy has a fondness for Saul Bellow’s novel, The Adventures of Augie March. You are telling us something here. Please let us in a bit.
Barager: The use of the name Augie in my story and title is a tribute to one of the great novels of 20th century American literature—and to its protagonist, one of the greatest characters of 20th century American literature. What makes The Adventures of Augie March so great? How about this, the greatest opening sentence in 20th century American literature:
I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
In his review of this novel in Commentary Magazine, Norman Podhoretz had this to say about Augie March:
“…The book is about America, or more specifically, the problem of the individual in a conformist society. Augie March stands for the American dream of the inviolable individual who has the courage to resist his culture—that figure whom, Tocqueville doubted could survive the realities of American life…”
My novel clutches this same dream to its breast.
FP: David Noble embraces American Exceptionalism. Your own thoughts on it?
Barager: The most compelling proof of the existence of American exceptionalism is the number of first generation immigrants living in the United States: 38.5 million. No other country even comes close; Russia is next, with 12.5 million. That immigrants from all over the world choose overwhelmingly to come—often while enduring great personal hardship—to a single country makes that country, by definition, exceptional.
And it has always been so, from the time the phrase was first coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America: “The situation of the Americans is therefore entirely exceptional, and it is to be believed that no [other] democratic people will ever be placed in it. Their wholly Puritan origin; their uniquely commercial habits; the very country they inhabit…”
G.K. Chesterton, in What I Saw in America, explained American exceptionalism like this: “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence…it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived.”
For nonbelievers, there is the more secular definition from Seymour Lipset in American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword: “…the United States is a country organized around an ideology which includes a set of dogmas about the nature of a good society…the nation’s ideology can be described in five words: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire.”
Whether you think American exceptionalism is a set of God-given values inextricable from a belief in God or a man-made ideology suitable for skeptics and believers alike depends on your belief or disbelief in God, but all you really need to believe about American exceptionalism is this: it is real, precious, and deserving of our loving and loyal stewardship.
FP: It is interesting that Jackie perpetually tries to mould David into her own image. And yet David accepts Jackie the way she is and doesn’t try to change her. Is there a larger lesson here on how the Left tries to reconstruct the human being?
Barager: There are two dynamics in play in this aspect of their relationship, which is exactly as you describe it—Jackie relentlessly trying to change David.
The Left’s most cherished value is equality and the Right’s most cherished value is liberty, which results in the Left wanting to remake society equal (with the Left’s self-conceived image as the ideal) and the Right wanting to be left alone to make of itself what it will. So Jackie, as a woman of the Left, seeks to remake David in the Left’s image, while David, a man of the Right, has no such desire to reconstruct Jackie. David is more tolerant of their differences because he is less concerned with equality than with liberty.
But there is an even more universal dynamic driving Jackie’s behavior, as alluded to by David in the story: “…that most distaff of urges, a woman’s desire to change her man.” As you have perhaps noticed, Jamie, the women in our lives seek to improve us.
FP: The themes and notions of honor and shame come across very powerfully in your story. The meaning for you personally?
Barager: Honor and shame are two sides of the same coin; one cannot exist without the other. And I am concerned that in many respects, we have become a more shameless society, and therefore a society lacking in honor. One of the sources I list in my bibliography is a book by James Bowman called Honor: A History. Bowman makes the point, as does Kyle Levy at the end of my story, that honor is a vital human instinct, without which human beings and the societies they form cannot endure. Bowman believes that the traditional honor culture of early America has collapsed and been replaced by a cult of celebrity. I have no doubt he is right. How many Americans under the age of 30 know who Lady Gaga is? And how many of them know the name of Salvatore Giunta, the first living recipient of the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War? An ever-smaller percentage of Americans serve in our armed forces and an ever-larger number of Americans have no immediate family members who have ever been in the military. This is a recipe for a mercenary army. I think it fair to say that national honor in America as it was once known is in a state of serious neglect.
FP: And so while we are at it, tragedy and redemption.
Barager: Tragedy and redemption have much the same relationship as honor and shame. From tragedy redemption is possible and without tragedy—both personal, as in the story, and national, as with Vietnam—there can be no redemption. The best drama, in my opinion, has the classic Aristotelian components of a main character presented with a defining obstacle that forces the character to make a critical choice, an act of free will that can lead to honor or shame, tragedy or redemption.
