AA book September Remember

This is the first Alcoholics Anonymous novel with liquor as its central theme. "..Avery Rickham, an explorer in Latin American countries, hated a lot of things, among them New York City. He liked country people and fishing and the jungle -- and he liked to drink. At first he was one of the estimated three million excessive drinkers in the U.S. Then he became one of the estimated six hundred thousand alcoholics in our country. This was Avery Rickham at the beginning of this novel -- suffering remorse from a terrific bender that had landed him in a police station.."

Grapevine, April 1945

        From" September Remember": a Novel about A. A.

Concluding Chapter XXI, begun in the March Grapevine. "September Remember," by Eliot Taintor (a writing team, one of whom is an A.A.), will be published April 16th, by Prentice-Hall.

(Rick the. hero of September Remember, is deeply concerned over Joe's continuing slip. Joe is Rick's best friend and original A.A. mentor. In an effort to learn how to help Joe, Rick has consulted Joe's psychiatrist, Dr. Wales. Together, Wales and Rick have gone up to New Haven where Wales is to address the Yale Summer School for Studies on Alcohol. Rich hopes to meet and talk to Bill Griffith, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who will be there.)

    Chapter XXI ... continued

    Two men were already seated there. One, "a long, lean, humorous, intelligent Vermont Yankee, " must be Bill Griffith, from Joe's description. The heavier man, Dr. Jellinek, Director of the School, spoke briefly ... introducing Bill Griffith. Rick watched the lean Vermonter unfold himself, look over the audience, walk down the
steps from the rostrum to the main floor and say with a grin and a slight drawl that he welcomed the spirit of informality and would like to talk as if this were an A.A. meeting. "Some while ago," he began, "a few of us from A. A. met with a group of distinguished physicians who were studying what they called 'recovered alcoholics' and 'un-recovered alcoholics' -- medical terms. They mentioned a third group, 'normal people.' Maybe some of us who had been 'dry' several years were hurt to find that we were still not considered 'normal.'
    "The doctors were very humble -- like our good friend Dr. Sam Wales, here -- they admitted that medicine has not done much for the alcoholic. They seemed to think that alcoholics are more sensitive, more emotionally childish than normal people and this hurt us -- we had always considered ourselves intellectually precocious.
    "In other words, they were describing the alcoholic character much as I would have put it. Let's say -- the alcoholic tends to the grandiose.
    "I was that way myself even as a child on a Vermont farm. I can remember the day my Granddad told me about the boomerang of Australia which came back to you if it missed the animal you were throwing it at. Granddad concluded with the dogmatic statement that nobody but an Australian could make a boomerang. That made me mad. You see, I had grandiose ideas. I determined to show him that I, Bill Griffith of Vermont, could make a boomerang. I neglected my lessons. I forgot to fill the woodbox. I spent all my time reading all the books on Australia in our town library -- except for the time I spent with drawshave and saw on every likely piece of limber I could lay my hands on. My Granddad got good and mad when I sawed the
headpiece out of my bed.
    "As luck would have it, this turned out to be the right piece of wood for a boomerang. I threw it around the Congregational Church steeple and it came back to me. Then I called my Granddad out for a demonstration. I threw the boomerang, it went around the steeple, came back and nearly decapitated Granddad." Bill paused while
the audience, laughed. "Now there was an example of the grandiose. I had spent an utterly unreasonable amount of study and exertion for no useful purpose -- simply to prove my own importance.
    "I could give you other examples that might look as if I had been developing some admirable qualities, such as persistence -- actually I was developing my ego. In school and in the war. It was during the war that I made the great discovery that a few drinks released me from self-consciousness.
    "After the war I went to New York. I was overcome by the vastness of the place, the numbers of sophisticated people. I felt a great urge to show these city folks that a Yankee from the Vermont hills could hold his own with them. I went to night law school. My wife and I lived in cheap rooms to save money -- we had decided that
money was all-important in getting ahead. My social drinking increased. Little did I realize that I was building a boomerang that would comeback and nearly decapitate me.
    "From a legitimate means of relaxation and release, liquor was becoming a necessity to me. And I was pouring it into a body that was very sensitive to alcohol. We have a way of stating it in A.A. -- alcoholism is an allergy of the body combined with a compulsion of the mind. That was what was happening to me. My hangovers became worse. Each time I drank I got drunker than I intended. But my business career was going ahead. I was making money in Wall Street, getting the social recognition I craved. Only I couldn't seem to live without liquor -- or live very happily with it. I was a drunk by 1924.
    "By the time the depression hit, I was being supported mainly by my wife, Lois, who is down there now in the fourth row." He waved a long arm toward a gray-haired woman with a gentle face, gentle and strong, and with the same look of serenity his own face had.
    "Then came, my big chance. I was offered a job as manager of a large syndicate. I had succeeded in staying sober during the preliminary talks -- six or eight weeks, I guess -- but they all knew about my drinking and before the deal was closed one of them came to me and said, ' Bill, are you sure you can stay off liquor; not take one single drink?'
    "'Oh sure,' I said, 'of course I can.'
    "'Well, would you mind if we put that in the contract?'
    "'Not at all, not at all.'
    "So they wrote in that if I look one drink my job as manager was ended."
    Rick knew what was coming -- it was the same sort of thing that had happened to him when he'd tried to go on the wagon on account of an important job -- and landed behind the eight ball. The A.A.s around him were all grinning reminiscently as Bill Griffith went on to tell how he had gone out to New Jersey to inspect the plant and gotten into a poker game afterward at his hotel with some of the company engineers. They had had a jug of "Jersey Lightning" and offered him a drink. He had refused repeatedly, but late in the evening he had gotten to thinking that in all his long drinking career he had never lasted "Jersey Lightning." So he had had a drink. Three days later he had come to on his bed in the same hotel. The phone was ringing. It was his new boss, telling him his job was ended.
    "Now I submit to you," Bill undid the buttons of his coat and pulled at a dark blue tie with white curlicues, "that is not the habit of drinking. That is an infinite projection of habit which might well be called an obsession."
    From then on things had gone from bad to worse pretty rapidly. Bill had been in Towns Hospital in New York, where Kidd Whistler had taken Joe. Even his doctor and his wife had about lost hope for him. Then one day an old friend, a former drinking pal, had come to see him. Bill had offered him a drink and Ebbie had refused. Ebbie
had looked different. He said he had got religion. He had talked to Bill about it.
    "Now I never thought much of the God business," Bill smiled, "but Ebbie called it simply 'a power greater than ourselves' and I had always believed in such a power. After Ebbie left I began to ask myself, 'Can beggars be choosers? Does a cancer patient quibble about cures?' No, he goes to the best physician in utter dependency.
    "This thought kept sticking in my mind through two or three more weeks of drinking. Then suddenly I cried out in abject desperation, '1 am willing to do anything. Anything. If there is a God, will He show Himself?' I had no faith at all but suddenly I was overcome with a feeling of being surrounded by Something. I felt transported to a mountain top ... I had a sense of light and ecstasy, followed by
great peace.
"'Oh, so this is the peace that passeth understanding,' I told myself. But I became cautious. Scared, I called the doctor. I thought I was going crazy.
    "'No, boy, you're not insane,' he said. 'Whatever it is you've got hold of, you'd better hang on to it. It's a lot better than what you had before.' I did hold on ... That was ten years ago and I haven't had a drink since."
    He looked around the solemn gathering and grinned. "Some of my irreverent friends in A. A. call my religious experience 'Bill's hot flash,' but it is very similar to several described in William James's 'Varieties of Religions Experience.' You could call James a founder of A.A. although he never heard of it, and Ebbie, certainly, and a man in Akron, Ohio, who believed that what had happened to me could help other drunks.
   "I am not saying that every man and woman in A.A. gets this sudden type of 'conversion,' as our doctor here called it. As a matter of fact," and here Rick felt as if Bill Griffith were looking directly at him, speaking to him, "most of our members approach the spiritual angle of our program tentatively -- some of them skeptically -- but it comes. Slowly, often. Unobserved by the person himself, perhaps, but the personality change, is just as much of a miracle.
    "It may come through faith -- or it may come through works. You see we get people both ways. The 12th step of our program is helping other alcoholics. That is religion too.
    "Our program has been borrowed from both religion and medicine. For instance," he raised his left hand, "the doctor recommends analysis and catharsis." He raised his right hand. "The priest, or minister, advises examination of the conscience and confession." He looked at his left hand again. "The psychiatrist says, 'You have stepped out of the herd. You are an introvert. You cannot be happy unless you can make contact with your fellowmen.'" He turned to his right hand. "And what does the religious man say? 'Think of others and you will be at peace. Practice the Brotherhood of Man.' The medical man tells his patient to 'find a hobby, some new compelling interest,' and the religious man talks about the 'explosive power of a
new affection.' They are saying the same thing in different words, and we have found that what they say is true.
"So ... A.A. is a synthesis of religion and medicine -- plus our own
experience. We have added two main things: first, transmission by alcoholics -- we've proved that only a drunk can help another drunk; second, group therapy -- membership in our society takes away an alcoholic's feeling of being a pariah and gives him a new, compelling interest in life. A newcomer feels more important each day that he
does not drink. And we've been told pretty often that we are all the type that has to feel important. That's another reason for A.A.'s success."
    Rick was impressed by the way Bill Griffith handled the questions which followed the enthusiastic applause. ...
    When the audience swarmed around Bill Griffith, Rick moved forward and joined Dr. Wales. Suddenly Bill detached himself from the persistent questioners, his arms outstretched.
    "Well, Rick. I'm glad to see you at last."
    "How the devil did you know me?"
    "Wales whispered to me on the platform that you'd come with him. But I guess," Bill laughed, "I'd have recognized your famous high bottom anyway. Joe's talked a lot about you. You're, his prize case.
    Rick's face darkened.
    "Joe Kelly will be all right." Bill Griffith put his hand on Rick's arm. "Joe has come, too far along in A.A., helped too many other people, to fold up permanently now. Right, Doctor?"
    It wasn't a question, really. Rick felt that Bill Griffith's confidence would have stood up even to a negative answer from Wales.
    Wales smiled. "Doesn't the Bible say that faith can move mountains, and Kelly is just a man -- a man who's had a bad blow but who has your faith. It's the thing that will help him most now. And I'm speaking as a psychiatrist," he added.
    "It didn't help Sylvia," Rick said. "Joe didn't help her. None of us helped her."
    Bill Griffith looked at Rick's dark, unhappy face. This was harder than any of the questions he had had to answer after the meeting, but he faced it with the same honesty. "Maybe, we did help Sylvia for a while. She said she was happier in A.A. than she had ever been in her life. Maybe we failed. Look at it this way, Rick. A.A. may fail once or twice -- or a dozen times -- and we may be sick at heart and full of self-reproach, but that isn't a healthy attitude. It isn't even statistical. We've, got to keep our minds on the hundreds of men and women A.A. has helped -- the hundreds more, it is helping every day. Sylvia was a lovely person, but Sylvia was one and we are many."
    Rick could see Sylvia in her white dress leaning against the column of Joe's porch, her lovely, pointed medieval face lifted in challenge, hear the ringing certainty of her voice. "A.A. keeps on -- men and women learn how to live without alcohol, even if some of them learn slowly, even if some of them fail. It doesn't matter."

Blueplate Gospel

by Leslie H. Farber, M.D.

Books in Review: September Remember, by Eliot Taintor. New York: Prentice Hall, Inc. 322 pages, $2.75.

Of all the methods devised by state, clergy or medical profession for curing alcoholism--prohibition, imprisonment, will power, electric shock, etc.--none has ever been so popular or so highly publicized as Alcoholics Anonymous. And so far as the limited aim is concerned of helping people deprive themselves of alcohol, there seems no doubt that the popularity is deserved.

Where other methods tend to say, "Now you are cured; go back to your life," this voluntary association of 15,000 members is unique in offering not a "cure" so much as a "life." Not drinking becomes in itself an absorbing occupation, providing fellowship, prestige and--in spite of an absurd body of crude medico-religious dogma--a very real communal faith. Obviously no one can give up a symptom without finding at least a partial satisfaction for its cause, which in this case is intricately related to the social structure. It is no indictment of the method itself, therefore, to criticize the kind of life celebrated by AA, or to suggest that what really goes on bears no relation to the blueplate values offered as explanation and inducement. These are not people driven to self-denial because of any deep awareness of interpersonal failure or spiritual emptiness in their lives; usually they have found that alcohol was threatening such real possessions as job, family or the deference paid them by the less addicted. It is hardly surprising if the compensatory social life which they achieve together must be glorified by women’s magazine phrases and lodge-meeting principles.

The advantage of the present 300-page pamphlet (disguised as a pulp-style novel) over the shorter booklets distributed by AA, lies in its detailed revelations of group activity. While the formal weekly meetings are devoted to inspirational talks by ex-alcoholics, coffee is drunk in no blue-nose spirit; good fellowship abounds ("You can get that sense of abandon without liquor"). AA members feel a natural solidarity: the way they would "get up and talk at meetings, really let their hair down, made -other contacts seem thin and superficial. Other people shadowy." And while AA insists that it has no ambition to impose sobriety on the nation, its members feel a natural willingness to share their benefits with any applicant. They are "on call," so to speak, day and night, answering requests for aid or enlightenment from strangers or backsliding fellows. Each member is at once both patient and physician: only from a fellow alcoholic can they receive that acceptance, without condescension, which society has withheld. As physician, setting an example to others, they have an incentive toward sobriety, but it seems to me they gain something more valuable as well: the privilege of adult responsibility without its full rigors. They feel free to become a child—a patient--again, whenever necessary. But in practice, of course, this dual role must cause some paralyzing inter-alcoholic confusions--depending on who is treating whom at the moment. Prestige is gained primarily through one’s success in not drinking; second, through one’s talent for mutual aid. Occasionally an unregenerate member is subjected to social ostracism. ("But probably every field has it lunatic fringe.")

One assumption is that only an alcoholic can understand an alcoholic. Within obvious limits this is true, but the quality of understanding is rather doubtful. Tag-lines of popular psychiatry, which serve as passwords in the organization, also serve to prevent any first-hand insight, while non-psychiatric under- standing seems on an equally debased level. There is perhaps a fortunate discrepancy, however, between the "religious" flavor of the pamphlets and the actual beliefs and practices deducible from the novelistic dialogue. The "Greater Power" so earnestly invoked in print is the kind of genteel deity, heavily infused with Buchmanism and popular science, to which a smart advertising man might subscribe in a mawkish moment. This has little to do with the prevailing faith, a strong group loyalty, which activates AA members and undoubtedly supplies another missing factor in their lives. A good sociologist might learn a great deal about our present society by watching the operation of this paradox: the social values that have, to some degree, driven the alcoholic to drink, are here recreated in microcosm but with enough empiric differences, apparently, to act as an effective substitute for drinking. Even with its preposterous ragbag of theory, AA has something of communicable value to offer the social sciences, but so far no psychiatrist has been enough of a sociologist, and no sociologist enough of a psychiatrist, to discover what it is.

Source: The New Republic, May 21,1945

Mason, Ruth Fitch, 1890-1974. (vassar library archives)

Mason, Ruth Fitch, 1890-1974.
(vassar library archives)