Читать книгу September Remember - Eliot Taintor - Страница 6

September Remember, originally published in 1945, has been obscured by time and is known to only a few as the first Alcoholics Anonymous novel. It was written by Gregory Mason and Ruth Fitch Mason under the pseudonym Elliot Taintor. For a time it was a best seller, but it has been out of print for almost seventy years now. As with many best selling novels of the past, in terms of content and style, it now can feel somewhat dated. Nevertheless, the book still holds more than passing interest to contemporary readers.

I came across this novel in the course of researching the writers Thomas Boyd and Margaret Woodward Smith, the parents of Betty Grace Nash, who was the co-owner of the Ridgefield (Connecticut) Press, where I had my first teenage job. In the late 1920s, Thomas Boyd had an affair with the poet Ruth Fitch Bartlett, and left his wife for her. Ruth left her first husband, Walter Bartlett, for Boyd, and the couple subsequently married and moved to South Woodstock, Vermont,

Thomas Boyd became an active communist in the early 1930s, influenced by what he saw during the stock market crash and subsequent Depression, as well as by what he experienced personally—as a writer unhappily working with publishers, whom he believed exploited writers. In 1934, Boyd ran a spectacularly unsuccessful campaign for governor, garnering just 177 votes statewide.

After Boyd passed away in 1935 at just 37, likely from the effects of being gassed during World War I, Ruth Fitch Boyd became a literary agent. In1937, she married anthropologist and writer Gregory Mason. They collaborated on two novels, Danbury Curve and September Remember.

After some further research, I learned that September Remember is considered the first novel ever to include Alcoholics Anonymous as part of its storyline. And it was evidently one of the best-selling novels of 1945. When I decided to reprint this book, I expected I would need to contact the heirs of the authors for permission. Researching the novel’s status at the Library of Congress, I discovered that its copyright expired in 1972 and had never been renewed. Unbeknownst to all, September Remember had fallen into the public domain and had become freely available for reprinting, but as so often happens with out-of-print books, its status was clouded and unclear until now.

During the intervening seventy years, many of the attributes of addiction and recovery described in the book have remained unchanged, giving the novel a certain timelessness and ongoing appeal. Both because of and regardless of its time and place, September Remember tells a fascinating story.