Not-God (12 page)

The new program’s first problem thus became the image it presented of “the real alcoholic.” Slowly, from early 1938, Bill and Bob and their fellow admitted alcoholics progressively developed two ideas on which they had thus far relied only implicitly. These understandings concerned how the alcoholic “hit bottom” and the process by which a newcomer “identified” with admitted alcoholics. Neither the phrase
hitting bottom
nor the word
identifying
appeared in the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous for another fifteen years. When they finally did emerge, “hitting bottom” and “identifying” were terms that Alcoholics Anonymous immediately recognized as well summarizing how the program and fellowship had begun and worked — clear witness to the unconscious depth of the
concepts
.
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“The real alcoholic” continued to be understood as described by Dr. Silkworth. “At some stage of his drinking career he begins to lose all control of his liquor consumption, once he starts to drink.” But “loss of control” could be and, of course, was denied even more easily than was “alcoholic behavior.” Perhaps so, intuited the early A.A.s from their own abundant experience, but the denial was only external. Their own personal histories amply testified to the fact that, indeed, the greater the external denial, the more deeply and painfully clutched the internal confusion, fear, and dread — especially of the specter of insanity. At some deep level, however buried, they knew from their own experience that the drinking alcoholic
knew
that he was out of control. And so the external realization could come through the internal, and
hitting bottom
became understood not as loss of employment or family, not as “sleeping in the weeds,” or even immediately as the felt inability to not drink, but as the sense of being “really licked” and hopeless in the terms, the concepts, and especially the
feelings
that Bob E.’s visitors had shared with him. As Bill Wilson summarized it in telling his own story: “No words can tell of the loneliness and despair I found in that bitter morass of self-pity.” On another occasion, Wilson summarized explicity what he and Dr. Smith had discovered: “You must always remember that ‘hitting bottom’ is the essence of getting hold of A.A. — really.”
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+

A further problem immediately arose. If “hitting bottom” was such an
internal
phenomenon, how could anyone transmit to another this sobriety-inducing and so life-saving realization? Wilson’s and Smith’s answer was based on what they had learned at the time of their initial meeting with each other, and that answer’s elaboration has already been glimpsed in the description of how Bob E.’s bedside visitors treated him. The telling of personal experience —
internal
personal experience — laid the foundation for saving identification. The antidote for the deep symptom of denial was
identification
marked by open and undemanding narration infused with profound honesty about personal weakness.

The process of identification was offered without any demand for reciprocity or for anything else. The sober alcoholic told his own story out of the conviction that such honesty was required only by and necessary only to his own sobriety. This example was evidence of the A.A. understanding that honesty was necessary to
get
sobriety. Rather than any direct attack upon the mechanisms of denial or the evidence of self-centeredness, the carrier of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous demonstrated literally and vividly the essential necessity of honesty to his own sobriety. This honesty basic to identification concerned precisely the speaker’s weakness and vulnerability: he bared his internal torment while drinking — in this very act becoming further vulnerable —
now even to this listener
.
⁶

The therapeutic power of this process of identification arose from the witness it gave, a witness to the healing potency of
the shared honesty of mutual vulnerability openly acknowledged
. The healing response to this invitation, this witness, lay in the act of surrender — the necessary foundation for “getting the program” of Alcoholics Anonymous. By November 1937, the outward manifestation of surrender had come a long way from Bill Wilson’s tortured but private abdication of his “inquiring, rational mind.” For Dr. Bob Smith, the act of surrender promised on the morning of that day (“I am going to go through with it”) had been embodied in his post-operative activities of 10 June 1935. The surgeon, in his realistic economic fears so cravenly desirous of clinging to whatever tattered remnants endured of his medical reputation, had finally “let go” only when he sought out, confessed to, and promised restitution to those whom he had harmed throughout his years of alcoholic drinking. Perhaps because Dr. Bob’s final surrender had come only as a dangerously delayed phenomenon, the Akron co-founder tended to make the explicit act of surrender a dramatic and required beginning. Surely Bob E.’s description of his “making surrender,” a description virtually identical with those offered by other early Akron A.A.s, pointed in this direction.
⁷

By November 1937, then, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith had come to some understanding of hitting bottom, identification, and the surrender resulting from the conjunction of these two key concepts and practices. As Wilson returned again from Akron to New York City, superficially the problem facing him with the yet unformed program of Alcoholics Anonymous concerned the proposed projects of hospitals, missionaries, and the book about which the Akronites had been so hesitant. More deeply he wondered, as his train’s clickety-clack provided a soothing rhythmic background for his ponderings: if Dr. Bob’s greater numerical success was due to the explicit, Oxford Group style “making surrender,” how would his New Yorkers receive this intelligence? So recently and so self-consciously separated from the Oxford Group, harboring among their number at least one militant non-theist, acutely hostile to the very words
surrender
and
conversion
in their wariness of religion, they would hardly return readily to so religious a practice as kneeling to “make surrender.” Was it possible to have both rapid numerical growth and openness to skeptics such as he himself had been if dramatic conversion experiences like his “hot flash” about which the New Yorkers warily joked were the exception rather than the rule?

Bill’s head began to ache, and he rested his wearied brain on a more congenial Akron catch-phrase: he would just have to meet this perplexing problem, like that of the proposed projects, “a day at a time.” Fortunately, handling the superficial problem would furnish the solution to the deeper one. The pragmatic philosophy of immediately treating people’s behavior in preference to investigating directly underlying causes was beginning to penetrate the fellowship and program of Alcoholics Anonymous on more than one level.

Always one to accentuate the positive, Bill Wilson stepped off his train at Grand Central more buoyed by the slim Akron majority favoring the proposed projects than burdened by the awareness of deeper problems. Wilson did not realize it at the time, but this was the beginning of what would be for him a lifelong task within Alcoholics Anonymous. He had become “the man in the middle,” and so his became the difficult role of mediating between different understandings of Alcoholics Anonymous by those who
were
Alcoholics Anonymous. For now, despite all his own vaunted “twin-engine drive” and promotional instincts, Bill found that his own zeal for the projects so grudgingly accepted by the Akronites was wildly surpassed by the enthusiasm of many of the New Yorkers, and especially by that of Hank P.

Wilson explained the concerns of the Akronites, who were — he had to point out often — a solid numerical majority of the new fellowship. But the New Yorkers, flushed with self-confidence, revealed no inclination to learn. They agreed that a book was the first appropriate and most important endeavor. Led by Hank and newcomer Jim B., most even seemed to feel that this project’s most significant effect would be the education of the benighted Akronites.
⁸

On one matter, Wilson saw the possibility of agreement. A major worry of the Akron alcoholics was the financial condition of Dr. Bob Smith: threatened with bankruptcy, he seemed certain to lose his home by foreclosure of its mortgage. Bound to Oxford Group principles as they were, the Akronites harbored no thought of selling their program or even of making a profit from the book which would set it forth, but they were convinced that such faithful, aggressive evangelism would, in God’s providence, attract the support which the program and its co-founders needed. The New Yorkers shared a similar attitude toward “professionalism,” as an incident earlier in the year had revealed.”
⁹

In mid-1937, the financial situation at 182 Clinton Street had become acute. Lois Wilson’s income as an interior decorator was barely sufficient to support her husband and maintain their home. Its pitiful inadequacy, even without the added burden of live-in drunks most of whom made no contribution towards board, came home to Bill with the realization that some of the sober alcoholics who were coming each week to the Tuesday evening meetings were back on their feet financially and were earning good money back in the world of business. So it was that when Charlie Towns, the entrepreneur who ran Towns Hospital, one day met Wilson making corridor rounds in search of prospects, the proposition that he presented struck Bill as more than merely attractive.
¹⁰

‘“Look here, Bill,’ said he, ‘I’ve got a hunch that this A.A. business of yours is someday going to fill Madison Square Garden.… Look, Bill, don’t you see you’re getting the bad end of the deal? … All around you, these drunks are getting well and making money, but you’re giving this work full-time, and still you’re broke. It isn’t fair.’”
¹¹

These sentiments uncannily summarized many of Wilson’s own thoughts. But then Towns continued with a proposal that offered an opportunity to do something. ‘“Why don’t you move your work in here? I’ll give you an office, a decent drawing account, and a very healthy slice of the profits. What I propose is perfectly ethical. You can become a lay therapist, and more successful than anybody in the business.’” Bill later recorded that at this prospect he had been “bowled over.” The Oxford Group-trained co-founder felt “a few twinges of conscience” over his rising, hopeful enthusiasm, but Towns’s stress on “ethical” and his own guilt over the burden Lois had shouldered quickly relieved these.
¹²

That very evening happened to be meeting night at 182 Clinton Street, and no sooner had the group assembled than Wilson burst into the story of his opportunity. As he explained its details and implications, however, Bill’s ardor shifted to uneasy misgiving before the stolid impassivity of his hearers. “With waning enthusiasm, my story trailed off to the end. There was a long silence.”
¹³

Finally, a spokesman for the for once quiet group cleared his throat. “’We know how hard up you are, Bill … it bothers us a lot.… [But] don’t you realize that you can never become a professional? … You tell us that Charlie’s proposal is ethical. Sure, it’s ethical. But what we’ve got won’t run on ethics only; it has to be better. Sure, Charlie’s idea is good, but it isn’t good enough. This is a matter of life and death, Bill, and nothing but the very best will do.’”
¹⁴

And so Bill Wilson, having heard for the first time the voice of what he would later term and praise as “the group conscience,” had obeyed it and had politely declined Towns’s generous offer. Now, some six months later, Bill knew that he need have no fear that any difference in attitude towards “professionalism” could jeopardize the tenuous unity between the New York and Akron contingents of the fellowship. If anything, he realized, this shared, Oxford Group-derived understanding might furnish the sound basis for cementing the threatened unity. Wilson adjusted his argument to meet the needs of the situation at hand. The special importance of a book, he pointed out, would be to demonstrate that the program was not the property of professionals, was not for sale.
¹⁵

Given this sense and this concern, prior funding for publication was imperative. Since one advantage that the New Yorkers enjoyed from their very location as well as from the personal pasts of many of them was possible access to persons of wealth, Bill noted, their immediate responsibility was clear. They could more than pull their weight in the agreed-upon projects — even all three of them — by obtaining the funds necessary to implement them.
¹⁶

The problem of obtaining money without strings attached became primary. The New York alcoholics drew up a list of wealthy prospects. In the alcoholics’ hopeful expectation, the startling fact that they — sober — could approach potential donors who knew them to be hopeless drunks would provide the best proof possible of the worth of the program they were promoting. To their very real astonishment, then, they obtained neither one cent nor a single promise of support. “Some of the wealthy exhibited mild concern and sympathy, but they were not really interested. Almost unanimously they seemed to think that tuberculosis, cancer, and the Red Cross were better charity investments. Why should they try to revive a lot of down-and-out alcoholics who had brought their troubles upon themselves? In great dejection we finally saw that drunks as objects of large charity might never be a popular cause.”
¹⁷

Angry and depressed, Wilson vented his spleen to his brother-in-law, Dr. Leonard V. Strong, in a “diatribe about the stinginess and shortsightedness of the rich.” Bill had chosen his listener well and perhaps craftily. Leonard Strong was a close friend of Willard Richardson, the deeply religious man who administered the private charities of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. After hearing out his wife’s brother, the doctor called his well-placed friend, and the next day introduced Wilson to him in person.
¹⁸

Richardson, an ordained minister, showed interest, and so a late December meeting was arranged, to be “held in Mr. Rockefeller’s private board room.” Besides Richardson, Bill Wilson and Leonard Strong, in attendance were to be: Albert Scott, Chairman of the Trustees of Riverside Church; Frank Amos, an advertising man close to Rockefeller; and A. LeRoy Chipman, an associate who looked after some of Rockefeller’s personal affairs. Dr. William Silkworth, Dr. Bob Smith, and some of both the Akron and the New York alcoholics were also to attend.
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