Not-God (3 page)

Within the Oxford Group, Rowland had found “the conversion experience that released him for the time being from his compulsion to drink.” Returning to New York City, he joined and became active in the Oxford Group at its United States headquarters — the Calvary Episcopal Church of Rev. Dr. Samuel Shoemaker. Alcoholics had not been a primary interest of Oxford Group adherents in America or in Europe, but Rowland chose to devote to such sufferers his efforts at living out and promoting his own conversion experience. Thus, in August 1934, hearing that his old friend Ebby T. was threatened with commitment to an institution because of his drinking, Rowland H. intervened, and with his friend Cebra G., pledged for Ebby’s parole, leading him to the Oxford Group and so to his first period of sobriety.
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For Ebby, indeed, did “get the message.” Accepting that his only hope lay in a conversion experience, that such was the function of religion, and that the Oxford Group was the most famed and the most respectable evangelical expression of religion in America at that time, he joined and found in it “friendship and fellowship of a kind he had never known.” Then, in a flush of confident enthusiasm, the hallmark of any experience of conversion, Ebby in turn sought out the most hopeless and most self-destructive drinker he knew — his old friend, Bill Wilson.
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The judgment and feeling were mutual. Wilson had long since marked Ebby an utterly hopeless case, even promising himself to stop drinking should he ever get as bad as
that
. As tough as things had been for Bill Wilson up to the day of that November 1934 visit, he had never been threatened with commitment to an institution … “well, hardly ever.”
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William Griffith Wilson had been born, “fittingly enough” — his biographer noted — “in a small room behind the bar,” on 26 November 1895, the first of the two children of Gilman and Emily Griffith Wilson. Yankees of Scots-Irish stock, Bill’s parents had both grown up in East Dorset, Vermont, where he himself was born. In spite of their shared background, the Wilson’s marriage was not happy, and one night in 1905 — after a long and largely silent evening buggy-ride with his puzzled but apprehensive son — Gilman Wilson deserted his family.
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Of this childhood trauma, one of his earliest recollections, Bill Wilson later nursed a memory and interpretation perhaps not unusual in such situations. “If only his parents had loved him more they wouldn’t have separated. And this meant if he had been more lovable, it never would have happened. It always came around to that. It was, it
had
to be, his fault. He was the guilty one.”
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Little evidence remains of how the lad interpreted his next separation — nor even, indeed, that it was necessarily traumatic at the time. His young mother, with characteristic Yankee realism, obtained a Vermont-quiet divorce and resolved to begin again. An exceptionally intelligent woman, she moved to Boston and launched herself on a brand-new career as an osteopathic physician, leaving Bill and his sister Dorothy in the care of their maternal grandparents.
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Fayette and Ella Griffith proved kindly as surrogate parents. Yet deep within young Bill Wilson ached a feeling of rejection — the more painful because, in his mind, it was deserved. Three incidents from these quiet years, a success, a discovery, and yet another failure, reveal the torment.

Grandpa Fayette tried hard to be a father to the boy, but he was a taciturn and introverted man, a too quiet person, like Bill’s father, Gilly. Yet unlike Bill’s father, Fayette was perceptive; recollecting, Bill felt that his grandfather was able to read his thoughts. One evening, Fayette intuitively marked the immense sense of determination beginning to form in the boy in response to the craving rooted in his felt-rejection. Almost casually, the grandfather thought aloud: ‘“I’ve been reading a good deal about Australia lately and no one seems to know why Australians are the only people in the world who are able to make a boomerang.’

“There was a pause, then Bill looked up into his eyes. ‘The only people?’”
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And so young Bill set to work, reading library books, speaking with woodcutters, covering every available scrap of paper with diagrams, and finally sawing, carving, whittling, and throwing. Some six months later, the boy, in silence, led his grandfather to the church graveyard. Using a boomerang fashioned — the grandfather realized with chagrin — from a three-foot plank filched from the headboard of his bed, the boy threw, stood waiting, and succeeded. “I did it,” Bill first whispered, then shouted. “Our Willie,” his grandfather observed, “The very first American to do it. The number-one man.”
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The “success”: to be recognized and called a “number-one man.” Whenever his proud grandfather reported the tale in Bill’s hearing, “all the lights in the room seemed to come up higher. He was filled with a kind of power, and when they went on about his accomplishment, he could feel it growing, spreading through his body, as if some potent drug had been released.” In later years Bill Wilson often harked back to that phrase, that quest. On the one hand, it was the story of his alcoholism; on the other, it was the source of Alcoholics Anonymous. A fitting irony: William Griffith Wilson’s first “success” was the fashioning of a boomerang.
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The “discovery” was more complex. His biography reveals that young Bill Wilson had few if any peer friends, although Rutland — the town to which the Griffiths moved shortly after Emily’s departure for Boston — was far from being the smallest town in Vermont. Bill’s closest friend, from about 1908, was Mark Whalon, a university student ten years his senior. The two — boy and young man — passed much time together when Mark was home on vacation, the boy Bill reveling in his enthusiastic friend’s quotations from Shakespeare and Burns, Ingersoll and Marx, Charles Darwin and William Graham Sumner.
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But ideas were not all that Bill Wilson imbibed during the times he spent with his friend. One dry but chilly afternoon, returning on Mark’s delivery wagon from neighboring Danby, they stopped by a tavern. Bill quaffed hot cider, apparently non-alcoholic, but he also drank in something more — the atmosphere of a rural New England tavern late on a summer afternoon. That “atmosphere” was not primarily the physical aura of “the warm, friendly smell of wet sawdust, spilled beer and whiskey” — although he could lovingly recall this. But rather, it was an emotional and vivid memory of that afternoon, “his feeling of being at home, his feeling for the men.” In later years, “sometimes he could think of nothing else. He wanted it again.”
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On the surface of it, Wilson discovered the joy of friendly sociability, of feeling a belonging with others; more profoundly, he discovered the experience of “obsession-compulsion” — of “thinking of nothing else” and of “wanting it again” — ideas that later furnished him the key for his understanding of himself and his alcoholism. Bill had already revealed a kind of obsession in his work on the boomerang. On that earlier occasion, however, the compulsion to achieve had faded with recognition as “number-one man.” Now, here, these deep feelings blended and persisted. Was it merely accidental, this discovery’s association with alcohol? Bill Wilson spent the rest of his life finding, then teaching, his answer to that question.

His experience of “failure,” which marked the end of Bill’s childhood, was even more significant: it involved the joys and terrors of first love in the young adolescent life of one who had reason to feel unloved. In the fall of 1909, Bill Wilson began his secondary education as a weekday residential student at Burr and Burton Academy, a coeducational school. There he discovered — and was discovered by — Bertha Banford, “the prettiest, brightest and surely the most charming girl in the school. He fell in love, deeply, completely in love, and Bertha loved him.” Bill and Bertha spoke deeply and shared much. They felt that their whole beings were attuned and understood their love as inevitable. Invited by Bertha’s love, Bill for the first time in his life reached out to another — and, through her, he felt, even to all others.
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Then, one November morning while Bertha and her family were visiting in New York City, the usual daily chapel routine at Burr and Burton was broken. After the hymn, the headmaster stood to make an announcement. Reading from a yellow scrap of paper, he informed the students that “someone very dear to all of us, Bertha Banford, had died the night before following surgery at Fifth Avenue Hospital.” For days, Bill Wilson was numb, struggling yet somehow also fearing to understand. The evening after Bertha’s funeral service, standing in the cemetery next to the crypt that held her body in seeming mockery of his inability ever to hold it again, the suddenly aged Wilson achieved a revelation of “failure”: “He knew now.… His need, his loving, didn’t matter a good goddam. His wanting, his hunger and desire, meant nothing to the terrible ongoing forces of creation and he would never forget this truth which he saw and accepted that night.”
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Wilson’s formative years closed on this note of helplessness. For all his positive and affirming experiences in the following years — his World War I army career, his meeting of and eventual marriage to Lois Burnham, his Wall Street adventures through the 1920s — the feeling of helplessness never left the deep core of his being. Never, that is, with one exception: and in pursuit of that “exception” William Griffith Wilson — Vermont-born, socially-connected, retired Army officer, and Wall Street “flash” — attained the final qualification for becoming “Bill W., co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.”

In the summer of 1917, some six months before his marriage to Lois Burnham and a full year before his brief war experience in France, the newly commissioned Second Lieutenant Wilson found himself stationed at Ford Rodman, Massachusetts. Wartime patriotism in those early months of American entrance into the Great War moved some of the well-to-do in the area to open their homes — mansions to one of Wilson’s background — to “our brave boys in uniform.” At one weekend entertainment, Bill discovered for the first time the feeling of loneliness in a crowded room. Awkward, ill-at-ease, he felt simultaneously ignored and conspicuous. As much for something to do with the gangling hands that hung from his six-foot three-inch frame as for any other reason, Bill took his first remembered drink of alcohol — a “Bronx cocktail” handed him by a “hearty but at the same time haughty … socialite” whose distracted attention as she pretended to chat with him immensely added to his “terrible feeling of inadequacy.”
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The effect and therefore the meaning of that first drink of alcohol proved profound. More than a half-century later, Wilson recalled its details for his biographer, Robert Thomsen. The importance of this recollection, the depth of its significance for what Wilson later contributed to others’ understanding of alcoholism, and the lack of other evidence require its quotation:

From that moment, Wilson devoted a lifetime to recapturing that elusive — and ultimately illusive — sensation of freedom. The route, after his marriage to Lois Burnham and brief Army experience, led through “Wall Street, that famous shortcut to wealth and power — or poverty.” During those years, Bill later recalled, “I was drinking to dream great dreams of greater power.” He was still dreaming — and drinking — when the stock market crashed in 1929. Wilson “looked with disgust upon the bankrupt people who were then jumping from high buildings,” but he himself “began sinking.… Finally I slid down into a state where I was not drinking to dream dreams of power; I was drinking to numb the pain, to forget.”
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He soon had much to forget: two rare business opportunities squandered through drink; a night in jail; being too drunk to attend the funeral of Lois’s mother, in whose home they lived. From 1930 through 1934 the details of Wilson’s life gave almost too much texture to an over-used phrase: his life had become “an alcoholic hell.”
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Through it all, Bill was watched over by two medical families. His sister Dorothy had married Dr. Leonard Strong, whom Bill liked and respected, once even accepting the physician’s referral to a talented colleague who had prescribed “willpower.” Lois’s father, who left the Clinton Street homestead to her and Bill in 1933 when he remarried, was Dr. Clark Burnham. He attempted to tread the narrow line between concern for his son-in-law and non-interference in his daughter’s marriage, leaning — perhaps wisely — more toward the second than toward the first.
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Through one of these family medical resources Wilson was introduced to the Charles B. Towns Hospital, a drying-out facility on Central Park West to which he was admitted four times in 1933-1934. It was apparently on the second of these visits that Bill first came under the care of Dr. William Duncan Silkworth. At their first meeting, Silkworth, later to be immortalized in A.A. lore as “the little doctor who loved drunks,” provided Wilson with an understanding of his alcoholism, an understanding that offered some choice between founded hope and utter despair, but that left no chance for any vapid middle.
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