Not-God (5 page)

The next day more light dawned. Bill could never remember exactly, but was inclined to think that Ebby, visiting again, brought him a copy of William James’s
The Varieties of Religious Experience
. What Wilson got — or thought he got — from the book was to prove significant to the history of Alcoholics Anonymous:

This was the substance of what Wilson had come to understand; also important was the meaning he found inherent in it, for this moment was — taken together with his “spiritual experience” — the third of the four founding moments of Alcoholics Anonymous. One-half of the core idea — the necessity of spiritual conversion — had passed from Dr. Carl Jung to Rowland. Clothed in Oxford Group practice, it had given rise to its yet separate other half — the simultaneous transmission of deflation and hope by “one alcoholic talking to another” — in the first meeting between Bill and Ebby. Now, under the benign guidance of Dr. Silkworth and the profound thought of William James, the two “halves” joined in Wilson’s mind to form an as yet only implicitly realized whole.

The whole of what became Alcoholics Anonymous appeared in these words — almost. The elements for the totality of Alcoholics Anonymous seemed to be present, but perhaps this is apparent only in retrospect. Until Wilson arrived at the explicit realization that whether or not he wanted to, he
needed
to work with other alcoholics to maintain his own sobriety, Alcoholics Anonymous was yet only coming into being.

Two intermingled themes brought Bill Wilson to the verge of the ultimate, recognized founding moment: the hopelessness of the condition of the alcoholic, and the necessity of an experience of conversion. Their sources were Silkworth and James.

Dr. William Duncan Silkworth, a Princeton graduate, had received his medical degree from New York University. In 1900 he began his internship at Bellevue Hospital, and the staff soon recognized that the young physician possessed a special talent very little prized. To even his own amazement, Silkworth found that he had a magic touch with drunks. In 1924, after completing specialty training in neuropsychiatry, he became medical director of the Charles B. Towns Hospital in New York, a private facility specializing in alcoholism and drug addiction. Here his skill found full range and scope; yet, until Bill Wilson came along, the doctor estimated that the rate of real recoveries among the alcoholics with whom he worked had been “approximately only two percent.”
⁴⁶

His experience — in his lifetime he treated well over fifty thousand alcoholics — convinced Dr. Silkworth of two things. One, “alcoholism is not just a vice or a habit. This is a compulsion, this is pathological craving, this is
disease.”
Two, in the science of medicine of the time, alcoholism was a hopeless disease — “an obsession of the mind that condemns one to drink and an allergy of the body that condemns one to die.”
⁴⁷

A third idea probably followed upon Silkworth’s experience with Wilson. In his published writings after 1937, “the little doctor who loved drunks” tended to stress less his theory of strict physical allergy (though he continued to hold and to teach it) and his suggestions for research in colloid biology. Rather, he turned his attention and emphasis to “recovery [as] possible only on a moral basis.” Eventually, in “The Doctor’s Opinion” essay that he submitted for use in the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
, Silkworth declared without qualification that “Unless [the alcoholic] can experience an entire psychic change there is very little hope of his recovery.”
⁴⁸

Although Bill Wilson himself always remained wary of referring to alcoholism as a “disease” because he wished to avoid the medical controversy over the existence or non-existence of a specific “disease-entity,” his usual terms “illness” or “malady” as well as his frequent comparison of alcoholism to “heart disease” bear witness to his acceptance of Silkworth’s medical ideas. In later years, the widespread diffusion of “the disease concept of alcoholism” was largely due to Alcoholics Anonymous.
^49
+

The influence of William James upon Bill Wilson — and so upon Alcoholics Anonymous— was more complex. Reading James’s
Varieties
profoundly affected Wilson. In fact, the American philosopher-psychologist was the only author cited in
Alcoholics Anonymous
, in a reference having more to do with “varieties” than with “religious experience”: “The distinguished American psychologist, William James, in his book ‘Varieties of Religious Experience,’ indicates a multitude of ways in which men have discovered God. We have no desire to convince anyone that there is only one way by which faith can be acquired.”
⁵⁰

Yet Wilson also seemed to attribute the phrase “deflation at depth” to William James. The problem: neither this expression nor the bare word
deflation
appears anywhere in
Varieties
. On the other hand, Wilson apparently did
not
note and certainly did
not
cite what
was
in James: the openness to explicit religion. Two examples, one minor, the second major. First, in one of the briefer footnotes in
Varieties
, James approvingly cited evidence that the only cure for “dipsomania” was “religiomania.” Given the circumstances in which Bill Wilson, painfully sobering up founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, read this simultaneously profound and diffuse writing of James’s Gifford Lectures, it is difficult to imagine that his eye did not pause for relaxation if not for refreshment at the scattered mentions of drinking and alcohol. Yet he never adverted to this clearly unwelcome idea — an idea that, bare weeks before, he had himself at first used to explain away Ebby on that first fateful visit. Second, if there is one key word as well as concept in
Varieties
, it is not “deflation” but “conversion.” Yet this term, so suggestive in America of a certain style of religion, never passed Bill Wilson’s lips or writing hand — at least not for publication — until many years later.
⁵¹

Therefore, on the question of William James as — in Wilson’s own words — “a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous,” a hypothesis: consciously and even craftily in his own wariness of religion, Bill Wilson linked James’s portrayal of “conversion” with what he had learned — directly from Dr. Silkworth and indirectly,
via
Rowland and Ebby, from Dr. Jung — of the necessity and role of hopelessness. Wilson’s efforts over many years to give intellectual respectability to Alcoholics Anonymous sprang from his own deep need as well as from his perception of the needs of others. This underlined linkage with a major figure in American intellectual history was therefore eminently useful to him. He made pragmatic use of the pragmatist James — with all the helpful connotations of this to those looking for “results,” for the “cash-value” of the idea of Alcoholics Anonymous.
⁵²

Less consciously, for he was not a deep thinker, but more explicitly in an almost careless way, Wilson, in the use he made of James, hit upon another deep thread of the American psyche — and one that also protected him and his program from seeming too religious. The pluralist James became eminently useful to the main theme of Alcoholics Anonymous. A large part of Wilson’s wariness of religion lay in his horror of absolutes. Thinking “absolutely” about anything was, for Wilson, “alcoholic thinking.” His — and A.A.’s — most frequent description of an alcoholic was “an all or nothing person.” Thus, as part of its very origins and most fundamental understanding, Alcoholics Anonymous has committed itself to rejection of any claim to a role as “one and only.” The pluralism of tolerating difference has remained as important and useful to Alcoholics Anonymous as its pragmatism. Especially in the early years of the fellowship, those who objected to the “religion of A.A.” found their attention directed to the key phrase, “We have no monopoly on God.” Later, when — using a derived sense — therapists of other persuasions objected to “the religion of A.A.,” their attention was called to another virtual truism: “Upon therapy for the alcoholic himself, we surely have no monopoly.”
⁵³

The utility to Alcoholics Anonymous of James’s
Varieties
and its impact upon the fellowship/program, were thus profound. Each word of James’s title served an important function, as confused as all this was in the mind of the hazily sobering Bill Wilson when he first made the philosopher’s acquaintance. A deep resonance seems to have been sounded in Wilson’s mind. Significantly, perceptive non-American students both of William James and of Alcoholics Anonymous have noted the peculiar “American-ness” of each.
^54
+

At the time, of course, Wilson did not think of Silkworth and James as sources. Still awed by the sobriety of hopeless Ebbv T., Bill considered Ebby’s source the important one; so he associated himself with the Oxford Group and began a life-long friendship with the Rev. Dr. Samuel Shoemaker, rector of Calvary Episcopal Church and chief American publicist for the Group. Within the Oxford Group, Wilson’s long alcohol-dulled drive to be a number-one man quickly reasserted itself, and he announced to his new associates that he was going to sober up all the drunks in the world.
⁵⁵

The Groupers were not impressed. Some of them had tried to work with alcoholics and their general experience had been the usual one of failure. Nevertheless they tolerated and even welcomed Wilson’s efforts among them. In time, they felt, he would learn just how hopeless drunks were. At that point, they hoped, his drive and enthusiasm could be channeled into more constructive lines. They waited, seeking meanwhile to implant more deeply in Bill their principles and practices.
⁵⁶

Bill, of course, did not wait. Since he felt more at home with a small group of struggling alcoholics at a neighborhood cafeteria than he did at Oxford Group meetings, Wilson extended that contact. Some he brought back to Clinton Street to live with him and the long-suffering Lois; exactly why, he did not know. Yet a sense was developing: alcoholics struggling against their obsession with “booze” seemed to do better if they spent time talking with others engaged in the same struggle. They did not, of course, talk about booze — that, after all, was the obsession they were fighting. Their talk was of spiritual things: the Oxford Group principles of the necessity of conversion and restitution, or their efforts to attain the Group’s “Four Absolutes” — absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love.
⁵⁷

They “seemed to do better.” But better proved not good enough. All but Bill himself soon went out and got drunk. Lois Wilson, clerking now at Loeser’s department store to support her husband’s new enthusiasm, her home at times overrun by drunks, offered a gentle and fateful suggestion. She might understandably have urged Bill to heed his Oxford Group friends, to move closer to the Group and to its respectable efforts among the respectable people who were its special vocation. The daughter of Dr. Clark Burnham might surely have felt more comfortable among the habitues of Calvary Church than among the denizens of Stewart’s cafeteria. But she did not feel that way for whatever reasons of background and temperament, nor did she prompt Bill in such a direction. As she saw her husband’s mounting frustration over the failure of his efforts, Lois’s suggestion was rather that on one of his visits to Towns Hospital, Bill express his concerns to Dr. Silkworth.
⁵⁸

One April day in 1935, Wilson did so. Silkworth, of course, might have offered the advice that Lois had not: “Look, Bill, Ebby and the Oxford Group have gotten you this far; why not get out of the driver’s seat and do it their way? Who do you think you are, you barely-sobered-lush?” But he did not. Drawing upon his deep knowledge of alcoholism, the physician pointed Bill in precisely the opposite direction: “Look, Bill, you’re having nothing but failure because you are preaching at these alcoholics.” Silkworth pointed out the frightening aspect — especially to alcoholics — of the Oxford Group absolutes, the apparent weirdness and disconcerting nature of the “hot flash” conversion experience that Bill insisted on describing to each potential recruit. He reminded Wilson of what Bill himself had pointed out to him in William James and had told him of Dr. Jung’s message to Rowland.