Not-God (13 page)

The meeting proved historic but began awkwardly. As the Rockefeller coterie waited to hear the presentation of the strangers who had attracted their attention by such a round-about route, the alcoholics for once sat mute — awed as much by the trappings of the room as by the wealth and power of their hosts. Finally, someone suggested that each alcoholic tell his story. The successive tales of misery, degradation, hopeless compulsion, and finally sober salvation made a deep impression. When the last alcoholic ended his pilgrim’s tale, Albert Scott, who had chaired the meeting, stood up at the head of the table and exclaimed, “’Why, this is first century Christianity! What can we do to help?’”
²⁰

The longed-for and eagerly sought-after moment had come. Wilson spoke up, “going for broke.” He mentioned the need for money, for paid workers, chains of hospitals, and especially literature, stressing the urgency as well as the worthiness of his appeal. Dr. Silkworth and the rest of the contingent — even those from Akron had been moved by Bill’s plea and the proximity of assistance — enthusiastically seconded all the points made, noting with satisfaction nods of agreement among the assembled advisors to great wealth. But then Albert Scott spoke up with yet another question, one which followed up his earlier query from an unanticipated direction: “’Won’t money spoil this thing?’”
²¹

Discussion resumed along lines not very different from those first laid down in Akron a month before. Toward its end, agreement was reached that whatever the final decision, the enterprise — yet unnamed — surely needed
some
money. Frank Amos offered to investigate, proposing that his findings could then serve as the basis for a direct presentation to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Wilson and Smith, still hopeful and enthusiastic, suggested that Amos look first at Akron — it was the older and larger group, and Dr. Bob’s financial needs were the more pressing.
²²

Conflicting memories veil the outcome of this journey, the next step in the history of Alcoholics Anonyinous. According to Henrietta Seiberling, she and others convinced Amos that money would indeed “spoil this thing,” and he so reported to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who agreed. In Bill Wilson’s memory Amos returned from Akron as enthusiastic as were the New York alcoholics, and “he recommended that Mr. Rockefeller grant us $50,000 just as a starter.” Wilson reported that “Uncle Dick” Richardson became just as enthusiastic, finding in this “conjunction of medicine, religion, and a great good work” something uniquely worthy of the Rockefeller beneficence. It was John D. himself, according to Wilson, who expressed again the concern of Albert Scott. On the basis that money would spoil any attempted living out of first-century Christianity, the world’s richest man flatly refused to fund the enterprise. One concession, however, Rockefeller did make: $5,000 was placed in the treasury of Riverside Church to furnish necessary temporary assistance to Bill and Dr. Bob Smith.
²³

Bill Wilson had, at the time of these early 1938 events, come to his perception of the necessity of “deflation at depth” for the individual alcoholic. He had not yet extended this insight to the newly formed and yet unnamed group of non-drinking alcoholics that would become Alcoholics Anonymous. Sensing that Richardson, Amos, Chipman, and Strong were not in complete agreement with Rockefeller, Wilson sought further meetings with these four, hoping through them to continue soliciting other persons of wealth. From this beginning came — in the Spring of 1938 — the Alcoholic Foundation, which eventually evolved into the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous. Among its first trustees were Richardson, Amos, Chipman, and Strong, and thus began the long and later troublesome tradition that made a majority of the organization’s trustees non-alcoholics. In the circumstances of this origin was rooted another important development in the history of Alcoholics Anonymous. Because of the legal impossibility of defining “alcoholic,” the group formalized itself under a simple trust agreement rather than by seeking any kind of legal charter.
²⁴

The Spring of 1938 was further significant, but not because of any success of the Foundation as its end had been conceived. The money-raising efforts “fizzled out. … It looked like the end of the line.” But the idea of a book remained. Bill Wilson, whose writing experience had been confined to the company reports which he had submitted to Wall Street brokers during his 1920s personal heyday, found that he did not know how to begin a work of the scope contemplated. Weighed down by many grand ideas and hopes, he felt driven by a need to tell it
all
, and the impossibility of this for a time inhibited him from even beginning. Dr. Bob advised, as always, “Keep it simple.” Trustees Frank Amos and LeRoy Chipman requested promotional literature for their fund-raising efforts; and in reply to Wilson’s query about what they wanted, the non-alcoholic trustees pointed back to the fact that their own interest and enthusiasm had been awakened first by what they had heard at the December 1937 meeting— the stories of the assembled alcoholics.
²⁵

Wilson therefore produced what became the first two chapters of
Alcoholics Anonymous:
“Bill’s Story” and “There Is A Solution.” Whether these were drafts for a book or promotional literature was not quite clear to Bill. What became increasingly clear was that whether primarily because of the titillating view of the underside of human life afforded, or primarily because of the potential for identification, or primarily because a pragmatic people responded to and thrived upon experience, the main marketable commodity that any alcoholic had to offer was his story. Himself a product of all that pragmatism, Bill Wilson did not think in terms of “primarilies.”
²⁶

A similar realization took place among the New York alcoholics. Their Oxford Group origins had acquainted them with the long religious and psychological tradition of the usefulness of confession. For the Oxford Group, this carried some connotation of “public” — although there was the distinction between “sharing for confession” which was private and “sharing for witness,” which, of its nature, was public. A difference of opinion over this distinction, indeed, had been one factor in the New York alcoholics’ departure from the Oxford Group, as had been the increased “group guidance” which Wilson found especially oppressive.
²⁷

But the separation from the Buchmanites having taken place, the alcoholics had to decide what was to be done at their own meetings. Aimed as this early experience was at potential adherents with whom some identification had to be established, the telling and re-telling of “stories” began un-self-consciously to develop into the practice that best embodied the core therapeutic process of what would soon become Alcoholics Anonymous. The book itself furthered this development.
²⁸

The remote internal pull to the publication of
Alcoholics Anonymous
was Bill’s and Dr. Bob’s November 1937 vision. The proximate external push came from an early fall 1938 meeting arranged by trustee Frank Amos between Bill Wilson and Eugene Exman, religious editor of Harper Brothers publishers. As attractive as Bill found the $1,500 advance promised him, the more promotionally-inclined New York spokesmen for the rapidly developing “group conscience” decided that the fellowship should own its own book, and further that if it had enough merit to prompt an advance from Harper’s, the book could solve their financial problems and so show up the thus far unproductive Trustees and Foundation. The decision was made to form a stock company, and “Works Publishing, Inc.” was born.
²⁹
”

In 1953, Works Publishing, Inc. would become A.A. Publishing, Inc., and finally, in 1959, A.A. World Services, Inc., but its original name bore a telling significance in the early history of Alcoholics Anonymous. According to most of the New York alcoholics at the time the name “Works Publishing” was chosen, “This name derived from a common expression, used in the group, ‘It works.’” According to the early Akronites, the “Works” in “Works Publishing” reflected the St. James quotation that had played such a prominent part in the “infusion of spirituality” during that first summer of 1935. The book was to be the first of the fellowship’s “works” following out the Jamesian call to live faith externally — by works. Both interpretations were true — each in its own way. Perhaps Wilson even consciously used the ambiguity inherent in the word
Works
. It reflected the New Yorkers’ fascination with and promotional stress on proven results; at the same time, it reassured the Akronites still hesitant about even this project. They would be encouraged when they heard this echo of “Anne Smith’s favorite quote.”
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Meanwhile, through the final months of 1938 and into 1939, Bill Wilson labored at writing. As he slowly roughed out the chapters, Wilson read them to the weekly meeting at his Clinton Street home and sent them as well to Dr. Bob for comment by the Akronites. In New York especially, there was heated discussion. Thus it was a not-very-serene Bill Wilson who, after much hesitation and even stalling, finally set out to put down in words the heart of the program through which he and close to one hundred other alcoholics had achieved sobriety.
³¹

Sprawling on his bed in an “anything but spiritual mood” one evening, Wilson poised his yellow pencil over the school tablet propped before him. Quickly, lest he block, he scrawled the words “How It Works” across the top of the page, then paused to meditate about the six-step procedure which his associates at the previous meeting had agreed pretty well summed up what they had learned from the Oxford Group:

1. We admitted that we were licked, that we were powerless over alcohol.
   
2. We made an inventory of our defects or sins.
   
3. We confessed or shared our shortcomings with another person in confidence.
   
4. We made restitution to all those we had harmed by our drinking.
   
5. We tried to help other alcoholics, with no thought of reward in money or prestige.
   
6. We prayed to whatever God we thought there was for power to practice these precepts.
   ³²
   

Too preachy, too goody-goody, he winced; also too complex and even unclear if one did not know the teachings of the Oxford Group. In any event, it was certainly no way to begin
this
chapter, and — against his will — the echo of “Oxford Group” reminded Bill again of the difference between the Akron and New York approaches. His correspondence and telephone conversations with Dr. Bob, and especially the surgeon’s increasing leadership in Akron, had somewhat soothed that difficulty, but the problem remained unsolved. Quickly, before that thought could overwhelm him, Wilson began to write, seeking to set down a theme of hope — something on which all could agree.
³³

“Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.” Bill’s pencil began to fly over the paper, and his thoughts continued to flow as he wrote a paragraph beginning:

Wilson paused. His intention had been to “break up into smaller pieces… our six chunks of truth … to be as clear and comprehensible as possible, [leaving] not a single loophole through which the rationalizing alcoholic could wriggle out.” Almost idly, he began to number the new steps: “They added up to twelve. Somehow this number seemed significant. Without any special rhyme or reason I connected them with the twelve apostles. Feeling greatly relieved now, I commenced to reread the draft.”
³⁵

Debate began almost immediately, as visitors arrived and Bill completed his first rereading aloud to them. Three points of view emerged. “Conservatives … thought that the book ought to be Christian in the doctrinal sense of the word and that it should say so;” “liberals” who “had no objection to the use of the word ‘God’ throughout the book, but … were dead set against any other theological proposition;” and the “radical left wing … the atheists and agnostics” who “wanted the word ‘God’deleted from the book entirely.… They wanted a
psychological
book which would lure the alcoholic in. Once in, the prospect could take God or leave Him alone as he wished.” Caught in this apparently inescapable cross fire, Wilson asked for a truce. Despairing of satisfying everyone, he finally secured temporary agreement that he would be the final judge of what the book would say.
³⁶

Wilson returned to his writing only to discover another problem. The most important parts of any book that sought to capture the attention and to change the habits of readers, he realized, were the beginning and the end. The beginning, after one false start, had posed no problem. His own story, after all,
was
the beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous. But how to conclude tortured him — briefly. Bill’s first efforts proved invariably too “preachy” — a quality that over the years jarred many when they came to the conclusion of the substantive part of the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
, for neither Wilson nor A.A. ever did solve this problem: