Not-God (18 page)

More important than the money, however, as the alcoholics began to realize in the weeks following the dinner, was the resulting publicity. Despite the curiosity of the press, no reporters had been allowed at the dinner. This was understandable, for Rockefeller was taking no chances. “Had any of us alcoholics turned up stewed,” Bill Wilson realized, “the whole affair would have collapsed ignominiously.” But as soon as all had gone well, Alcoholics Anonymous was put in touch with the firm of Ivy Lee, the Rockefeller publicity consultants. Together, they drafted a statement to the press. Marked by the Ivy Lee touch, the ensuing publicity was widespread and generally favorable, despite some lurid treatments such as the New York
Daily Mirror’s:
“John D. Dines Toss-Pots.” Requests for help and orders for the Big Book “poured in, and the awful letdown which had followed the departure of the dinner guests was now forgotten.”
³¹

The Rockefeller dinner — its hopes, their shattering, and the final resolution of both — might serve as a blueprint for this whole period. The newly sober alcoholics, especially in New York, were slowly coming to the discovery that “putting the cork in the bottle” was not the whole story. As their experience unfolded, they coined two phrases — appropriately ugly phrases — to describe and interpret what they observed happening around them and to them. “Alcoholic grandiosity,” they discovered, could also characterize a “dry drunk.” And insofar as this marked a retraction of “surrender,” forgetfulness of “bottom,” the attempt again to take over control of their lives and wills, it gave warning of, if not a return to active alcoholism, at least a kind of dry hangover that could render sobriety itself almost too painful to bear.
³²

Bill Wilson, with his cherished drive to be a “number-one man” and his vaunted “twin-engine propulsion,” himself provided an almost too accurate living out of this problem. The Pietist message, “Let go and let God,” which was in time to infuse the “A.A. Way of Life,” pushed only slowly and with great and painful strains into his consciousness, mainly through the experiences of this “era of publicity.” The return to drinking of promoter Hank, who had been his first New York success, and of Bill’s friend Ebby, whom the co-founder revered as his sponsor, weighed against Wilson’s confidence in and hopes for Alcoholics Anonymous. The loss of the Clinton Street home, the early failures to obtain publicity for the Big Book, the frustrations of fund-raising and especially of the hopes cherished for the Rockefeller connection, all these muted his joy and enthusiasm over the slowly increasing number of hopeless drunks attaining sobriety.

As always, Wilson avoided the obvious theological term for what was emerging as the “original sin” of even sober alcoholics:
pride
. Yet a foundation was being laid for the discovery and awareness that the First Cause of an alcoholic’s difficulties — drunk
or
sober — was an appropriately unique specification of the “self-centeredness” that lay at the “root of our troubles.” It was what Wilson and the years would call “alcoholic grandiosity.”
³³

Concerning his own greatest manifestation of grandiosity, even in his 1955 history purporting to detail “the full story” of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson could bring himself only to hint. When the Rollie Hemsley story — complete with full name and pictures — broke in the newspapers in April of 1940, it provided the first challenge on a national level to the fellowship’s still evolving understanding of its principle of anonymity. For a moment, as some within the New York group even at the time realized, A.A.’s co-founder found himself in a predicament. Anonymity was indeed becoming more deeply understood as a first principle, but also emerging as a fundamental guideline was A.A.’s sense that it was “fellowship” rather than organization — the acceptance that, beyond the “twin ogres of madness and death,” Alcoholics Anonymous possessed no central authority capable of imposing discipline.
³⁴

To the astonishment of virtually all in New York, Bill escaped the dilemma by grasping at both its horns. Inwardly, he still cherished the warm glow of the Rockefeller contact which had honored him as virtual sole founder and the copious praise of the post-dinner publicity. Hence, he responded to the Hemsley notoriety by taking to the road, courting the press in every city he visited, giving out interviews and encouraging pictures.
³⁵

In several cities, especially at the beginning, the local membership of Alcoholics Anonymous, mostly new adherents who had been attracted by the Hemsley publicity, relished and encouraged his efforts. But not for long. Soon many of these newcomers were celebrating their newly found social acceptance by toasting their success — and that, of course, did not “work.” Older members began to close ranks; they pointed out to Bill the dangers in his new approach. For a time, at summer’s end, Wilson argued with them in defense of his new activity. Rapidly, however, there unfolded a three-phase phenomenon which would be named only at its end. Bill, one oldtimer eventually told him to his face, “had better watch himself because he was sure as hell acting like a man on a
dry drunk.”
³⁶

Its stages had been easy to spot — by oldtimers from the outside at the time, by Wilson himself in hindsight. First had come his “exceptional thinking.” Bill had forgotten why he had sought out Dr. Bob that first time — for his own sake. He might by gratuitous accident of history be “co-founder,” but before that and after that he was also and more deeply “just another drunk trying to stay sober.” Thinking he was “different” led in only one direction — straight to another drink, and so, inevitably, to another drunk.
³⁷

Second, at least briefly, Bill thrived on the dissension and controversy that his new mode of acting provoked. A journey by Hank to Akron and Cleveland was interpreted as proof of Hank’s “problem” — not entirely inaccurate, for Hank was drinking and in his tales attacked Wilson viciously. But Bill relished the “challenge” in this. It became a test of “loyalty,” and he cherished the realization that Dr. Bob and Anne Smith had had nothing to do with Hank and had expressed openly their disbelief of his stories. What Bill was doing in this matter was clear to some who remembered more of “How It Works” than did its author. There, Wilson had written: “Resentment is the ‘number one’ offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else.” Patently, many oldtimers realized, Bill was setting himself up for some grand-daddy resentments.
³⁸

Third, and here the term “dry drunk” proved frighteningly accurate, what had gone up had to come down. Almost overnight, as the winter of 1940 broke, Wilson plunged into the depths of despair. Of what use were all his efforts? They had gotten mostly criticism. Many people were sober, but many also were drinking again. In Cleveland, some were calling for his exclusion from Alcoholics Anonymous and even accusing him of financial trickery — this the result of the activities of the first New York alcoholic
he
had saved. A spiritually bedraggled Bill Wilson cut back his travels and returned to the Twenty-Fourth Street clubhouse where he was now living. The retreat did him little good. Mainly, it was just a reminder of others’ ingratitude, a reminder that his own house had been lost despite Lois’s heroic efforts. His two upstairs rooms struck him as tinier and more drab than ever, but in them Bill sat and thought. What was the meaning of the events and emotions of the past few months? How was one who had written the key words, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God,” to understand them?
³⁹

In time, Bill Wilson not only remembered but enlarged upon what he had written of “resentment.” In time, too, he suggested that the “inventory” of the Fourth Step of his program be conducted according to the outline of “the Seven Deadly Sins” — and “pride,” of course, headed that list. These realizations came only slowly and painfully over the years.

But now, in 1940, something very special happened: an occurrence that not only sowed the seeds for much of that later development, but that also helped to consolidate Bill’s own growth in sobriety over the preceding six years into the maturity that would characterize his thought for the rest of his life.
⁴⁰

Whenever Wilson in later years looked back on this next significant happening in his own and A.A.’s life, he waxed uncharacteristically poetic. In his mind, it had been the gift of a very special providence, and Bill strove to fit his language and imagery to the elegance of that understanding. Anyone who would understand Wilson must gain an appreciation of what this moment meant in the life of the blunt, direct man who wrote the stylistically spare text of the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
— and of just how Bill Wilson habitually recalled that moment.

It would seem that on a chill, rain-pelting early winter evening in late 1940, as Wilson almost tangibly felt himself being wrapped ever more tightly in a gloomy pall of spiritual darkness, he sat forlorn in the sparsely furnished clubhouse rooms in which he and Lois were then living. Disconsolate, his former way of escape — alcohol — forever denied, Wilson nursed his many shattered hopes and recent stinging disappointments in self-pitying and frustrating reverie. Just then, when he was at the very nadir of that abyss, a veritable gleam of light came literally knocking at his door, as Bill’s morose meditations were suddenly interrupted by the building’s janitor. Someone downstairs wanted to see Wilson. For the first time in his sober life Bill was about to say no when force of habit led him instead to wave his hand in tired acquiescence. Any interruption was to be welcomed, and besides, perhaps what he needed was to work with yet another drunk, although lately every success was bringing even more frustration than had all the failures earlier.

Hesitantly, the uninvited caller shuffled into the room, and Bill sensed in dismay that this bundled, partially crippled man wasn’t even an alcoholic. Probably just some bum looking for a hand-out, Wilson guessed to himself, until the stranger’s raincoat came unbuttoned and revealed the Roman collar around his neck. Father Edward Dowling introduced himself as a Jesuit priest from St. Louis who, as editor of a Catholic publication, was interested in the parallels he had intuited between the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Exercises of St. Ignatius, the spiritual discipline of his Jesuit order. That he showed delight rather than disappointment when Wilson wearily confessed ignorance of the Exercises at once endeared the diminutive cleric to Bill.
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Dowling shuffled across the room and sat down in the shabbier of the room’s two decrepit chairs, balancing his cane across his knee. As they began to converse, Bill noted that his visitor’s round face seemed to gather in all the light in the room and then reflect it directly at him. The priest wasted little time on small-talk. His very tone of voice pulled Wilson out of himself, but it soon became clear that Dowling was ready to do more than merely listen. That evening “Father Ed” began sharing with Wilson an understanding of the spiritual life that then and subsequently seemed always to speak to Bill’s condition — if this Quaker phrase can be appropriate for conversations between a troubled former agnostic and a saintly member of the Roman church’s elite society. Not since his earliest days in the Oxford Group had Wilson felt himself in the loving presence of such a receptive listener. Then, Bill had unburdened himself especially to Ebby. But it was only now, as this evening with Father Dowling wore on, that the man who had written A.A.’s Fifth Step came to feel that he himself was finally “taking his Fifth.”
⁺
He told Dowling not only what he had done and had left undone — he went on to share with his new sponsor the thoughts and feelings behind those actions and omissions. He told of his high hopes and plans, and spoke also about his anger, despair, and mounting frustrations. The Jesuit listened and quoted Matthew: “Blessed are they who do hunger and thirst.” God’s chosen, he pointed out, were always distinguished by their yearnings, their restlessness, their thirst.
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In pain, Bill asked if there was ever to be any satisfaction. The priest almost snapped back: “Never. Never any.” He continued in a gentler tone, describing as “divine dissatisfaction” that which would keep Wilson going, always reaching out for unattainable goals, for only by so reaching would he attain what — hidden from him — were God’s goals. This acceptance that his dissatisfaction, that his very “thirst,” could be divine was one of Dowling’s great gifts to Bill Wilson and through him to Alcoholics Anonymous. Another was to prove less happy from the Jesuit’s own point of view. Bill spoke of his own difficulties in prayer and his continuing problem in conveying the meaning of his “spiritual experience” to other alcoholics. There was a move afoot within the fellowship just then, he told Dowling, to change that phrase in the Twelfth Step to “spiritual awakening” — it seemed to Bill an attempt to mask rather than to clarify the role of the divine in the alcoholic’s salvation. Tartly, Father Ed offered a succinct response: “If you can name it, it’s not God.” Years later, Wilson would paraphrase the expression back to Dowling as a partial explanation of his difficulties in accepting the Catholic faith.
^43
+

But at this moment Wilson cherished the consolation his new friend’s words brought. The priest continued, his clear eyes sparkling as he sensed his effect on the now relaxed figure slouched in the other chair. With characteristic gentleness, Dowling pointed out what should have been obvious — that from which, indeed, he had intuited a link between the Exercises of Ignatius and the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill’s own prayer had been answered, had it not? He himself was sober. If God was choosing to use him to offer a program for sobriety to others, this was a great and glorious “fringe benefit.” Who was he to demand “more” of what was already a gratuitous gift? To seek more, yes. That was inevitable, for it was the seeking of the God who had made him — and made him sober — for Himself. But to demand?