Not-God (52 page)

Earlier Advisory Actions had precluded other alternatives. The 1965 General Service Conference had advised against members setting up transitional facilities using A.A. names such as “Twelve Step House”: “Since these ventures are separate from the Fellowship, it is advisable that they operate under names which do not link, them to A.A.”
¹²⁸
Two years later, in 1967, the Conference “approved a position paper on rehabilitation centers to the effect that such rehabs, rest homes and hospitals are
not
part of A.A., and therefore are not responsible for adhering to the Traditions of A.A.”
¹²⁹
To a 1967 query that challenged the confusion that might arise if A.A. members “become expert in the alcoholism field,” “the consensus was that an individual A.A. working in these programs can educate both the agency and A.A.”
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The two-sided nature of that education manifested itself in different ways on different levels. At the grass-roots group plane, those newly arrived from treatment and those experienced in A.A. recovery tended to get along quite well so long as the former did not numerically overwhelm the group in too short a time. What went on at higher levels proved more problematic. As one acute observer put it:

Such questions appropriately introduce the conclusion to this necessarily incomplete story. Not only because Alcoholics Anonymous still thrives, but also because even if the fellowship itself should cease to exist, the impact of its program would continue, A.A.’s whole story cannot be told in the foreseeable future. Yet it is clear that any interim summary, any attempt at a concluding snapshot of Alcoholics Anonymous embarked on its second fifty years, must be framed within the two-sidedness that has shaped the fellowship and its program and its story from the very beginning. A.A. suggests to its members that their stories reveal that they can be
both
“sober” and “alcoholic.” Earlier chapters attempted to capture the unfolding of that insight by exploring the implications of the key Big Book sentences, “First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn’t work.”
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The acceptance of not-God-ness, the embrace of being both-and that the Twelve-Step program inculcates in A.A. members, applies also to the A.A. fellowship itself. Nowhere is this clearer than in the enduring yet creative tension between the necessity of unity and the need for diversity. A.A.’s pluralism reflects the core of its spirituality — “the spirituality of not having all the answers.”
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For despite the apparent successes of explosive growth and broadening respect, despite the heady triumphs of a golden anniversary that saw the ceremonial presentation of the five-millionth copy of its Big Book, despite an outreach opportunity that seems on the verge of carrying A.A.’s spiritual message to nations guided by Marxist-Leninist thought, each high bore with it also a low. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous, because they are alcoholic, found nothing surprising in that. But as the fellowship continues to seek the wisdom that will allow it to distinguish between the realities that it can and those it cannot change, its members have increasingly turned to their own story, the story of Alcoholics Anonymous, for guidance in discerning both serenity and courage. And in that quest that itself is the continuation of A.A.’s story, recent history shows promise of proving as helpful as ancient annals in shaping the changes required by continuing growth and by still newer means of communicating essential identification.

Bill Wilson’s 1971 death reminded Alcoholics Anonymous how fragile were its ties with its past. While some scurried to establish archives and to record the memories of still-living oldtimers, others in A.A.’s service structure hit upon the idea of making each November’s issue of
The A.A. Grapevine
not only a reminder of “Gratitude Month” in accordance with the American Thanksgiving celebration, but also a “Classic Grapevine” issue carrying articles devoted to A.A. history and reprints of pieces from the journal’s early years.
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“Classic Grapevine” began appearing in November 1972. At the same time, led by two trustees with academic ties, others sought to bring to fruition Bill W.’s intention of establishing the formal archives of Alcoholics Anonymous. A.A.’s co-founder had well prepared the ground: his correspondence was almost wholly preserved, as were the results of his research for the book
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age.”
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Bill dropped by his new corner office at 468 Park Avenue South, to which Alcoholics Anonymous World Service moved in April of 1970, only a few times, but on one of those laborious visits, he suggested how and where the archives could be begun. Mindful of Wilson’s hopes, A.A.’s trustees formed an archives committee in 1973. Its chairman, George G., explained the archives’ function to the 1974 General Service Conference: “The main purpose of the archival library is to keep the record straight, so that myth does not predominate over fact regarding the history of our Fellowship. The library can give A.A. a sense of its own past and the opportunity to study it.”
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With Nell Wing, Bill’s long-time secretary, serving as custodian, A.A.’s archives formally opened on November 3, 1975, with a brief ceremony in which Bill’s widow, Lois, took part. The New York archives soon began serving many, but before tracing that outcome, it merits notice that especially in the 1980s, A.A.’s archivists have encouraged local and regional service offices to erect local archives preserving their own history. The 1981 distribution of a forty-four-page “Handbook For Setting Up An Alcoholics Anonymous Archival Repository” has been supplemented by annual publication of “Markings: Your Archives Interchange.” At the time of its 1987 General Service Conference meeting, the fellowship rejoiced in over sixty such local area repositories, and new ones were being established at the rate of about six a year.
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Although some of the local archives are of more antiquarian than historical interest, the preservation of local newspaper stories and memoirs generally supplements such enshrined tokens as an early printing of the first edition of the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
or a souvenir coffee pot. Early meeting lists or even membership or Twelfth-Step call lists sometimes allow tracing how groups spread, and an occasional annotated copy of the Big Book or of
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
invites appraising continuity of interpretation. In the later 1980s, local historians were only beginning to mine such treasures.

The Alcoholics Anonymous General Service archives have from their origins served both in-house and outside explorers of A.A.’s story. The fruits of that research began to appear in 1979, with the publication of the original, dissertation version of this book. Even within that process, however, my research was aided by that of Niles P., who was gathering additional primary data as he worked on the book that Alcoholics Anonymous published in 1980,
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers
. Contemporaneous with that project, A.A.’s archives cooperated with research for Al-Anon’s 1979 publication of the book
Lois Remembers
.
¹³⁸

Scholarly interest in Alcoholics Anonymous has been more than merely historical, and non-historians have not always needed the archives. Trustee Milton Maxwell’s book,
The A.A. Experience
, drew on them; Mary Catherine Taylor based her anthropology dissertation on participant-observation and interviews. Until the late seventies, most serious scholars had ignored both alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous. Occasional exceptions — Bales, Bacon, Keller — “proved” the rule in the proper sense of that term: they stood outside the scholarly mainstream. Then Madsen, Taylor, Blumberg, Leach and Norris, Kurtz, Robinson, Rudy, and Denzin, as well as Bean, Mack, Khantzian, and Vaillant, presented their findings, and other as yet unpublished studies await polishing. Although less rigorous observers still sometimes confused Alcoholics Anonymous with the intellectually fuzzy, pop-therapeutic fads that perennially sprout on the American landscape, those mindful of the fellowship’s history and its program’s grounding in the mainstream tradition of Western spirituality have been more and more heard and heeded.
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Within the fellowship, members attended mainly to Conference-approved literature.
¹⁴⁰
After the mixed reception accorded Robert Thomsen’s
Bill W
. in 1975, A.A. hoped to publish paired biographies of its co-founders under the fellowship’s own auspices. Because of a dearth of archival material from Dr. Bob, who died in 1950 and had not been in the habit of writing letters, and also as a pledge to non-New Yorkers that the co-founders’ and A.A.’s history would receive balanced treatment, work began first on the Dr. Bob book. Its writer’s bad health and untimely death pushed that work to early publication in 1980.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers
had a rough-hewn quality, telling its story more anecdotally than narratively. Until its pairing with the new biography of Bill W. at A.A.’s 1985 convention, sales proved disappointing.
¹⁴¹

The Wilson biography was further delayed when that writing assignment had to be shifted for a second time. Finally, in late 1984, in more than ample time for its distribution to precede A.A.’s fiftieth birthday celebration,
Pass It On
appeared. Blending simple style with narrative comprehensiveness, the book became an immediate popular success within the fellowship. Meanwhile, an outpouring of meditation books by treatment-center publishers stimulated recurrent suggestions of the need for a Conference-approved daily reflection book, and a 1986 survey confirmed that members approved such an undertaking. The 1987 General Service Conference thus advised “development of a daily reflections book based on individual A.A.’s (including Bill W.’s) sharing based on the Traditions and Steps, and that a progress report be submitted to the 1988 Conference Literature Committee.”
¹⁴²
Of more likely proximate appearance is yet another book filling in A.A.’s history — a kind of
“Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age
, volume 2,” picking up where Wilson’s 1957 work left off. Given the trustees’ and delegates’ wariness of interpretation as well as its writer’s announced intentions, the book will be comprehensive and anecdotal.
¹⁴³

The reception of the filmstrip “Markings on the Journey,” first shown at the 1980 New Orleans convention, alerted A.A.’s trusted servants to the members’ desire to know more of the story of Alcoholics Anonymous, their own story. As befits golden anniversary celebrations, much attention to the historical also infused A.A.’s 1985 Montreal gathering. Unsurprisingly, then, attention was turned to ways of making more such material available to the fellowship. One result, in addition to the ventures already described, was the 1986 General Service Conference’s conditional approval of a project designed to bring to the membership, in book form, at least a substantial number of the 156 articles that Bill W. wrote over the years for the
A.A. Grapevine
.
¹⁴⁴

In its turn to the historical, as always, Alcoholics Anonymous reflected not only its own development but the era in which it flourished. From diverse directions, interest in narrative, a fascination with storytelling, had been reborn in the late 1970s and rekindled into flame in the 1980s. Philosophers and theologians, literary critics and historians, even psychologists in a turn to qualitative research — each examined, theorized about, and attempted to utilize story. Alcoholics Anonymous, meanwhile, lived story and lived by story, thus affording a rare laboratory for the illustration and testing of theory.
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Because the concept of “sober alcoholic” lies at the core of the A.A. program, Alcoholics Anonymous most vividly reflects its own philosophy by embracing, as fellowship, its own being both-and. The fellowship’s current story affords many such opportunities. Like the individual alcoholic, Alcoholics Anonymous experiences both ups and downs, and both have been as clear as ever in its most recent history.

The 1985 Montreal International Convention, A.A.’s well-publicized golden anniversary celebration, was an “up,” except perhaps for some of the several hundreds who could not find rooms. Despite comprehensive advance preparations, every hotel room within eighty miles of Montreal was booked. Some conventioneers counted themselves lucky to locate accommodations in Burlington, Vermont. Those who found themselves without a room either left early or scrounged space on the floors of rooms of friends. Few chose to sleep in parks or other public places — an observation sedately offered by a reporter apparently surprised that alcoholics would not choose the environment stereotypical-ly associated with them.
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In general, from the television news shows through the news magazines to the local newspapers, media coverage was comprehensive, occasionally insightful, always respectful, and surprisingly subdued. The more than 44,000 conventioneers, representing fifty-four countries, participated in meetings from nine each morning to after one the next — with a few hundred “early birds” also arranging 6:00
A.M
meetings each day. An ambivalence that combined “mixed feelings of awe and a sense of ‘down home’” framed the opening flag and closing candle ceremonies. Thoughts of history and emotions of fulfillment spilled over each other especially at the Friday night “introduction of historic figures” — the moment of Lois Wilson’s appearance and when the five-millionth copy of the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
was presented to Ruth Hock Crecelius, who as Bill’s and Hank P.’s secretary had “typed the original manuscript.”
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