Authors: Ernest Kurtz
Not-God (4 page)
According to Dr. Silkworth, Bill’s alcoholism was an illness: one look at himself and that should be obvious, the physician pointed out. Wilson had become physically allergic to alcohol, the doctor went on, yet his mind remained obsessed with it, condemned to drink against any will of his own. Although Silkworth did not use the term, he also described to his patient the phenomenon of compulsion: given the physical allergy, once an alcoholic such as Bill ingested
any
alcohol — even one thin drink — he became totally unable to control further drinking. The first drink got the alcoholic drunk, whatever might be the case for “social drinkers” — those not afflicted with the physical allergy. A rather desperate picture: allergy, obsession, compulsion. But the doctor also held out a slim hope. They (Silkworth was including himself and always stressed his sharing in his patients’ efforts, and theirs in his) had to accept the fact of physical allergy and the inevitability of alcoholic compulsion, but they could work together toward Bill’s overcoming or at least living soberly with the obsession.
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Hardly a happy prognosis, yet it buoyed the painfully drunk Wilson, and this reaction itself was testimony to his alcoholic desperation. His new understanding and doubtless also the doctor’s kindly interest temporarily sustained Bill, but to no apparent long-term avail. He began drinking again, and now, in order to purchase his alcohol, even stole the pitifully few bills he could find in Lois’s purse. She had been maintaining her family home and supporting her drunken husband on a clerk’s salary. When Bill was inevitably hospitalized again, Dr. Silkworth had seen enough. Wilson had proved unwilling or unable to use the only diagnosis and help that the doctor had to offer. His case was clearly hopeless, and Silkworth told Wilson just that. Downstairs, moments later, the doctor informed Lois of her choices: to have Bill locked up, to watch him go insane, or to let him die. From their experiences of the past five years, both Bill and Lois knew that the neuro-psychiatrist was right.
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And so, of course, alcoholic that he was, Wilson found hope in this very proclamation of hopelessness: knowing
this
, he surely would never drink again. Never lasted only the few weeks until Armistice Day. Having expounded — in a barroom — to his companion for the day his Silkworth-derived understanding of his alcoholism, Bill accepted the bartender’s offer of a drink “on the house.” After all, he had been in France sixteen years before. “My God!” his friend exclaimed. “Is it possible that you can take a drink after what you just told me? You must be crazy!” Wilson’s response was brief, simple, and accurate: “I am.”
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Thus began Bill Wilson’s last binge, the one interrupted by the late November visit from his friend Ebby. During lucid intervals, Bill brooded morosely. The diagnosis was in, hopeless insanity, and surely he was validating it each time he reached for another drink to ease the pain or to nurse the self-pity from that awareness. Yes, he was hopeless. Only now, through the alcoholic haze, had come Ebby T., whom he — Bill Wilson — had labeled hopeless. After all, he himself had only been
threatened
with institutionalization; Ebby, Bill knew, had actually been
committed
. Yet here was Ebby, and Ebby was sober, and Ebby had just declined a drink with a smile.
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Confronted by that fact, Bill Wilson found hope. He was more aware, however, of confusion. The word
religion
troubled him deeply. “What a crusher that was — Ebby and religion! Maybe his alcoholic insanity had become religious insanity. It was an awful letdown. I had been educated at a wonderful engineering college where somehow I had gathered the impression that man was God.”
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Of Bill’s earlier exposure to religion, little is known — probably because there is little to know. Grandfather Fayette, the chief influence on the boy’s life, was an Ingersoll-inclined transcendentalist. In response to his ideas, the young Bill Wilson had “left the church” at about age twelve — on “a matter of principle.” Ironically, the “principle” involved concerned a required temperance pledge. Chapel was the custom at Burr and Burton; but Bill’s recollections of his profound, under-the-stars conversations with Bertha Banford revealed that the young Wilson had no “religion” beyond an adolescent romanticism easily congruent with both his grandfather’s Vermont vagueness and his friend Mark Whalon’s adoring admiration of the power of the human mind. Here then, while Wilson sat drunk in his kitchen listening to Ebby T., at the moment of the conception of A.A.’s fundamental idea of “one alcoholic talking to another,” was born the self-conscious wariness of “religion” that was so deeply to infuse the program and fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.
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Given his long history of alienation from formal religion. Bill knew that he would not tolerate being preached at. Yet his pain and confusion at this moment opened Wilson to
something
. Ebby was a friend. Indeed, Bill dimly felt as he began to listen, Ebby was proving his friendship by
not
urging this new-found “religion” upon him. Something else — something more significant to one mired in self-pity — was happening. As Wilson later recalled how that process that was to become Alcoholics Anonymous had begun: “In the kinship of common suffering,
one alcoholic had been talking to another.”
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Ebby did go on to explain quietly some things about the Oxford Group: its non-denominational nature: the importance of taking stock of oneself, confessing one’s defects, and the willingness to make restitution; that one could choose one’s own concept of “God” — after using the term once, Bill noted, Ebby spoke instead of “another power” or a “higher power.” Bill began to listen —a little. And just then, Ebby rose to leave, and Bill went back to his brooding. Bill Wilson knew deep in his heart that he couldn’t accept this “getting religion”: yet Ebby —
hopeless
Ebby — was in fact sober, and this fact gnawed in Wilson’s alcohol-soaked gut.
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A few days later, Ebby returned with a friend. Shep C. did not attract Bill. Shep seemed too “Ivy League,” a “pantywaist socialite who’d probably gone wild one night on too many sherries at a Junior League cotillion.” What could he possibly know about drinking? Ebby and Shep talked — incessantly, it seemed to Wilson. They spoke of serenity, of their new life and newly found sense of purpose; they talked of prayer, meditation, and especially the love of giving oneself in service. They finally left, and Bill’s gagging changed from mental to physical; he’d been pouring himself stiffer and stiffer drinks while absorbing their onslaught.
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The door opened and he stood there, fresh-skinned and glowing. There was something about his eye. He was inexplicably different. What had happened?
I pushed a drink across the table. He refused it. Disappointed but curious, I wondered what had got into the fellow. He wasn’t himself.
“Come, what’s all this about?” I queried.
He looked straight at me. Simply, but smilingly, he said, “I’ve got religion.”
I was aghast. So that was it — last summer an alcoholic crackpot; now, I suspected, a little cracked about religion. He had that starry-eyed look. Yes, the old boy was on fire all right. But bless his heart, let him rant! Besides, my gin would last longer than his preaching.
Decades later Wilson recalled the struggle within himself during that night and on the following day. His precise recollection expressed well the ambivalence to and wariness of religion that were later to abide so deeply at the core of Alcoholics Anonymous:
Ebby and Shep C. were now asking him to give up the one attribute of which he was the most proud, the one quality that set a man above the animals — his inquiring, rational mind. And they wanted him to give this up for an illusion.
Finally — and he knew he was pretty drunk by the time he reached this point — he had to look at the fact and admit it: what they were asking him to do represented weakness to him. How could a man so demean himself as to surrender the one thing in which he should have faith, his innate, inquiring mind?
He was willing to concede religious comfort might be all right for some — for the old, the hopeless, for those who had passed beyond loving, beyond any hope of really living, but, by Christ, he was different.
It might be the last arrogant gasp of alcoholic pride but, miserable and terrified as he was, he would not humble himself here. On this point he would go out swinging.
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Thus Bill decided the issue — or so he thought. Since he resolved it in favor of “his inquiring, rational mind,” it struck him as only fair, the next morning, to undertake some inquiring, rational investigation — after all, that had been his Wall Street profession. If he wanted to learn the real souce of Ebby’s sobriety, Bill Wilson must himself look into the Oxford Group at its headquarters, the old Calvary Church. To facilitate his investigation, of course, fortification was required, so Bill bar-hopped his way down Twenty-Third Street, for a time even forgetting his purpose and intended destination. Finally, dragging with him a Finnish fisherman whose vocation had reminded him of his own quest, Wilson arrived at the Calvary Church Bowery mission.
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There Bill found what he expected: “life’s discards and the rejects of society.” Upon seeing the drunken pilgrim, the door-greeter was about to eject him, until Ebby intervened, insisting that Bill could join the group in the meeting room if he first ate a large plate of beans and washed them down with a great deal of coffee. Even the greeter’s rejection did not make Wilson conscious that some of those on whom he looked down might have seemed, to an objective observer, better off than he. Sitting in the last row in his alcoholic stupor, Bill mellowed as the coffee and food did their work. “Hell, these weren’t bad fellows.” Why, they drank the way he did! And so when the leader, Tex, called for penitents to come forward and witness, Bill Wilson, showman, stepped forward. There was an audience in the hall. Wilson, who for five years had been mired in the isolation of alcoholic loneliness, surely could not let such an opportunity pass.
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The next day he felt like a fool, yet one fact struck him. On the way home from the mission, he had never even thought of stopping in a bar. For three days, days of internal struggle and bleak futility, Bill Wilson lay abed at home, unable to eat, drinking only enough to stave off the pain of withdrawal. He wanted to survive. But why? He knew himself doomed to the intolerable options of dependence on some spurious faith or an alcoholic death or incarceration in some institution. Bill felt paralysis of thought and will. Suddenly, on an impulse, with no clear plan beyond “more thinking,” Wilson decided that he could think all this out more sharply if he were dried out. Acting on this “rational decision,” he set off yet again to Towns Hospital and Dr. Silkworth, drinking four bottles of beer — the extent of Lois’s credit at the neighborhood grocery — along the way.
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Dr. Silkworth was unenthusiastic about what little he could make of Wilson’s ravings about a plan, but he gave Bill a bed. On the second day, Ebby stopped by. Only when asked by Bill for his “neat, pat formula,” did he repeat it. “Realize you are licked, admit it, and get willing to turn your life over to the care of God.” Wilson nodded, about all he could do, and Ebby left. Barely able to move, certainly unable to sleep, painfully suspended between full withdrawal symptoms and the sedation that was easing them, Bill Wilson tried to think.
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In the first formal telling of his story, Wilson slid quickly past what happened next. He had learned that recounting it injured rather than aided his credibility, and it certainly had not helped anyone else to “get the program.” Yet, to him, it had happened, and he knew it, and eventually he had to set it down. Two decades later he did so, in the most detailed telling of his story, at the “Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age” Convention of 1955:
My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit. I still gagged badly on the notion of a Power greater than myself, but finally, just for the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once I found myself crying out, “If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!”
Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, “So this is the God of the preachers!” A great peace stole over me and I thought, “No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are all right. Things are all right with God and His world.”
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“A great peace.… Things are all right.…” But almost immediately the fears began again. Had not Silkworth warned him of alcoholic brain damage? Was this the evidence of it — a hallucination founded in his obsession with Ebby’s sobriety? Hadn’t he, after all, been doing strange things lately, like that foolish scene at the mission? Almost frantically, Wilson called a nurse and begged her to summon Dr. Silkworth. Let him decide, Bill thought. One way or the other — sobriety or an institution — this was it. Only, he had to know which.
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The doctor came, and Bill related everything that had happened, each detail he could remember. Then Wilson waited for his answer. Silkworth asked some questions first, “probing questions,” and Bill strained to answer accurately. Finally the doctor sat back in the bedside chair, his brow furrowed. The suspenseful silence became too much for Bill Wilson. “Tell me,” he pleaded, “was it real? Am I still … sane?” Silkworth hesitated a moment longer, the lower part of his face pursed. Finally he spoke: “Yes, my boy. You are sane. Perfectly sane, in my opinion.” The physician continued briefly, speaking of “psychic upheaval” and “a conversion experience,” but he quickly qualified the words by insisting that he was but “a simple man of science.” Yet, Silkworth concluded, “Whatever it is you’ve got now, hang on to it. Hang on to it, boy. It is so much better than what you had only a couple of hours ago.”
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