Not-God (25 page)

In 1955 Bill Wilson praised God that neither he nor its trustees could save Alcoholics Anonymous — even from itself. Yet one problem of “salvation” remained. Like the individual alcoholic, Alcoholics Anonymous itself was not God. This evident fact, all connected with A.A. — especially its trustees — clearly accepted in 1955. But the transition from accepting not being God to embracing its limitation as the source of its wholeness was to prove as difficult for Alcoholics Anonymous itself — and especially for its trustees — as it had been for the fellowship’s individual members. That not being God implied being not-God was a difficult lesson to learn. Yet the acceptance that A.A. was made whole by its very limitations was necessary to both the fellowship and the program, and so to it — with strategic but largely unconscious acumen — Wilson turned his attention and efforts in the years after 1955.

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   Some who gained a measure of control over their problem-drinking, or even achieved total abstinence, by the use of other treatment modalities, at times in this period advertised themselves as “ex-alcoholics.” Only A.A. members professed that their fundamental condition remained unchanged, that they continued to be “alcoholics.”

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   “lady ex-lush”: a delightful but apparently apocryphal tale, cherished especially among female members of A.A. of a certain class background, concerns Ms. Mann’s vehement protest to a careless editor who had captioned her picture: “ex-lady lush.” Marty is reported to have wired: “I am still a lady — goddammit!”

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   The circumstances of Wilson’s invitation to speak at Montreal are related in detail in Tiebout (Greenwich, CT) to Wilson. 18 November 1948;
cf
. also Dr. Frank C. (Charlottesville, VA) to Wilson, 30 December 1948: it is clear that many in the A.P.A. were unenthusiastic about Wilson’s appearance. Wilson offered cute witness to this in an oft-told ancedote describing how a past-president of the A.P.A. had after his talk noted that “outside of the few A.A.’s in the room, and myself, I do not think a single one of my colleagues believed a word of your explanation.” Bill expressed surprise, for he had been applauded. “… the old man replied, ‘Well, Mr. Wilson, you A.A.’s have a hundred thousand recoveries and we in the psychiatric profession have only a few. They were applauding the
results
, much more than the
message.’”
(Wilson to Dr. John G., 9 October 1967, italics Wilson’s).

1955-1971

Bill Wilson withdrew from formal leadership within Alcoholics Anonymous at the climactic moment of the fellowship’s “Coming of Age” convention on 3 July 1955; he died on 24 January 1971. In the years between, the fellowship faced and attempted to solve the organizational problem created by its founder’s longevity. A.A. thrived over these years because the continuing presence of the charismatic authority of its co-founder served powerfully to reinforce its qualities of openness, simplicity, and tolerance. So long as “Bill W.” lived, even his remote presence inhibited the development of any organizational bureaucracy that could stifle A.A.’s original vision and zeal under a haze of self-serving process. But Alcoholics Anonymous also suffered because that same presence impeded the development of any kind of truly autonomous, self-renewing authority. Despite the acceptance of its “Legacies” by A.A.’s General Service Conference, a society shy of even the term
leadership
was hard pressed to locate the source of its authority when the essentially charismatic prestige of original vision was withdrawn from “official” service.

Yet Alcoholics Anonymous did establish limited independence from Wilson as he diverted his attention to other areas whither it could not follow. Further, A.A. received, largely involuntarily, its co-founder’s final legacy — the “responsibility” of changing the trustee majority from non-alcoholic to alcoholic. Most importantly, Alcoholics Anonymous finally achieved clear and definitive acceptance of its fundamental limitation, of its profound not-God-ness. The fellowship attained this ultimate acceptance largely by following Wilson’s insistent even if “unofficial” example, as A.A. finally resolved its relationship to “other problems” and to the use of psychoactive chemicals other than alcohol.
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“A.A. isn’t fool-proof, and never can be.” Some of the more timorous among A.A.’s trustees felt that after 1955 Bill Wilson himself had set out to disprove at least one sense of this axiom. They — and he — carefully shielded from public scrutiny three areas among the co-founder’s many activities. Each could have been seen as related to A.A.’s direct confrontation with alcoholism. That they were not so understood revealed the fellowship’s sense of its own limitations. The three areas were Wilson’s interest in spiritualism, his experimentation with LSD, and his promotion of the Vitamin B-3 therapy.
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Evidence of the reality of “the spiritual” fascinated Bill Wilson. His conviction that he had incontrovertible personal evidence of individual human conscious life lasting beyond physical death profoundly influenced Bill’s adult faith, at least from the mid-1940s. After 1948, drawn through friendship with philosopher-mystic Gerald Heard into the ambit of the later-life interests of Aldous Huxley, Wilson experimented with and eventually claimed some power over spiritualistic phenomena. So profound was Bill’s immersion in this area that he at times confused the terms “spiritualism” and “spirituality.”
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Yet despite his conviction that he had evidence for the reality of “the spiritual” and so — in his logic — of the actual existence of a “higher Power,” Wilson chose not to share, much less to proclaim or to impose, this foundation for faith either with, to, or upon Alcoholics Anonymous. The fellowship through its trustees heartily and gratefully accepted its co-founder’s silence on so potentially controversial a topic. Only guardedly did Bill share the insights of his experiences in this realm with a few trusted friends, for he apparently believed that the faith required for salvation from alcoholism had to be just that — faith, and so by definition based on the intellectual “bottom experience” of insufficient evidence. Such, after all, had been his own “spiritual experience,” despite all his certitude concerning it.
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Wilson’s two other outside interests related more directly to treatment for alcoholism, and therefore, their relationship to Alcoholics Anonymous was even more ambiguous. Perhaps bridging the understandings of alcoholism as “spiritual disease” and as “mental (or psychological) disease” arched a line of research and experimentation that approached apparent fruition only in the late 1950s with the synthesis of lysergic acid diethylamide — the psychoactive chemical popularly known as LSD. The most common theory underlying the therapeutic use of LSD ran that the alcoholic was seeking to induce chemically the experience of transcendence but using the wrong chemical to that end. If a more appropriate chemical could evoke the experience of transcendence, it was hypothesized by serious medical experimenters, the obsession with and compulsion to ingest increasing doses of alcohol could be allayed. The alcoholic would come to see the drinking of alcohol as inappropriate to his transcendence, and therefore would give up his drinking. The closeness of this understanding to the Jungian insight and Dr. Jung’s own experiments in this area added to its attractiveness to Wilson and to some of his medical friends who agreed with his intuition of the three-fold nature of the alcoholic sickness. If the human psychological quest for spiritual transcendence could be satisfied by a physical chemical, a three-fold unity of treatment/ cure would balance the felt-unity of the “three-fold disease” with an elegance appealing to the scientific mind.
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Little is known concerning Wilson’s personal experimentation with LSD beyond the fact that it certainly occurred. Whatever its effects upon him, there is no evidence that he ever thought his alcoholism “cured” in the sense that he could again drink alcohol safely. His main interest was in the possible usefulness of the LSD experience as an aid for those who otherwise could not “get the [A.A.] program.” More and more in his later years, Bill Wilson realized that many who approached Alcoholics Anonymous turned away unhelped, and many more never even approached it. Wilson’s main efforts outside A.A. in the final fifteen years of his life were attempts to remove the mental or psychological and physical obstacles that impeded some persons from openness to the spiritual.
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More clearly and explicitly aimed at this goal than his interest in LSD was Bill Wilson’s final pursuit, “the Vitamin B-3 therapy.” The two medical researchers with whom Wilson explored the LSD experience, Doctors Abram Hoffer and Humphrey Osmond, had discovered in their work with schizophrenics that massive doses of vitamin B-3 — also known as niacin or nicotinic acid — seemed to be of special help to those of their patients who were also alcoholics. Bill became so involved in this final interest of his long lifetime that he established a separate mailing address from which to spread information about this therapy, especially among physicians in Alcoholics Anonymous, urging upon them research efforts to verify the treatment’s utility. Further, Wilson’s enthusiasm for this treatment was so great that he is reputed to have said, near the end of his life, that if his name were to go down in history as having made any contribution to mankind, he suspected that it would more likely be for his promotion of the B-3 therapy than for his role in the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous — a strong and surprising statement indeed.
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Because of his promotional efforts among A.A. physicians, Bill’s involvement with the B-3 therapy became a threat to Alcoholics Anonymous with its tradition of “no opinion on outside issues.” At the trustees’ suggestion, Wilson moved the work to his home and then — with the co-operation of one physician-friend and still under pressure from his trustees — still further from identification with himself, to an Oyster Bay mailing address. On the one occasion when the question of Bill’s involvement with the B-3 therapy was raised at a meeting of the General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous, the proffered answer was succinct and definitive:

Q.: Can you discuss the subject of Bill and Niacin in any detail?

A.: Such a discussion has no place at this Conference, since it has nothing to do with A.A. The General Service Board is on record as recognizing that niacin has nothing to do with the A.A. program. Bill concurs in this.
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Bill Wilson’s concern for those who seemed unable to “get the program” was the constant thread uniting the three aspects of his personal history that some feared might adversely affect Alcoholics Anonymous. In these instances, this concern verged so closely to “opinions on outside issues” — and so to the danger of being “drawn into public controversy” — that both Wilson and Alcoholics Anonymous carefully segregated such explorations from the A.A. name and from even erroneous hint of A.A. connection. In two other areas, however, the problems and solutions were not so clear-cut. The image of Alcoholics Anonymous held by those outside the fellowship and the problems of potential adherents who because of “other problems” seemed unable to grasp or even to approach the “simple program” of Alcoholics Anonymous continued to exercise the ingenuity of this fellowship so aware on the one hand of its dedication to “the Legacies of Recovery, Unity, and Service,” and on the other hand of its own profound and essential limitations.

From almost the closing moment of the 1955 Coming of Age convention, Wilson — despite his overt withdrawal from A.A. leadership — undertook to promote a change in the ratio among the trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous from a majority of non-alcoholics to one of recovering alcoholics. The intertwining of this endeavor with expansion of the theme of “responsibility” was clear in his correspondence. In these letters, Bill’s first concern was to include in A.A.’s responsibility those who remained outside its fellowship but were in obvious need of its program. More and more, however, perhaps because of the objectivity that retirement afforded, Bill moved to emphasize A.A.’s responsibility to sufferers from alcoholism who rejected its program because they found membership in its fellowship unattractive or even repulsive. Wilson apparently intuited that the “immaturity” diagnosis of alcoholics, which in this period some were extending into a critique of Alcoholics Anonymous itself, inhibited many who needed the program from approaching it. The most devastating criticism of those who are sensitive to their immaturity, after all, is to label their very efforts at maturity but further manifestations of their immaturity. Thus the stress Wilson placed upon “responsibility” as a characteristic of maturity furthered his aim of achieving the change in the trustee ratio. More deeply, however, the ratio change served the co-founder’s lofty but limited concept of responsibility.
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Wilson’s letters between 1955 and 1960 reveal him pulling back from a style of ratio change advocacy that at times seemed to some to threaten the independence that Alcoholics Anonymous had achieved from him at its Coming of Age convention. Over most of these five years, Bill relied upon the fellowship’s elected delegates to each year’s General Service Conference to carry forward and to implement his vision of responsibility. The 1954 General Service Conference theme had been “Confidence and Responsibility.” A subtle shift of emphasis followed the 1955 lull during which, on the eve of A.A.’s most significant convention, its General Service Conference meditated on the theme “Awareness” (of the implications of the impending changes). In 1956, A.A.’s chosen representatives assembled under the theme “Confidence in Stability” — an apparent marshaling of a sense of direction as the fellowship confronted and internalized Wilson’s changed role in their midst. By 1957, however, some of the delegates themselves caught Bill’s earlier vision. Gathering to discuss the problems of “Stability and Responsibility without Complacency,” they announced a secondary theme that echoed not only Wilson’s earlier hopes for fellowship self-direction but also his enduring fear of organizational imposition. Their theme was “The Need for Authority Equal to Responsibility.” Under the impact of this problem-recognizing motif, Wilson further subdued his advocacy of the ratio change. “At the forthcoming Conference I am having nothing to say whatever about the Trustee ratio.… I really did quit at St. Louis and meant to.”
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