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feel like talking, and the tone of the meetings is as varied as the people who

choose to attend. Group consensus rules in all things, so in any good-size

city

there are smoking meetings and nonsmoking meetings, meetings for early risers



and for night owls, meetings mostly populated by long-timers and meetings more

oriented to the newly sober.

The 12 Steps and decentralized structure have proved so effective and popular

that other groups have copied the template for dealing with other problems:

Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous and so forth.

But


AA has never branched out. Getting and staying sober has been labor enough.

Unlike many spiritual visionaries, Wilson came to understand "that when he

heard

the voice of God, it was often just the voice of Bill Wilson," as Cheever puts



it. And so, in the now-famous catechism that he created, AA members are

pledged


simply to turn their will and lives over to "the care of God as we understood

him," with italics right there in the Big Book. Prospective converts are often

assured that they may take as their God the nearest radiator if that's what

works for them. Almighty God with the white beard, or a gentle breeze in the

treetops, or the sublime engineering of a molecule, or the vastness of space,

or

the love of friends, or the power of the AA meeting itself: Choose your own



Infinite.

Whatever works.

In the can-do land of the bottom line, even our spirituality tends to be

results-oriented.

But the language of AA plays provocatively with a simple word: "work." In one

sense, sobriety is something that just happens, much like Wilson's great clean

wind. It is a gift from the Higher Power to the alcoholic. At the same time,

"work" means work, as in tangible, sometimes even grudging, effort. In the

early

days, Bill W. and Dr. Bob would sit in the Smith parlor refining their



drunk-saving techniques, and often Smith's wife, Anne, read aloud from the

Bible. They were partial to the Epistle of James, which reminded them that

"faith without works is dead." AA members speak of "working the steps," and

many


meetings end with the affirmation that "it works if you work it."

This means returning again and again to the state of mind and the exercises

that

constitute the upkeep on each miracle of sobriety. Beginning with the



admission

that they are powerless over alcohol and continuing through labors of

humility,

repentance, meditation and service, AA members maintain the dam that holds

back

the obliterating tide of booze from their lives.



A Friend of Bill W.

Cheever is a forthright woman with a big laugh and no immediately obvious

illusions, a hard-working writer who publishes books like clockwork, pens a

column for Newsday and teaches at Bennington College. She decided to write

about

Wilson because "I loved him. I loved how he changed the world without knowing



it, just as a way to stop drinking himself. I loved his Yankeeness," by which

she seems to mean a range of qualities, from the Emersonian flinty optimism,

to

the unsentimental practicality, to the hovering dark clouds and the weirdo



seances, which she calls his "table-tapping after dark."

No doubt she also loved Wilson for the fact that his miracle, worked and

reworked through the long chain of drunks, touched her own family, late in the

life of her father, the short-story artist John Cheever. Booze was the

lubricant

of Cheever's masterpieces. He was the poet laureate of postwar suburbia, in

which hope, striving, lust and angst were all refracted through the bottom of

a

cocktail glass.



But what was symbol and atmosphere in his stories was toxic in John Cheever's

life, as his daughter explained in her acclaimed memoirs "Home Before Dark,"

and

booze washed into Susan Cheever's life as well. In her book "Note Found in a



Bottle," she recalls learning to mix a martini by the age of 6, and doing

plenty


of drinking as an adult. Susan Cheever now speaks of her father's AA years as

an

amazing gift to the whole family, not a gift of bliss so much as a gift of



simple reality. When a drunk enters the unreal world of his illness, he takes

his family and friends with him.

Her homage to the family benefactor is pro-Wilson but not hagiographic. "I

like


to take saints and make them into people," she explains. She touches the

spiritual bases in her portrait of Wilson, but seems more moved by the

concrete

elements. Over lunch at a Manhattan bistro, she recalls her first visit to

Wilson's boyhood home in East Dorset, Vt., not far from the Bennington campus.

Cheever noticed the low ceiling of the stairway leading to Wilson's room, and

caught a glimpse in her mind's eyes, so to speak, of the gangly boy having to

duck his head each time he passed.

"And I was him," for that moment, she says. "I understood what it was to be a

depressed 10-year-old boy trapped in that house" after his parents had

abandoned

him to his remote and austere grandparents.

It's not easy making a spiritual figure compelling and real without slipping

into iconoclasm. Cheever's approach is to apply a writerly version of Wilson's

humility. She gets the goods on his serial adultery, for instance, but

declines


to make too much of it. "He was engaged to Lois when he was 18 -- hello!"

Cheever says. "They were married 53 years. All we really know is that they

were

friends through an amazing life. He was a good-enough husband."



Likewise, she can look into Wilson's LSD experiment with proto-hippie Aldous

Huxley without getting mired in a puritanical inquisition into whether this

constituted a "slip" in his sobriety or hypocrisy in his creed.

This attitude allows Cheever to see that Wilson's inconsistencies and quirks

weren't blemishes on his record -- they were the essence of a flawed man who

was


endlessly seeking what works. "Again and again, his intuitions were wrong,"

Cheever says. "But he wasn't interested in problems. He was interested in

solutions." Most of the key traditions of AA operations, including its

independence, anonymity and governance-by-consensus, ran counter to Wilson's

personal disposition. "He wanted fame and fortune, but somehow was able to

figure out that AA would have to be a group in which nobody represents it,

nobody speaks for it and nobody's in charge of it."

Sobering Reality

The striking thing about Wilson's story -- which only settles in upon

reflection

-- is how hard his life was even after he sobered up.

What, really, had that bright light and clean wind changed? He and Lois

remained

penniless, even homeless, for years. Sometimes it seemed that AA was

determined

to keep him poor forever. He had a chance to cash in by allying his message

with

a particular hospital, but his fledgling flock forbade him to do it. He



harbored

hope that John D. Rockefeller Jr. would lavish money on him, but instead

Rockefeller came through with a tiny stipend. Alcoholics Anonymous struggled

for


six long and underwhelming years before catching its crucial break: a glowing

article in the Saturday Evening Post.

Then, as the group flourished, Wilson was attacked by jealous colleagues and

abandoned by old friends. He sank into a crushing depression, and "often just

sat for hours with his head on the desk or with his head in his hands,"

Cheever


writes. "When he raised his head, he was sometimes weeping." Wilson liked

children but was childless. Cigarettes were killing him but he couldn't stop

smoking.

He wrote of "being swamped with guilt and self-loathing . . . often getting a

misshapen and painful pleasure out of it."

It was enough to drive a man to drink.

Yet for 36-plus years of this troubled and very human life, he was able to

resist that next drink. Perhaps the most efficacious miracles are the small

ones. And because "his mind was the right lens" and his will was "the right

machine," in Cheever's words, for mass-producing that limited but crucial

victory, Bill Wilson's miracle keeps working, one person and one day at a

time.


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Of Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson, Cheever says, "He changed the

world

without knowing it, just as a way to stop drinking himself." (Helayne Seidman



For The Washington Post)

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

++++Message 1785. . . . . . . . . . . . One Solitary Voice by Jack B...any

info.?


From: wbmscm . . . . . . . . . . . . 5/4/2004 6:43:00 PM

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

Does anyone have any information on a gentlemen by the name of Jack

B. who wrote a publication called "One Solitary Voice"?

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

++++Message 1786. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: One Page At A Time (2004)

From: Arthur Sheehan . . . . . . . . . . . . 5/6/2004 10:40:00 AM

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

I found Cheever's book to be a big disappointment - not based its so-called

"revelations" but from numerous factual errors in the material. Having read

most of the books cited in its bibliography, I don't get the sense Cheever

studied them very thoroughly. The book is acclaimed to be well researched but

I don't get a sense that it measures up to those claims. I'm somewhat tempted

to develop an itemized list of its errors (they are not trivial).

Outside of revealing a letter from Bill that his first drink was a beer (a few

weeks or so before drinking a Bronx cocktail) I didn't see anything that

hadn't appeared elsewhere. In regards to Bill asking for whiskey on his death

bed, the delirious comments of a dying man should not be projected as being

representative of anything other than the delirious comments of a dying man.

Regrettably there are those who persist in wanting to elevate Bill to demigod

status and deprive him of his human fallibility. All things considered,

despite his infidelities, séances, LSD, niacin, smoking himself to death,

etc., etc., Bill's shortcomings do not need to be either rationalized or

vilified. Bill left a priceless legacy of recovery, unity and service that has

saved the lives of countless millions since 1935. That legacy gets obscured by

what seems to be a disturbing and ever-increasing trend these days to churn

out titillating exposés and editorials masquerading as well-researched

biographies.

Arthur

----- Original Message -----



From: Lash, William (Bill)

Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 5:25 PM

Subject: [AAHistoryLovers] One Page At A Time (2004)

One Page At a Time

Susan Cheever's Chilling Glimpse of AA's Tormented 'Saint'

By David Von Drehle

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, May 3, 2004; Page C01

During her research for a biography of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill

Wilson, author Susan Cheever dug through the just-opened archives at

Stepping

Stones, Wilson's longtime home outside New York City. Alongside an

archivist,

she sifted reams of material that had not been looked at in decades.

One day, the archivist handed her a sheaf of wide, green-lined pages --

hourly


logs kept by the nurses who tended Wilson on his deathbed.

Cheever glanced at them. They seemed mundane.

"Keep reading," the archivist urged her.

Cheever came to the pages covering Christmas 1970. On the eve of the

holiday,

Bill Wilson passed a fitful night. A lifelong smoker, he had been fighting

emphysema for years, and now he was losing the battle. Nurse James

Dannenberg

was on duty in the last hour before dawn. At 6:10 a.m. on Christmas morning,

according to Dannenberg's notes, the man who sobered up millions "asked for

three shots of whiskey."

He was quite upset when he didn't get them, Cheever writes.

Wilson asked for booze again about a week later, on Jan. 2, 1971.

And on Jan. 8.

And on Jan. 14.

"My blood ran cold," Cheever said recently of the discovery. "I was shocked

and

horrified." With time to ponder, though, she found herself thinking, "Of



course

he wanted a drink. He was the one who talked about sobriety being 'a daily

remission.' I realized that this was a story about the power of alcohol:

that


even Bill Wilson, the man who invented sobriety, who had 30-plus years

sober,


still wanted a drink."

In the Big Book, as AA's foundation text is known, Wilson recalled the time

in

1934 when doctors concluded that he was a hopeless drunk and told his wife



that

there was no cure, apart from the asylum or the grave. "They did not need to

tell me," he added. "I knew, and almost welcomed the idea."

On Jan. 24, 1971, the man known modestly to legions of alcoholics as "Bill

W."

was finally cured.



Powerless Over Alcohol

Cheever's discovery, reported in her book "My Name Is Bill," doesn't really

change what little we know about alcoholism, a cruel, confounding and

mysterious

disease. It doesn't really change what we know about Wilson, a rough-hewn

and


unorthodox American saint sketched by Cheever in all his chain-smoking,

womanizing, Ouija-board-reading, acid-tripping holiness.

But it might change, at least a bit, the way some of us think about miracles

--

the shelf life of miracles, the limited warranty they carry, and how



high-maintenance they are. Miracles come in Bill Wilson's story, but always

with


strings attached. They are a bequest -- but not like an annuity that pays

out


endlessly and effortlessly. More like an old mansion, precious and

beautiful,

but demanding endless, unglamorous upkeep.

The miracle of Wilson's sobriety -- and the birth of AA -- arrived like

something out of the Old Testament. It was 1934, late in the year, when the

doctors had given up on Bill. Booze, which once put its arm around his

shoulder,

now had its jaws around his throat. A smart, handsome, charming man, Wilson

had

become the kind of drunk who could set off one morning to play golf and



awaken a

day later outside his house, unsure how he got there, with his head bleeding

mysteriously and his unused clubs still at his side. "The more he decided

not to


drink," Cheever writes, "the more irresistible drink seemed to become."

So for the third time, Wilson checked himself into a private hospital in New

York that specialized in drying out "rum hounds," as he called himself. He

knew


what to expect: doses of barbiturates, assorted bitter herbs, castor oil and

other purgatives, vomiting, tremors and depression. He also knew it probably

would not work, that just about every hard case like him went back to

drinking


after being discharged.

The prospect was so dismal that Wilson picked up a few bottles of beer for

the

cab ride.



Wilson had a friend named Ebby Thatcher, another alcoholic, who had a friend

named Roland Hazard, yet another drunk, who was wealthy enough to seek help

from

the eminent psychiatrist Carl Jung in Switzerland. When Jung realized how



serious Hazard's drinking problem was, he told his patient that the only

hope


was a religious conversion -- in Jung's experience, nothing else worked. The

American psychologist William James had arrived at a similar conclusion,

declaring in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" that "the only cure for

dipsomania is religiomania."

Well, by God, Hazard got religion and sobered up, for a while. He preached

this


approach to Thatcher, and Thatcher in turn proselytized Wilson.

"I was in favor of practically everything he had to say except one thing,"

Wilson later recalled of his conversations with Thatcher. "I was not in

favor of


God."

After a couple of days at Towns Hospital, Bill Wilson was past the d.t.'s

and

feeling really low. Science could do nothing for him. He now realized that



he

couldn't kick the booze by himself. Yet he was unable to believe in the only

power experts knew of to save a drunk.

Then:


"Like a child crying out in the dark, I said, 'If there is a Father, if

there is


a God, will he show himself?' And the place lit up in a great glare, a

wondrous


white light. Then I began to have images, in the mind's eyes, so to speak,

and


one came in which I seemed to see myself standing on a mountain and a great

clean wind was blowing, and this blowing at first went around and then it

seemed

to go through me. And then the ecstasy redoubled and I found myself



exclaiming,

'I am a free man! So this is the God of the preachers!' And little by little

the

ecstasy subsided and I found myself in a new world of consciousness."



Wilson never had another drink.

Carry This Message

Brimming with vision and new consciousness, Wilson blew back into the

familiar


world as if everything had changed -- not just for him, but for all of

creation.

He bragged that he was going to save every drunk in the world. He went

scavenging for men to preach to, finding them in missions and hospitals and

jails and among his own drinking buddies. Some of his targets thought he

sounded


an awful lot like the Bible-brandishing temperance ladies he had rebelled

against as a young man. He discovered that many alcoholics were "not in

favor of

God" -- God was an authority figure and drunks don't deal well with

authority.

"This doesn't work," he despaired to his wife, Lois. She reminded him that

he

was keeping at least one drunk sober -- himself.



But within months, even that project was at risk. Having been blinded like

Saul


on the road to Damascus, he now had his sight back and -- as often happens

to

the miraculously enlightened -- was discovering little by little that he was



much the same as before.

Tempted while on a business trip in Akron, Ohio, Wilson fought off the

bottle by

cold-calling churches from the hotel directory in search of a drunk to help.

One

call led him to an alcoholic surgeon named Bob Smith. Initially, Smith



objected

to being saved -- this was after one of those sad-but-hilarious tales that

give

a sort of rosy glow to a truly savage disease: Wilson's first scheduled



encounter with Smith was called off after the doctor staggered home blotto

carrying an enormous potted plant for no discernible reason. He deposited

the

non sequitur before his bewildered wife, then passed out.



The next day, when they finally met, Wilson answered Smith's reluctance by

saying that he wasn't there for Smith, he was there for Bill Wilson. This

was a

key insight in the development of AA -- the realization that helping another



drunk is key to staying sober oneself. It reflected Wilson's new humility

about


his wondrous white light and great clean wind. Before, he was trying to work

miracles in the lives of others. Now, he was just trying to maintain the

miracle

in his own.



And it worked. After one relapse, Smith, who had been drinking even longer

and


harder than Wilson, got sober. Bill W. and Dr. Bob shared the story of their

recoveries with more drunks in this same spirit. Some of those men and women

got

sober themselves, and reached out to still others. And so on, down through



the

years and out around the planet to the largely anonymous millions of today,

who

range from celebrities to legislators to schoolteachers to busboys, from a



former first lady to the businessman striding down the sidewalk to the

desperate

soul working on a second sober sunrise. AA is now so widespread and well

known


that creators of the children's movie "Finding Nemo" could playfully include

a

12-step meeting for fish-addicted sharks, confident that every parent in the



global reach of Disney would get the joke.

It's impossible to know exactly how many people have tried AA, how many

stayed

sober, how many attend meetings and how often. The group is not only



anonymous,

it is non-hierarchical, nondenominational, non-centralized, nonpartisan.

According to the Twelve Traditions that govern AA, there is no requirement

for


membership except a desire to stop drinking, and the group endorses no cause

apart from that one. All it takes to convene an AA meeting is two alcoholics

who

feel like talking, and the tone of the meetings is as varied as the people



who

choose to attend. Group consensus rules in all things, so in any good-size

city

there are smoking meetings and nonsmoking meetings, meetings for early



risers

and for night owls, meetings mostly populated by long-timers and meetings

more

oriented to the newly sober.



The 12 Steps and decentralized structure have proved so effective and

popular


that other groups have copied the template for dealing with other problems:

Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous and so forth.

But

AA has never branched out. Getting and staying sober has been labor enough.



Unlike many spiritual visionaries, Wilson came to understand "that when he

heard


the voice of God, it was often just the voice of Bill Wilson," as Cheever

puts


it. And so, in the now-famous catechism that he created, AA members are

pledged


simply to turn their will and lives over to "the care of God as we

understood

him," with italics right there in the Big Book. Prospective converts are

often


assured that they may take as their God the nearest radiator if that's what

works for them. Almighty God with the white beard, or a gentle breeze in the

treetops, or the sublime engineering of a molecule, or the vastness of


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