Illustration · A desk at night in 1954, with a reel-to-reel tape recorder of the period, a desk microphone and typed pages. Mel B. calls Bill W.’s recollections of that year his “taped memories.” Not drawn from a photograph.

Hot flash

Bill W. told the story of his night at Towns Hospital for the rest of his life, and no two tellings were the same.

“Tell us where you used to hide your bottles and tell us about that hot-flash spiritual experience of yours.”

The kind of letter Bill W. remembered getting after 1946, when he was out talking about the Traditions · Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957

Telling by telling

In December 1934, a few days into his last stay at Towns Hospital, Bill W. had the experience he spent the rest of his life describing (The bedside, in The Little Doctor, tells the night itself). He told it in books, in talks to doctors and clergy, on tape and in letters, and the telling changed.

The first written telling was “Bill’s Story,” set down in 1938 for the Big Book. There the experience comes the moment he accepts the program Ebby T. had laid out for him. There is no cry and no white light. “The effect was electric,” he wrote, and he felt lifted up “as though the great clean wind of a mountain top blew through and through.” The wind is a likeness, and he gives what happened no name.

Eleven years later, in a paper read to the American Psychiatric Association in Montreal, the night had become a scene. He cries out to God, and “the place lit up, blinding white.” He seems to stand on a mountain in a wind “not of air, but of Spirit,” and a thought comes: “You are a free man!” His taped memories of 1954 and his talk at AA’s St. Louis convention in 1955 tell it the same way, at greater length.

What he called it changed too. In the 1950s it was his sudden spiritual experience, or his sudden awakening. Writing to Carl Jung in 1961, he called it “an illumination of enormous impact and dimension.”

Members had a shorter name. After the Traditions came out in 1946, Bill remembered, letters asked him to come and talk about his “hot-flash spiritual experience.” Pass It On, AA’s biography of Bill, says he used the name himself, to make light of it. Wherever he uses it in his own writings on hand here, he gives it as other people’s word.

Listen Hot flash About 1 minute

Compare the accounts

Seven tellings

Seven of Bill’s tellings in his own words, in the order each was set down: a line from each, what he called the experience, and which of six things it has in it.

From the Big Book, Bill’s 1949 paper and his 1960 talk to clergy as transcribed at silkworth.net, the Grapevine as collected in The Language of the Heart, Pass It On and AA Comes of Age. A filled mark means the telling has it; an outlined one, only as a likeness or in other words; a faint one, not at all. Quotations are short excerpts.

1938
“Bill’s Story,” the Big Book’s first chapter“…the moment I fully accepted them, the effect was electric.”Calls it: no name
crylightmountainwindfree manPresence
1949
A paper read to the American Psychiatric Association“The place lit up, blinding white.”Calls it: “the phenomenon”
crylightmountainwindfree manPresence
1953
The Grapevine, “A Fragment of History,” July“I immediately knew that I was a free man.”Calls it: “my sudden spiritual awakening”
crylightmountainwindfree manPresence
1954
His taped memories, as quoted in Pass It On“Suddenly, my room blazed with an indescribably white light.”Calls it: no name of his own
crylightmountainwindfree manPresence
1955
His talk at St. Louis, printed in AA Comes of Age“Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light.”Calls it: “my sudden spiritual experience”
crylightmountainwindfree manPresence
1960
A talk to a conference of clergy“The room filled with a blinding white light.”Calls it: “my transforming experience”
crylightmountainwindfree manPresence
1961
A letter to Carl Jung, January 23“There immediately came to me an illumination of enormous impact and dimension…”Calls it: “an illumination”
crylightmountainwindfree manPresence

The book’s night

In the Big Book’s own telling he sees no light, and the mountain and the wind are only a likeness. The white light, and the mountain and the wind as something he saw, come from his later papers and talks.

For a closer look

Go deeper

The night as a doctor told it in 1943, who used the name, and how long it lasted.

Mr. X

The earliest telling with a cry in it, among the sources here, isn’t Bill’s own. In May 1943 Dr. Harry Tiebout, a psychiatrist in Greenwich, Connecticut, read a paper on AA to the American Psychiatric Association in Detroit, and told the founder’s story without his name, as Mr. X’s. It was printed in January 1944.

In Tiebout’s account it happens on the evening of Bill’s first day in the hospital, not a few days in. Mr. X cries out, “If there is a God, let Him show himself now,” and is lifted into a joy that lasts some hours. There is no white light, no mountain and no wind, though Mr. X often said that afterward “everything took on an indescribable illumination.” He put those who “enter Alcoholics Anonymous on the strength of such an experience” at roughly 10 per cent; the other 90 per cent, he said, change slowly.

Whose word

The earliest “hot flash” in print among the sources here is in a novel. In March and April 1945 the Grapevine ran a chapter of September Remember, by “Eliot Taintor,” a writing team, the magazine said, one of whom was an AA member. In it a co-founder of AA named Bill Griffith tells a Yale audience a story much like Bill W.’s, and says that some of his irreverent friends in AA call it “Bill’s hot flash.”

Bill used the name three times in the sources on hand, in 1949, 1955 and 1957, and each time it is someone else’s: the alcoholics who “kidded me about my ‘hot flash’” in 1935, and the members whose letters asked about it. Pass It On, written after his death, remembers it the other way round: Bill called it that himself, so often that others took it up, “never realizing that Bill was deliberately ‘deflating’ his own experience…”

Six minutes

How long it lasted depends on the telling. Tiebout’s Mr. X stayed on his heights “for some hours.” In 1949 Bill made it six minutes, and set it beside the six months it might take someone else. In his 1954 memories he said he didn’t know how long. In 1960 he told the clergy, “How long this state lasted I have no idea,” and a few sentences later called it “perhaps six minutes,” beside “six months or even a year or more” for most members.

Each time he gave a number, it was to set his minutes beside the months most members took.

Sources

Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939 (first printing, as reprinted): “Bill’s Story.” Fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001: “Bill’s Story.”
Harry M. Tiebout, M.D., “Therapeutic Mechanism of Alcoholics Anonymous,” American Journal of Psychiatry, January 1944, read to the American Psychiatric Association in Detroit, May 1943. Reprinted in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, Appendix E.
Bill W., “Basic Concepts of Alcoholics Anonymous,” New York State Journal of Medicine, August 1944, as transcribed at silkworth.net.
AA Grapevine, April 1945, “from ‘September Remember’: a Novel about A. A.,” by Eliot Taintor, from the scan at silkworth.net.
Bill W., “The Society of Alcoholics Anonymous,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1949, read to the American Psychiatric Association in Montreal, May 1949, as transcribed at silkworth.net.
Bill W., “A Fragment of History: Origin of the Twelve Steps,” AA Grapevine, July 1953; “How AA’s World Services Grew,” Part II, June 1955; and his letter to Carl Jung, January 23, 1961, printed in the Grapevine, January 1963. All in The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988.
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 5, quoting Bill’s recollections (dated 1954 by Mel B.), and chapter 15, on “hot flash.”
Mel B., Ebby: The Man Who Sponsored Bill W. Hazelden, 1998. Chapter 1, on Bill’s taped memories of 1954.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Recovery: The First Legacy” (Bill’s talk at St. Louis, July 1955) and “Service: The Third Legacy.”
Bill W., talk to the National Clergy Conference on Alcoholism, New York, 1960, printed in the conference’s “Blue Book,” vol. 12 (1960), as transcribed at silkworth.net.