Understanding the Malady

Today’s two sentences come from page 139 of the Big Book, in chapter 10, “To Employers,” which talks to a boss about a valuable man who drinks. Its writer begins with three good men he had fired for drinking, all three of whom later took their own lives, and then with himself: “What irony—I became an alcoholic myself!” In the loan copy, the draft sent out for comment early in 1939, the passage went on, telling the employer to check the feeling and “remember that your employee is very ill.” The printed book left that out.

Of the book’s opening chapters, Pass It On, AA’s biography of Bill W., counts at least ten as Bill’s. For this one, it says there is “some reason to believe” it was the work of Hank P., and Arthur S.’s timeline of AA history notes that he has been credited with all of it but its opening paragraph. Drinking had cost Hank a top job at Standard Oil of New Jersey, Lois W. remembered. Out of Towns Hospital, he was Bill’s first real success in New York, and he became Bill’s partner in a failing Newark business and in getting the book published.

The book came out in April 1939. Within a year Hank was drinking again, and the tellings disagree about when. Bill and Lois both tied it to a fight over moving the little office from Newark to Manhattan, which Hank wanted kept in New Jersey, and both brought in Ruth Hock, the office’s secretary: Bill said Hank wanted her to go with him, Lois that she had turned down his proposal. Pass It On, written later, says no one can say for sure what set him off, and that which came first, the drinking or the break with Bill, “will never be known now.”

Late in 1939, Hank sent Bill a memo arguing against moving the book business in with the Alcoholic Foundation’s office. Bill answered that he couldn’t agree, and that the members would like Hank “to come back with us very much.” It was hard, Bill wrote, to win the others over to Hank’s ideas, since they “sometimes feel that you are no longer one of them,” and he asked Hank not to take disagreement for unfriendliness. Pass It On reads the letter as a sign that Hank was already drinking.

As Bill remembered it, with Hank drinking and Ebby T., Bill’s own sponsor, still drinking too, the group asked itself, “If stalwarts like these can relapse, what is going to become of the rest of us?” It made them more watchful, he wrote, and Hank’s slip set off no others. In 1940 Hank, broke and shaky, signed over his shares in the book. Lois remembered him coming back to the program for a short while; Bill wrote that he never really recovered. He died in Pennington, New Jersey, in 1954, and Lois put his death down to drinking.

More on who wrote which chapter of the book: To Wives, in By the Carload. On Hank’s idea of publishing it themselves: Par value $25, in By the Carload. On the shares he signed over in 1940: Legacy, in By the Carload.