A “Sane and Happy Usefulness”

Today’s passage ends a stretch of seven paragraphs in “The Family Afterward,” the Big Book’s chapter for the households of the newly sober. The chapter has just dealt with the father who comes home sober and throws himself into making money. Then it turns to another kind. He has had a sudden spiritual experience and can think of nothing else, and at home there is talk of spiritual matters “morning, noon and night.” He may press the family to catch up at once, or act as if they no longer concern him. After a while they “suspect father is a bit balmy!”

The book half takes his side, and here it changes from “he” to “we.” “We have indulged in spiritual intoxication,” it says. “Like a gaunt prospector, belt drawn in over the last ounce of food, our pick struck gold.” Father has only scratched “a limitless lode,” and it pays only as long as he keeps digging and gives away everything he takes out. So the family is told to “let him have his head,” even if he neglects them for a while to help other alcoholics. He is safer than the man who puts business first, and less likely to drink, “and anything is preferable to that.” Then comes today’s passage, where the writers say how their own such spell came out.

Bill W. wrote the chapter in 1938, though his wife had hoped to. Lois W. wrote in her memoir, Lois Remembers, that she had expected to be asked to write “To Wives,” “and perhaps the following one,” which is this one. Bill said no: apart from the personal stories, he wanted the book in one style. So the pages that speak for the family were written by the husband.

By Lois’s account of those years, he had been something like that father. When he came home from Towns Hospital in December 1934 he was full of plans to sober up other alcoholics, “all the drunks in the world perhaps.” The two of them went constantly to meetings of the Oxford Group, the evangelical movement whose ideas had helped him get sober. “It was an ecstatic time for us both,” she wrote. But Bill was busy with his alcoholics, and she missed him: “We were seldom alone together now.” One Sunday, when she had been in the group nearly two years by her own count, Bill remarked that they would be late for the meeting. She had a shoe in her hand, and she threw it at him. “Damn your old meetings!”

The paragraph after today’s passage suggests that the family look into the alcoholic’s principles for themselves, and hopes for a wife with “a sane spiritual program.” Lois did that. On the way to the meeting that Sunday she began to look at her own part, and from then on she took a daily inventory. Then she went through the phase herself. In the list of dates at the back of her book, under 1935 to 1941, she wrote: “I become quite pious for a period.”

The passage was trimmed on its way to the book in print now. In the loan copy, the draft sent out for comment early in 1939, its first sentence named God outright and ended on one more word, “nevertheless.” The first edition put a pronoun where the name had been and kept “nevertheless”; the fourth edition has dropped the word. The last four words, the reading’s title, read the same in all three.

More on the shoe, and the house full of Bill’s drunks: Damn your old meetings, in Captain of My Soul. On who wrote the chapters for the family: To Wives, in By the Carload. On the draft sent out for comment: Loan copy, in By the Carload.