Accepting Success or Failure

Today’s passage is the second of two paragraphs of questions in Bill W.’s essay on Step Twelve in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. They come where the essay turns from carrying the message to practicing AA’s principles everywhere else. Just before them it warns that Twelfth Step work brings both: the man worked with for months who drinks again, and the run of wins that tempts a member to manage other people. Just after them it answers: “Yes, all of these things are possible.”

Bill had known both. At AA’s convention in St. Louis in 1955, as he told it in AA Comes of Age, his wife Lois W. recalled the three years when their house at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn was full of alcoholics who went back to drinking, “seeming failures all.” Some of them sobered up later, he added.

The spring of 1939 brought a larger one. Bill and Hank P., his partner in publishing the Big Book, had counted on an article in the Reader’s Digest to sell it. When they went back with the book about to go to press, the editor told them his staff had turned the idea down and he had forgotten to say so. AA had about a hundred members. Five thousand books, by Bill’s count, were about to land in the printer’s warehouse “with no market whatever.” The printer, Edward Blackwell of Cornwall Press, said he would see them through, and did.

Then the house went. On May 1, by Bill’s account, the bank that owned 182 Clinton Street found a buyer. The storage warehouse had to pay the mover, since Bill and Lois could not, and it held their furniture for two years. Nearby AA families started a fund for them; Bill remembered $50 a month from it, Lois about $20. Lois, who kept diaries, counted 51 changes of address in 1939 and 1940. That year 20,000 postcards went to doctors ahead of a national radio interview, and twelve came back, two of them orders. The sheriff came to the book’s office in Newark with an eviction notice. Bill wrote that “after nearly four years of my sobriety we had no prospect of any income or the certainty of any place to live.”

Some things held. In September Liberty magazine printed an article on AA, and 800 pleas for help came in. Bill and Ruth Hock, the office’s secretary, answered them, Ruth writing to every one, and Bill wrote that the appeals “had made us forget our own troubles.” When snow fell at Thanksgiving, two friends from New Jersey’s first AA meeting, Bob and Mag V., took Bill and Lois in for the winter at Monsey, New York, in a house where the furnace and the pump quit by turns and a $3.75 secondhand stove heated a room they called Siberia. “But it was a very happy time,” Bill wrote. Lois wrote of her side of it too. In February 1940 she sat down on the stairs in Grand Central Station and wept: “Will we ever have our own home?” Bill understood, she wrote; he wanted one too.

More on the reviews, the broadcast, the twelve postcards and the article that sold the book at last: Twelve postcards, in By the Carload. On the two years Bill and Lois lived in other people’s houses, and the home they found: About fifty homes, in Number One Man.