The Joy of Living

Today’s passage is the tail of the last sentence in Bill W.’s essay on Step Twelve, in the Twelve and Twelve of 1953, and with it his twelve essays on the Steps are done. The paragraph it closes says so at once: “These little studies of A.A.’s Twelve Steps now come to a close.” After it come only a wish for every reader and the Serenity Prayer. The essay had opened, on page 106, by naming the same theme in nearly the same words.

Between that opening and this close, Bill had written at length about what goes wrong in sober lives: money, marriage, fear, the urge to come out on top. He seems to have known how it might read. The closing paragraph grants that “it may appear that A.A. consists mainly of racking dilemmas and troubleshooting,” and adds, “To a certain extent, that is true.” The essays had dwelt on problems, it goes on, because their writers were “problem people who have found a way up and out.” Only then does it turn to good living, and to today’s words.

Pass It On, AA’s biography of Bill, published in 1984, sets the two books side by side. The Big Book, it says, “radiates Bill’s joy and gratitude” at having found a way to stay sober; the second book “reflects an entirely different mood.” He wrote it in 1951 and 1952, depressed nearly the whole time, and came down so hard on the dark side of things, the biography says, that he seems to have felt he owed the reader “an explanation — or apology.” At least one friend who read his drafts asked for nothing of the kind. Jack Alexander, the Saturday Evening Post reporter, wanted fewer dashes and exclamation points in the essays on the Steps, and otherwise wrote: “I stayed with you to the end, which is more than I can say for Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’”

Bill had made the same turn once before. In 1939, in “The Family Afterward,” the Big Book’s chapter on a family’s first sober years, he stopped after pages of money troubles and old grudges: “We have been speaking to you of serious, sometimes tragic things.” Then, two sentences on: “But we aren’t a glum lot.” His reason was the newcomer: “If newcomers could see no joy or fun in our existence, they wouldn’t want it.” So, the chapter says, “We absolutely insist on enjoying life,” and it gives laughter a job: “cheerfulness and laughter make for usefulness.”

Fourteen years later Bill wasn’t sure the harder book would find readers at all. On October 5, 1953, he wrote in a letter: “At first, I was dubious whether anyone would care for it,” apart from oldtimers who had run into trouble in parts of life other than drinking. But newcomers were using it too, he went on, and more than 25,000 copies had been shipped.

More on how Bill wrote the Twelve and Twelve, in a studio in the woods: Wit’s End, in Suggestions Only. On the depression he wrote it through: The quarter mile, in Number One Man. On a friend in St. Louis who had the drafts read aloud to him: Stuff of the saints, in Some Bum from St. Louis.