Only Two Sins

Today’s line comes from a page most members can’t turn to anymore. The reading cites page 542 of the Big Book, a page number from the third edition of 1976. There the line comes near the end of “He Who Loses His Life,” the story of a member in New York who calls himself Bob. It was first printed in the second edition, in 1955. The fourth edition of 2001 left it out, and its page 542 falls in a newer story.

Bob wrote plays and spent years in a job he hated. After some thirty-nine years of being dependable, he writes, with no reward he thought fair, he decided to drink himself to death. In some seven years of hard drinking he was jailed nine times and fired from three jobs. He had been to AA once already, and treated it as a show to take his friends to. After a last ten-day binge, on money borrowed from a star who had acted in his play, he went up to the country to a doctor he had known since boyhood, who asked whether he wanted to live or die. He had just turned forty-six. He answered that he supposed he wanted to live, and when the doctor, having a brandy against the cold, passed him the bottle, he set it down and made coffee. He hadn’t had a drink, he wrote, since January 12, 1947.

The line under the story’s title sums him up as a playwright whose brains got too far ahead of his emotions, and the story says much the same in his own words. His definition of alcoholism is a state in which “the emotions have failed to grow to the stature of the intellect.” So when he comes to his two sins near the end, growth is the word he has been working toward. And the reading gives only the second half of his sentence. Its first half says there is only one law, and that law is love.

His title echoes a saying of Jesus in the Gospels: “he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” Near the end, Bob puts it in his own words, as a paradox he had seen come true. Sober, he and a plumber started a group up again in a nearby town, and he built a new career, published a book and was appointed to the faculty of his old school. Twenty years on, in September 1967, he wrote an article for the Grapevine’s series by the authors of Big Book stories, signing himself E.B.R. of Manhattan. He never turned down a Twelfth Step case, he said, and the best of sobriety for him, he admitted, selfishly, was being in command of himself.

The fourth edition’s preface doesn’t name the stories it dropped. It counts them: Part III, “They Lost Nearly All,” gained twelve new stories and lost eight, besides two moved up to Part I, among the pioneers. Every change over the years, it says, has had the same purpose: “to represent the current membership of Alcoholics Anonymous more accurately,” and so to reach more alcoholics. Daily Reflections came out in 1990, when the third edition was the Big Book, so its page numbers are the third edition’s.

More on the Big Book’s editions, and the fifth one due in 2027: Legacy, in By the Carload.