JOHN CHEEVER SOBERED up in time to write one last short novel, Oh What a Lovely Paradise It Seems, in which the protagonist finds himself in a parish-house:
…one of those places where the rummage sale would be held and the nativity play would be performed. He looked into the faces of forty men and women who were listening to a speaker at a podium. He was at once struck by his incompetence at judging the gathering. Not even in times of war, with which he was familiar, not even in the evacuation of burning cities had he seen so mixed a gathering. It was a group, he thought, in which there was nowhere the force of selection.
John Berryman didn’t make it, killing himself before finishing Recovery, his novel of alcoholism. Saul Bellow remembers forcing a window at Berryman’s house to find him facedown, rigid, diagonal on a double bed. “These efforts are wasted,” said the poet; “We are unregenerate.” But Bellow also remembers the poem “Surprise Me,” in which the poet prayed for the “blessing gratuitous… on some ordinary day.”
The blessing gratuitous on some ordinary day is what 2 million members of Alcoholics Anonymous seek in the parish-house or rectory, between rummage sales, in an underground network of church basements like the caves of the early Christians, in hospitals, union halls, bookshops, health clubs, high school cafeterias, the YMCA, the Friends Meeting House, a synagogue, the American Legion and the McGraw-Hill Building and the Port Authority. They’ve been selected by their disease. Their passion is sobriety. Two-thirds of them survive, and not by magic.
Nan Robertson, a veteran New York Times reporter, is herself a recovering alcoholic. She hit bottom after the death of a cherished husband. With AA’s support she not only survived a nearly fatal attack of toxic shock syndrome, but wrote a magazine account of it that won her a Pulitzer Prize. She cheerfully admits she could not have done so alone. Getting Better is written, splendidly, in gratitude. Its lifesaving business is to celebrate and “demystify” her weave of steadfast friends.
Not a weird Druidic cult, nor penal colony, lynching bee, pop-psych seminar, convention of Jesus freaks, or fallout shelter for twitchy bums on their way to cirrhotic seizure, AA is everybody you’ve ever met, trying in small groups to help each other through the night. To qualify for membership, all you have to do is to want to stop drinking. In this amazing democracy, with more than its fair share of awful coffee and blue cigarette smoke, people tell stories. These many stories—of joblessness and paranoia, of smashed automobiles and nights in jail, of wife-beating and child abuse, of hallucinations and attempted suicide, of waste and pain and disconnection and the end of love—are really one: of the lost child in a black forest of bad chemicals.
AA began with an exchange of stories, in Akron, Ohio, in May 1935, between two drunks on whom the medical profession and the clergy had given up. Dr. Bob Smith, a local surgeon, and Bill Wilson, a visiting stock market “securities investigator,” told each other the worst about themselves. Ever since, it’s been an AA slogan that “you are only as sick as your secrets.” AA slogans, like “One Day at a Time,” “Keep It Simple, Stupid” and “It Works If You Work It,” always strike the stranger as being, if not downright loony, at least a lot of baby talk. So, too, do the “12 Steps” seem to strangers as comically mystifying as “The Emerald Table” of the alchemist Hermes Trismegistus. We’re too smart at first to grasp the practicality of the slogans, and to appreciate the terrifying simplicity of the Steps: be honest; change yourself; help others.) After these Founding Fathers were done with the First Meeting, they went into the world to talk to others like them, often dragging them out of hospital beds to do so.
Of the two, Bill W. is the more appealing, a Christmas tree of gaudy flaws. He’d go on sober to partake of spiritualism, niacin by megadose, Bishop Sheen, and LSD; to enjoy too much his crumbs at the tables of the Rockefellers; to drop names and, compulsively, to womanize. He was never sure himself whether his famous “conversion experience” was the sight of God in a blaze of “indescribably white light” or merely a “hot flash” of toxic psychosis. He lingered a decade too long as leader of an organization opposed on principle to any sort of hierarch, but when he died, in 1971, AA’d grown from two men in Akron to 475,000 men and women in eighty-nine countries.
The indefatigable Robertson, who seems to have gone to most of those countries for a meeting, serves notice in her full-bodied portrait of Bill W. that Getting Better intends to be useful rather than pious. She will entertain us with the history of the program, from its origins in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and the Protestant work ethic, to the publishing division by which it’s become so self-sufficient it refuses outside donations and won’t permit its own members to contribute more than five hundred dollars a year, to the fiftieth-anniversary festival in Montreal in the summer of 1985. She’ll tell us as much as we need to know about alcoholism from Hammurabi and Chung K’iang—the first recorded “blackout” occurs in The Bacchae by Euripedes—to Dr. Benjamin Rush in 1784 and Betty Ford in 1978, with sidebars on toxicology, the “disease concept,” genetic predisposition, cultural stress, and, of course, everything we’ve learned from our invasion of the privacy of identical twins. She’s full of scary facts, encouraging figures, gallows humor, and hardy appetite. And there’s an invaluable appendix of addresses and telephone numbers for the 72 million Americans—family and friends—whose hearts are broken by 18 million “problem” drinkers.
But AA—a citizenship seeking always to be innocent of politics—has had its problems, and we hear about them. How can you be all-inclusive and coherent at the same time? In the beginning, women weren’t admitted. (They were too “nice” to be drunks, said Dr. Bob.) Nor were the young. (They hadn’t “suffered enough,” he said.) Addicts—of tranquilizers, speed, heroin, coke—weren’t welcome, either. (And there is still some hostility, although many members came to understand in the inscrutable way members seem to, as if by body language and abrasion, that all chemical dependencies look alike in the dark.) From detox and rehab programs now paid for by health insurance, there are more bodies than there are basements. And the Children of Alcoholics movement, with its separate meetings and Speaking Bitterness, menaces the very civility of discourse that’s one of AA’s most astonishing achievements.
And then there’s the God problem. Robertson devotes a chapter to it. Go to almost any AA meeting, and when they aren’t talking about God, they’re talking about “spirituality.” A recovering alcoholic is supposed to turn over his or her life to a Higher Power. This Higher Power sounds suspiciously midwestern and Protestant. It needn’t be. AA’s a surprising success in Catholic Mexico and Brazil; and the Steps look a lot like what Maimonides and Rabbenau Yonah of Gerona had to say on repentance; and if you show up anyway, in rage and doubt, having derived your ethics from Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Einstein, and having found your awe in Bach and sunsets, nobody’s going to quibble. AA, really, is sort of Buddhist, all about reciprocity; and also existential, except not chic. You are likely to have been alone for a long time, and the highest of powers is a community of those who went into that loneliness before you, and came back, and are mending.
Besides, if you’re still uncomfortable, there are meetings for agnostics and atheists, as there are meetings for nonsmokers, and the deaf, and gays and lesbians, and meetings predominantly of doctors and lawyers, actors and writers, airline employees and prison personnel, clergy and merchant seamen—1,600 meetings of 650 groups every week in New York City alone. And you can always start a group of your own. All it takes, says Robertson, “is two drunks, a coffeepot, and some resentment.”
What happens at a meeting? According to Robertson: love and service. Well, yes, but how? Somebody tells a story, maybe terrific, maybe not. Anybody else who wants to, shares. A hat’s passed. There are bores and glory hounds, crybabies and monomaniacs, but there is also an etiquette, an unwritten encompassing, a respectful patience, a decorum hard to describe because it’s in the very grain of the occasion, in the listening. You think about who are you, what you really mean, how you got here, like an athlete in training, and that you’re probably not good enough to stay the course. The first weeks it feels like paying your taxes, an unpleasant duty done. Then, after a month or two, it feels like voting, something clean. Later on, or maybe all the time, it’s a breathing space, a sanctuary, somewhere safe from ambush by the world you flunked, a parenthesis in which you are assisted at inventing a braver self by people variously sad and heroic who are sorry for your troubles, and forgiving, and available. Whether God shows up I wouldn’t know, but somehow, in the collective wisdom, witness, and example of these friends of your affliction, there is Berryman’s blessing gratuitous, a kind of grace. You are not quite so much a stranger to yourself, and so you go to bed, one midnight at a time, having chosen not to drink.