Customer Reviews

My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson--His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous

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Is there really a need for yet another biography of William G. Wilson, the now famous co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and author of the original "Twelve Steps" of recovery? At last count, at least half a dozen full-length versions of Wilson's life have appeared in print since his death over 30 years ago. A number of the earlier biographies (e.g., Robert Thomsen's Bill W. [1975] and the anonymously written Pass It On [1984]) are, while certainly of some historical interest, unabashedly biased, sentimentalized, and verging on the hagiographic. Recently, however, more critical readings of "Bill W."'s life have been undertaken. Francis Hartigan's own Bill W., published in 2000, belongs to this class, as does the volume by Susan Cheever that is the subject of this review. These latter efforts provide a welcome and healthy corrective to the accounts of Wilson's life that tend, perhaps unintentionally, to lionize him out of all proportion.

There is little question that Bill Wilson was one of the most influential and quixotic figures of the past hundred years. In fact, Aldous Huxley regarded him "as the greatest social architect of the twentieth century" (Hartigan, 4). The significance of Cheever's particular contribution to the growing literature surrounding Wilson and the movement he spawned lies principally in her facility as an accomplished writer to provide a narrative context as well as fresh insight into and new understanding of this fascinating man. Unlike most of Wilson's previous biographers, she brings to life with exceptional skill those scenes from his life that are unusually compelling. At times it is indeed like reading a good novel.

In so doing she invites the reader to consider Wilson's simple yet turbulent Vermont upbringing as the key to understanding his unparalleled successes as well as his dismal failures. For, despite bringing into existence and nurturing the AA movement into a worldwide phenomenon, Wilson was nonetheless financially unstable, wracked with chronic depression for most of his life, a notorious womanizer and, by some accounts, a lousy sponsor to newcomers to the program of recovery he helped create. Cheever often treats these various episodes with deft humor and critical compassion. In relating Wilson's infamous first drink of alcohol, at the tender age of 22 at a cocktail party in New Bedford, Massachusetts (where he was stationed prior to shipping out to France during World War I), Cheever describes the circumstances that led the "gawky soldier" to break his promise to himself not to drink:

Bill had never seen a mansion like the Grinnells'.... [T]he glowing rooms and fragrant gardens beyond were filled with people chatting, drinking, and laughing. Bill didn't see anyone he knew.... Then there were the socialites, the men in evening clothes, and the butlers circulating with silver trays of glistening cocktails. Bill Wilson had never seen a butler.
Secretly writhing, he began to think about making his escape when one of the Grinnell sisters appeared next to him. He tried to smile and avoid saying anything stupid. Then someone put a cocktail in his hand, a Bronx cocktail, it was called. The sweet drink made of gin, dry and sweet vermouth, and orange juice shimmered in its glass. (74)

Compare this to Wilson's own typically terse account of the same event:

War fever ran high in the New England town to which we new, young officers from Plattsburg were assigned, and we were flattered when the first citizens took us to their homes, making us feel heroic. Here was love, applause, war; moments sublime with intervals hilarious. I was part of life at last, and in the midst of the excitement I discovered liquor. I forgot the strong warnings and the prejudices of my people concerning drink. (Alcoholics Anonymous [4th ed., 2001], 1)

Of course, these first few apparently innocent drinks of Wilson's were anything but. They simply removed the cover of the alcoholic bottomless pit into which he would gradually descend for the next seventeen years until his last drink in 1934. Cheever covers this dark period of his life with considerable care and an eye for detail. While there is very little to be found in these pages that has not already been dealt with elsewhere, Cheever weaves together a colorful narrative that concludes with some speculations on the significance of Wilson's role in the history of American religious thought. Taking her cue from Dr. Ernie Kurtz, the author of the excellent Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (1991), Cheever argues that 1934, the year of Wilson's last drink, "is an important year in the history of American religion ... when the strains of the old and new religions merged into a kind of neo-orthodoxy in which God becomes simultaneously beyond, beneath, and above human possibility. Bill Wilson often referred to himself as a brilliant synthesizer. He was fond of saying that no one founded A.A. but that it had grown organically from the needs, ideas, and solutions of dozens of men and women" (122-123).

Perhaps the reason AA has proven over the years to be arguably the most consistently successful treatment for alcoholism is that it tolerates a level of diversity among its membership that is rarely found elsewhere. The appeal to agnostics made by Wilson in the fourth chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous is a good example of this. He argues for recognition of what might be termed a universal religious sensibility, not unlike that of theologians Friedrich Schleiermacher of the 19th century or Paul Tillich of the 20th. Cheever views Wilson's own personality and background as reflective of this tolerance. She claims that AA, as Wilson lays it out in his writing, "revels in its own paradox. It does not avoid contradiction; in fact, it embraces contradiction" (235). In many respects, the following observation of Cheever summarizes her understanding of Wilson's personality and the program of recovery that was shaped by it:

Bill Wilson's nature sometimes seemed to have been designed for the task at hand - the job of synthesizing six or seven different streams of philosophical thought, some from books, some from other teachers, and some from the very air he breathed while growing up in a small Vermont town. He had the understanding to see what worked and what didn't work for himself as well as for other drunks, and the stubbornness to persist in trying to help his tiny program spread.... His experiences - as a child growing up in a temperance state, as an Army officer, as a Vermonter - all added up to a background that helped him understand the way power and political opinions could corrupt even the best intentions of the most intelligent people. He was not a perfect man, but he was the perfect man for the job (234-235).

As is well known by those who follow such things, Wilson's reading of William James' Varieties of Religious Experience had a profound impact on his understanding of how best to create in the alcoholic the spiritual experience necessary to recover from alcoholism. He experimented with LSD near the end of his life for much the same reason. He was a spiritual seeker in the best sense of that term - but not for himself alone. Long after he had recovered from alcoholism he came close to converting to Catholicism, eventually deciding against it because of the effect - negative or otherwise - he thought it might have on AA. Cheever makes it clear that virtually everything Bill Wilson explored or engaged in after he stopped drinking was driven by the question of how it would help another alcoholic or strengthen AA. Above all, he was a pragmatist. Something was of value only if it proved effective.

Nonetheless, the self-imposed burden of how his personal behaviour might affect the movement at large eventually proved too much to bear and, near the end of his life, Wilson stopped attending meetings of the very organization he helped to create. Cheever's treatment of this period in Wilson's life is done with uncharacteristic empathy and understanding. To the best of my knowledge, she also relates for the first time in print the agonizing last weeks of his life when, lying on his deathbed in the final stages of emphysema (Wilson was a life-long smoker who never was able to quit), he began to request whiskey from his nurses. (According to the nurses' records the whiskey was never supplied to Wilson.) A self-proclaimed "rum hound" to the very end, Cheever poignantly remarks that "[i]t's a measure of the power of alcohol that even in his last days alive, Bill Wilson still wanted a whiskey" (249).

Susan Cheever's excellent account of the life and times of Bill Wilson should rightfully take its place alongside the other biographies of this remarkable individual. It is a fair and insightful treatment of the life of a drunk whose pioneering ideas with the Twelve Steps "have entered the common consciousness and changed how we define being human in a way certainly as powerful as the ideas of Sigmund Freud or Thomas Jefferson" (254). "Bill W." discovered a unique way of being human AND religious in an increasingly secular world and, in so doing, helped millions of people. I believe Ms. Cheever has acquitted herself well in telling us his story.

Bill Wilson was the driving force behind the creation and growth of AA, and laid the foundation for many other 12-Step programs. The result is that millions of people are recovering from Alcoholism, drug addiction, eating disorders, compulsive gambling, sex addiction, and the list goes on. There is no denying his great contribution. There's also no denying his shortcomings, but if he were a perfect man we would not have this groundbreaking spiritual program of recovery.

I think Susan Cheever did a great service to Bill and all the people who have benefitted from his work by showing that he was a man, not a saint, not the devil, a man who did great things. The book shows also that Bill knew that AA should not rely on the leadership of one or a few flawed people, and that it should be led by a group conscience. I suspect Bill knew he had serious problems (the biggest being depression, the root of all the others)and that a larger group, a democracy, should carry the fellowship in to the future.

Great writing, great research, great story. Thanks Susan Cheever.

Having read Note Found in a Bottle, I was eager to see this biography. For all her superior writing skills and fresh access to archival material, Cheever has added little or nothing to existing works on Wilson.

LSD, niacin, smoking, and adultery are addressed in the same shallow terms as before, no new information appears. Important AA issues are not covered any better than in previous books and sometimes worse-e.g.: Marty Mann was not the first woman in AA, she was preceded by at least three others, one of whom outlived her and remained sober from the mid-40s on. Cheever has failed to research the Oxford Group beyond AA sources, which tend to soft-pedal criticism to avoid offending the pro-MRA subculture (`Back to Basics') within AA. The Oxford Group's excesses in matters of money, property and prestige, the Group's political entanglements with extreme right-wing governments, the use of deception and emotional manipulation in attempts to recruit public figures (Aldous Huxley was reported to have made one of his rare displays of public anger at the slimy approaches the O.G. made to him), all are ignored. Sam Shoemaker's eventual expulsion of the OG from his church, and his subsequent reconnection with Bill Wilson go unmentioned.

Worse yet for Cheever, or her editors, snippets of background atmosphere are riddled with obvious factual errors. Speaking of the relatively short passage on Huxley: Cheever claims that 'Citizen Kane' was an adaptation of Huxley's novel, 'After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,' a howler obvious to anyone who has read the book and/or seen the film. Cheever reports Huxley's death in 1956, wrong by seven years. She devotes an incoherent paragraph to "the `kinesthesiology'(sic) of the body advocated by Australian therapist F.M. Alexander..." claiming the Gerald Heard was a student (he wasn't), that the Alexander Technique is called the `Alexander method,' (it isn't), that the Technique is `a cure for depression' (it isn't), and that Alexander was a `therapist' (he most adamantly was not).

The ONLY new thing I learned from this book is that Wilson asked his attending nurses for whiskey on several occasions during the last weeks of his illness, and that they talked him out of it.

Two decades ago, I took up with a recovering alcoholic, and in a show of support, I attended several open Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. After a while, I had to confess that I found them really hokey. "That's because you are not an alcoholic," he replied. "If you were, you'd recognize the genius of the mind that created it. It's brilliant."

For the last two days, I've carried Susan Cheever's book about Bill Wilson around with me, reading, I must admit, compulsively. Cheever, whose father John's important fiction covers the period in which AA grew up, brings a literary eye to the development of a character familiar in American public life: the charismatic leader. If it's not perfect in every factual detail, it is rich in content about our society, addictive substances, and our own craving for a savior.

As in the lives of most alcoholics, there's a lot of pain. Surviving divorce in New England when it was rare, abandoned by a mother who remained nevertheless demanding, losing a sweetheart whose family had adopted him as their own--Cheever describes these events in Bill's early life in a sympathic but unsentimental way. She's less successful in blending the history of Vermont from colonial times to the present, but even with awkward flashbacks and forwards, this secondary narrative tells us a lot about the world that informed Bill's character. He was politically conservative, but doggedly independent; someone who with little tutoring found within himself both musical and engineering talents. He attended his family's Congregational church but failed to find the spiritual sustenance that he needed. His admission to a prestigious boarding school coincided with an impressive spurt in physical and mental growth, but he dropped out when felled by depression after his girlfriend died.

By the time he takes up drink, we are prepared for a daunting ride. To anyone familiar with the genre of drunkalogues, it's predictable, but Cheever keeps the story moving by putting Bill's various binges in personal and historical context. By the time he gets to his Akron meeting with Dr. Bob Smith, AA's co-founder, all the elements are in place. It's perhaps unfair that Bill W.'s story gets more attention than Bob S.'s, but, steady and conventional (once sober) are less compelling than mercurial and brilliantly insightful. If the latter gifts are more impressive, so are Bill W's weaknesses--his inability to give up the tobacco that eventually kills him, the depressions that leave him weeping publically, and the perpetual womanizing. Amazingly, he works out the Twelve Traditions that guide the organization while clinically depressed. The more successful he and AA become, the more he craves anonymity.

Especially if you're unfamiliar with the practices of AA, it's instructive to see how they developed from the experiences of these two men and their cohorts. I was surprised that Bill W. had a powerful (although perhaps drug-induced) conversion but that he remained determined not to define God for anyone else. If he lacked impulse control in some areas of his life, he exercised it in others where most popular leaders fail. Cheever is even-handed about Bill's long marriage to the former Lois Burnham, whose life's work supported him and helped establish Al-Anon for families of alcoholics. While some might write the two off as codependent, Cheever brings sympathy to this long alliance. Perhaps someone will write a book about the women of AA, but, as Cheever notes, it was born in a man's world, and many people thought only men could become alcoholics.

Finally, Cheever's book makes clear that Bill W. knew that AA was not the final solution for alcoholism. He saw a psychiatrist. He experimented with LSD and Vitamin B--the first in hopes of finding a shortcut to conversion and the latter as an fixative for chemical dependency. He missed the days when he could attend meetings himself without being recognized.

Ultimately, dying of emphysema, he desperately wanted a drink. I found myself thinking: Why not? But his caretakers refused him, perhaps thinking of the millions who would follow. He was still a drunk, but he was their drunk.

I found the book "My Name is Bill" to be delightful and engrossing. It quenched a thirst I have built up over many years to know more in the way of details about AA, Bill, and a lot of things that I could never get from AA literature. Cheever put skin, flesh, as well as colors, sights, sounds, and smells onto to the bare bones at a time when I was looking for just that.

The accuracy of particular details was not a huge concern for me, though I can understand it being so for people for whom Bill W. is a spiritual founder, and for whom AA literature is something of a spiritual canon. They have a certain right to be possessive of him, and perhaps an obligation to be vigilant about details, motives, and traditions. I just wanted to know Bill was from Vermont, not New York, as many people tend to believe or assume. I wanted to imagine some of his childhood, some of his family, and some of his surroundings. I did that with the help of Cheever, and in this way the details were more of a vehicle than an end unto themselves.

The book was a two-fold experience: first, and not unimportantly, it was a People-magazine-like-delight of finding out this or that about this person or that. For instance, learning that Bill tinkered with engines as a youth, or why and when he and Lois lived in that clubhouse. Secondly, while the book was not life-changing, it did leave me with images, and deepened understandings that will linger in my mind provocatively. One example is how his grandfather had a mountain-top spiritual awakening that resulted in subsequent life-long abstinence from alcohol. Another is how for much of his life Bill was not able to attend an AA meeting simply as person who needed to be there. The first I did not know about prior to reading this book, while the second I did. But in both cases the book contributed something substantive to my way of thinking and feeling about the topic of Bill Wilson.

While Susan Cheever makes a valiant effort to use imagery and some carefully styled first person musings of Emily and Bill Wilson, her efforts fall somewaht flat. On the balance, this is essentially a retelling of "Pass It On." There are a few details at the end regarding Bill W.'s sexual compulsions that are common AA lore, and have appeared elsewhere.

For those interested in the history of AA, this won't offer much in the way of insight into the early days of AA and how the program worked. Entertaining at points, but difficult to read attenteively if you have already read other accounts of Bill Wilson's life.

Cheever's artistic touches didn't do much for me. I would rather she had put additional effort into her research, and brought a fresh telling with some new facts or insights.

A completist must have. For the rest...optional.

Susan Cheever has done a great service for any reader interested in the deeply American life story of Bill Wilson. She traces the influences of his strict Yankee grandfather, his emancipated mother, his high-living father -- and much more -- on what would gradually become the ideas that revolutionized the way alcoholics might find lasting relief. Susan Cheever brings a special empathy and grace to the heartbreaking story of Bill Wilson's lost first love. From there, Cheever draws a clear and compassionate picture of Wilson's life-long battle with his own demons, while he cleared the way for millions. My Name Is Bill is a great story, told with skill and passion. A generous and beautiful book by Susan Cheever.

This is a gripping book; I read it in a single sitting. Bill W. is a very interesting figure, and Susan Cheever tells his story in a lucid and compelling way. But the book offers more than just a biography: it also does some very sophisticated and nuanced intellectual history. I came away from the book with a much deeper understanding of the multiple roots and contexts of the twelve-step program.

This is a good book, but when compared to Francis Hartigan's biography, I find myself asking, Why did Cheever write it? Hartigan's bio is much more penetrating and insightful if you want to know what made Bill tick.

Anyone can pick a book and its author apart, but for me the life of Bill Wilson by Susan Cheever,is a wonderful story about a man who suffered much from the bondage of alcohol. But this life of suffering, found its fulfilment in changing the lives of thousands of people who were also under the bondage of alcohol-- bringing them peace and new life, through Alcoholics Anonymous.