The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair

by Upton Sinclair

It was a four-hundred-mile trip, my first by air. We flew over the road I had driven many times, and it was fascinating to see it from above. I told Craig about the sights; but, alas, she hadn’t much interest. At the airport there was an ambulance waiting, and soon she was in a hospital bed.

I doubt if anybody in the hospital had ever heard of the rice diet, and it was hard to get a large plate of well-cooked rice without gravy or butter on it. In fact, it was hard to get anything that Craig wanted, including quiet; but even so, the miracle began right away. She got well and was able to breathe lying down. After a couple of weeks she was able to walk a little.

My mind turned to that little cottage up in the Corona hills only seven miles away. In that cottage there would be no nurses gossiping outside her door at midnight. I would be the one to take care of her, and I would move on tiptoe whenever she slept. I persuaded her to let me take her there; the doctor consented, on condition that I bring her down twice a week for the blood tests that were necessary—to make sure that the supply of salt in her blood wasn’t below the minimum required. I promised so to do.

So for half a year more we lived in that cottage. I was nurse, cook, housemaid, chauffeur, and guardian angel. I cooked a pot and a half of rice for Craig every day, and she was so well that it was a miracle. Even the cautious doctor had to use extravagant language when he set the newest x-ray photograph beside the earliest one. I said to him, “Don’t you think that is remarkable?” His answer was, “I should say it is spectacular.”

The results of the rice-and-fruit diet were so spectacular that I decided to try it myself. I didn’t want to bother with blood tests, so I added celery to the diet—it is a vegetable of which I happen to be fond, and it gave me what I thought was the necessary bulk for safety. I added a spoonful of dried-milk powder for a little more salt. We were both having large quantities of fruit juice, mine being pineapple because it is the sweetest. Both of us took vitamins.

Throughout most of my writing life, certainly for a half century of it, I had been accustomed to say that I was never more than twenty-four hours ahead of a headache. But from the time I adopted the diet of rice and fruit, which I still follow, I ceased to have headaches, and I have even forgotten, now, what a headache feels like. Nor have I had any other ailment, not even a cold.

But to return to my story. With the good doctor’s permission I took Craig back to our Monrovia home, and we got some apparatus that was supposed to take the smog out of our bedrooms. We lived there in peace and happiness for a while; but then Craig discovered that she could no longer bear to eat any more rice. She began trying all other kinds of health foods, in particular bread stuffs that were supposed to be low in salt. Also, she could no longer stand the blood tests, because the nurses couldn’t find the vein in one wrist, and the other wrist had become sore from too much puncturing.

So all the heart troubles came back; and there was something worse, called fibrillation—an endless quivering of the heart that was most distressing and kept her awake at night. I had gotten an oxygen tank; she would call me, and I would get up and put the little cap over her nose and turn on the valve and wait until she had had enough, and then turn off the valve and go back to bed and sleep, if I could, until she called again. Neither of us wanted a stranger in the house, so I had her sole care. I cooked her food, served it, and cleaned up afterward.

Every day I took her outdoors. I took care of her flower beds, and she would gaze at them with rapture—her poppies, her big red rosebush, her camellia bush that bloomed every April, and a wonderful golden oleander that bloomed all summer.

Every night I put her to sleep with prayers. “Dear God, make her well,” was what I wanted to say over and over again, but Craig insisted it must be, “Dear God, make us well.” I didn’t need any help so far as I could see, but I said it her way; when the fibrillations got bad, I would say it over a hundred times, or maybe two hundred, until at last she went to sleep. I could never tell when she was asleep; so I would let my voice die away softly, and wait and see if she spoke.