The Road to Wellville (78 page)

But Dr. Kellogg—Dr. Kellogg, that amazing high-wire act of a sprightly, proselytizing, tightfisted, food-altering, revolutionary great-grandfather, author and presiding genius of the whole alimentary business, what of him? He throve and he faltered, like anyone else, but he never let his guard down and he never missed a photo opportunity. We see him today, his portrait hung in that celebrated gallery alongside Sylvester Graham, Bronson Alcott, Thomas Edison and Old Parr, eternally smiling with a mouth full of physiologic teeth, his white cockatoo perched on his white shoulder. Or on his bicycle, at seventy, cutting figure eights in a pair of shorts for the camera, tossing Indian clubs and lifting barbells, doing a triple gainer from the high dive of the Miami-Battle Creek Sanitarium pool in Miami Springs, Florida, in 1933, aged eighty-one.

He fought his wars, and he had his triumphs. But on the evening of May 31, 1908, while rockets shot into the air and all the crowd of his inmates, his associates, his patients, devotees and familiars oohed and aahed and strained their eyes toward the heavens, he had some dirty work to do, some lies to tell, some dirt to sweep under the carpet. He appeared before an astonished Murphy, Linniman and some two dozen others who had sprung into the teeth of the fire and were even then driving it down to nothing, limping up the ground-floor hallway in his
rags and tatters. There was a sheen of blood and perspiration on his face, a glistening coat of macadamia oil pasted to the hard proud swollen knot of his bare belly, and he carried a reek of intestinal secrets with him that made two of the men, full-grown and eudaemonically sound, turn away and gag. “It was George,” he cried, his voice trembling, face ashen, “he did it all. He attacked me, set the place afire, let the animals loose.” He hesitated, overcome. They moved toward him, but he gestured them away. “I tried to save him,” he choked, and then he said no more.

Those were the good years, the years of the San’s heyday, the years when all the world came to him, John Harvey Kellogg, the one man, the unimpeachable, the authority, the king. The teens gave way to the twenties, the war years rose up and fell away like some sick red tide, women traded in their dresses and feathered hats for short skirts and cloches, ragtime segued into jazz, and the Battle Creek Sanitarium rode higher and higher on the current, unsinkable. John Harvey Kellogg’s nimble fingers and razor-honed scalpel probed a thousand abdomens, ten thousand, and his enema machine irrigated the most celebrated bowels in the country, yea, the world. Johnny Weissmuller stopped by to have his plumbing inspected; Byrd, Amundsen, Grenfell and Halliburton paid their homage; J. C. Penney, Amelia Earhart, Battling Bob La Follette, Henry Ford. In 1928 the Doctor added a fifteen-story addition, sumptuous with marble, crystal, tapestries and murals, and sat back to watch its two hundred sixty-five new rooms fill with the physiologically wanting.

It never happened. The Crash came, the dyspeptic set took to dosing themselves with milk of magnesia, diet was whatever you could get. The San crashed under the burden of its debt, the glorious building that had witnessed the conversion of so many oceans of intestinal flora and the slow mastication of so many hundreds of tons of grits and granola, the Goodly Temple on a Hill, was sold at auction to the federal government and rechristened the Percy Jones General Hospital, and Dr. Kellogg retreated to Florida while his enemies—and they were legion—lifted up their parched old heads and sniffed something new in the air.

In the end, though he received and administered more enemas than
any man in history, though he ate more vegetables, smoked less, drank less, slept less and exercised more than practically any man of his time, even Dr. Kellogg couldn’t live forever. On December 14, 1943, like his nemesis, C. W. Post, before him, John Harvey Kellogg passed on into eternity.

He did die, yes. But could anyone ask for more?

In fourteen smart, funny, and richly crafted works, T. C. Boyle strips away the veneer of respectability draped across the American psyche, and exposes the comical truths beneath.

AFTER THE PLAGUE

These sixteen stories display an astonishing range, as Boyle zeroes in on everything from air rage to abortion doctors to the story of a 1920s Sicilian immigrant who constructs an amazing underground mansion in an effort to woo his sweetheart. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, these new stories find “one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers” (
The New York Times
) at the top of his form.

ISBN 0-14-200141-4

BUDDING PROSPECTS

All Felix and his friends have to do is harvest a crop of
Cannabis Saliva
and half a million tax-free dollars will be theirs. But as their beloved buds wither under assault from ravenous scavengers, human caprice, and a drug-busting state trooper named Jerpbak, their dreams of easy money go up in smoke. “Consistently, effortlessly, intelligently funny.”—
The New York Times

ISBN 0-14-029996-3

DESCENT OF MAN

A primate-center researcher becomes romantically involved with a chimp. A Norse poet overcomes bard-block. These and other strange occurrences come together in Boyle’s collection of satirical stories that brilliantly express just what the “evolution” of mankind has wrought. “Madness that hits you where you live.”—
Houston Chronicle

ISBN 0-14-029994-7

EAST IS EAST

Young Japanese seaman Hiro Tanaka jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and swims into a net of rabid rednecks, genteel ladies, descendants of slaves, and the denizens of an artists’ colony.
The New York Times
called this sexy, hilarious tragicomedy a “pastoral version of
The Bonfire of the Vanities
.”

ISBN 0-14-013167-1

GREASY LAKE AND OTHER STORIES

Mythic and realistic, these masterful stories are, according to
The New York Times
, “satirical fables of contemporary life, so funny and acutely observed that they might have been written by Evelyn Waugh as sketches for …
Saturday Night Live
.”

ISBN 0-14-007781-2

IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY

Boyle, winner of the 1999 PEN/Malamud award for short fiction, tears through the walls of contemporary society to reveal a world at once comic and tragic, droll and horrific, in these sixteen magical and provocative stories. “Writing at its very, very best.”—
USA Today

ISBN 0-14-011950-7

RIVEN ROCK

With his seventh novel to date, T. C. Boyle pens a heartbreaking love story taken from between the lines of history. Millionaire Stanley McCormick, diagnosed as a schizophrenic and sexual maniac shortly after his marriage, is forbidden the sight of women, but his strong-willed, virginal wife Katherine Dexter is determined to cure him. “As romantic as it is informative, as colorful as it is convincing. Boyle combines his gift for historical re-creation with his dazzling powers as a storyteller.”—
The Boston Globe

ISBN 0-14-027166-X

THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE

Centering on John Harvey Kellogg and his turn-of-the-century Battle Creek Spa, this wickedly comic novel brims with a Dickensian cast of characters and is laced with wildly wonderful plot twists. “A marvel, enjoyable from the beginning to end.”—Jane Smiley,
The New York Times Book Review

ISBN 0-14-016718-8

T. C. BOYLE STORIES

“Boyle has the tale-teller’s gift in abundance,” writes the
Chicago Tribune
. And nowhere is that more evident than in this collection of sixty-eight short stories—all of the work from his four previous collections, as well as seven tales that have never before appeared in book form—that comprise a virtual feast of the short story. “Seven hundred flashy, inventive pages of stylistic and moral acrobatics.”—
The New York Times Book Review

ISBN 0-14-028091-X

THE TORTILLA CURTAIN

Winner of France’s Prix Medicis Etranger for best foreign-language novel,
The Tortilla Curtain
illuminates the many potholes along the road to the elusive American Dream. Illegal immigrants Candido and America cling to life at the bottom of Topanga Canyon, dreaming of a privileged existence of the sort endured by L.A. liberals Delaney and Kyra, When a freak accident brings these two couples together, darkly comic events leave them wondering what the world is coming to.

ISBN 0-14-023828-X

WATER MUSIC

Funny, bawdy, and full of imaginative and stylistic fancy,
Water Music
follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, explorer, from London to Africa.”
Water Music
does for fiction what
Raiders of the Lost Ark
did for film … Boyle is an adept plotter, a crazed humorist, and a fierce describer.”—
The Boston Globe

ISBN 0-14-006550-4

WITHOUT A HERO

With fierce, comic wit and uncanny accuracy, Boyle zooms in on an astonishingly wide range of American phenomena in this critically-applauded collection of stories. “Gloriously comic … vintage Boyle … [these] stories are more than funny, better than wicked. They make you cringe with their clarity.”—
The Philadelphia Inquirer

ISBN 0-14-017839-2

WORLD’S END

Walter Van Brunt is about to have a collision with history that will lead him to search for his long-lost father. This fascinating novel, for which Boyle won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction, showcases the author’s “ability to work all sorts of magical variations of literature and history” (
The New York Times
).

ISBN 0-14-029993-9