WATER FOR ELEPHANT [138]
Dave Weich: Is it true that you’d never been to a circus before starting your research for Water for Elephants?
Sara Gruen: It’s true. I had no history whatsoever. No interest, no connection to anyone associated with the circus. I grew up in northern Ontario. I don’t know if they didn’t come up that far or if I just never went, but if I did go it made such a little impression on me that I didn’t remember it.
DW: What wound up being your favorite act?
SG: In the end, the liberty horses.
DW: Describe exactly what they do.
SG: A person, usually a beautiful woman, comes out with a group of twelve horses typically, sometimes all white, sometimes black and white. She stands and makes signals with whips in the air, and she talks to them, and they obey her.
I have a horse, and I think it’s very cool that they can get horses doing that with no restraint and no halter.
DW: Marlena is that woman in Water for Elephants.
SG: Yes, and in fact I modeled her act after ones I had watched.
DW: You explain in a note after the final chapter that many of the details in the novel were drawn from real life, or what passes for it in existing records. For instance, one of the strangest: the scared lion hiding under a sink.
SG: It’s true.
DW: And Rosie was based on a real elephant?
SG: Several elephants, yes. There was actually an elephant that would pull her stake out of the ground to go and steal lemonade, and then she’d go back and put her stake back in the ground and look innocent while they blamed the roustabouts.
DW: You couldn’t have started your research expecting to find enough real-life stories to fill out the novel. Or did you?
SG: No. I had thought that I would make it all up entirely, and of course the main thrust of the story is my own, but there were too many of these wacky anecdotes not to try and fit them in. Then to be able to say afterward, “Yes, this really happened.”
DW: In your research, did you talk to circus fans?
SG: I did, and they led to the portal of the circus folk, who were harder to reach. They have a rather reclusive society because various people are coming after them. It took me months and months to make contact with them, but when I did the real stories began to come out.
DW: What exactly do you mean by people “coming after them”?
SG: PETA, for the use of animals in the circus. Also, I don’t know if there’s an organized group coming after them for the use of freaks in sideshows, but they’ve had enough contact with that type of group that they don’t give out contact information easily.
DW: How did you first make contact?
SG: I was looking for the rights to photos in the book, so I was finding people who had circus archives. And of course they had connections. But it was a lot of give and take before they realized I wasn’t planted by somebody else to come after them.
I actually got the phone number of a guy who owns a sideshow. He keeps human heads in his house. It took me four months to get up the nerve to call this guy, but when I did he was really sweet and helpful. They’re shrunken heads; he doesn’t just go off and behead people. But yes, he has a collection of shrunken heads.
DW: One of my favorite details in the book, having nothing to do with the circus, describes the boys in the hobo jungle: when they sleep, they take off their shoes but tie them to their feet. How did you educate yourself in Depression-era America?
SG: I wasn’t quite sure at first that this was the era I’d set the story in. A circus photo set me off on the path of the novel, but then I got on a sidetrack about hobos and I realized that something like 80 percent of them were under twenty-one. You think about hobos and you imagine middle-aged, dirty men by the side of the track, but no, they were kids.
DW: So much happens on the train or just off the train. It’s the book’s main setting.
SG: The whole of a circus worker’s social life happened on a moving train. When they were off, they were setting up or they were performing or they were tearing down, so everything