In early 1989, when my seventh novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, was about to be published, I was at loose ends. My screenplay of The Cider House Rules was in its fourth year of not going into production, and I was a recently retired wrestling coach who was between novels. I don’t like being “between novels,” especially when a new novel is being published and I haven’t the next novel firmly in mind. (What would turn out to be my eighth novel, A Son of the Circus, was a long way from being “firmly in mind.”)
My son Brendan had just won the New England Class A title at 135 pounds, and I had happily retired from coaching wrestling—again. I had first retired in 1983, when my son Colin won the New England Class A title at 160 pounds. But this time I was forty-seven; I knew I had coached (and had retired from coaching) for the last time.
Sometime that spring, when A Prayer for Owen Meany was solidly holding the number-two position on the New York Times bestseller list, I talked to Salman Rushdie on the phone. (We’d met in London ten years earlier and had been friends ever since.) Following the death threat against him (in February 1989), Salman had gone underground; he was somewhere in England, I presumed, when he called. The number-one bestseller on the New York Times list that spring was The Satanic Verses, the book responsible for the fatwa against Salman.
I made a mock complaint to him … something along the lines that Owen Meany would surely have made the number-one spot on the Times list if I hadn’t had the misfortune to be published at exactly the same time as his Satanic Verses.
“You want to trade places?” he asked.
No. I did not. We talked for a while about the next novel I thought I wanted to write. “It’s about an Indian-born doctor living in Toronto,” I told Salman. “He’s a Canadian citizen, but he doesn’t feel assimilated into Canadian culture—he doesn’t feel very Canadian. And when he goes back to India, which he does periodically, he doesn’t feel like an Indian, either. He’s a foreigner both in his country of birth and where he lives.”
“So what’s different, or at least interesting, about him?” Salman asked.
That was the problem, I admitted. I was working on it; that was all I could say.
Something about orthopedic surgery seemed to me to be the key. Could it have to do with the difference between the kind of patients an orthopedic surgeon sees in Toronto as opposed to Bombay? There are more crippled children in India. Then I read an article in a medical journal on the subject of the most common form of short-limbed dwarfism, achondroplasia, for which (at the time) a genetic marker had not been found. Maybe my doctor was an amateur geneticist, taking blood from achondroplastic dwarfs? That might be a little different, or at least a little interesting.
That’s as far as I was with A Son of the Circus, which I would end up dedicating to Salman, when the photographer Mary Ellen Mark and her husband, Martin Bell, a British filmmaker, came to visit me in my house in Sagaponack. (Martin has since become an American citizen; he directed American Heart.)
Mary Ellen and Martin were old friends of mine, but we’d never worked together. That weekend they brought some new photographs of Mary Ellen’s to show me. She had spent a lot of time photographing the small circuses of India, principally the child performers in those circuses. And there suddenly, in the photographs, were my doctor’s dwarfs—achondroplastic dwarfs, the clowns of the Indian circus. My doctor could make a study of them; he could draw their blood, I thought.
This led to a further thought about my doctor: of more interest to me than his profession, which was orthopedic surgery, was his passionate amateur pursuit—the dwarfs’ blood, the search for the as-yet-unidentified gene for achondroplasia. But what might the doctor’s other hobbies be? I’d known many doctors who wanted to be writers, or who fancied themselves as writers already. Why not make my doctor a screenwriter? Of course I knew he would be a bad one, just as I knew he would never find the genetic marker for achondroplasia. (So much for hobbies.)
Something magical happened later. Almost simultaneously with the publication of A Son of the Circus, a doctor in California found the gene for achondroplastic dwarfism. In a letter, he admitted to me that he’d found the genetic marker for achondroplasia without having met a single dwarf.
But at the end of the summer of 1989, Martin Bell and I knew only that we had a story (or parallel stories) in common. Martin wanted to make a documentary film about the child performers in an Indian circus—probably about one child performer in particular, he said. Would a feature film on that subject interest me? Martin asked. Did I want to write a screenplay about the fate of a child (or children) sold to an Indian circus? We could go to India and research the story together.
That fall, I wrote the first draft of a screenplay—at the time titled Escaping Maharashtra. I also took some notes for my novel about an Indian-born doctor and his dwarf-blood research, and his work with crippled children in Bombay. The doctor is passionate about circuses because of the dwarfs, but he also knows that many of the performers are children who’ve been sold to the circus by their parents. (The parents know that their children will have a better life in the circus.) The doctor, in addition to his dwarf research and his screenwriting, develops another amateur pursuit—rescuing street children from Bombay and placing them in Indian circuses.
Naturally the circuses will take only the most talented acrobats and street performers among these abandoned children. Mary Ellen told me that the girls might otherwise become child prostitutes. The majority of the child performers in the Indian circuses are girls. But what if one of these gifted girls had a crippled brother? What could a crippled child do in the circus?
That became the link between my orthopedic surgeon, with an interest in dwarf blood and crippled children, and the circus.
I went to India in January 1990, by which time the parallel stories of my screenplay and my novel were increasingly connected. The novel was already called A Son of the Circus. Not long after Martin Bell and I returned from India, my screenplay, Escaping Maharashtra, was retitled, becoming A Son of the Circus, too. Thus this screenplay was never an adaptation of the novel (like The Cider House Rules). In fact, the screenplay was finished—except for fine-tuning—several years before I finished the novel. With any luck, Martin and I might have seen the film produced, and even released, before the novel was published. But that kind of luck we didn’t have.
Martin was also unlucky in another respect. In Junagadh, at the Great Royal Circus, he was bitten in the face by a rabid chimpanzee. I was in Bombay at the time; the call came that I was to carry the rabies vaccine in a thermos. But keeping the vaccine cool all the way to Junagadh was impossible. The plane from Bombay to Rajkot was delayed. Ramu, the driver from the circus who met us at the airport in a battered Land Rover, required another couple of hours to navigate the road between Rajkot and Junagadh.
In the novel, I described that trip in the Land Rover as follows: “The landscape of hideously slain animals flew by … [we] hurtled through the darkened countryside and the dimly lit towns, where the reek of cooking and excrement assailed [us]—together with the squabbling of chickens, the barking of dogs and the savage threats of the shouting, almost-runover pedestrians. Ramu apologized that his driver’s-side window was missing; not only did the rushing night air grow cooler, but the back-seat passengers were struck by flying insects.”
In Junagadh, “the streets were teeming; two crowds were surging against each other. A loudspeaker on a parked truck played circus music. One crowd was coming from the early-evening show, the other hurrying to line up for the show that was to start later on.… Although Ramu never stopped blowing his horn, the Land Rover barely crawled through the crowd. Several small boys clung to the door handles and the rear bumper, allowing themselves to be dragged along the road.… Far ahead of them, a dwarf clown on stilts was leading the throng. It was even more congested at the circus because it was too early to let the crowd in; the Land Rover had to inch its way through the well-guarded gate.”
The rabies vaccine in the thermos was tepid by the time I delivered it to Martin, but the stuff worked. In addition to the bites on Martin’s face and neck, a clump of his beard was gone and he’d been bitten on one hand (while trying to keep the chimpanzee from biting his throat). It had been a 160-pound chimp that had jumped on Martin from the back of a horse. A great way to begin our research at the circus.
In Bombay, I’d visited a children’s hospital, a private club, a police station, a library, and the brothels on Falkland Road, but the time I spent with Martin and Mary Ellen at the Great Royal Circus in Junagadh—most of the month of January—was the really important time. That was when the parallel but separate stories of the screenplay and the novel clearly emerged.
The screenplay would be the story of what Dr. Daruwalla wished had happened to the children in the circus and to the Jesuit missionary. The crippled boy learns how to perform the skywalk. (In the novel, he falls and dies.) His beautiful sister is killed instantly by a lion. (In the novel, she runs away from the circus to become a child prostitute in Bombay, where she dies of AIDS.) And the Jesuit missionary gives up his vows; he falls in love with a woman in the circus—a former trapeze artist, now training the children. (In the novel, the missionary also gives up his vows, but he’s a homosexual; he doesn’t fall in love with a woman.)
Yet the essential characters and the atmosphere for both the screenplay and the novel were the same. In the novel, Dr. Daruwalla (the screenwriter) creates a scapegoat to portray himself; embarrassed at his amateurism, his failure to find the genetic marker for achondroplasia, Dr. Daruwalla invents a young American doctor and makes him the idealistic fool who’s obsessed with getting the dwarfs’ blood. (In the screenplay, Dr. Daruwalla is a minor character, but a dignified one; dwarf research would be beneath him.)
That winter I was in Junagadh, the leader of the dwarf clowns was named Shivaji. I had already studied achondroplasia; I knew that an achondroplastic dwarf could be born of normal parents, and that the dwarf’s children would have a 50 percent chance of being dwarfs. This type of dwarfism is most often the result of a rare genetic event, a spontaneous mutation, which then becomes a dominant characteristic in the dwarf’s children.
Shivaji’s parents had been normal. Shivaji’s only child was a dwarf. Shivaji’s wife was normal, and—to use his own description of her—“almost beautiful.” But she’d come from a very poor family; she had no dowry. “Only a dwarf would marry her,” Shivaji explained.
Sitting in his tent, I was unsuccessful in convincing Shivaji that his existence was probably the result of “a rare genetic event, a spontaneous mutation”; he didn’t believe in genes, he told me.
Shivaji was no less suspicious of my fictional doctor. “What does this guy want with our blood?” he asked.
I explained that my doctor was looking for the secret thing that made him a dwarf.
“It’s no secret,” Shivaji told me. He thought he knew all about it. He said he was a dwarf because, on the morning his mother conceived, she looked out the window and the first living thing she saw was a dwarf. “That did it,” Shivaji explained.
What about his son, who was also a dwarf? That was because, on the morning his wife conceived, she rolled over and looked at Shivaji. “I told her not to look at me, but she did,” he said. “Your doctor is wasting his time,” Shivaji added.
I tried again. “My doctor is looking for something in the dwarfs’ blood, which—if he finds it—will help other people not to give birth to dwarfs.”
“Why should I help your doctor put an end to dwarfs?” Shivaji asked. An unanswerable question.
In the novel, I gave Shivaji’s firmly held opinions to the character Vinod. In the screenplay, I let Shivaji be Shivaji—I hoped that he might get a chance to play himself. That wasn’t to be. (I presume that my Shivaji is still a clown in the Great Royal Circus, but we will use a different circus in the film.)
Although it took me five and a half years to write the novel of A Son of the Circus, once I finished, the book was published on schedule in 1994. The screenplay was first scheduled to go into production in the fall of 1997, but that fell through. The film was then scheduled for production in the winter of 1999. Jeff Bridges was cast as the missionary both times. And, both times, the film came up short by exactly the same amount of money: $1.5 million. Thus the second production fell through as well.
This is a notable difference between a novel and a film. A novel that has been accepted for publication, and has been edited for publication—and is in all other respects ready for publication—does not “fall through.” That is one of the principal reasons I prefer my day job as a novelist to my occasional job as a screenwriter. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of truly good novels I have read in manuscript that have not been published, but good screenplays don’t get made into movies all the time. (More’s the pity—so many bad ones do.)
As of this writing, Martin Bell isn’t leaving for India anytime soon. It’s been nine years since we were in Junagadh together. Martin’s face is completely healed. But not really.
In the novel of A Son of the Circus, I made comic use of that chimp attack—a “racist chimpanzee,” upon spotting the unfamiliarly fair-skinned missionary among a sea of all-brown faces, bites off the missionary’s earlobe. After the biting, the missing earlobe cannot be found.
Of course I know that the real chimp attack was not comic to Martin Bell; nor will his face be “completely healed” until we make the movie. In the movie business, it’s absolutely essential to keep believing that we will.