Jane Smiley - A year at the races : reflections on horses, humans, love, money, and luck

A LOVE STORY , at least a convincing one, requires three elements the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together. If the lover isnt ardent, then the story isnt a love story. If the beloved isnt appealing, then the lover just seems idiosyncratic, or even crazy; and if they have no adventures, then their love is too easy, and they have no way of learning anything important about themselves and one another. Without going into detail, I will say that two of my favorite love stories are Pride and Prejudice and The Big Sleep. All three of these elements are distinctly present in both of themDarcy and Elizabeth , Bogart and Bacallthe lovers are ardent and appealing, the events dramatic and revealing, and the ultimate connection, the witness feels, is both lasting and exemplary.

I mention this because every horse story is a love story. In the following volume I will make the case that it is often a story of mutual love (or, to be cooler about it, mutual attachment). In every horse story the lover (customarily the human) is ardent for something, maybe only winning, but often something more intangible and altruistic, and in every story the human and the horse do many things together, some of them wonderful, many of them foolish, and some of them simply mysterious. But the element often missing, as far as the outside witness is concerned, is the appeal of the beloved, the horse himself, herself, and so the love story fails to convince and becomes only a testament to skill or obsession or life-style on the part of the human. But horses are individuals, and humans do have an authentic response to their individuality that offers as many revelations as any other kind of love.

E. M. Forster once pointed out that characters in novels spend far more time thinking about love than people do, or at least than English people that he knew did. No doubt this is because love is a riddle that has to be solved over and overwe read and write about characters solving this riddle in order not only to enjoy it with them, but also to generalize from their situations to our own. For this reason, the love story I am about to tell is first particular and then general. Though I esteem and admire horses in general and Thoroughbred horses in particular, my love is for my own horses. Love has moved me to observe them and to ponder what I have observed, to relate what Ive observed to others, and to try to make something of each incident, or at least fit it into a pattern. My hope is that the incidents are interesting or entertaining enough to engage the reader, but also that what I have made of them will give the reader something larger to think about than the doings of Jane Smileys horses. Most horse books are manualscompendia of techniques for getting along with horses, staying safe, taking care of their needs, and getting them to perform. The greatest of thesefor example, Alois Podhajskys My Horses, My Teachersadd a philosophical view to the practicalities, and are not only useful but profound. Other horse books attempt, through pictures and anecdotes, to evoke in the reader the admiration and pleasure the author feels for horses as a speciesa herd thundering past, two beautiful stallions rearing, a mare and foal galloping in a green pasture. The pictures are representative of horseness. What I am hoping to do is somewhat differentnot to evoke horseness, but to evoke horse individuality; to do what a novelist naturally does, which is to limn idiosyncrasy and character, and thereby to shade in some things about identity.

I readily admit that it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species. For this reason, every horseman is convinced that his horse, and horses in general, are possessed of certain qualities. These qualities may be largely useful and mechanical, or they may be largely athletic, or they may be largely grand and spiritual, or they may be largely emotional. A trainer I knew told me that a woman she knew had said that she was having trouble with her horse because the horse wanted to have sex with her. My trainer and I found this hard to believewe suspected that the horse simply wanted to dominate the woman. But this idea was no more unbelievable to another horseman I know than that I think that some of my horses feel affection for me. When I expressed the opinion that my horses bumping me gently with his head was a sign of affection, he said, Affection? I never think of horses as having affections. The fact is that, with horses as with everything else, we see what we are predisposed to see, and then we mold them, consciously and unconsciously, to fit in with our predispositions. Nevertheless, it is always a worthy exercise to attempt to transcend subjectivity, to let the action speak for itself, and to let the reader judge.

The sentiments of horsemen exist in uneasy relationship (sometimes in the same breast) with the beliefs of behaviorists. This is analogous to reading about love in a novel and reading about love in a treatise on attachment behaviors, with the difference that romantic ideas of love are the norm for people, and scientific theories of attachment behaviors are considered evidence of an unsavory degree of coldheartedness on the part of scientists. The opposite obtains in the horse worldhorsemen, and especially horsewomen, are repeatedly warned not to sentimentalize or anthropomorphize their animals, and so they keep their attitudes private. They kiss their horses or hug them or baby-talk them only when the expert isnt around. They feed treats rather surreptitiously, or try not to tell cute stories in general company . But I am going to tell cute stories anyway, in the hope that an accumulation of cute stories will someday change the widespread human perception of horses as Cartesian machines, or lower beings, or unpredictable beasts, or selfish and insensate items of bulky furniture. What science has discovered about the minds of horses would make a short bookin fact has made a short book, The World According to Horses, by science writer Stephen Budiansky, ninety pages. Like the anecdotes of lovers and parents, the anecdotes of horsemen form a larger body of information than the findings of science. In this book, I will make the case that horses are more like people than they are like machines, and that the insights of psychology into the human mind have productive applications to the equine mind. The study of human psychology has two branchesscientific findings and anecdotal evidence. Both Freud and Piaget observed their subjects in detail and drew conclusions that were later supported or disproved by more rigorously conceived studies. Observation came first, because detailed observation inspires the imagination to go further, to be more systematic, and to ask more particular questions.

Certainly, my ignorance will be showing. If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand. Like all mysteries, horses tempt the horseman to have theories. Theories of horses are lenses, taken up for a while and then discarded, for organizing and perceiving the mystery. Their value is in their usefulnessdoes a particular theory promote improved cooperation between horse and human? If so, it is a good theory for a time. This book is full of theories.