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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
There's no denying that part of the appeal of "Seabiscuit" is its old-fashioned quality. There's the aw-shucks story of how Smith chose Pollard -- a choice made, Hillenbrand says, when the trainer introduced horse to jockey and Pollard produced a lump of sugar from his pocket. There's the book's endearingly retro language. (One chapter, quoting a sportswriter of the time, is called "The Dingbustingest Contest You Ever Clapped Eyes On.") And there's the heart-tugging account of how Seabiscuit's incredible fame was a respite for a Depression-weary country. (The horse was the most frequently mentioned news personality of 1938, beating out even FDR and Hitler.) But evoking the past is not the same thing as nostalgia. No one is likely to long for the world Hillenbrand describes, a world of horses raced to the point of exhaustion or worse on small-time racing circuits.
The horrors Hillenbrand describes jockeys enduring are even more awful: starvation diets, purgatives, summertime jogging in rubber suits, even the last resort of swallowing a tapeworm's egg. And even those horrors pale when she gets to the jockeys who were killed or injured in the sport. These men destroyed their bodies for the sake of a sport that paid them little, often kept them in slave conditions and gave them no insurance. Pollard was lucky enough to work for a man who considered him family. It was the charity of Howard and his wife, Marcella, that rescued Pollard when, in a horrendous accident, a horse fell on him during a race and crushed his chest. And it was Pollard's friend George Woolf who took his place atop Seabiscuit for some of the horse's victories.
But for a story whose appeal is basically one of winning against the odds, "Seabiscuit" never gathers itself up into a phony, olden-days coziness. Howard, Smith, Pollard and even Seabiscuit are given the chance to act as if their fate were not predetermined -- an unusual gift for characters who populate a legend. Hillenbrand allows them to breathe. She has an astounding eye for detail: The stories of the races in which Seabiscuit shattered speed records are turned into infinities where the possibilities of winning or losing reveal themselves in infinitesimal increments. These passages are almost unbearably suspenseful.
Hillenbrand also has a good sense of what to leave out, which may account for the book's near-perfect pacing and length. Introducing her human characters, Hillenbrand doesn't, thank goodness, waste any space on the begats, those snoozer passages that you have to endure in biographies and histories when you just want to get to the story. Seabiscuit's heritage gets more attention than anyone else's, and that's just as it should be.
If you're crazy about animals, part of the reason to love this wonderful book is obvious. Without sentimentality or anthropomorphism, Hillenbrand writes of an animal's intelligence and character. (Seabiscuit was the slyest of horses. His favorite trick, when he enjoyed the lead in a race, was to slow down just enough to allow his closest competitor to catch up with him. Then, giving the other horse just enough time to taste a chance of victory, Seabiscuit would issue a dismissive snort and leave his rival in the dust.)
The heart of its appeal, though, is its seamless combination of triumph and melancholy. Like any great success story, "Seabiscuit" is ultimately sad. Glory always burns brightly and briefly, and the racing life of a horse (and Seabiscuit's was longer than most) is even briefer than most kinds of success. We're always aware that the colt's victories are keeping something at bay. And so it's when he's retired, and the principals go their separate ways, that the book becomes most like a love song, reveling in the exquisite sadness of knowing you held something in your hands only to see it scatter to the winds.
