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 Laura Hillenbrand is young to be well-grounded in the early history of our country. Her descriptions of the three men and their horse are flawless. Listen to her words.
The owner: (Chapter I opens with this quote) 'Charles Howard had the feel of a gigantic onrushing machine: You had to either climb on or leap out of the way. He would sweep into a room, working a cigarette in his fingers, and people would trail him like pilot fish.'
The trainer: 'Smith had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility. ... When photographed hatless, he had an unsettling tendency to blend with the sky, so that his eyes hung disembodied in space.'
The jockey: 'Red Pollard was sinking downward through life with the pendulous motion of a leaf falling through still air. ... he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary and his books: pocket volumes of Shakespeare , Omar Khayyám’s Rubaiyat, a little copy of Robert Service’s Songs of the Sourdough, maybe some Emerson, whom he called Old Waldo.'
When Laura Hillenbrand, apparently no more a stranger to Shakespeare than to horses, discovered the personality of the famous thoroughbred, to write Seabiscuit’s story was a challenge made in heaven.
... From Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis:
Look, when a painter would surpass the life,
In limning out a well-proportioned steed,
His art with nature’s workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed;
So did this horse excel a common one,
In shape, in courage, colour, pace and bone. ... Seabiscuit?
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