"Driven by compulsion"

A horse-racing novel that's more about race, slavery, and lineage than horses.

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Here’s what I’m currently reading, since you asked: Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King; White Girls by Hilton Als; and Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff.

And now: the inaugural edition of this newsletter.

This year, the “greatest two minutes in sports” was a muted affair.

The 146th running of the Kentucky Derby happened quietly over Labor Day Weekend, only the second time since 1945 that the race was not held on the first Saturday in May. Due to the pandemic, the race was pushed four months. No fans were allowed in the stands. There were no rich women in floppy hats; no rich men in preppy polo shirts drinking mint juleps; no drunk college kids chugging beers in the infield. Unsurprisingly, TV ratings for this year’s Derby were down 49%.

Today, October 3, the Triple Crown will conclude with the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico in Baltimore, with no fans in the stands to see it. The Belmont Stakes, normally the third leg of the Triple Crown, ran back on June 20.

I’m not a horse-racing guy, or a gambler, but in most years I try to catch the Kentucky Derby on TV. It is, after all, only two minutes long. But most casual viewers likely have no concept of the years of planning, breeding, spending, training, and emotional pain that go into those two minutes.

C.E. Morgan’s masterful 2016 novel The Sport of Kings conveys that lesson with somber grace. For my money, it’s one of the best and most underrated (even though it was a Pulitzer finalist) sports novels ever written—and it’s barely about the sport. If you’re not a sports person, don’t worry, and stick with me: the book is more about horse raising than horse racing.

The novel doesn’t even fully bring the reader to the Kentucky Derby until nearly 500 pages in; it is more concerned with race, slavery, and blood lines. That makes it the perfect sports novel for right now, an era in which the most culturally compelling events in sports have taken place off the court and off the field, a time in which NBA players nearly voted to end their season early in order to bring attention to black lives in America and the police brutality that threatens them.

The novel opens on a moneyed Kentucky farm in the 1950s when Henry Forge is a young boy, enduring whippings and stern lectures from his father John Henry Forge, a bigot and tyrant. Henry hangs out too much (his father thinks) with Filip, the black house servant; it is implied that Henry’s deaf mother, Lavinia, is having an affair with Filip. (John Henry quickly makes Filip disappear.) Much later in the story, Henry’s own daughter will also have an affair with a black servant, continuing the cycle.

When Henry becomes obsessed with horse-racing, his father warns him to stay away: “Dignity can’t be purchased, Henry, least of all by these latecomers, these… these outsiders, who dress up their addictions in Sunday clothes and Derby hats. People call it a sport, but I’ll tell you this: This so-called sport is driven by compulsion, and weak men love nothing more than to abandon themselves to their compulsions.” 

Soon enough, John Henry is dead and out of the way (not a spoiler), and Henry is breeding race horses—just what his father didn’t want. You assume Henry is the book’s main character, but the narrative soon shifts to his daughter Henrietta. (I like novels where the main character keeps shifting.) It’s no accident Henrietta is named in Henry’s image; she is in many ways an echo of him even though she rebels against him (mainly by having sex with many of the men who work on the farm). When their incest is revealed (yup, Henry is as evil as his father was), it feels inevitable, and you almost shrug. Henry views human inbreeding in the same light as racehorse inbreeding. (“I am as trapped as any thoroughbred,” Henrietta thinks to herself.)

Henrietta raises horses under Henry’s tutelage. By age nineteen, she can recall “the name of every horse she’d ever seen place [at the Derby]… they were all locked in her memory. It wasn’t love or passion, but the taxonomical principle of her mind at work.” (That passage reminded me of this description of the childhood of Coleman Silk in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, one of my favorite novels ever: “Growing up, they never said, ‘See the bow-wow.’ They didn’t even say, ‘See the doggie.’ They said, ‘See the Doberman. See the beagle. See the terrier.’ They learned things had classifications.”) It’s hard to say Henrietta loves horses in a romantic sense. Her approach is coldly clinical, like her father’s.

One of Henrietta’s projects, a horse named Seconds Flat, sired by the famous Secretariat for a hefty fee, places second at the 1990 Kentucky Derby by leaping over a gruesome three-horse pileup, but Henry isn’t satisfied with second place, and the book hurries past the whole event, saving a full visit to the Derby for much later.

Henrietta eventually hires Allmon Shaugnessy, a stoic young black man, to work as a groom on Forge Run Farm, focusing on the horse Hellsmouth, Henry’s next great hope for Derby glory. The novel ends up being Allmon’s story more than anyone else’s. He grew up in Cincinnati with his black single mother Marie, abandoned by his white Irish trucker father Mike Shaughnessy. He fell in with drug dealers to support his mother through her chronic pain. When she died, he ended up living with a distant relative in Kentucky.

Henrietta and Allmon have a searing love affair. (Horse stables; sweat; sex; think of All The Pretty Horses.) You see it coming, but it is gorgeously described, and not in any way sappy: “It was the smell of him that had slain her… A cutting scent of his body so strong that at first she found it almost distasteful, like sun-ripened sweat on the body too long, until it wended past her nostrils into her lungs and turned to a strange distraction… she couldn’t help it, she felt she had no choice, her body was ferrying her there, the selfish hum of the blood rising in pitch.”

Novels with writing this beautiful often lack plot. But this one overflows with action. (You may worry I’m giving away the whole book here, by the way, but not hardly: I’m entirely avoiding, by my count, at least four pivotal events and two central characters.)

Interrupting all the action at Forge Farm are interludes that tell the story of Allmon’s ancestor Scipio, a runaway slave who escaped to the North by crossing the Ohio River, narrowly surviving the ordeal. From an old document Henrietta finds in the Forge library, the will of Edward Cooper Forge in 1827, we learn Scipio was born on Forge Farm. Allmon doesn’t know, and the document doesn’t mean anything to Henrietta, but the meaning to the reader is clear: Allmon has unknowingly come full circle to work at the place where his great great great grandfather was born a slave.

This is the book’s brilliant convergence: it traces the blood lines of Henry Forge and Allmon Shaugnessy to show how Henry’s ancestors thrived by exploiting Allmon’s ancestors. Allmon’s own past was pain, and his family history was pain, and as Faulkner wrote (oft misquoted), “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (Faulkner, to whom C.E. Morgan has been compared, was also obsessed with blood lines, particularly in The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses; Morgan wrote the foreword to the 2014 Modern Library edition of Faulkner’s Light in August.)

Henry, deeply shook by an event I won’t spoil, eventually comes to understand the terrible significance of that same document. In an imagined conversation inside his head, his father asks him, “Henry, who built this state?” And Henry admits the answer: “Why, the help, Father, the servants, the bondsmen, the chattel, that species of property, those dark machines in the fields… they felled trees and laid foundations under the eager eyes of rifles.”

When The Sport of Kings finally takes you to the 2006 Kentucky Derby, Hellsmouth wins, but Morgan undermines the moment of victory. Immediately after the race, the novel switches perspectives again to Mack, the prickly trainer, who can’t be fully happy in the moment because he “hated all the hats and the cheesedick celebrities, hated the dilettantes, the brutal distance, the field thick with worthless runners… The whole Derby rigamarole was a bullshit sham and a shitshow, except for this, this, THIS. And THIS is why he was screaming, his suit jacket threatening to rip at the seams as he reached his triumphant arms over his head, his mouth hollering gibberish, his Stetson behind him on the ground, band up and collecting rain.” (For more of this kind of ranting, in a far less serious vein, read Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” one of the best “sports” essays of all time.)

Morgan also nails the vacuousness of the winner’s press conference. In one of my favorite moments, a journalist asks Henry whether Hellsmouth can win the next two legs of the Triple Crown, and Henry pauses, “sitting stiffly in his shirtsleeves before the black YumBrands!YumBrands!YumBrands! Banner that rippled faintly in the breeze from a fan… as he looked from one camera lens to the next, a sea of dark apertures narrowing on his face.” (A little bit Tom Wolfey, no?)

In the moment after victory, Henry makes a truly shocking decision that puts a period on his path to the Kentucky Derby, the decades-long trail of pain and blood that Henry, Henrietta, Allmon, Mack, and the Black gay jockey Rueben all traversed to reach a place that in the end could not be anything but a letdown. 

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Coming up next week: Travels around the globe with the weird atlas of William Vollmann.