Book Review by Steven D. Price
Racing Time: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Liberation, Patrick Smithwick, Dementi Milestone Publishing, Manakin-Sabot, VA, 2019, cloth, illustrations by Sam Robinson, 481 pagesIn 2006 Patrick Smithwick published Racing My Father, a memoir of his legendary steeplechaser forebear, A.P. “Paddy” Smithwick. Six years later came Flying Change, the account of the author’s youth as a race rider under his father’s tutelage before leaving the track for a writing and teaching career until the sport’s siren song drew him back.
Now comes Racing Time. Subtitled A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Liberation, it is at once a celebration of the author’s appreciation of family and friends, both human and equine, and an elegiac recollection of three men with whom Smithwick’s life was as closely entwined as the braids on a hunting whip lash: the late former-jockeys-turned trainers Tom Voss and Dickie Small (names familiar to all race enthusiasts) and groom Speedy Kiniel.
Smithwick’s panorama offers much to present and ruminate over. His writing is visual with settings and descriptions that bring to mind Munnings paintings or Peb racetrack cartoons, other times a Bruegel wide-screen cast-of-thousands scene or a Winslow Homer solitude watercolor. Indeed, in his own words, a Saratoga race day has the color and movement of a Mondrian.
Smithwick is a learned man, and his wide-ranging erudition occasionally threatens to take over at times when less would be more. However, when he’s on target, he hits the mark, as when cocktail-party chatter with a middle-aged couple revealed that they had lost a son in a swimming accident at the prime of his youth, ‘Sounds like the A.E. Houseman poem on an athlete dying young,’ I thought, then turned the page to find that the author quoted a relevant verse from that very work. Similarly, there may be more detail in farm and riding activities than necessary for some readers.
But these are minor complaints. The overwhelming beauty of the book is in the relationships between the author and his three friends. Speedy Kiniel, for example, a horseman of the old school whom you would want on hand to rejuvenate a horse with an old bowed tendon is an ex-prizefighter and musical entertainer right out of Damon Runyan; small wonder Smithwick craved his companionship in and out of the barn. Similarly, the reader shares Smithwick’s loss of Voss and Small, who served as the author’s “running buddies” and mentors to the end.
Although Racing Time is very much a stand-alone volume, I would recommend starting with Smithwick’s first two books for the full effect of why this book is worth reading. What F. Scott Fitzgerald concluded in The Great Gatsby applies with equal force here too: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Posted April 8, 2020
Steven Price is an editor and author of numerous books about horses and equine sport. He is a long-time member of Foxhunting LIfe‘s Panel of Experts and is currently in the process of completing his own memoir, The Outside of a Horse.