When Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley broke her leg in a fall off her horse, Tick-Tock, three months before leaving Ames, Iowa, to try out life in California, she didnt take it as bad karma, not for a moment. Instead, as the swirl of preparations went on around her, she did what any self-respecting fiction writer would do: She invented a fantasy.
“I was sitting around reading about thoroughbreds, and I thought, `Wouldn’t it be fun to breed one?’ ” Smiley said.
To that end, even before the boxes were unpacked in her new home in Carmel, Smiley bought a brood mare, Biosymmetree, and bred her to a stallion, Golden Act. One year later, the first foal, Lumberjack, was born. His picture is on display in Smiley’s home, along with pictures of others she has bred since then. “All of those babies were born and I kept reading about pedigrees and sires,” she said with a smile as she straightened the snapshot on the door of her refrigerator.
Declaring herself “thoroughly over-horsed” since moving to northern California three years ago, the 49-year-old author of “A Thousand Acres” (Fawcett Books, paperback) and “The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton” (Fawcett) sat on a high stool amid the amiable clutter of the kitchen, her second favorite room in the house–her first being the study, where her ninth work of fiction, tentatively titled “Horse Haven,” is in progress–for a conversation, over guacamole and chips, on her whole new life as a horse breeder.
Q. Some would gasp at the very thought of shucking the mantle of distinguished professor of arts and humanities for the dicey business of breeding racehorses. Have you any regrets for the academic life left behind at Iowa State?
A. No. I was tired of it. I don’t think of the move as a risk at all, although I suppose the stakes here are higher because it costs so much more to live in California than in Iowa. I just gave up teaching for sport and a new novel. I write for two or three hours a day and then I have my horses and my kids to take care of. (Two of Smiley’s three children, A.J., 6, and Lucy, 16, live with her in Carmel. A daughter, Phoebe, 20, is in college and spending the summer on an internship in Washington, D.C.) Right now I’m working pretty hard to get the final draft of the novel finished, and when you’re working hard there is a kind of mental pressure, so it’s good to have a routine.
Q. Do you think all writers have a private fantasy of the perfect place to write?
A. Some writers might, but for me, the writing just goes along, no matter where I am. I have no rituals. The place where the writing happens is in my head. Because my study adjoins the master bedroom and the bathroom is right there, I just get up from my desk and go take a shower if I’m having a problem. Every day I write two or three single-spaced pages in two or three hours. I always write the whole first draft, all at once, and then I come back and do revisions.
Q. Another California writer, Joan Didion, has said that people are more affected than they know by the place they live in, by landscapes and weather. Do you think this is true?
A. Joan Didion is really conscious of being molded by California. That’s because she was born here, I think, and because she has written about this place in so many of her novels. For me, I’d say that mostly the ideas for the novels come first, and then I figure out some place to set them.
Q. If a sense of place is not essential, then how do you go about imagining the settings for your novels?
A. I pick up a sense of place visually, by looking at details. Some places really affect me and others don’t. In some of my books I have evoked the Midwestern landscape and character, but that’s because that’s where I happened to live. I got interested in certain issues when I lived in Iowa and I explored them and then I left. I’m working on a novel about horse racing now. My aim is to evoke racetracks around the country and the world, which to me requires a sense of location more than a sense of place. If I want to get a feel for Southern California, for instance, I just go down there and go to the track. Now, I love Santa Anita (in Arcadia), but I don’t especially care for Churchill Downs in Louisville–or Del Mar (in California). Del Mar leaves me cold. But I see Santa Anita, even on the television, and I get excited. And I’d rather go anywhere than back to the Meadowlands in the swamp country in New Jersey. The track there is sort of like an industrial waste pit. I love Chantilly in France, and I got a good sense of place at Newmarket, but I really loved Cheltenham in England, which was not a flat course but a jump course. I respond differently to different places, but usually the response is pretty immediate.
Q. And now you live in Carmel. What’s it like, living and working here?
A. Just look out the window. Everything here is perfect. I have no complaints. Everybody who moves here feels the same thing, right away, which is, `Oh, it’s so expensive. How am I going to live? How am I going to get that big house with all of that property?’ Everybody has this feeling, all the time, that if they don’t keep working, really hard, they will lose what they have and then they’ll have to leave California. In Iowa, the normal, reasonably priced house has four bedrooms. In California the normal house costs 10 times what it cost in Iowa and has only three bedrooms. It’s absurd. But gradually, you settle for the things you can have and you forget about the things that you can’t.
Q. Are you saying you’ve become more spiritual since you moved to California?
A. Sure. Certainly something about this place touches people spiritually. You look out on Monterey Bay and you feel your heart open up and your spirits rise. Many writers and artists have been very inspired here. Maybe it’s the cypress trees along the coast or maybe it’s the rough rocks out in the ocean. But it seems to me that you gain a spiritual life only partly from a sense of place. It’s also a sense of fellowship with the people around you. A lot of people are drawn here because they have a sense of how beautiful it is, and so that’s a natural way of having a sense of fellowship.
Q. Tell us more about your current passion for thoroughbreds.
A. It’s a seductive thing. I really like studying breeds and DNA theories. You figure out a nice little mix and then see what you get. You might come up with something that’s worth a lot of money or you might come up with a dud. I once bred an inexpensive mare with certain flaws to a stallion that was not a champion and they came up win an absolutely gorgeous baby that another breeder offered to buy before it was 6 months old. On the other hand, Glory, the filly that’s out there now, has quite a good pedigree, but she’s had problems with her legs ever since she was born. First they were crooked, but they straightened out and now they’re crooked in a different way. She’s also got a little temper. And she cost a lot of money. But that’s the way it always is with thoroughbreds. The ones that cost you a million dollars are gasping in their stalls and the ones who were practically free are running around absolutely perfect.
Q. Have you found a congenial community of writers out here?
A. I don’t care one way or another if there are writers around. I just don’t care. I’m a sportswoman. I hang out with horse people now.
Q. Do you miss anything about the Midwest?
A. No. There is nothing that I miss. I was in Iowa for 24 years. That’s pretty much enough for anywhere. I was happy and I got a lot done and I raised my daughters there, but I was ready for a change. Living in the Midwest, you are always aware of who is leaving. And if you live in a place where people are leaving all the time, you’re always wondering, `Why did they leave?’ and `Why didn’t I leave?’ `Am I ever going to leave?’ and `When am I going to leave? Is it too late?’ If you choose to stay, you become a little defensive about your choice and gradually, in the case of the Midwest because the winters are so harsh, you become stoic.
Q. Which brings us back, I guess, to becoming a more spiritual person.
A. You have to be quite an unusual person to find the Midwestern landscape elevating. Not many people do. On the other hand, if you’re living where you really want to live and the people around you also want to live in that place, then all of those issues about who you are and whether you should have left take on a different coloration. `Should I have left?’ becomes `Should I have gone ahead and done what I wanted, even though I had obligations back there where I came from?’ `Should I have stayed behind and sacrificed my life and what I wanted in order to fulfill those obligations?’ That’s really hard. At one end of the road is, `What’s holding me here?’ and at the other end is, `Well, I did what I wanted. Was it the right thing to do?’ For me it was.
