A conversion to the equine faith

“Horses have a way of taking over people’s lives,” Michael Korda writes in “Horse People,” a memoir tracing his two-decade transformation from Manhattanite to serious horse aficionado. By the end of the book, Korda, the author of popular nonfiction narratives (“Country Matters,” “Man to Man: Surviving Prostate Cancer”) and editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, is contentedly at home on his sprawling property near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., with as many as six horses at a time in a barn complete with automatic water dispensers for the animals, a horse trailer, a four-wheel-drive vehicle for towing it and significant relationships with a vet and a blacksmith.

“You don’t see the passion for horses clearly until you get a glimpse of it in other people,” Korda observes. “[O]ne horse, then another, and so on -- it all seems to make perfect sense, and rather like collecting (or drinking), there’s no one single point at which you’re likely to say to yourself, ‘Hey; this is getting out of control!’ ” Korda’s own narrative illustrates this snowballing effect as he recounts the gradual but inexorable changes that marked his transition to horse person.

The story starts more than 20 years ago as the author, living in New York City, searches out riding lessons for his son Christopher and happens upon Clove Lake Stable on Staten Island. In no time, he and Christopher are outfitted in English riding attire and enjoying father-son lessons on Saturday and Sunday mornings, rekindling memories of the author’s own childhood experiences. Soon Korda is waking early most mornings to go riding in Central Park before work. He enters into an affair with Margaret, a fellow morning rider, and divorces his first wife (as Margaret divorces her husband), and the two then embark on a horse-centered life that takes them deeper and deeper into equestrian terrain.

Korda’s account is for the most part anecdotal -- moving upstate, buying horses, dealing with equine illness and mishaps, working with vets and barn hands, coping with a narcoleptic horse who’s liable to fall asleep instantly (“one moment you could be riding him, the next moment you were on the ground”). He tells of being invited to fox hunt in Middleburg, Va., after inadvertently gaining a reputation as a daredevil on horseback, a reputation he downplays in vain. The hunt is a hilarious and harrowing jaunt wherein the author does whatever he can to stay on top of his mount. Margaret, meanwhile, develops an interest in competitive riding, and her forays into dressage, three-day eventing and other horse competitions are described in great detail. Photos of Margaret (along with a few of the author) appear regularly, and the author’s line drawings pepper the text.

Korda moves beyond the experiences of Margaret and himself to discourse on horse ownership and domestication and to examine with relish the subculture of horse people (“a kind of secular religion,” he says). Making the rounds with a local vet, he explores different styles of equine custody: backyard horses living below the radar in urban areas; horses kept not for riding but for viewing; horses stabled in opulent, chandelier-lighted surroundings. He attends a rodeo with “Lonesome Dove” author Larry McMurtry, and he visits a penal institution where injured thoroughbreds, instead of being put down, are sent to be cared for by the inmates, an exercise that helps rehabilitate convict and horse alike. The ethics of horse ownership, fox hunting and thoroughbred training are touched on throughout.

For all the book’s breadth, though, most of it remains firmly (and at times annoyingly) planted in the patrician realm of the “landed gentry” that constitutes Korda’s new life -- a realm, he tells us, in which “the total number of acres you owned still counted for something, as well as the number of generations that land had been in your family’s hands; it was a world as well in which a certain degree of eccentricity, a good seat on a horse, and an autocratic presence counted even more than mere wealth, a world of big estates, riverside mansions, and dirt roads.” The tone tends to the exclusionary (the aristocracy vs. those who tend the horses for their “betters”), as when he complains about the difficulty of finding and keeping good barn help. We read in excessive detail about the clothes worn while riding, how his fellow horse people decorate their homes, and the color coordination of one’s riding outfits with one’s horse trailers and four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Still, if you can gallop beyond this minor annoyance, there’s much enjoyment to be had. Korda’s tales are like a leisurely horseback ride on a lovely afternoon -- a reminder of the beauty inherent in the equine world, so exotic to most of us.