By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This fragment mixes class talk, marital refusal, and self-fashioning, then closes by turning hardness into an ethic.
With the restored physical details, the page feels less like loose boasting and more like active character construction. The Sweet Gibbon appears as a social and bodily ideal at once, while the final insistence on doing what is hard gives the whole passage a self-forging quality.
The underlined title 'How beautiful is the / Sweet Gibbon' presides over a page that builds its hero in three movements. First a defensive social ledger - 'I have a business. My father / has a business' - and a wife 'in the / literature' who 'is not going / to marry a cab driving beat.' Then an idealized body remembered from boyhood football: 'He threw a football so straight / shouldered,' the 'white / jersey with the blue / number,' the 'hansom' face and 'rib cage clean.' Finally a vow echoing the North Beach note - 'I will do something that / is hard' - so admiration, class anxiety, and self-forging resolve all converge on one figure. Spellings 'troubly' and 'hansom' are the manuscript's.