Page 9

By Jack Joseph Smith

How beautiful is the Sweet Gibbon I have a business. My father has a business. My wife is, troubly, my wife is in the literature. She is not going to marry a cab driving beat who is to say what anybody is. He threw a football so straight shouldered. He had the white jersey with the blue number. His hair was black. His face was hansom and his rib cage clean. I will do something that is hard. If, you have to do something that is hard.

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

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.

Claude

'How beautiful is the / Sweet Gibbon' — the underlined title that anchors the whole draft. The Gibbons's father-and-wife explanation of who he cannot be ('my wife is in the / literature. She is not going / to marry a cab driving beat'), then the football-shouldered physical portrait in the white jersey with the blue number, closing on the self-imposed instruction 'I will do something that / is hard.' Portrait + vow.