I remembered the blows Harry had struck and that the black had struck and the blows I had seen Billy McCarthy strike. The black had a feint and a cross that confused Harry and that landed the black’s left every time full on Harry’s chin. Each time it landed Harry became a little more groggy but he could not avoid the blow. And I remembered how the black smiled each time as it landed. He had two rows of gold-covered teeth and his smile was like Jack Johnson’s golden smile.
I went along factory streets fancying myself the great black, possessing the knowledge of the black’s feint and cross and with the athlete of the warehouse standing before me.
Aha! There is a slight rocking movement of the body, just so. The head moves slowly and rhythmically like the head of a snake when it is about to strike. Oh, for a long row of yellow gold-crowned teeth to glisten in the mouth when one smiles the golden smile in factory streets, in factories themselves or, most of all, when in a fight, when about to knock an athlete who works with one on a certain platform, “for a goal,” as we used to say among us fighters—an athlete on a platform and with three or four large heavy Swede teamsters standing looking on and smiling also their own slow smiles.
Patience now! One gets the body and the head moving just so, in opposite directions, with opposing rhythm—a sort of counterpoint, as it were—and then the golden smile comes and, quickly, shiftily, the feint with the right for the belly followed with lightning quickness by the left, crossed to the chin.
Oh, for a powerful left! “I would give freely and willingly all the chances I possess of being buried with great pomp in a marble sepulchre on a hillside above a magnificent city for a powerful left,” I think each evening as I go home from work.
And all the time pretending to Nora and myself that I am one who loves mankind! Love indeed! Nora who wished to make happy the one man she understood and with whom she was to live was the lover, not I.
For me the athlete, poor innocent one, has become a symbol.
NOTE V
IN the many factories where I have worked most men talked vilely to their fellows and long afterward I was to begin to understand that a little. It is the impotent man who is vile. His very impotence has made him vile and in the end I was to understand that when you take from man the cunning of the hand, the opportunity to constantly create new forms in materials, you make him impotent. His maleness slips imperceptibly from him and he can no longer give himself in love, either to work or to women. “Standardization! Standardization!” was to be the cry of my age and all standardization is necessarily a standardization in impotence. It is God’s law. Women who choose childlessness for themselves choose also impotence—perhaps to be the better companions for the men of a factory, a standardization age. To live is to create constantly new forms: with the body in living children; in new and more beautiful forms carved out of materials; in the creation of a world of the fancy; in scholarship; in clear and lucid thought; and those who do not live die and decay and from decay always a stench arises.
These the thoughts of a time long after the one of which I am now writing. One cannot think of the figure of a single man as being in himself to blame but as the man named Ford of Detroit has done more than any other man of my day to carry standardization to its logical end might he also not come to be looked upon as the great killer of his age? To make impotent is surely to kill. And there is talk of making him President. How fitting! Tamerlane, who specialized in the killing of men’s bodies but who tells in his autobiography how he was always desirous that all living men under him retain their manhood and self-respect, was the ruler of the world in his age. Tamerlane for the ancients. Ford for the moderns.