to do to make there are more lives than walking desperate the streets hurry underdog do make
a speech urging action in the crowded hall after hand-clapping the pats and smiles of others on the platform the scrape of chairs the expectant hush the few coughs during the first stuttering attempt to talk straight tough going the snatch for a slogan they are listening and then the easy climb slogan by slogan to applause (if somebody in your head didn’t say liar to you and on Union Square
that time you leant from a soapbox over faces avid young opinionated old the middleaged numb with overwork eyes bleared with newspaperreading trying to tell them the straight dope make them laugh tell them what they want to hear wave a flag whispers the internal agitator crazy to succeed)
you suddenly falter ashamed flush red break out in sweat why not tell these men stamping in the wind that we stand on a quicksand? that doubt is the whetstone of understanding is too hard hurts instead of urging picket John D. Rockefeller the bastard if the cops knock your blocks off it’s all for the advancement of the human race while I go home after a drink and a hot meal and read (with some difficulty in the Loeb Library trot) the epigrams of Martial and ponder the course of history and what leverage might pry the owners loose from power and bring back (I too Walt Whitman) our storybook democracy
and all the time in my pocket that letter from that collegeboy asking me to explain why being right which he admits the radicals are in their private lives such shits
lie abed underdog (peeling the onion of doubt) with the book unread in your hand and swing on the seesaw maybe after all maybe topdog make
money you understood what he meant the old party with the white beard beside the crystal inkpot at the cleared varnished desk in the walnut office in whose voice boomed all the clergymen of childhood and shrilled the hosannahs of the offkey female choirs All you say is very true but there’s such a thing as sales and I have daughters I’m sure you too will end by thinking differently make
money in New York (lipstick kissed off the lips of a girl fashionablydressed fragrant at five o’clock in a taxicab careening down Park Avenue when at the end of each crosstown street the west is flaming with gold and white smoke billows from the smokestacks of steamboats leaving port and the sky is lined with greenbacks
the riveters are quiet the trucks of the producers are shoved off onto the marginal avenues
winnings sing from every streetcorner
crackle in the ignitions of the cars swish smooth in ballbearings sparkle in the lights going on in the showwindows croak in the klaxons tootle in the horns of imported millionaire shining towncars
dollars are silky in her hair soft in her dress sprout in the elaborately contrived rosepetals that you kiss become pungent and crunchy in the speakeasy dinner sting shrill in the drinks
make loud the girlandmusic show set off the laughing jag in the cabaret swing in the shufflingshuffling orchestra click sharp in the hatcheck girl’s goodnight)
if not why not? walking the streets rolling on your bed eyes sting from peeling the speculative onion of doubt if somebody in your head topdog? underdog? didn’t (and on Union Square) say liar to you
Newsreel LII
assembled to a service for the dear departed, the last half hour of devotion and remembrance of deeds done and work undone; the remembrance of friendship and love; of what was and what could have been. Why not use well that last half hour, why not make that last service as beautiful as Frank E. Campbell can make it at the funeral church (nonsectarian)
BODY TIED IN BAG IS FOUND FLOATING
Chinatown my Chinatown where the lights are low
Hearts that know no other land
Drifting to and fro
APOPLEXY BRINGS END WHILE WIFE READS TO HIM
Mrs. Harding was reading to him in a low soothing voice. It had been hoped that he would go to sleep under that influence
DAUGHERTY IN CHARGE
All alone
By the telephone
Waiting for a ring
Two Women’s Bodies in Slayer’s Baggage
WORKERS MARCH ON REICHSTAG
CITY IN DARKNESS
RACE IN TAXI TO PREVENT SUICIDE ENDS IN
FAILURE AT THE BELMONT
Pershing Dances Tango in the Argentine
HARDING TRAIN CRAWLS FIFTY MILES THROUGH
MASSED CHICAGO CROWDS
Girl Out of Work Dies from Poison
MANY SEE COOLIDGE BUT FEW HEAR HIM
If you knew Susie
Like I know Susie
Oh oh oh what a girl
Art and Isadora
In San Francisco in eighteen seventyeight Mrs. Isadora O’Gorman Duncan, a highspirited lady with a taste for the piano, set about divorcing her husband, the prominent Mr. Duncan, whose behavior we are led to believe had been grossly indelicate; the whole thing made her so nervous that she declared to her children that she couldn’t keep anything on her stomach but a little champagne and oysters; in the middle of the bitterness and recriminations of the family row,
into a world of gaslit boardinghouses kept by ruined southern belles and railroadmagnates and swinging doors and whiskery men nibbling cloves to hide the whiskey on their breaths and brass spittoons and fourwheel cabs and basques and bustles and long ruffled trailing skirts (in which lecturehall and concertroom, under the domination of ladies of culture, were the centers of aspiring life)
she bore a daughter whom she named after herself Isadora.
The break with Mr. Duncan and the discovery of his duplicity turned Mrs. Duncan into a bigoted feminist and an atheist, a passionate follower of Bob Ingersoll’s lectures and writings; for God read Nature; for duty beauty, and only man is vile.
Mrs. Duncan had a hard struggle to raise her children in the love of beauty and the hatred of corsets and conventions and manmade laws. She gave pianolessons, she did embroidery and knitted scarves and mittens.
The Duncans were always in debt.
The rent was always due.
Isadora’s earliest memories were of wheedling grocers and butchers and landlords and selling little things her mother had made from door to door,
helping hand valises out of back windows when they had to jump their bills at one shabbygenteel boardinghouse after another in the outskirts of Oakland and San Francisco.
The little Duncans and their mother were a clan; it was the Duncans against a rude and sordid world. The Duncans weren’t Catholics any more or Presbyterians or Quakers or Baptists; they were Artists.
When the children were quite young they managed to stir up interest among their neighbors by giving theatrical performances in a barn; the older girl Elizabeth gave lessons in society dancing; they were westerners, the world was a goldrush; they weren’t ashamed of being in the public eye. Isadora had green eyes and reddish hair and a beautiful neck and arms. She couldn’t afford lessons in conventional dancing, so she made up dances of her own.
They moved to Chicago, Isadora got a job dancing to The Washington Post at the Masonic Temple Roof Garden for fifty a week. She danced at clubs. She went to see Augustin Daly and told him she’d discovered