30b
PARTISAN REVIEW
professor, this same Artie with whom he had played near the
Soldiers and Sailors monument on Riverside Drive. Not that to be a
professor was itself so great. How could anyone bear to know so many
languages? And Artie also had to remain Artie, which was a bad
deal. But perhaps success had changed him. Now that he had a
place in the world perhaps he was better. Did he love his languages,
and live for them, or was his cousin Artie also, in his heart,
cynical? So many people nowadays were. No one seemed satisfied,
and Wilhelm was horrified by the cynicism of successful people.
Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone. And irony. Perhaps
it couldn't be helped. It was probably even necessary. Wilhelm
however feared it intensely. Whenever at the end of the day he was
unusually fatigued he attributed it to cynicism. Too much of the
world's business done. Too much falsity. He had various words to
express the effect this had on him. Chicken! Unelean! Congestion!
he exclaimed in his heart. Rat race! Phoney! Murder! Play-the–
Game! Buggers!
At first the letter from the talent scout was nothing but a
flattering
sort
of joke. Wilhelm's picture in the college paper when
he was running for elass treasurer was seen by Maurice Venice who
wrote to him about a screen test. Wilhelm at once took the train to
New York. He found the scout to be huge and oxlike, so stout that
his arms seemed caught from beneath in a grip of flesh and fat; it
looked as though it must be positively painful. He had little hair. Yet
he enjoyed a healthy complexion. His breath was noisy and his voice
rather difficult and husky because of the fat in his throat. He had
on a double-breasted suit of the type then known as the pill-box;
it was chalk-striped, pink on blue, the trousers hugged his ankles.
They met and shook hands and sat down. Together these
two big men dwarfed the tiny Broadway office and made the
furnishings look like toys. Wilhelm had the color of a Golden Grimes
apple when he was well, and then his thick blond hair was vigor–
ous and his wide shoulders were unwarped; he was leaner in the
jaws, his eyes fresher and wider; his legs were still awkward but
he was impressively handsome. And he was now about to make his
first great mistake. Like, he sometimes thought, I was going to pick
up a weapon and strike myself a blow with it.
Looming over his desk in the small office darkened by over-
