310
PARTISAN REVIEW
get stood up. The older women would know better. The mothers are
on your side. With what they know, if it was up to them, they'd
take you in a minute. You're very sympathetic, even the young girls
feel that. You'd make a good provider. But they go more for the
other types. It's as clear as anything."
This was not how Wilhelm saw himself. And as he surveyed the
old ground he recognized now that he had been not only confused
but hurt. Why, he thought, he cast me even then for a loser.
Wilhelm had said, with half a mind to be defiant, "Is that your
opinion?"
It never occurred to Venice that a man might object to stardom
in such a role. "Here is your chance," he said. "Now you're just in
college. What are you studying?" He snapped his fingers. "Stuff."
Wilhelm himself felt this way about it. "You may plug along fifty
years before you get anywheres. This way, in one jump, the world
knows who you are. You become a name like Roosevelt, Swanson.
From east to west, out to China, into South America. This is no
bunk. You become a lover to the whole world. The world wants it,
needs it. One fellow smiles, a billion people smile. One fellow cries,
the other billion sob with him. Listen, bud," Venice pulled himself
together to make an effort. On his imagination there was some
great weight which he could not discharge. He wanted Wilhelm,
too, to feel it. He twisted his large, clean, well-meaning rather foolish
features as though he were their unwilling captive, and said in his
choked, fat-obstructed voice, "Listen, everywhere there are people
trying hard, miserable, in trouble, downcast, tired, trying and trying.
They need a break, right? A breakthrough, a help, luck or sym–
pathy."
"That certainly is the truth," said Wilhelm. He had seized the
feeling and he waited for Venice to go on. But Venice had no more
to say; he had concluded. He gave Wilhelm several pages of blue
hectographed script, stapled together, and told him to prepare for
the screen test. "Study your lines in front of a mirror," he said.
"Let yourself go. The part should take ahold of you. Don't be afraid
to make faces and be emotional. Shoot the works. Because when you
start to act, you're no more an ordinary person, and those things
don't apply to you. You don't behave the same way as the average."
And so Wilhelm had never returned to Penn State. His room-
