165. Phone-sex comedy

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In Stephen Holden's review of For a Good Time, . . . Call, a "fizzy, potty-mouthed comedy" about two nice girls who do phone sex for fun and profit, he says that "the fantasies in which they collaborate with their male clients have little to do with who they really are" (NYT 9-1-12).

I have to stop at "who they really are."  Maybe some people know who other people really are, maybe they know who they themselves really are, and maybe, as a consequence, they're able to talk so confidently.  "Oh sure, there's the fantasizing us and the real us.  There's no connection."  So fizz on.  But other people will be troubled by the assumption of knowledge here, and want to take the director, Jamie Travis, into the seminar room — knowing well what they will hear when they come out: "Lighten up!  Lighten up!"

Then there are those who, right in the middle of a seminar, can't keep from fantasizing: "Suppose I were as smart as those people in New York and knew who everybody really was?  Suppose self-knowledge were a snap?  Suppose I knew for sure that 'adopting a pornographic mind-set' had no consequences in my real life?"

There in my fantasy is my good Episcopalian mother giving those young ladies a talking-to:  "What do you think the Collect for Purity is about?  'Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts.'  You must know hearts have thoughts.  Those are the things you're selling your customers.  So what do you think 'cleanse' means?  You shouldn't use words unless you know what they mean."

"And as for you, Stephen Holden, you with your 'prostitution without despoliation, without guilt.'  Guilt.  What would you want your daughter to feel after she did something like that?  Joy?  Shared over the Christmas dinner table?  Joy to the world."

Now there's Scott Fitzgerald in my fantasy, bringing more words to think about.  "I spoiled this city for myself."  Everybody thinks about 'spoiled' ('despoliation,' above) and sees that he spoiled Paris because he spoiled something in himself.  "The way Milton's Adam spoiled the Garden for himself," a seminarist breaks in.  "Did something to his responding mechanism."

And, can it be, there's the mythic Ernest Hemingway, speaking as a counselor.  "You lose it if you talk about it."  Lose what, telephone talker?

"Lose Love's Elysium," breaks in Thomas Carew, "the paradise of sensual delight.  Where shepherds initiated shepherdesses, on beds of asphodel."

"Lose discovery," adds John Donne, "lose the ability to say, and hear, what hands say, hands roving 'before, behind, between, above, below': 'O, my America, my Newfoundland.'

Yes, but nobody can speak confidently of the relation between thinking and doing — which, if you are what you do, is a relation between thinking and being.  Think one way, be another?  "Never," says Jesus.  "Think your brother a fool and you're a murderer."

"Think me anything you want," says the sergeant.  "As long as you don't do anything about it, like speak out loud, you're an OK soldier."

From a distance it looks like a wash.  But up close, really close, in introspection, the sergeant seems to have the edge.  Most of us believe that we can, inside, call somebody hateful names and still love them, still be good soldiers, still be loving people.  Think hate, be loving.  Think smut, be nice.

Think violence, be gentle.  Think ease, be industrious.  Think rebellion, be cooperative.  Think self, be team.

Does it work the other way?  Think Kike, not be anti-Semitic?  Think Buck, not be bigoted?  Not so well, I think.

The clincher for the free fantasists seems to be the novelist.  In order to render them he (or she} thinks as his characters think, to the point of horror.  The more intimately he shares the process, the horror, the better the novel.  He finishes and is the same jolly person.

"OK, so there you have it.  The customer is paying for a living part in a novel.  His live opposite plays her part, puts down the phone, and is the same nice girl."

So where does that leave Fitzgerald's word "spoil" and Hemingway's word "lose"?  Are they just play words?  No connection with real life, real people?  If those words are just play words, then an awful lot of thoughtful people have been awfully wrong for fifty years.

"And, as you certainly will point out next, the Book of Common Prayer, with its 'cleanse,' has been wrong for four hundred.  Bishop Cranmer is just another novelist."

I would go on to that, but it takes us too deep.  Jesus becomes another novelist, as does God, writing the Bible.  We talk about that and we're in over our heads in no time, explaining how there can be truth in fiction.  That's for the seminar.  Here I'll settle for what I think we can all agree on: that Jamie Travis's girls are playing parts in a very bad novel. 

"I certainly agree. Good novelists (or playwrights) recognize, as Fitzgerald and Hemingway do, that there's something inside us that can be 'spoiled' or 'lost.'  Bad novelists write as if there's no referent for those novelists' words, nothing deeper for their happy surface action to connect to."